EPIC HOME STUDIO SETUP 2021 | Jim Daneker ( studio tour)

[Applause] [Music] uh okay another classic epic home studio setup studio tour video it's monday if you guys didn't know these videos come out on this channel every single monday got a bunch more in the pipeline coming soon and some other very exciting things so if you're not subscribed hit subscribe and hit the notification bell smash like button all that stuff anyway today i'm going to go check out my friend jim danaker's home studio and he is just a ridiculously talented pianist keyboard synthesizer aficionado very talented producer musician composer he also created his own sample product for main stage i'm sure some of you musicians use mainstage if you play live he has his own product for mainstage called backstage pass so cool he basically took all the classic and like best sounds from all the biggest records remade them using that gear through the gear that was used on the records like the knees and the process through the effects and the reverbs and stuff and created those as presets for main stage it's called backstage pass if you guys wanna check that out i'm gonna put all of his links down in the description give him a follow he also has a youtube channel where i'm nudging him to crank out some more videos so let's give him some motivation go subscribe to his channel watch his videos he's gonna be putting up a lot of cool stuff on keyboards and synthesizers i know that you like keyboards and synthesizers and i don't do a lot of that stuff over here so go give him a subscription follow him on instagram check out his website if you're interested in the backstage pass product check it out at backstage pass dot store nobody's sponsoring this video this is just me being pumped about it it sounds really cool to use in the studio as well go support him support the people who are awesome i'm going to tell you one more time make sure you're subscribed with the notification bell and then just tap that like button if you're tired of me selling please go down into the comments and tell me tell me whatever you need to tell me i'm ha i want to i want to hear it all let me know what you guys think of jim studio it's in a bonus room in his house which is so cool and he did such a fantastic job of making one a wild system between the five million keyboards he's got in there but it also it looks great jim thank you for having me thank you guys for watching we're now probably at 45 000 or something like that subscribers i'm just i'm very thankful for you there's going to be some really fun stuff i'm going to be doing over the next month which involves me doing some traveling so stay tuned that's it i don't have anything else to say so now i'm gonna do this and we're gonna be there in one so is this is this like a master bedroom in a normal house this would probably be the bonus room oh suppose oh yeah because the garage is on yeah we're on top of the garage it looks like you got a couple cents here just a few i think we've cut down to i think it's 15 now just the essentials i've kind of made a rule where if i'm gonna bring something in it has to have some kind of unique identity that's different than everything else it's such a comfortable room the first thing that stands out to me for whatever reason is the colors and then this treatment look at this is it crown molding and are there lights above it too yeah there's like an led rope light up there long story short it basically it's all leftovers from my previous studio the the house i was in last the aesthetic is important to me i i want to feel inspired because i'm in here every day definitely brought some color swatches and painted it some some lighter colors but still warm you know i'm a big fan of reds and browns and but as far as the treatment like all the the cloud that i built that's all leftovers it's all crown molding from my previous studio that that i'd never ended up using and um two years ago i kind of redid some stuff and i put the tennessee barn wood up because ultimately i would love to be in a cabin somewhere out in the woods there's mirrors behind the panels i just noticed yep so you know carl tats does his his rooms that you've probably done a few i got the idea from him he does these he basically does the mirror thing on the walls visually it makes the room look a lot bigger than it is and if i were to finish this what i would do is build these the wood frames i don't like the edges of these the panels they're just cloth yeah they just don't look great so i'd love to actually hide that by building some nice wood frames and putting you know light strips in there you know the panels are extremely absorptive and then in between them with the mirrors it keeps things alive i went maybe a little overboard i really did a lot of measuring so that wherever there's a mirror on the opposite side of the wall there's absorption yeah so these are all what is it g and k jk gik acoustics you know i used to make all my own stuff i built the cloud i made that myself i didn't want to make 22 right you know panels i didn't have the time so i bought them and these are actually really nice because they kind of get into bass trap territory because they're deep enough they've got an air cavity behind them and i actually left about an inch behind them so you know low end can get back there resonate the bear and they're not just the typical two inch panel that's really going to give you mid and high end absorption they they get down pretty low i see you have some back here in the in