EPIC HOME STUDIO Setup 2022 | Ray Parker JR (studio tour)

[Music] who are you gonna call four words that we all know and immediately connect with thanks to today's guest ray parker jr also the name of a documentary about rey coming out soon ray parker jr is a legend of a guitar player musician producer engineer gear nut and songwriter ray has made some records of the last five decades with some real upstarts here just to name a few stevie wonder marvin gaye bill withers herbie hancock bb king buddy rich patty labelle and literally hundreds if not more than that rey not only has a fantastic story but also an epic home studio setup check down in the description for links to gear let me know what some of your favorite parts of rey's studio are down in the comments and thank you to sweetwater for sponsoring this video hit the like button and subscribe to the channel for more content like this and let's go check out rey's epic home studio hi i'm ray parker jr this is my personal studio and i'm going to say it's very very selfish studio because i just built it the way i wanted it for once in my life without any interruptions i think i fired a few people a few designers and stuff like that they were telling me what to do so the first thing that's very very very unique here is this studio is very much more complicated than it looks if you look at my house over there and you look at the actual graphic design of the house in order for the neighbors to allow me to do this the studio had to look exactly like the house so that in itself was a really masterminding piece so i got the neighbors to agree with letting me put up a studio next to my house in this residential area and the uniqueness of this is on a city plan records this is actually a recording studio okay so if i sold a house it's a recording studio and i'm sure you realize the excitement of this because most people have like entertainment thing and if they make too much noise the neighbors complain and they have to take everything out well this is already low in the city records as a recording studio that's great so it's done like that so with that being said now we're going to go inside i'm a guitar player you might have guessed right yeah and we're not even going to start here we're going to come in here okay to solidify how much i love the guitar when i take a crap it's on the guitar that is nice is that custom-made or this then we got our shower this is by the way a two-story building downstairs i have a complete wine cellar a pool table yeah pool table and we could do a bunch of different stuff yeah oh wow so it's a two-story building that's amazing and part of what really makes that work is i didn't want the floor to be a concrete floor okay so in there when they were making a stiffer stiffer i regulated it and said no it's got to bounce a little bit and get the base it's got to rattle and give you that feel you know nice man so here's my guitar case this is not all my guitars but this is some of them wow and some of these are really really nice we got the the unmarked gibson les paul with no serial number so i think that's a 52. next to that is the guitar george benson gave me from one of his albums the black one is the guitar stevie wonder gave me when i went on tour at 18 years old with the rolling stones so he bought me that there's the one down here to burning one is phillip church's guitar he gave me [Music] then psr made me this blue one with the ash thing which i love and this guitar over here stratocaster is probably the most popular guitar it's a 56 strat one owner guitar that's an incredible shape yeah it's in perfect shape i got the case and strap and storage to it if you look at the back of it looks just like the front i mean you'd never know it was that old of a guitar so some of this stuff that's my p bass that i've had there [Music] and underneath there we have storage for microphones and a bunch of other stuff ooh you got my gypsum guitar table which you won't see anywhere except the factory and that's a long story they actually shipped me some guitars by accident i returned them and the guy gave me this table as a gift okay so everywhere in the studio if you look up there's no mic cables i mean excuse me mic stands all the mic stands come out the wall like this yes and we went with bright colors if you see the walls are orange and green just to keep people awake and all of the bottom is aluminum all the lights it lights up everywhere here yeah that's nice and all the the stands are like this we have a little cameras everywhere high definition cameras so if you want to do a session on the internet you can play your base in here and this door closes this door seals and closes so the bass player is isolated the guitar player which is me over there obviously you can see through to the guitar player wow that's amazing that these these doors like match the wall they go right in and we got double doors too yeah stop it so i can actually crank my guitar up in here if you come in here you'll see this is a guitar room and the mic stand again comes out of the wall so it doesn't sit on the floor unravel and shake then we have the here back pro headphone system if you go a little in there to the left there and everybody can make their own headphone mix or put you know iphone track and the headphones or do what they want to do and then you'll see a camera up above that as well yeah they're so the camera swivels yeah they're small and they swivel too so you can move them around and get it they have cameras here you see for the drummer and stuff and then we did high ceilings in here so we can get a little rock and roll drum sound if we want to and we got microphones up top there that one looks like it's twisted his face in the wrong way so yeah we haven't recorded trump's lately but that turns around correctly and my buddy in toto david paige says you got to have some rock behind the drum set to get the right feel so we put a rock wall behind the drum set and so then i got defender roads here the electric kit here the regular kit there we use the regular kit most of the time and again like the big huge boom mic that most people have like you have at