Adding Outboard To Your Studio

hey everybody welcome back to studio talk my name is barry johns and we're going to talk about things that can affect your and my project studio but first let me give a little bit of dose of humility i'm an idiot this is a second time recording this video uh because the first time i guess what i did i screwed up over there in pro tools see me back there okay let me just do this hey back there i'm recording the audio for this well i had the range selected because i'd exported a previous audio file i bounced it down and so it kept all that so when it got to the end of that what do you think happened it stopped recording that's right so i don't care who you are you can screw up okay so today we're going to talk about hardware and this is incorporating uh you know external analog hardware into your project studio i think this is an important topic and and i'm going to caution you right now you know this video is going to be a little bit long and and if you don't watch the whole thing then you might as well just stop right now because i'm going to give you things to consider and so before i get started you know one of the things that we can do today in a greater way than we've ever done before because of the internet because of youtube and some other online forums and things is not only can we learn from our own mistakes which is the greatest way to learn when you screw up and you make a mistake aka what i did back there you know you're going to recognize that and try to not do that again you can also learn from other people's mistakes things that they've done maybe areas where they've not spent their money wisely or they've not made great choices ultimately regretting them and hopefully have enough humility to be able to go out there and and tell people that and so this is going to be a little bit of that some of this is going to be about my personal mistakes i've made along the way as well as what i've seen other people do so you know we get to a stage to where often many of us consider adding external hardware analog hardware to our workflow and our project studios so let's first talk about the basic foundation of a project suti and what that requires and what most of you have is is the is the entry entry lane into recording obviously you've got a an interface right that typically has at least a couple of microphone inputs on it if not more also hands your handles your analog to digital conversion and then you record that into a daw anywhere from reaper to pro tools to cubase to digital performer studio one luma pro tools whatever it may be whatever particular daw that you use and oftentimes the vast majority of those daws come with stock plug-ins and those stock plug-ins typically are out there to emulate or reproduce the effect of what historically had been done with analog hardware that means capacitors resistors transformers tubes you know turning knobs all that stuff that is not done in the digital domain and there's there's a huge lure and a huge attraction to being able to incorporate that into your studio so as you can see now you can see i've got quite a bit back over here i've got quite a bit back over there and if you look back over here i got a 500 series back over there be rack 500 series rack back over there most of that is over there is uh our microphone uh preamps um and so obviously i've incorporated a lot of analog hardware into the workflow of my studio now when you look at all of this i think any reasonable person would say that guy being me okay has way more than he needs to actually do great recordings and i completely completely completely agree with you on that there's no doubt about it you know i happen to be at a point you know i'm older than most of you people out there you know i've developed a career this is not my day job it never has been my day job i've been enthusiastic and passionate about it i've spent a lot of my free time involved in everything you see behind me but but i have a day job i have a family i have five kids i have a wife all of those things and so you know everything you see here was amassed over years and years and years and years i just didn't go out and put it all on a credit card no no no no no that would be a horrible thing to do so when when you're considering and you know whether you're going to go down that rabbit hole of of analog analog gear into your workflow you've got to ask yourself am i going to get what i need and what i'm looking for out of that analog hardware is it going to give me the return on that investment that justifies it and i'm going to argue for many of you for many of you the answer that question is no you can do great work and produce great music and and and do great things with just the stock plug-ins that come with your daw yes there are other greater plug-ins that give you the color and the vibe and everything of old traditional analog gear and i'm not saying anything against that i own quite a lot of those plug-ins and everything but just like you can easily go down that rabbit hole of plug-ins and buy way more than you need ended up using it just because you can and i've got another video on that you should go watch those out like how many eqs do you possibly need or channel strips do you need uh is adding more and more and more really going to improve your recordings or is it just going to give you eye candy and you just like the look of it so um the same holds true i'll be honest with you some degree for analog hardware so let's so we've talked about what the foundation the fundamental um components of a home recording studio