EPIC HOME STUDIO SETUP 2021 | Axis Audio (studio tour)

[Music] wow today this is like a super epic home studio setup like this these guys rightly earned the title webster and mike webster is a mix engineer and mike is a mastering engineer they're roommates business partners and they they built this studio in what is literally an upstairs bedroom of the house they live in what makes this studio home studio just uh just a little bit different than than i don't know like let's say my home studio or probably your home studio is that it is a certified dolby atmos 7.1.4 surround sound studio that's epic so thank you to webster and mike for one building such an awesome studio and inviting me over to come show it off and check it out because i i i had never even experienced this i mean i guess the closest thing i've experienced is just going to a movie perhaps yeah i don't think i had ever heard anything like this before it really was impressive and i got to hang out afterwards and listen to some some of the mixes that webster has done in there and it's it was amazing if you guys want to follow them i put their instagrams and their studio website down in the description go give them a follow they're really nice guys and built an amazing thing and they built it in again the bedroom of a rental house so sick now perhaps you've never seen one of these videos before essentially i do these epic ridiculously epic home studio setup tours and i do them every single week so every monday on this channel there's a new studio tour of like just the craziest stuff you've ever seen so if you guys happen to like that then go feel free to hit that red subscribe button and youtube will then show you the next time that i give you one so that's how that works if you guys want to see more of that go ahead and press that subscribe button also smash that like button for the youtube algorithm that just that's an easy way to help me out also shout out to everyone who's been going to andrewmastersmusic.com and booking me for the zoom calls the consultations i do consultations over zoom you can schedule a zoom call booking me for mixing and the remote drum sessions have been a ton of fun i've gotten some fun new mic so it's just made everything more exciting and fun to do anyway if you guys want to check that out andrewmastersmusic.com thank you guys for watching the video go check out the guys from access audio down in the description and let's go check out their studio [Music] wow so when did you guys get into this house first off because you guys aren't from here right well not originally um i moved down here in uh 2010 to attend belmont university and mike moved down here about two years ago we moved into this house in july of last year before we even moved in we're kind of looking at doing adobe atmos space and that ended up turning into this kind of dream which then kind of got realized in some way you know so what was this room before you turned it into this just like a bonus room yeah yeah i mean really we came and saw it when the old owner was here and it was just a bonus room there were a couple couches on this side a tv there's actually a bed over there and technically according to uh to most i think the things it's considered a a full bedroom if you were to see it on a sale listing so yeah we were able to kind of just we came up and immediately realized it's kind of potential with the height of the ceiling and went for it and you said june last year uh july of last year july yeah july 2019. what was the process of like planning this room did you hire somebody as far as like the design and acoustic and all the acoustics and all that honestly most of it was between the two of us for what i was doing prior to kind of the pandemic a lot of my job was actually doing 3d renders and designs for venues when i was on the road touring so i have all of the laser measurement tools and things like that so i came in here and broke out those tools and literally took as many measurements as i possibly could and came up with pretty much a full 3d scale render of the room before we moved in and started placing things and kind of just messed around with stuff as i could figuring out where different speakers would be and all of it was obviously realized in a 3d render so it was to scale so we got a pretty good idea ahead of time obviously when we moved in in july had a good idea of what was going to happen but we're able to make a little bit of a few tweaks and then just kick off and go right into it so all the acoustic panels in here were built by ourselves we did it ourselves we mounted them ourselves all the lighting in here was done by us really yeah everything all of it was dude kind of ground up and it was a rough couple months yeah dude it's uh yeah it's not easy yeah we had we had some ac problems with it too so when we were building the panels there was no ac up here just a lot of fiberglass and dust and that was uh there was a time well it obviously turned out unbelievable very impressive thank you guys did a super good job yeah tell me about this yeah the system here yeah so the the system is uh built around the dolby atmos immersive format immersive audio is kind of making its way into the music industry now where people would have experienced something similar to that idea i mean over the past 20 plus years would have been in theaters with surround sound of like five one and seven one i guess five six years ago is when dolby atmos really started coming onto the market and they were pushing that into films and that's where it first made its presence and in the past two years is when they've started to kind of push into the music world so what this room is built around is that basically a monitoring format for that layout which in their perspective this would be considered a 7.1.4 monitoring layout so we have seven speakers that are around us at ear height a left center right a left side right side and a rear a rear set of left side and right side plus four overhead speakers and then one lfe or low frequency effects channel um so that was that's kind of why we have all those speakers the cool thing with atmos is that it doesn't truly have like a specific playback format in terms of how many speakers it's played back on