your studio i mean this just comes out the wall there's a hole in any kind of mic and and what nice thing about these orbit stands is you just push a button and mic clips in yep and so you want to change it you push a button it clips out and i have every mic on its own setup but if you just want to switch to a u47 something just go clip clip and it's in and it's done and it's going and it's really cool to see a studio fully take advantage of these with audio and video and the headphone systems oh yeah in the headphone system this is really cool and this if you look at this and think about it this glass is i've always wanted one of these i never could have it and this was my sixth studio i'm building i said this time i want the glass to go to the floor yeah so the glass goes to the floor and if you think about this how do you think this glass got in here it doesn't fit through any of the doors so when we were building the studio before the roof went on and before the walls went in the glass two pieces of glass they weighed 800 somebody they had both go in oh man look at the size this glass tall is seven feet plus tall yeah and it's wide so this had to be already set in place and several guys lift it up frame it and then you put the rest of the ceiling and walls in so the glass was the fourth one but i always like the glass because i can look at the engineer and see what his foot's doing see if he knows what the heck he's doing and vice versa you know comes into that that's so cool all of the walls here are done with what you call mass load vinyl in the old days like at united western and some of the old studios they build uh two walls and they have space between the walls yep well mass little vinyl is really really heavy a piece of it this big i can't hold it's so heavy yeah so with this this this studio is made out of metal beams everywhere to hold the load on the ceiling the loading the walls and even with the glass windows you can't hear anything outside we're playing the drums and blasting at four in the morning the neighbors don't hear anything yeah if you stand in the middle of the street and it's dead quiet you won't hear the speakers blasting and it gets loud it gets loud and the drums are even louder yeah but you won't hear anything that's so cool then there's these new doors when these clothes there's mechanisms that go down and seal it to the floor wow so it's not just like a simple door oh yeah no that's it shuts down yeah it locks it seals itself then you have to you have to push this to them to undo it you know yeah they're very complex doors with very heavy if you look at these it shows you how heavy this door is yeah yeah and so this part of my deal here this is just something i wanted i used to record it to record plan in sausalito and the one here all the time and i've been to electric ladyland new york and the jimi hendrix feel right just to feel it was always the moroccan you know that thing with the the bean bag i mean the old days i guess people will be smoking their pipe and doing some cocaine i don't do that but the look of it yeah i just want the look so i made this extra deep where we could put a moroccan daybed in and i got this at a moroccan store and the guy said what colors do you want i said all of them i said my walls are orange and let's go for it no and this actually comes with poles to go up here and you can put the thing around it so i didn't go that far oh yeah if i was in my 20s still i might have done that with the girls i said i'm gonna be needing that and then we had this made in the back and we got lights going everywhere yeah and as you see the floors light up as well and he really thought of everything with the yeah like it seems like everything is hidden yeah yeah everything is nice yeah everything's clean everything's hidden and this art piece came from barbara domsky she did the las vegas airport hit the wind hotel and stuff like that so you know she was a fan of mine i was definitely a fan of hers so i somehow convinced her to make this art piece to fit in the middle i call this like the sun down or it's actually the center of the studio the center of the universe yeah and it's it's a crazy impressive each one of those lines is a separate piece of glass exactly that is crazy and he weighs hundreds of pounds so her and her husband had to actually drive here in a van from las vegas and hang it for me and so it's just uh like touch it's really each one is just a line and it just really makes the studio pop beautiful like crazy that's great this i got in montrose swiss and that's a tamiya clawed knob there's only so many of those i think 50 so i got one of them then the other artwork here is ernie barnes original painting from the sugar shack and the sugar shack is a very famous painting by ernie barnes the from the marvin gaye i want you album yeah and he blew this up to show one of the band members from the i want you album which just so happens to be on that album i'm playing the guitar so i told the famous artist ernie barnes says you don't know it but you drew me playing the guitar so i got to have this painting man that is so cool yeah so i took that one and then out this door see if you open it i have a vineyard there so we growing grapes yeah oh i don't know if you'd be able to catch that on there but look at that that's amazing yeah we're growing red grapes out there in which i have several years bottoms man really utilizing every oh yeah every square inch that's so cool and we didn't make a staircase going to the basement because we don't want to mix all this stuff together you got to go out the front door and walk all over your house oh okay that way otherwise you know because this people are coming in yeah they'd be bringing food and grapes in here that's not yeah yeah and we don't want none of that and then over here my kids play the piano i don't play that much i'm a guitar player at heart but we got everything on patch cable system here we got live wire what do you call that oh the live stream live stream streaming thing where we can do you know mix the video tracks together i don't know how to use it but i guess somebody took it for me and then this