this little vocal booth as well that you made most of the wood trim in here it's all just the cheapest pine you can get but i like it rustic i i don't like it really smooth and fun like a lot of shoes it's it's oak and everything is real super smooth i love that again i'd love to be in a cabin yeah so and then this stain is called bombay mahogany i forget who makes it i've used it on pretty much everything all of my custom stuff i did on my my argosy workstation there's a couple different shades but like even these wood pieces around the studio most of it is that bombay mahogany it just it comes across gives you that red without being like bright red right it's just got a nice look to it it's warm and inviting and so how long did it take you to put this room together when i moved in the first thing was building that cloud i had to do that before i moved anything in really didn't take long building the cloud i basically did that in probably two days okay so what is it that you're doing in here obviously keyboard player there's been a lot of things anything from film scoring and commercial music doing some covers actually but doing them in a film trailer style so like taking taking a a song that was big in the 80s and making it sound like it's an epic film trailer the other big thing besides just producing the occasional album project which i don't do a lot of that anymore i've gotten very picky about that designing sounds about a year and a half ago i came out with a main stage expansion for live keyboard players which is based on my touring rig that i've used over the years with a guy named michael w smith so i've done sound design for for two decades and people would ask if i would ever consider selling these sounds and marketing them and i never did because i never had the time see i guess it was 2019 we had a big open hole in our tour schedule and around the same time i found that that uh there are three or four companies doing really well making these main stage expansions main stage is think of it as it's a virtual keyboard rig that can be anything you want it to be it's also for guitar players too but it's instead of having to you know back in the old days when we would tour i would have physical keyboards yeah and you would depend on the sounds that are in those keyboards well nowadays with with sample libraries and virtual instruments being so good now you can just take one keyboard controller and it can be you know even a cheap fill in the blank m audio or you know whatever now i can show up anywhere and use any controller and i've got all of my high-end custom sounds everything right now is it the website's called backstagepass.store it's a small family of things right now there's backstage pass itself which is the the meat and potatoes stuff i was telling you about then there's dx streams which just came out and then a dedicated high-end acoustic piano one of my good friends blair masters is one of nashville's best keyword players session players he's got a yamaha c7 in his studio that has midi and so he's been able to he's deep sampled it several times over the years and so i kind of took his latest version we worked together on creating an optimized version for for this platform if i go and buy it is there do you have like a channel with information on it it's all on the the backstage pass dot store that's awesome all right well everybody go check out all his links for for that stuff if you're interested in it there i'll put all of them in the description and also give you a follow let's start with the desk tell me about this desk it's just an argosy i think it's called a dual 15k i got it in like 1999 i think back in the day it had you know if you go on argosy's site they've got many different versions and it had a cutout for a keyboard and then initially i had the taller racks that had four more rack spaces i changed out the tops to i think they call it the mastering version i've customized it so many times over the years i cut out the keyboard tray so that i could put a i built a stand underneath i had such a heavy keyboard for years that bounced when you played it and i didn't like that so i built a really solid this is not going anywhere it's anchored to that so it's actually not touching the argosy at all and then i put this on a slide out tray so that if i'm working on something other than music i can lean in and you know do it when i'm mixing last year i built this whole little center thing because i wanted to have my main mic pre right there so i could actually make adjustments while i'm tracking you know vocal and you know it's warm warm audio i mean they're they're yeah but these mic pres i shot them out with some knees yeah it was like couldn't say which one is which i love the features of this one it's really unique because everything's right here you've got two front panel versions did you label the buttons i did what are these limiters so those are uh golden age they're la2as in an la-3a chassis there's actually even an extra tube socket in there so you can swap out tubes you can do some really cool experimenting but at the end of the day i love the sound of them and then you have this is this the x-touch yep that's the x-touch standard and then this is the x-touch compact which is anything but i don't know why they call it compact but i use this one for for logic for any automation this one i dedicated strictly for virtual instrument programming there's two layers you got an a and b layer when i'm working with sample libraries doing film scoring stuff