okay the way they built the format is that it's scalable so i can mix on this rig which is a 7.1.4 rig and it's what their suggested size is for a mixing or mastering space of what the playback system is but that same mix can be translated to a stereo set of speakers or a quad set or a 51 or something even larger than what's in here and it will translate to that with a click of a button their auto their algorithms and their dsp and things will automatically take care of that so it's kind of cutting out a lot of the remix processes that would have had to take place in the past and that's really exciting because now all of a sudden artists and labels and any type of content provider or creator now can do kind of a one-stop shop for a mix they can get something mixed once and they're now able to distribute that in pretty much any format as possible and go from there instead of like having it mixed in stereo and then have to mix it in five one and then seven one or something like that so for the layman yeah meaning me yes who's used to using two speakers in the sub is it going through your computer software connected to a piece of hardware that then the speakers go to what is the chain the chain for it makes it make sense there are multiple options for it there's different ways for it to work in this particular space it's all off of just the computer itself so i have i'm running a mac pro it's a 2019 model with that my current workflow is utilizing uh pro tools ultimate which is the new version of what they would have called hd um alongside dolby's what their software for atmos which is considered or called dolby atmos renderer and that is basically the brain for for working with this so essentially instead of for a typical stereo user that's mixing in their daw and just pushing out two channels of audio now this instead of like the daw just going straight to your speakers that my in my workflow the daw is pushing all of these channels from the daw to the renderer and then the renderer realizes that and does a bunch of stuff under the hood to play it back on my system so is that going through an interface then like where are the speakers plugged into the speakers are all plugged into this interface behind me uh it is a avid pro tools matrix studio this interface was actually a purchase when we came into this space mike and i both ended up changing our interfaces and going moving to this piece and one of the biggest reasons was because of its a just like how robust and flexible it is and b it's kind of marketed into the dolby atmos workflow as it is and the big reason for it and part of the feature set with it that made us go with it is the fact that it has monitor controlling built into it you can kind of build your own monitor section for assigning what inputs are going to be like different sources so i can have a source that's coming from my daw and then a source that's coming from playback on my computer somewhere else and a source that's coming from a receiver and then i can do the same thing with outputs and i can be like oh i wanted to have uh this monitoring layout as one output set or a stereo monitoring layout as another yeah as well as volume control dim mute and all that and then beyond that and this was the biggest reason we ended up going with the unit was the dsp in it that allows you to do eq and delay to be able to tune the room and tune the speakers to the space because it has just a huge amount of that to be able to do that and in a space like this that we're utilizing essentially 12 speakers really if you count in the subs it's 14 having the ability to kind of uh the ability to kind of time and tune that was paramount to being able to make this work the right way yeah i can't even imagine i mean if you put together all the time that we took to actually position all of the speakers in here and align them between using like physical measurements a laser measurement and then also using like a microphone with delay finding and stuff like that it probably would account for at least four or three to four days of work i mean we were getting down to like 16 of an inch yeah of of moving things and really just getting it as precise as possible and i mean it was great i mean we found that it was great when we moved into the space and just kind of had it roughly laid out yeah it just the size of the room lent itself to being great but that that little change and us dialing it in that much just made everything really really click which was awesome well you know it's interesting because you have sort of that void in the stairwell but this the way that the ceilings are designed with the drywall and the lack of anything being parallel yeah in here is phenomenal yeah so the shape of the room the size of the room it's a really spacious bedroom yeah you know yeah and then you guys nailed the treatment so this is this is really really impressive webster you're a mixer yeah and then mike you do the mastering yeah like what made you think i need to go from two to would you say 14. yeah 14 speakers it's really like think of it more of 12 realistically in terms of how it's actually playing back right but like but yeah what made me kind of get to that what was the like oh this might be better um honestly i mean i remember the first time that i heard atmos for music and the the first thing that kind of went through my mind mike and i actually heard it together and we we walked out of the studio that we heard it in and both of us were like well that's cool but who cares like i care but the people that we work for and the the end consumer like no end consumer has this right nobody even has something that's like bookshelf speakers or like tiny speakers like this you know like yeah and then even if you did have those people what are the chances that they're going to set it up correctly you know right and so there was a point where i kind of walked out of it and wrote it off and this was the end of 2019. um in the beginning of 2020 i saw a demo and the demo was from nam and they were showing this guy basically mixing in pro tools and he like sold an instrument and i i was wearing headphones at the time and he's moving it around and you can hear it moving around your head on headphones because atmos dolby