without incorporating traditional analog you know where there is no digital involved in any aspect of it and that is your interface your daw your mod well your monitors technically are your uh studio monitors are technically analog but but uh or at least a vast majority excuse i got a cough yeah i leave that stuff in here so just deal with it okay so um but anyway that's the foundation right some of you actually just use headphones to mix you know and and so when you're on a budget and things like that matter so when you're going down that road to incorporating analog analog gear let's talk about the various types of analog gear that most people consider i think first and foremost the first thing that most people consider and should consider if they're going to go down that road are elevating the quality of your microphone preamps especially if you record a lot of analog sources whether it's guitar either electric acoustic vocals piano drums things like that you know microphone preamps are going to really help having good quality microphone premiums are going to help you a lot over the regular interfaces that come with your average project studios interface now obviously there are interfaces that have much greater and much better plug-in not plug-ins i'm sorry preamps on them but i'm going to talk about the average person out there okay and so the first foray is going to be in microphone preamps i think after that for most people it's probably going to be an outboard compression whether that's 1176 la2a or a style level type compression those are typically the ones that most people would look at uh secondary and then followed up by that by eq okay and get some various eq now when you're going down that road you have different formats you know that you can you can purchase and utilize this analog gear and probably the most common is your 19 inch standard rack size units that could be a one two or three u rack unit size um or you can go with your 500 series and your 500 series are kind of like back over there where you see a bae i think that holds uh six over there and then you have another bae right there that holds six 500 series modules in them and that's a way to keep things kind of compact and one of the reasons having it compact and advantageous is that is you want to try and keep yourself in that sweet spot between your monitors you know you see both those monitors back there you want your ears kind of balanced almost like in a triangle between those that's what's called the sweet spot uh an equal distance between the the the main tweeters of the speaker and then your ears an equal distance all three sides of a triangle and so you want to keep that in there because if you go off to the left you go off to the right obviously that's going to affect uh the tonality of things that you're hearing so if you can get something it's and you can grab and i'm trying to get my fingers in frame whatever you understand what i'm saying um well you can grab it like if you can see back over here you can see all that gear over there that's really i can easily just kind of lean over and grab and utilize that rack gear there but when you get into some of this stuff right here you get outside of the sweet spot somewhat so that's when i might have to put on a set of headphones or whatever just to kind of balance and go back and forth just to kind of see same thing back over here you know i can still relatively stay in the sweet spot by just reaching over because i'm going to develop muscle memory and knowing where those controls are and how to adjust them okay so you want to consider these things and which style formats you want to go into if you want to go 500 series then you're going to have to buy a rack like that one right there okay or like the one back over there let's see if i can get out okay i'm gonna get out of here so you're not seeing so now you're seeing my mess all the way back there but at least you can see some of this gear a little bit better it's more in focus and so you can see that there i've still got a few slots open on that one and i do have it mapped out what's ultimately going to go there um but but but you want to decide which way you want to go but if you've got to buy a 500 series rack that's an initial initial 400 or more investment and getting a good one and what you want to watch out for for 500 series racks is can it provide the proper amount of power across all of the units that it houses in it some of the lesser expensive ones are kind of a little bit iffy on that so you undo your homework on that and don't just get the cheapest one you can find so so okay so now we've established this the stereotypical it's not all that but those are the stereotypical mic preamps compressors and equalizers okay and some of those are you know a combination of a couple units i'll go back over here again if you can see over there there is a heritage audio unit that is a 1073 um clone unit where it has the neve mic emulation of a neve mic preamp as well as an evq so that's all in one unit that's another great way to start you kind of get both of those at the same time so once you're going to go down that road then you've got to figure okay what quality is going to give me um the right value for the money spent because um let's just face it if you've got a typical session let's say you've got for a lot of home studios my home studios and project studios are not doing 100 tracks i mean some of you are but a lot of you simply aren't doing that you're probably maxing out around 30 or so at the most and if that doesn't apply to you then just ignore