it's important to have you know seven or eight different controllers but you got two layers of it everything must serve a purpose i imagine everything does okay um i'm looking at three macbooks yes and then a second monitor that's tied to a pc down in the corner so when i'm doing a big film scoring project which i actually don't do a lot of those lately i did i was up to five computers at one point all networked through vienna ensemble pro which is right michael whitaker talked about that in the video you did with him so this kind of lets you be modular like i've got 64 gig of ram in here and four solid-state drives but it lets me i think there's i forget how many instruments i've got loaded but there's four or 500 instruments just in this one machine and it's all getting piped via ethernet into my main mac which is the the macbook pro which this one's only a i think it's a 2018 2019. i went with a laptop because i typically do a lot of touring and i want to be able to take work on the road with me when i'm home it plugs into this little cowl digit dock which is genius and that little dock runs pretty much the whole studio that's called cal digit it's called a ts3 plus under here i've got a 4 bay solid state array which all my samples are hosted on that my media drive so when i come home i literally just plug in the laptop and then it it connects to the entire studio i was just going to ask about this console but i think i just figured it out are all the keyboards going through that yeah it's basically a sub mixer especially with some of the older synths like the the dx7 and and stuff like that and this guy arturia the matrix bru it's analog and it's it's pretty noisy yeah which is just part of the character of it so what i do is i run all the synths pretty much into here and then everything is gain optimized so everything is you know your gain structure is set up properly i've got noise gates on every channel so that nothing is making any hiss or noise when it's not being used and then i'm going adot light pipe from here into my apollo which is in the rack yeah so the main apollo is down there i never really have to touch this thing it's really just a glo yeah this is the mark ii 96k version of the o2r which still sells for about nine grand found it for 500 bucks if i'm understanding this right you've got console ua console yeah it probably has some channels just open you could walk up to a synth and hear it so i've got a a dedicated center return loop set up where anything in here can get routed through my hardware chain when i want to commit it and track it i'll do that typically and i've got a couple open channels on the apollo so the stuff i really care about like the analog stuff i want to get every ounce of it i'll i'll run it through the through the hardware and and then you've got this uh some pedals over here is this for reamping no so these i'm a reverb junkie and i'm always i've got way too many reverbs and typically they're all in the box but somebody i forget what it was well the big sky of course is a big deal everybody loves the big sky but the one that really got me is maybe two years ago is this the specular tempest for really atmospheric dreamy stuff i don't think i've ever heard a better reverb than that so if you're not using a reamp thing through it what what's it going through to come out of the interface so into it basically just ascend return loop from the apollo so i've got one pair of the apollo line out line outs going into these ebbtech line level shifter they take it from -10 or from plus four balanced to minus ten so that it matches the level that that wants to see those zebtech boxes are great they don't do anything sonically they just convert level from unbalanced to balanced and so you've got like a few small guys up here are these that you're using often i had surgery on my hands a couple years ago for trigger finger couple decades of pounding on weighted action keyboards yeah there's a reason to have 88 keys weighted keys when i'm playing piano stuff i'm a piano player if i'm just quickly auditioning sounds and i don't want to be playing a weighted keyboard it's just nice to have these a controller that's ideal for me it's this korg d1 it's a digital piano that happens to be low profile it's thin the action is weighted but it's not super heavy so yeah i can actually play faster stuff like when i'm scoring playing string parts and whatnot but it has no pitch and mod wheels it's just a digital piano so like oh let me grab a little arturia or this little korg i've got pitch and mod wheels right here on my desktop so i can play from any keyboard they all get routed into you know logic and then what's this guy streaming mixer oh yeah roland so yeah it's a broadcast mixer it takes four hd or three hdmi inputs from three cameras or you know whatever your sources are it's got two uh mic pres and let's see it's a switcher you know you can switch between your any any of your sources and stream straight to whatever youtube facebook instagram i thought you were talking about the stream decks those things are absolutely bonkers you know they instantly change to whatever your foreground app is when i'm in email like i've got a button that types my email address which is ridiculously long yeah i never type my email address it just hit a button so you've got you know your software kind of piped in here and then is that that's also going that's what we're seeing over here on the ipad what this does is it gives you hands-on control for everything you see on