atmos has this uh this basically feature a playback that's called binaural which kind of works with how the physics of your head work and how sound wraps around it and if you're wearing headphones they try to recreate that and they have a way of recreating it with eq and phase and level differences um so they can kind of like fake this space yeah when you have headphones on and the second that i heard that that was when it was like okay like here's something that everyone in the world can listen to and will because people like this is how people listen to music they listen to it on headphones now that's just how it is yeah and then for the people that want to get to this level they can or like a movie theater or whatever it ends up being even venues there are some venues that have atmos installations in them now um there's clubs that have them and also some different uh museums and exhibits and stuff like that yeah but i think finally once i put that together of like okay cool there's there's a there's a core consumer base that can actually be realistically that can become out of this you know that was when i was like okay now i need to know more and it was it was a slow step slow stepping process to get to where i was like i'm in you know yeah um that was kind of the spark was like i need to i need to give it a second chance and from that point forward i just kept adding things i had two speakers in my current current room at the time and i added another pair of speakers behind me to create quad and i started messing around with that and then i added another two to create 6.0 and i at that point had gotten the renderer and that's one of the coolest things with the way that atmos works is that even though this is what their suggested mix space is you can technically mix into atmos with two speakers or with six speakers now do you get the full immersive effect are you actually able to like do it correctly and not shoot yourself in the foot not quite yeah but you do start to slowly get an idea as to what's happening and that's one of the coolest things it was that i didn't have to buy all 14 speakers to just start to mess with it but by the time that i got to like six and we were able to like match the speakers between all neumanns that was where it was like okay cool this works i think it's time to invest in it you know so if you can webster can you just like make sense of what this system is because i see some stuff on the desk here that i'm sure kind of ties into all the speakers and how the room functions yeah before you go who makes this desk where'd you get this desk yeah okay so the desk uh man the desk and the racks in this room were a really big deal for mike and i yeah they're beautiful part of the the do-it-yourself thing of having done all of these panels and stuff we both actually co-designed these racks and desks no way so we were kind of at the time trying to figure out a way to get to a minimalist kind of idea of not a lot of gear right in front of us basically trying to remove as much from between us and the sound field and kind of clean up the image and things like that so the idea was moving to something like that and as we were working through it uh i had come up with a couple ideas and then mike honestly was just like hey like what do you think about a standing desk and that immediately kind of caught my my ear because i was like man like in our profession like all we do is sit you know and we sit and we slouch and and honestly like we do it for hours on end and you don't even realize it until until you're done and then you just repeat um and this was just a great idea because it was like great like we hey it's different it's something that's just really eye-catching and it's really cool to the space but b gives us the chance to stand you know like if we can sit we have a high pin chair that will roll over but we'll we'll find ourselves kind of swapping between the two as for the build itself it was actually done by a friend of mine who took care of everything his name is jeremy bain he has his own woodworking thing called bain custom woodworking so check him out shout out bane yeah he's incredible we literally we provided him with these designs although he does all of his own design stuff too if you need him to do it but i gave him the designs for the racks and this and he just killed it i mean it it's amazing the woodwork was great yeah it's just a solid acacia slab on the top so we really liked having this free-flowing edge on the front and having it feel a little less kind of rigid and square yeah absolutely so that was kind of where the desk and rack idea kind of came from you know yeah i love how you laid the just like the the two core things yeah right in the middle not too much cluttering up the space this monitor is down out of the way i love that yeah and then your two you know you've got some faders and this has got to be like your kind of monitor control situation right yeah so uh this is the avid dock the faders over there with the s1 the avid dock was the first unit that we purchased up here um before adding in the s1 the biggest reason for adding the dock was part of what we talked about with the monitor controlling that the matrix provided in that it integrates right into the software that you that controls the the matrix so with that the matrix studio that's down there um so this is actually able to completely control it where i have my sources at the top i can have my outputs right next to it and i have a volume control here and because it's all digital i don't have to run all the analog lines which would have been 14 both ways to the desk and boat yeah and now it's just a cat kit so it it made it so our cable run was a lot cleaner kept all the analog stuff over out of the way um so that was the thing it looks just one little snake that's so cute like shia labeouf would say as for the rest of the stuff on the desk man uh the meters were a lot more oriented to mike um he uses the mq and these these vus for his mastering work uh this unit though the tc electronic the clarity m he actually had a stereo version and we upgraded it to the 5.1 version that allows me to do to actually utilize it for doing metering and things for my atmos mixing in real time and