EPIC HOME STUDIO Setup 2024 | Tommy Wiggins (studio tour)

yeah like a nonchalant in the studio moment okay I'm ready that's how he is [Music] the [Music] okay so we have truly found a new Nashville Gem and his name is Tommy Wiggins So today we're going to go check out his actually epic home studio setup which was designed to do many things multi-track recording mixing and mastering which he specializes in I'm going to put a link to his mastering website if you need some mastering down in the description and like many of you I think he also got into this whole studio thing so he could create record and write his own original music which I'm going to link down in the description you got to check it out his band camp down there but above all Tommy is a hilarious and very fun person to spend any amount of time with I think you guys are going to really love this this interview that we're doing here one thing Tommy and I both have in common is that we both absolutely love Sweetwater I'm sure you do as well Sweetwater sponsoring this studio tour check out some of the gear that I have here in my studio which you may not recognize down in the description there will be affiliate links to them thank you Sweetwater for sponsoring this video we have an absolutely fun time joking around about it in this tour I think you're going to love it also if you didn't notice we did move Studios once or twice recently which is going to be a fun story for you to watch on my other channel studio time one of the best things about moving Studios if you've ever experienced it is taking apart and resetting up a studio patch Bay if you're thinking about adding a patch Bay to your studio check out the description for links to all the stuff we use on ours and if adding a patch Bay to your studio is something that you've been considering but you just are not totally sure on what to get and how to do it check out our new patch bit course I'm going to link it down the description it's 20 bucks it's a full comprehensive course on everything you need to know about patch bays and what to do and how to get one and set one up for your studio 20 bucks again link down in the description make sure you hit the like button subscribe to the channel and let's go check out Tommy Wiggins epic home studio setup thank you so much for having us tell me about this amazing compound that you have here it really is a compound this is like the probably the 10th iteration of Tommy's tracks in various locations wow we started this particular version right at the start of the pandemic so of course the phone didn't ring for 6 months so I had time to build it and Conor and another friend of ours during that time uh we also decided to go mobile so we could uh visit the kids and go around so we invented Tommy's tracks mobile there's hardly any internet service when you're in National Forest campground so all you have to do is write songs and so I've written a couple whole albums wor the songs just in the last couple years that's amazing just for people watching let's kind of Hit the list here you've had a very storied career of a lot of different things but from what I understand along that whole journey writing music and recording your own albums yeah in fact everything that I do in the studio is in support of the songs yeah before there were actually home Studios per se you know you couldn't do that yeah and and what we did is I started out in the early' 70s instead of going to a regular regular studio that Bruce sedine had done uh we went to the basement and uh did our basement tapes like the band did you know big pink and the band and it's been like home recording ever since this is my 39th year of having a home studio oh my gosh it's like I'm the Grandad Grandad of Home Studios right and uh yeah it's been a real journey along the way I was able to start and direct two recording schools that we've trained thousands of musicians how to record their own material all right and that's really a a great you know feeling yeah course I've learned and recorded on just about every format there has been uh you know since the early '70s that's amazing looking forward to your AI version of your career right well but you got to feed it right ai's got to you know got to get the good stuff so it can create what it feels is going to be the next good stuff right terrified and looking forward to it I'm still going to be writing songs with my notebook in the woods but then I'll bring them to whatever Studio that's going to happen and my motto is rock until the wheels fall off I love it tell me about this what like this whole thing there's a lot going on here we've got the van got the van got the mobile rig everything is fenced in got a little Studio hang for the for the studio cats and and we got on the other side of the house there's a pool and a gazebo so you know when you're tired or if it's not your turn yet you can hang by the pool oh I love that it's always nice having a place to send people that's Pleasant to be in and it is absolutely beautiful over there thanks yeah it's a it's a beautiful day I just want to touch on what this house was and sort of what you've done this seems like a like a classic Nashville 60s Ranch just kind of tell me the thought and the design behind it it's pretty cool you're correct in saying that it's a 60s Ranch so it's all on one level except for this used to be the garage the owner before us turned it into a media room but it was really just kind of a slap Dash kind of thing and so I C my wife into letting me have the garage and what was originally the old kitchen so that's kind of the studio complex and because I've been building recording studios uh since the late 7s I have a background in in carpentry you know I could never afford to go to other places so I've always had to build my own yeah yeah you know we basically gutted everything and this is the first Studio I've ever done that I actually hired the uh framers and hired the drywall cats and hired the electricians but other than that I've always had to me and my buddies have built it so I've taught Acoustics and recording studio design at the college level I know how it's done because I've been reading ever since the 70s of oh recording studios what can you do Etc and so along the way I've gotten the schools to be able to help design what I felt the dream is for the recording schools I've Had The Good Fortune of hiring