console is just a mixed mixed piece of gear instead of the old days when you had like an ssl and all you had 36 channels but all channels were the same you know 100 channels and they're all the same now you can mix and match things like i like the sound of a neve console so i got you know four neve old 1073s and you can put you know distraction mixers these are the bae eqs but at the same time i got api preamps and api eqs right so you can mix it and put the different things together for all the different sounds you need yeah this is a nice collection of stuff here here we got 24 channels of analog you know stuff just like if you had an old console yeah but they don't get broken and fought you know yeah go out of style like an old console because you can pull in and pull out other things and replace them this is actually the um allen science thing i can't read it no tone lux that's stuff that they oh really yeah that's cool and then these are the new r d ripper neves yeah and these are some of my favorite uh di mario labs they made a little uh i think i used that on ghostbusters actually oh no way yeah that's amazing yeah they just had a great sound that i really really liked you know but for me i started off as a kid playing the guitar and the clarinet and sacks but also the first one in my neighborhood who had a magnavox mono tape recorder at like 7 8 years old so i just been a gadget freak from then and we're going to escalate that too now from some of the first records i made in fact all of my first records were made in my home studio that i personally wired and bought all the equipment for and i did the same thing for prince i built his first studio so all of his hits were cut on the board that i got him and the stuff that we put in there for him and then later i you know graduated to american studios in north hollywood and i had two ssl rooms there then i had another studio in mammoth and then this studio is like my my home studio so all of my records i've engineered myself and and uh have mixed myself that's amazing all of the hits i mean with no schooling no anything just trial and error doing the sound you know from all the way from jack and jill to the first one to mr telephone man to you know ghostbusters all of it that's great so i'm pretty hands on with the equipment yeah man i love that yeah i'm a gadget guy we have a documentary coming out and the documentary is called who you gonna call yes and i think it's a wonderful piece this director fran shrine did it the only thing missing in the documentary for me yeah is all this electronic stuff he didn't really harp on ray had american studios with miles davis cut in janet jackson i mean billy idol everybody used to cut in my studio wow so he didn't really harp on that and and if i had some more time in the documentary i would have you know went to american studios and showed the public that side of me as well yeah so that's the side of me that you won't see in a documentary well that's great i'm glad we get to get a little dose of it in there yeah yeah my career started in detroit which is obviously motown yeah so i worked a lot with holland johan who wrote all the hits for the supremes and the four tops and that stuff smokey robinson was real close to marvin gaye ever since i was 15 years old i did all the marvin gaye records and a bunch of stuff and then my big jump from that to go fast uh stevie wonder called me when i was 18 and wanted me to go on tour with him in the rolling stones if you can possibly imagine that's the biggest tour in the world at the time i'm 18 years old and you don't want to know what all we did on that tour it was wonderful and from there i went i moved to california i started working with barry white and the carpenters and seals and crofts and tom jones and engleberg humperdinck and a whole bunch of people and i started writing songs had my first hit with chaka khan and rufus when i was 19 and the song went number one then i wrote this tune called you make me feel like dancing i wrote some other hits to it with paddy bale and barry white but this one song you make me feel like dancing i wrote i didn't get any credit on it but i put the whole track together clive davis figured out that i did that and didn't get paid so he said give me the jack and jill song and i'll pay you which he did and that started my band radio in which we had seven or eight gold platinum albums in a row wow then my parents got sick and i thought that i was sort of retiring i was like well i've done enough i mean i've got a bunch of hit records i got money i'm gonna take care of my mom and dad then this song i wrote at the same time is the other song when i was 19. tune called mr telephone man this group called the new edition recorded it and it blew up to number one and a week later or two weeks later after i recorded that i recorded this song for motion picture called ghostbusters yeah and that went win so that so my best year was actually after i thought most things were over sort of you know and uh just to show you some time frame of that even though i'm thinking things are over when i wrote ghostbusters and recorded the new edition i was only 28 29 years old wow so i had a wonderful and then after that you know more successful career and i've been touring and playing and working on tv shows and different things ever since so i love music music is my life there's no retirement from music you you know there's no start and there's no end you just keep going so you can't play anymore yeah i'm living the american dream seriously yeah well you can always go i'm on instagram facebook and all that kind of stuff and i have a new record coming out it's called make america high again really yeah yeah yeah so it's it's uh i like lyrics so all of my stuff is very playful and lyric oriented you know that's great well i'll put links to all your stuff in the description for everyone to check out and i really appreciate you letting us come in and do this thank you yeah it's fun [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 374,897

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: trayAG3e2bE

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022