screen so you can you have your presets for sort of designed for the specific sound of the song yeah or as a reference and then you have the controls on the ipad right it's like having a virtual mix console right under your fingertips without having to mess with your software and then what's the one underneath it is that even though that controls that one is for when um typically more when i'm deep into logic for my scoring template what's the app the app is called touch osc basically tinker toys i mean you can you can create any kind of controller whether it's both of these are running touch osc that's the main screen for for backstage pass it gives me 24 program change buttons what's called b3 designer i can dial in all my b3 stuff like how much distortion i want this is the main screen for dx streams and then i've got another screen for like a channel strip editor like this one would be for a synth like attack decay sustain release basic envelope controls a thing called atmosphere which kind of is a third hand i can trigger a note if i want to hold a pad sound during a transition i can hit that and it'll it'll hold that for me and play whatever note i specify just hit say i'm in the key of f i hit the f and then turn it on it'll hold an f with whatever pad sound i've got called out interesting yeah the worship guys love that like worship teams it's a big thing for them that's awesome so yeah you can do anything with touch osc all right i want to ask about how everything is being held and fitting into here this is pretty impressive and and on the back side of this let me see if we can see it from under here this is hardcore and also very meticulously neat the stands they are a company called stantastic makes these there's called either the 102 or the 103 ks only difference is the amount of tiers that they have but you can add tiers so like in this case i got four on this one but you can add as many tiers as you want i like the really clean look all i see is keyboards so they kind of look like they're floating in in mid-air and you can angle them however you want they're extremely sturdy so like nothing bounces they've got a good low profile plenty of room underneath for petals or whatever like this one over here i mean i've got some racks under there these other ones like these those are just little things i found on amazon they're like 60 bucks there's just two stairs yeah they're super solid they're welded steel i wanted this one to be kind of on its own and featured and just be able to wheel over here and mess with this guy this guy the ob6 i wanted this right there with it because it's these are the two probably top dogs as far as analog synths in here and then for monitors you have uh i see these are the atom what are these tsp t8v so i want to be able to hear in stereo and i wanted something as full range as possible because i'm used to these monster pmcs yeah which are ridiculous okay so super fast keyboard tour this would be the uh wall of 80s these two here the dx7 yamaha and the roland d50 these two synths are probably responsible for pretty much every pop hit that you heard between 1983 and 1989. super super iconic another favorite though which is kind of a sleeper was and sonic stuff the vfx which was a lot like the d50 spare dx7 for parts arturia matrix brute one of the best analog mono synths out there i think it just has a really really wicked sound the analog effects on it are really good when i want like an arpeggiated sequence i go to this guy a lot roland system 8 this thing is all things vintage roland the jupiter 8 juno 106 like if you wanted to score stranger things this is the synth you would get it's one of the best modeling since out of the last 10 years i think and it just does any of those roland iconic sounds the asm hydra synth this thing is is unlike anything else out there it's got polyphonic aftertouch which was unheard of for the longest time it's got this long ribbon controller and it's it just does some really really creative sound design that you can't can't really do with anything else sequential pro 3. this is a lot like the matrix brute it's a mono synth primarily but it's got real vco oscillators so borders on moog territory you could do some mini moog type stuff with this but it does some things that nothing else does it's got a couple different filter models the oberheim filter the profit filter so all in one box super super creative below that one of my favorites of all time the access virus ti there's more power in that synth than probably anything on the market and it's the technology is 20 years old it's like gosh techno like edm like any any of that kind of super super arpeggiated creative stuff it's lush and beautiful another sequential piece the profit rev 2 which is a different flavor than their other stuff it uses dcos so the raw tone is a little bit i would say generic which is not necessarily a bad thing what it makes up for in in other ways is crazy modulation routings being able to do some really cool sound sculpting that you can't do with the others and it's got a really unique flavor behringer poly d this is my mini moog stand in i've done a lot of testing between this and a real moog this is a moog the soul of a moog it sounds insane when you want that big fat moog low end this is a great option and this is behringer poly d yep it's got the roland juno chorus chips oh cool and an analog distortion so kind of a little bit of a hybrid but really really cool core wave state this thing is like if you want to score a movie