that's just an incredible tool so for me most of the time i'm utilizing more of the two control surfaces and then this and with mike he honestly is rarely using the faders over here he'll use the monitor control here and then all three of the meters that are right here which ends up being great so as minimal as it is it's actually really useful for us heck yeah and it's i mean it's really our backbone things you're using the most yeah and nothing else yeah and then so you said you got the mac pro yes so we got the mac pro it was probably the most painful purchase i've made in my life um yeah yeah i hate spending that type of money on a computer however uh i mean it is the professional computer that's pretty good yeah it's loaded up we have uh two uad octo pci cards in it we have oh nice a thunderbolt octo attached as well and then the backbone for how we're actually connecting the matrix to the computer is actually over dante which is a network uh protocol for audio so i have a focusrite redneck card in there that's handling all of that that's transporting basically that acts as like what the computer would consider the interface and it transfers the audio over cat six or seven to the matrix over here which then converts it to analog so that's red net yes yeah net focusrite has a range called the rednet range and that is they have the red and the redneck range and both of those are the ranges that are utilizing dante for audio transport and control and things like that um so that was just kind of for us there's a couple companies that make cards like that i just happened to find a really slamming deal on reverb and there went that you know that's amazing i can't like it's it's obviously the atmos thing is ridiculously cool and very rare yeah it's you know especially in a home studio yeah but dude i'm i'm really big on aesthetics and like building a functional space where you want to spend time yes and you're like you don't walk in there and you go i gotta finish this thing because i hate being in this room yeah like you know this is this is a room you want to be in like for i like i would just live here you know i go downstairs to go to the bathroom and refuel yeah but like i would do everything up here yeah it is so so cozy and so you know just the right amount of gear and comfort i see you got some got some are those vinyls over there mike i'm gonna have you tell me a little bit about the gear and some of this cool uh tape stuff and and and some of the nitty gritty outboard stuff that is catching my eye okay cool where do you want to start so what what is it like mastering with all of these speakers versus you know how you've traditionally mastered prior to this room this room is great because it has such a high volume such a big space the room doesn't compress on itself like some of my previous smaller rooms where you start turning up and it just it feels like you're fighting the room itself that doesn't happen here and with these neumann monitors adding the subs to the 420 so we have the kh 420s on top with sub extensions under each one the room goes down to 14 hertz so i can hear any infrasonic information that a client may have missed yeah mic stand hits all that kind of stuff is very apparent wow but in terms of the difference between working in immersive audio and stereo audio yeah it's huge it's completely different it's a there's a steep learning curve it's a very new experience most of my work is still high resolution stereo yeah a lot of my clients are still they they're unaware of immersive audio or they're just finding out about it in terms of dolby atmos for music say a lot of my clients are still concerned with vinyl i'm preparing vinyl masters frequently that's awesome yeah yeah first off tell me again what what are what are these speakers they're you said they're neumann's women which so we have it's the kh line the kh okay cool so we have kh420s with 870 subs underneath kh 310s on the sides and rear and then kh-120s up in the ceiling which is i mean gangster i mean you got we're very lucky 12 what however many the number is of really amazing studio monitors we listened to a lot of different speakers i i've had the 420s since about 2015. and we've heard a lot of different things and the neumanns are beautiful they're really detailed they have lots of headroom and for the price point you just can't beat them so tell me a little bit about the gear in this desk here yeah explain a little bit of this so what's going on here these are my vu meters and really my most critical meters the thing i reference most of the time i started in the business about 17 years ago wow so that was before the idea of luff's right came in so i'm i'm very attuned to my rms vu meters and i pay attention to those with the tc i have left meters inside my daw which is wavelab steinberg's wavelab where i do all my mastering work stereo mastering work they have fantastic metering i have rms and lux metering there as well so here with the the dangerous mq i have digital peak meters analog rms and over here i have another set of rms vu meters they're both calibrated to a slightly different standard and respond the speed of them is just a little different so i'm really used to these i've had these the longest i have a great idea of about how loud something is looking at those meters every genre requires a different approach yeah every client has maybe a different request for something so when i started it was early on in the home studio world people didn't have a lot of outboard gear people were mixing in the box with early plug-ins so projects required a lot of color to be added sure you know so in the early days everything was going through my very mu or something like that but as time went on people the plugins got better the home studio work got better and now people are adding so much color in the mix process that i don't necessarily have to do that in the mastering stage yeah so sometimes i'll be completely in the box sometimes a project needs a little bit of color and i might reach to something like my curve bender or or the very mew or something like that or sometimes it just needs a little api love on it i started pretty young i probably when i was 18 or 19 i started becoming aware of things that's