John St from Walter St his first commission was electric ladyland oh wow right yeah and uh I've also had the great Fortune to work with Russ berer who's done NFL films Owen and the Sweetwater Studios right so and and then there was a guy for that Steve orfield who has built in the Guinness Book of Records quietest room in the universe my go so I've been able to you know glean just because I'm interested in studios and design and construction to be able to use those for my own Studios as well I love that well we're going to just as we go through just steal all of the things that you've learned and and we'll all use it in our setups not that you haven't done the same thing well this is what I do I go to people's places and I steal all their great ideas it's great um yes glean and and stealing is good yes right it's sharing sharing sharing well that's the thing you know we all get to benefit from it so come on in all right so what you see here is a space that's 24 ft long 20 ft wide and 10 ft tall and the tall is the good important part and for my work what I do is because I write and then I record my own stuff and to pay for my recordings I master other people's music so the studio has to be two different things it has to be like a tracking room so that you can you know cut cut songs and it also has to have a really good sweet spot for mastering and so what you see around us the equipment wise is actually just two different systems one's a mastering system and one is the one for uh recording I knew I had to have some booths I knew I had to have a drum room I knew I had to have a vocal booth or percussion group I knew I had to have a couple of places for amplifiers and my favorite Leslie and luckily I have an office up upstairs so that's another Booth when we started ripping the old stuff down we realized that there's concrete steps like went from the office all the way down so I went oh now I have to design something you know it was actually a good deal so I lopped 4ot off the side and turned this part into a galley turned this into an amp room which we'll look at and then a drum room and then put the booth off the side in a recording room you want things to be somewhat symmetrical so we've got the drums on one side and the booth on the other side I've always been uh since the early days more into what was formerly known as live end dead end room where you deaden the front space and you then leave the live space so that the early Reflections don't hit your ears milliseconds after the direct sound so The Sweet Spot really is right here in the the previous space it was the same gear but we had an MCI console at at that time a 428 for those who are keeping score and we just weren't getting the definition and uh my dear and now departed friend Mark rubel uh I was going to have lunch with him one day and all of a sudden our lunchmate was Chris Huston Chris Huston had been in band since Liverpool days and had recorded just a linty just Chris hu s t n um and you'll see what he what he's done he's recorded all the classic things of the early uh late 60s and early '70s well he's turned into a designer and he said well okay with these measurements Tommy what we need to do is we need to move the speakers Back 9 in and we did and holy cow all of a sudden you know we weren't in the trough the base trough we finally you know hit the sweet spot so I guess there's four different acousticians that I've learned from from all those years there weren't any any schools to go to at the time to be able to to do this work so I would read modern recording techniques and I would also read you know building home Studios by a guy named Alton Everest he was like the granddaddy of Acoustics so those are the guys that I learned from and then you just start doing your own thing so in my live and dead end we've got 4 in of 703 or rock wool kind of the whole area so that the bnw speakers can hit me right in The Sweet Spot and I'm not hearing early reflections off the sides yeah uh and then we had to put this cloud in uh so that things you know could absorb up the top okay so now I got mastering covered you know you have to diffuse and absorb those are all uh homemade home constructed diffusers and behind them there's an absorptive quality and then we all learned by doing you know we would start building the different traps uh and here's here's a a construction technique for just the the home people you know you think that if you have a 703 and you put a you know wrap of fabric around it it'll be good well what you're still doing is you're sucking up the highs so we put this craft paper in the front of it so the high frequencies can roll off so it can be more natural I love that yeah and there's different types of uh of things that you can buy I call it Lumberyard EQ and so in the lumber yard e Q what we do is this is one of uh Greg Mackey's early thing called audio control and it's it's a 31 band uh RTA where you can take different measurements with you know a uh an omni mic uh calibrated mic and then you take measurements in different uh areas and you plot out your room and then you can see what your trough is and then my way of doing it is okay let's deal with the base first so then you build your absorbers and okay what we got going in the mid-range so then you got to build your more diffusion uh and are we lacking or or do we have to like cut the highs a little bit uh so you know it's lumber yard EQ yeah you know you go to Home Depot or Lowe's or Menards or whatever you know the place is near you and you start building your room uh but just my advice is just don't think that deadening everything is the is the good thing you can just make it too dead oh but then we have reverbs I I've gone back and forth on that through different studios I've done in my homes and the last room that I did I went really dead uhhuh and it was a A-Frame bonus room above a garage but it had a stairwell in the back and then there was a half wall so the low end on 25% of the back wall went back 5T further than the rest it was pretty good uh not perfect by any means but you know I'm also tracking in there so very dead drums and very dead everything M once I moved out of there and got in this new situation with this essentially freestanding like big you I mean you saw the other day uh Goos Goos yeah they were like added space behind them so it's actually trapping stuff and I didn't realize