you could do it with this one keyboard [Music] like really cool uh evolving soundscape type stuff really evolving atmospheric stuff i haven't heard anything like that that that's a another favorite and last but not least the sequential prophet five this thing is kind of responsible for much of what we know about synthesizers it came out in 1979 and the architecture of this is pretty much what every synthesizer since has followed subtractive you know analog synthesis it's got two oscillators a mixer section filter amplifier this is the this is where it all started it was the first programmable uh synthesizer that was analog but that lets you have presets and nothing sounds like this it just sounds insanely good and then it's cousin the sequential ob6 which is really modeled after the oberheim stuff very similar in some ways but what this is known for are the filters yeah so when you want that ridiculous just fatter than should be legal is this being used as a controller as well yeah the roland phantom 7. this one kind of along with the system eight just recently they ported a lot of their iconic models like the jupiter 8 juno 106 jx 3 excuse me jx8p they put those models in here now so this i take this out on tour when i go on tour sometimes this is my main controller so it's got ridiculous sounds in it it sounds gorgeous roland yep the roland phantom but i love the action on it it's got a nice uh synth action it's it's all routed through logic so when i'm working on the prophet five you know if i'm listening through these monitors i'll typically be playing from this and tweaking from here you know whatever is my destination synth i can be on pretty much any other in the room and play what i'm wanting to hear where'd you get this thing this little table for the laptop uh i made it you know i've always got pine sitting around down in my garage so actually just last week i use this for a lot of different things it's just a quick lock locator stand if you search for quick lock locator stand i forget what the model name is but i love it because you can pull it apart you can widen this so i just made a tabletop but i've used it for music stands i used coffee stands yeah and then what are these speaker stands did you make these i just got no i just got these amazon i'm always on amazon they're 100 bucks they're called rockville here i actually just got the smaller ones here i was going to put up so it's this but in a taller yeah yeah they're also um fillable you can fill them with sand okay so they're so you can you can really make them dense if you want which is important you have like the keyboard stand here but then you have the wood yeah you've put on top so it's kind of like a nice table yeah the reason for that was because these two synths by themselves were too narrow and i'm like well i kind of want them next to each other so yet another diy nice little adjustable light here which i'm always killing yeah it's like if i want to work with the prophet you know just kind of throw it over that way and you got this john william things over here what's this i did my life dream back in 2016. i took a year or two off from everything else did a kickstarter and did a big cinematic instrumental record i hired an orchestra and did it right john williams is my lifetime hero when i grew up listening to his film music he came to nashville and conducted the national symphony a couple years ago and so it was i'd love to have met him but it just it didn't work out so i sent him my album when it was done with a thank you note just thanking him for years and decades of inspiration i just said i don't want anything from you i just you know here's a copy if you don't do anything with it fine but i just want to say thank you and he sent me uh he signed the cover of my album sent it back to me and so at least i know it was probably on his coffee table who knows yeah i like that you took the these back corners and then you made it into like a nice little bookshelf and you have software stuff in there yeah just for yeah yeah my parents gave me some old family furniture and that's like that piece goes back decades and uh so i'm just using it for whatever but stuff that my daughter made me over the years and and my wyatt earp replica whatever model it is from tombstone which is probably my favorite movie for anyone who's curious they can go remind me the website again backstagepass.store check out all the stuff that he has on there he's worked tremendously hard and it would be such a value for i'm sure a ton of people watching this and then do you have like instagram and other stuff instagram just jim danneker d-a-n-e-k-e-r in the description click the the show more all of his links are in there for the website give him a follow this is very creative and and well done so thank you again appreciate it all right i will uh i'll get out of here go follow him hit the like button and uh we'll see in the next one [Music] oh

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 68,251

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: vZsaxc9KeHs

Length: 26min 56sec (1616 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/Conradfr]

I thought the way he makes everything working together as one system is interesting.

[u/ubahnmike]

Waht exactly is epic about that? I mean he has a bunch of synths, some classics among them. But then there´s an old digtial mixer (I have one too, EPIC!), some highly questionable chinese-knock-off outboard and weird monitor placement.

Nice studio, nice guy, but epic? I dunno.