when i started working professionally in the business yeah and being in commercial studios and seeing all the stuff and and understanding why they had it and why i might need it so i started saving up and doing whatever i could to find deals and start buying uh awesome gear do you remember what the first piece of gear that you got when you're starting off where you're like this this is going to take me to the next level the very very first piece of really high-end gear i bought was this 5500 this api eq love it would never sell it i don't think i've ever used a 5500 i i to be quite honest i don't use a lot of api stuff okay and i think it's just because studio i came up in had ssl me even trident sure so i you know it wasn't until i was over at blackbird where they've got a bunch of apis where i spent a little more time on them but i came up in an all api facility got it and it's funny how that impacts yeah you know what we go with that was a studio in the washington dc area called bias recording studios oh nice and good name there was a time when api was actually in the same town just down the street from the studio oh cool so there's a history there the 5500 is is just a 550b with a little added control so you can change the level steps to be half db 1 db or 2 db steps oh cool so it's a little handier in the mastering world right makes definitely makes recalls easier yeah after that i probably bought my very mew that was probably my next big piece of gear we have a couple different things so i've got an api 2500 which is an amazing bus compressor there's really nothing that's quite like it yeah it's a special box really cool has a lot of attitude it's it does great stuff certainly has that api sound some of the other gear we have down here like the 7600 or these rupert neve mic pres or this api di unit every once in a while somebody webster might be working on a project and somebody needs to come and do a quick last minute overdub or something like that cool so we just have a couple things handy in case we need to do a vocal or guitar overdub or something this thing is really special up here this is a chiswick reach and it's a little-known tube compressor that's humongous sounding and gorgeous well is that real handwriting or is that it is yeah i believe the builder and wrote that on there for the studio he built it for yeah it's handmade and just sounds huge and gooey has the biggest transformers i've ever seen [Laughter] i have a little an ssl style compressor down here for my gs audio that's really cool it's a great great ssl sounding compressor nice that's great and then you guys you said you designed and made these racks as well we did in fact so much of the whole studio came about because of kovid yeah because it gave us the time to step back and think about what we wanted to do we our previous lease was going to expire we knew we had to move so we started thinking about what we'd like to do ideally yeah and we just had time to do stuff like design racks and i mean you did a phenomenal job these things are beautiful webster and i just threw out a bunch of different ideas and started looking at things that design elements we really liked and thought you know what what wood species would be really beautiful started picking things and then webster started working on it in sketchup and laying it all out and doing measurements and getting all the design files together to be able to send guys ought to consider throwing up a little a little website where you just sell the designs yeah all right over here we have uh my chandler curvebender which i love just big big tone beautiful sounding eq i i love it can sort of create some kind of low end out of nothing it seems i know dude it does a special thing oh my gosh uh and i love it for that i've owned most of the major mastering eq's on the market wow and i settled on this one it doesn't necessarily have as many frequency choices as i'd like to see but it always sounds beautiful yeah uh my manly verimu love it yeah i love the very mu compressor it's it's a classic and for good reason it's on so many records and it just sounds it does a special thing so what you had mentioned this is the this very mu is different for mastering than the regular verimu is that correct right this is their mastering edition so everything is stepped it's switched fully recalled oh that's nice below that i have the igs tube core which is another very mu style compressor although this one is a perhaps a little more flexible because you have some tweakable attack and release times and it also gives you a wet dry control so you can do parallel compression with it nice all built in uh it sounds different than the very mu the mainly very mu but uh in the same kind of world yeah you can squash stuff a little harder with it if you need to and it can be a little snappier it's just a nice second option way up at the top here we have the igs v8 igs is a really cool company they make really really cool stuff everything has cornhill transformers in it this is a sort of a neve 2254 flavored bus compressor and i use it most of the time blend it in i'll run it in parallel oh cool and just use a little bit of it but it it does that smashing thing yeah in a beautiful way and just different than the plug-in options yeah smash the like button had to get it in there guys you knew it was coming that's awesome i've you know i've never heard of uh igs before so it's that's one of my favorite things about these videos is you know finding these little gems and this may be a huge really you know popular thing and i'm just you know only been exposed to whatever i've been exposed to so it's really cool they're a very cool company the owner's name is igor and he builds just awesome stuff these are it's again all switched these are elma switches expensive lasts forever high quality parts i've loved the units i have from igs and then down here this is the avid matrix studio interface yes that's kind of the that's a new thing right i haven't seen these before they released it in 2020. wow wow that's kind of cool 16 io is that what it is 18 i o 18 okay analog and it has some digital as well everything it runs over dante yeah and it's sort of the the brain of the whole studio right it's the main