what i'm saying right now but um but but let's say you got 30 tracks and you want to put a compressor on every one of them i would caution you think about that don't over compress uh that's one of the things that most people do they over squash a living crap out of their music and takes the life out of it and all the transients but that's a different video but let's just say you want to put a compressor across all those tracks well you can't realistically do that with hardware are you going to go out and buy 30 compressors you know that's where the cost doesn't make sense you know you're ultimately going to put plugins across that and you're going to decide you know of the hardware pieces i own what what are what are the tracks that are going to be my priority in other words what tracks do obviously when you're when you're recording through microphone preamps and you're doing it at home you can do you can keep that same mic prep on everything that you record assuming you're you're recording everything in mono versus stereo and if you're doing stereo then buy two of them and you can keep that consistency but when you're talking about adding compression especially and then outboard eq well that's when you've really got to start thinking about okay where where am i going to use these both most on what types of tracks am i going to use these on the most because typically you might do some light compression on the way in while you're tracking and i want to emphasize late if at all if you're not used to knowing how to do that i would even suggest don't track at all with hardware just just do it and then affect it after you get in there but once you know what you're doing then you can track with some light compression and have that be able to be much more mixable much more sit in the mix after you get in there versus actually doing it once you're in now there's a big debate over that i've gone back and forth done my own analysis and i'll share that with you in a separate video some other time but it's got to be really really really light compression so most people are doing this via hardware inserts and that's when you're applying that hardware insert inside your daw just like you would a plug-in where it's basically telling that okay take this signal that's recorded on this particular track send it out of this channel on the insert on an interface i'm sorry that channel is connected to the input of whatever outboard gear you've got and then the output of that outboard gear is going back into the input returning back into your interface so as you're playing back it's in it's converting it from digital analog out to the outboard device let's say a compressor it's bringing that signal back in from the output of the compressor into the interface and it's going analog to digital back and so you're able to listen and listen to that in real time as that's being processed so that's how most people use it and so when you're doing that and you're thinking about it okay what are the typical tracks and i know i'm talking fast because i don't want this to be a 40 minute video so you can re-watch it if i'm talking too fast but you know what what you ultimately got to decide is what are the average tracks that are going to matter to me the most and i think for most music this is not all okay this is generalization here but for most music the two most most important tracks are your vocal number one and your snare number two okay uh one keeps the rhythm and one really sets the whole vibe of the entire song and makes or breaks the song so if you only have two compressors two eq skies kind of thing that's where you're gonna wanna put them okay that's that's what i do now you can choose different maybe you're dealing with a different genre and things like that where things are different or maybe you can afford more pieces and you expand it beyond those two you know after that might be the kick as an example and then probably followed up by the bass depending on the style of music you're doing but the wrestling guitars and everything don't benefit as much of that in the analog world as it does in the plugin world so again these are just my opinions so keep that and take that for what it is you may have a different opinion you may have different experiences which is perfectly fine so so when you're going down this road you know consider these things and and and and what types of outboard do you want to invest in first before you even develop a plan for what you're going to buy you want to develop okay what am i looking for what are my priorities and what's my first second and third priority for most of you that should be microphone preamps depending on the interface that you have and the other things that you already own okay and so you obviously have to balance this upon what you already own as of today obviously that's kind of a given right so this is assuming that you don't have any so when it gets into the thing for an average microphone preamp that's really going to take you up to the next level you're probably talking in the 500 series probably in the 6 to eight hundred range and then in a 19 inch round probably the eight to the eleven hundred range for your average high quality microphone preamp now it sounds like a lot of money but that's the cost of these things now can you buy a microphone preamp for less than that well sure you can you've got warm audio for example makes an api 312 clone that's around three four hundred dollars i think it's 400 bucks i think if i remember correctly and i've got one over there you see that orange one over there that's one