interface everything's going in and out of it over dante and that's nice it ties into the what's it called the s s one the control surface yeah the dock and the s1 talk to it we have this set up as our monitor controller in my previous studio and in webster's previous studio we had analog monitor controllers i had a dangerous unit he had a grace and so it was a big switch moving to an all digital control surface yeah but it worked out really well i wasn't sure i would like it but it's done everything we needed to do you guys definitely earned the epic title keyword it was it was a lot of work a lot of stress but we got through it and and we're very proud of it and and back there if the client every once in a while i get a request to print something to tape so i've got my ampex atr oh sick yeah this is a great tape machine and i've got quarter inch and half inch heads for it so sometimes i'll bounce the tape and then bring it back in that's awesome so uh mike you're you're printing masters to the atr 102 sometimes yes people will request or sometimes i feel like it's just the best thing for the album or the project yeah it just needs that saturation yeah i treat it just like any other piece of outboard gear yeah tape just does a thing and it's a beautiful sound it's not right for everything not right for every project but some things really benefit from it there are a lot of plugins that approximate it pretty well yeah but the real thing still has a few percentage points over some of the plugins but they're they are really really good that's awesome and did you say that you do mastering for vinyl so yes i can prepare masters for vinyl i'm not cutting lacquers up here yeah but um yeah i can prepare a digital file set for vinyl releases and that happens frequently yeah what considerations would be different for preparing it's a couple different things you know the primary one is high frequency content right really so s's tend to splatter with vinyl and you have to be careful you can't apply the same processing for the most part to the vinyl master that you do for the digital master of course the digital stuff tends to be hotter if you're going to vinyl let it breathe a little bit let it have a little more dynamic range if you can unless it's just really part of the sound and it needs to be squashed but it doesn't tend to translate to vinyl as well yeah so i'm paying a lot of attention to high frequencies to any s's i'm doing de-essing i'm being very careful about infrasonic information any stuff below below 20 but even even below 30 i'm just being cautious of and also add any out of phase information on the sides that can cause a lot of problems when it comes to cutting lacquers and i've spoken with a lot of colleagues people who do cut lacquers and i've tried to learn more about what they need to see from me have you guys seen sound city studio documentary yeah that part where uh where rupert's talking yeah and it cuts to dave girl and he's just like i didn't graduate high school [Laughter] that's i felt that when you were just talking i was like why did i even ask this question it's all good that's cool man i love i love like the things that i don't know that other people are like deep into that's really cool i learn new things every day and there's i know that there's so much that i don't know yeah but it's fun to learn and i always try to ask people who have done it before yeah let's see what i need to know to to get better at what i do all right so we have the main listening mixing mastering spot over here you've got your little tape nook yup slash you got a you have a vinyl player i have a turntable over there turntable yeah and what's before we leave this what's this little setup for is this for operating something yeah so uh the idea with this is just that uh if i come over and i need to do a tape transfer or something or i need to work on aligning the cartridge on my turntable that i can have meters and the daw appear and just keep an eye on some stuff and control the computer so you've got the wireless keyboard and mouse here how does this monitor connect you got an hdmi on the floor or something uh there will be oh okay we didn't have it i'm just constantly trying to learn like you never know some people they're like what you don't know about wireless monitors no no wireless no it's just it's the next thing we have to run back behind the walls and it's on order and then where did you get this sidecar because this is really cool this is made by sound anchors oh of course they're daw stamp of course it is sound anchor yeah made big crazy stands that you guys see in all the cool studios in these videos because of course they do sidecar daw stand that's what you said it's called sound anchors stand up yeah it's fantastic i've had it for years can get real tall if you needed to just like a speaker stand i like that great casters and yeah it's just handy to be able to have a face scope out very sturdy yeah super cool all right and then i would imagine you know some storage over here you guys have microphones what do you what what's yeah a bunch of different things we have media and cases cds some microphones and things and envelopes for shipping and that kind of stuff just office supplies yeah just basic stuff it's so it's cool that you have like you know the contr what's called the control room right the control room you know sort of different sections of this space that are used for different things storage and literally you have a little office over here separate which is you know i need thing i need more separation in my setup for sure there's too too much and too little of space here yeah but then you have what you call a beat your b rig yeah we're just calling this the b desk this is just the desk a place for a bunch of extra gear to accumulate and i can sit over here and send off invoices or emails or send off files to clients if webster needs to get back on the main computer and do some stuff or listen on headphones or something yeah i need a b rig and i need a b guy you know what i'm saying like hey man can you take care of all that other stuff and transferring back up and all the things i don't want to do you got some ns10s that's it's sweet yeah it's cool to just be able to hear something on a completely different system oh yeah just uh see how it translates to something else and often webster will be working on something and we'll make files and he'll hand it off to me and i need to just send it off to the client or embed metadata or something like that and i can just come over here without tying up the main immersive side of the room yeah and then you have your your seinfeld viewing station that's right i'm a big fan so uh yeah i mean this is a proper lounge it it was just a really cozy nook we were lucky with the way this whole space was laid out and i thought we need a sofa i can't get it over like the the ceilings in here are just with between the lights the treatment the the ceilings there's even a little window back there what is this like a it's a little reading nook a reading nook yep in case you need to chill out for a while in case you got two clients who like don't want to be right next to each other somebody can sit over in the reading nook that's right maybe they're doing in instagram post selfies and they don't want to be near it by the natural light over there the sun comes through yeah yeah golden hour yeah that's great we just tried to make it clean and neat but also comfortable yeah dude well you guys definitely did that this is like a super beautiful everything about this just feels like home and you know and then you turn around sorry everyone if this is making you dizzy with the wide lens but right yeah it's i appreciate you saying so yeah yeah it's it's uh it's really remarkable and cozy and inspiring and all the all the things so i envy you this is amazing all right so how did you get connected with dolby and like what was that process like did they come over here and help you guys or yeah well so honestly the beginning of my whole process was really just me diving into it myself and the farther that we got along into it uh honestly i guess the first two to three months that i was into it i thought that this wasn't even possible yeah i got into seeing what their specifications their white papers were and just kind of wrote it off of like cool the only way that you can do this is if you have a a-list commercial space there's no way that we're gonna be able to do this anywhere else yeah um and the farther that i got down the road i started realizing well okay cool that's really what they're they're really focusing on is that for like film people and you know it seems like there's a lot of different music batmus rooms that are popping up that are not quite as tight on this so what ended up happening is we mike actually knew a friend i guess through this guy that he's bought a lot of gear from over the years back in dc who has an atmos facility up in maryland if that's right yeah she ended up getting connected with us and then actually connected us with the guys at dolby and we started having conversations with them about it showing them what our plans were for the room i sent them all the 3d renderings what our specifications were going to be and uh i mean we moved like i said we moved in in july we i honestly both of us thought we'd be done with the space by september we didn't get with shipping delays and covet and all sorts of other things we didn't finish till december um but in middle of november the guys from dolby actually checked in with us and we're like hey we're going to be in nashville uh we'd love to come by and just kind of see the spot and we were like completely caught off guard by that i mean they gave us less than a week notice and uh we didn't have one of the subs in yet but we're like yeah okay cool like come and see it as it is we're obviously gonna get a sub and for an lfe channel but let us know like it was kind of a nice like precursor of being like the way that i think both of us viewed it was cool like take a listen to the room see what it is and let us know what we need to change to like meet what you guys want it to be for this format um and i remember i was standing there talking with uh with carrie uh thomas from dolby and was like so like let me know what are you hearing what do we need to change how do we need to tighten things up and things and he was like man we have like 106 dolby atmos enabled music studios around the world i don't see why this can't be 107th and i was like oh so that's that okay here we are yeah obviously that hinged on us getting the subs and and getting the rest of it in but sure come the beginning of this year they they kind of did their final or their final like push of finally releasing all of the dolby atmos for music side of their marketing and stuff and they reached out to us and we're listed on their website as a dolby atmos enabled music studio now that's really cool which is super awesome and really exciting for us and that's kind of what our journey has been with dolby and they're great they've been nothing but supportive they've been really great at communicating with us at getting us connected with uh different people and and just kind of being advocates for us um and it's been a great two-way street of kind of just communication with them and it's been awesome well congratulations dude yeah thank you this is um you know certainly deserved you guys did a fantastic job and thanks really really inspiring and and humbling for me and my my two speakers right now i feel like i'm the guy with the mono player and i'm like oh wow do you ever need two yeah well i will say i don't think either of us expected this to be where we were at if you said this a year ago you know if you were like if you're like yeah this is what it's going to look like in here and we'd be like yeah that's funny there's no way i just went for it yeah yeah and somehow it just it worked out which has been great so what's the uh what's the website the website is access.audio access.audio yeah there's no dot com it's a little different um but access.audio will bring you to the website that's where you'll be able to get kind of some more information about the two of us you'd be able to also there's an faq page that shows you kind of walks you through some general questions about immersive audio and dolby atmos if you want to know more and a link to a video from dolby and then our email where you can end up getting