over there and so i happen to have one of those and they do a great job of that and and i would tell you when you get into that in that 400 range that's where i would caution you to kind of stop don't go below that when it comes to microphone preamps yes there are some you can get for less than that that do a good job for the price but they're not going to retain their value at all when you're ready to sell it and go move up to the next level you're not even going to get hardly much of your money back okay and and so it's worth it if you can swing it to save up your money and maybe go to that next level and that's true of just about any piece of outboard hardware to a point all right now if you can see right over here you can see there's some clark technique pull take eq clones now those were given to me a friend of mine actually gave those to me i didn't pay for those and i'll be honest with you i don't use them that often and and they're they're dirt cheap when you buy them brand new but you can also go on reverb and look and see what the sold how much they're selling for used and and they don't retain their value at all none of the clark technique stuff holds its value at all which is to be expected quite honestly that's not a dig on them that's to be expected in that particular price range back over there i've got a clark technique um 1176 but you can see above it i've got some warm audio gear i've got a warm audio pultec eq which is vastly superior to this one in my opinion so if you can save the money and go to that next level up clone because all of these ultimately's are clones right you're not going to go out and spend 5 000 on a real pultec eq okay well today it'd be a clone but but the the quality of what the original pull texts were you're getting the 5 000 range i don't see you doing that and i don't see me doing that i just don't see that okay i can't see a possible return on investment in a project studio so that's why i say you get to a certain point a certain point just doesn't make any sense now i did a video recently where i compared the um warm audio 1176 to the clark technic kt 76 along with the cla 76 the waze version the purple audio the um mc70 mc77 um which is a fantastic or written you know their their actual hardware compressor of that is probably the best you can buy it's better than universal audio's version but but you're also paying more for that and then also the slate version of the 1176 and you can tell there and in my opinion now you can use your own ears and figure it out yourself go back and watch that but in my opinion the warm audio amongst all of those kicked the butt of all the others okay and so that clearly told me that that that particular level on that is better than the plugins okay now how much is it really worth it to go from there up to like twenty four hundred dollars to buy the universal audio 1176 compare i think that's around 700 bucks or 800 bucks is it worth it to spend more than double two and a half times that am i going to get that much more going with an original universal audio 1176 not me no way if you're in a professional situation and you're actually making a living doing this which is almost impossible to do these days okay but if you're actually doing that then maybe then then then maybe and still it's an iffy maybe to me because plugins have gotten so good but but i would rather take that money the difference in there and buy it other additional hardware and so when you're contemplating what you're going to buy i think when you're when you're contemplating adding external hardware to your project studio i think the first thing you've got to understand is let's start picking the order and the things that i see me potentially buying not that you will buy them all but potentially buying them okay and once you've decided that then you want to do like a one two and three what are the what are the optimal where it makes the most sense where i can get the most bang for my buck without having to spend a ton of money um and so i think there there's plenty of options out there you've got a company like cappy as an example that makes incredible api clone stuff for a fraction of the cost i would not even consider original api stuff i would go with the cappy stuff first okay you know you've got hairball audio for example if you're handy with a little soldering iron you want to make your own stuff that stuff's not that difficult to make and you can build your own 1176 or build your own other components and do it yourself and actually learn something along the way and save a ton of money and really get good high quality stuff so you know there's a lot of options out so do your homework but i encourage you really think long and hard about buying the stuff that's inexpensive i'm not going to call it cheap because cheap is referred to the quality the physical quality of the devices and there are some out there that offer decent quality and physicality considering the price and you've got to put that all into perspective there are some out there that do it but would it be better to save your money and spend more money and just be patient and get a unit that you're not likely to sell are not likely to want to sell to move up to the next thing again reverb can be your friend you can go in there and search for the items you're looking for find out the history of them go in and choose only select use and only show sold items and you're going to see how much that item sold for you should be doing that anyway when you're buying something used and i always encourage buying used over new always always always if you can you're always going to save money that way okay so consider that and see and if you see something that's selling for 400 and they can barely get 175 dollars for it ask yourself why am i throwing away 225 dollars because ultimately if you're not going to keep it it's just going to be a temporary thing in your studio it's better to wait another six months or another year or whatever it's going to take you depending on your financial situation to get to that next level where you can look at it as an example like some of the warm audio stuff that typically holds its value pretty good the higher you get up in there it's going to hold its value amazingly well like distressors hold their value very well purple audio mc77s hold their value very well a lot of those things hold their value the worm audio stuff considering the price holds its value pretty well compared to some of the stuff like golden age and clark technique and some of these others that basically don't hold their value at all okay so oftentimes it's about patience it's better to work with what you've got within your current environment being plug-ins and things like that and then eventually if you're going to go down this road then start adding this stuff to it but i'll leave you with one last thought be practical please look if you're a single person out there and you've got no other bills no other responsibilities then throw your money at whatever you want to throw it at right but if you've got a family and you've got kids and things like that you really got to think about where this stuff makes sense because yes does this crap back here look cool it does but hey i guarantee you i'm older than you and i've been doing this a very long time and this stuff was bought over many many many years and i'll be honest with you too i've worked hard in my day job and i make a pretty good living in my day job i do this stuff for fun it's my passion this is my speed boat this is my atv this is my fishing boat this is all those things out there that you know that guys typically like to go out and buy i'd rather spend that money into this but keep in mind if i buy a speedboat then hey my whole family can go out on that so maybe it's better wise to spend it on that but then again you know what they say about the first and the last day experience of a boat owner's life they're both equally bliss because there's a lot of responsibility on a boat and you don't use it anywhere near as much as you think okay so anyway i don't want to get digressed too much so consider these things think about these things when you're looking to incorporate i'll be doing more videos actually i've got my that camera hang on that over there is my canon eos r okay and you can see it's pointing down at the warm audio la2a clone and over here you'll see the clark technique la2a clone i'm going to be doing a comparison video coming out soon it's going to compare those like i did with the 1176 compare it with you know your typical um you know your typical um plug-in alternatives and this one's actually going to include the new slate one that they're trying to market out there and we're going to compare in that one we're going to be bringing that one into the fold too and compare it against the hardware because one of my main number one gripes when they go out there and they demonstrate hardware and they demonstrate plug-ins out there on youtube as far as i'm concerned spending two seconds of your time just looking at nothing but that and not hearing it compared to anything else is a waste of your time okay because if you don't have anything to compare it to it means absolutely nothing it needs to be compared to a piece of hardware or to other similar plugins where you can hear a distinguishable difference and then and only then can you judge is that something i should add to my tool chest okay and so keep that in mind when you're looking at that stuff out there so think think about that a lot okay so anyway if you like the stuff i talk about on this channel i really appreciate come on you spent this if you've gotten this far in the video you've dedicated enough of your time it's not going to kill you to hit that like subscribe notification bell button down there so you know when i've got new videos out there you're supporting the channel you're telling me that you like what i'm doing and i'll be honest with you if you don't like what i'm doing i've i'm i want to hear those comments let me know tell me what you think go down those comments and just talk both good constructive whatever it may be i'm all about feedback so let's let's talk about these things share your experiences please talk to each other about where you've made some mistakes or you've had some massive successes you know get in there just remain humble and you know stay cool you know that's all of that just stay cool so until next time which is i guess going to be my next video whenever that comes out i hope you all have a great day

Channel: Barry Johns Studio Talk

Views: 4,528

Keywords: avid, protools, protools hdx, protools ultimate, hdx, avid omni, avid hdx, avid hybrid engine, avid carbon, avid hdx hybrid engine, cubase, logic pro, studio one, universal audio, daw, studio, recording, recording studio, home recording, post production, avid.com, avid DUC, duc, Digidesign DUC, presonus, uad, control surface, plugin, plugins, compressor, delay, reverb, uc1, ssl, neve, microphone, preamp, eq, equalizer, 500 series, a designs, warm audio, cable, cables, analog, outboard

Id: 1Vnw7E4N_qc

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021