in touch with us if you're interested in any type of mixing or mastering work both in stereo and in and in immersive and then we also have a little section on there with some friends of ours that we've worked really closely with that are incredible in their craft whether they're session musicians songwriters producers engineers and even some some of the people that helped us get all this gear some of the people that were our partners in buying the gear through so that's kind of what the website's around and based around we try to try to get it to be as professional as possible considering where we're at and i think we did a pretty good job but yeah you guys definitely nailed it been a bit of thing um but yeah i know you were asking about these lights earlier yeah so um the things that catch my eye are sure you know sometimes silly things but i'm like i said i i like the strange details yeah i noticed these little leds down on the floor and those are so cool you know i love up lighting obviously it makes a huge impact in a room like this with really you know basically any room with treatment yeah you know with shadows and stuff yeah and those are you know pretty close to the hardwood well you guys did a pretty great job it's not easy matching yeah woods yeah you know yeah um i i hand built the boxes um they're the light boxes yeah oh so there's no amazon like no no amazon like unfortunately there are links for the the bulbs that you can get with the inside that's so cool good job yeah so the bot the bulbs themselves are the philips hue lights like mike just said yeah um the boxes are literally um we had leftover oak from the racks and the rack designs that i had been putting together um and the floor is obviously hardwood oak yeah and we found a stain that kind of matched it and it's pretty seamless so it kind of disappears into it which has been great um but yeah man the the amazon link is me that's yeah linked in the description yeah but uh but yeah that's really cool dude they've been super cool and then uh obviously the the lights in the ceiling are the same lights honestly uh all the all the like these boxes are it's literally just a cube of of oak with a hole in the middle of it and i took um these uh they're literally ceiling mounts for can lights that i did buy through amazon so here's your plug okay i see i see what you're saying yeah yeah but they're they're literally if it was like a can light that was in the ceiling they would pop in and they would just be like the mount for it so all it is is that and then you can have the light in it um you just wired it a little switch to it yeah yeah so just had a straight through it's just lamp wire straight to that and there it is above the cloud yep got some just like a little like light strip that's coiled up in there that can give it some accent lighting for in between the wall and the cloud as well so the floor lamps are just ikea yeah there you go yeah yeah guys don't underestimate ikea no uh-uh we don't do that here mike is a big believer in ikea which i am too i am too on a budget but i believe in ikea that's hilarious yeah all right dude well thank you guys for having me and um thank you yeah you know this was really a phenomenal one of the like more creative epic studio home studios that i've seen and um certainly a unique you know you know business partnership mixing mastering uh pretty much strictly right yeah because it may be a vocal overdub here yeah every once in a while vocal overdub i mean mike and i are both well-versed in tracking um i i got to a point from when i moved here between all the things that i did of of the experiences that i had of living in like ocean way a and b when i was at at uh belmont i mean i had i had so much experience in those rooms from being able to just use them as a student yeah that i probably paid off two years of my tuition just in the time i got to use it for free oh yeah yeah so but because of that it kind of ruined my livelihood for like experi like i lost the the desire to track anywhere than a professional studio oh okay so like having a home space to be able to like capture things in has never really been a high priority to me because for me i'm just like why would i have a space that's going to be subpar i'm not going to have nearly the selection or the gear to do it when i can just go there for a day yeah and they have all this stuff and it's going to sound 10 times better and also i mean i'm old school in that i love just getting a band together too man like at my in my point of view i'm like if you're if you're getting a whole band together and going into a studio there's something about the vibe that everybody has together and if you're not gonna do that it's gotten so easy for everybody to record that they're not calling me to come to my home studio to record they're just doing it at their own place and then they just send me the files you know so what i'm going to say to that yeah is you guys need to come on to my podcast and i'm going to give you a lot of pushback on that sure and it'll be really fun but um but that's that's i i love obviously i came with a commercial studio i mostly agree yeah but that's a that's a podcast right there that's a hot topic i can go i can go on for days on that one cool well thank you guys so much for having me and uh again congratulations on this beautiful spot everyone go check out axis.audio yep that's it link in the description i'll put you guys instagrams down there perfect if guys want to follow you or or message you or whatever yeah and um and yeah i will uh i will get out of here thanks again see you guys [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 44,198

Keywords: home studio, studio tour, home recording, mixing, how to, aea, ribbon mic, gear review, recording tech, technology, affordable, producing music, investment, recording studio, recording, audio engineering, productions, music, millennial, mixer, home, diy, universal audio, luna, uad, plugins, soundtoys, studio, drums, big drums, drum sounds, sounds, sweetwater, senheiser, coffee, session, consulting, andrew, masters, vintage king, dangerfox, studio desk, Epic studio gear

Id: mqXPSxsSTHk

Length: 54min 2sec (3242 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021