like how much my room was just sucking up all all of them like I would have to crank yeah I'd have to crank it up so loud I'm like man it still feels like kind of quiet in here even when it's blasting loud so it's yeah that's something I've learned over the years that I I've you can go way too far on so that's that's really cool yeah and and that's kind of been the history of recording because in the beginning like 50s and 60s you know there were one room and every all the cats were in the same room and had to balance with each other yeah and then all of a sudden multitrack came and so now oh we're going to put so many mics on the Dr and how do we keep the drums out well we baffle them off from everything else we'll add an EMT plate or something in you know whatever you know Reverb they had I wanted to ask about some of the materials Sweet Water will like [Laughter] that okay you're asking about you know the materials you know it's a popere of of whatever a room needs what I discovered was that ARX who made you know the the original foam that then died and started disintegrating you know years later also made a styrofoam product so what you're seeing up in here are actually styrofoam and they're paintable without changing the acoustic uh treatment you know because it's more diffusion uh and they're very light they sell them in like 15 packs and they're 2 by two so you can stick them in a ceiling grid if you want and in our case uh we just decided we needed uh to put them everywhere and in the corners developed kind of a triangle where you we have a fabric end and then put some f fiberglass just regular loose bat fiberglass in in the back behind it and then just screwed it to the ceiling it's it's real simple yeah uh and very effective and it hides the trap door as well uh so oh yeah that's great for the attic yeah more specifically than that actually meant the ceiling tile oh the ceiling tile like do you know what what kind of material that is you really want is the kind with the holes in it so that in the old 50s and 60s schools that you you see them they actually sell those but because they cost too much money I just use uh Armstrong whatever the kind of like you know it's just got a little bit of a texture to it so there's a little bit of diffusion you know they're half in thick so we're getting absorption yeah you know and you have to look at the kind of well what it's it going to do it's only going to absorb the highs it's not going to do anything for the lows but in my last one two three four studios I've just gone to the lumber yard bought bought a box of those things and glue them up glue and and staple them up to you know just whatever ceiling it is and trim it on at the end and got it and it's about the cheapest thing going uh I would like to get some of the older style ones that you know with all the holes in it you just want to have it sound natural cuz I can hear the sound of sheetrock and the sound of of drywall is not good in a recording of course and especially with everybody's bonus rooms uh like in Nashville it's like you know yeah that that's how we have these Extra Spaces Y and when you have an A-frame you're so close to on the sides to to what it is so you got to start diffusing the things y I'm going to ask about your setup here so the way that you're using this room is the way that I think a lot of us are which is for multi-purpose right mastering but also creating writing and then being able to track and I don't know maybe cook or post parties or something um that's in the galley oh in the galley okay uh and the smoker's Lounge is way back there oh yeah it's an interesting space because you you said it's 24 ft long 20 yeah 24 you've got a lot of stuff in here what five booths one two three four five six kind of yeah or five no cuz the upstairs right the upstairs and people and we track in here at the same time so we can get a five piece band happening so something that is a big deal at least to me when I work in a studio or I'm living in a studio is the desk situation now your desk situation is super cool can you just walk me through it a little bit Yeah my desk situation has to do with being able to master yes so you don't want all kinds of stuff in front of you in front of the speakers so you want a clean line of sight and the least amount of uh obstruction between the speakers and my ears and so I went with a design of a couple of lowboy racks and a monitor system and I found this little desk on Craigslist for 50 bucks of course everything else cost way more yeah uh but to me it works because I can sit in The Sweet Spot and I'm getting the 12 in in speakers as well as seeing the mids and the highs and I pretty much have a clear uh clear to the back of my ears because you you want basically an equilateral triangle when you're mixing or mastering uh and I've got the ability to deal with uh two different different systems at a time this is the mastering system so everything is here and I can kind of like you know work it and still be kind of within the The Sweet Spot and um other than these uh duresses which I love love love thank you again Sweet Water and the the a to d conversion over here I I'm pretty much set and for tracking that's this side so I got my original 1176 that I started working with at the studio that I worked in in 1978 so I've actually worked on this with this machine since like then that's great which is amazing in great condition too yeah it it certainly is I've had three in in the rack at one time that's kind of really gear porn yeah um but you have to re you know reallocate resources so everything is is kind of like functional and right with you I've been part of the whole revolution of of of Home recording you know so an epic recording studio home recording studio back back in the 70s and early 80s is much different than than it is now of course but uh uh I've gone through all kinds of formats I could list all the formats but um what I decided is that now that I finally trusted the sound of plugins and I was a I was not a believer but then they kept getting better and better and better and finally I said yes I'm going to do this and so away went the venerable MCI 428 that had come out of uh Dynamic sounds in Kingston Jamaica you know that got was was commissioned in 74 uh finally said goodbye to that and recently I said goodbye to uh the manly mixer manly mik mixer which is a 16 input mic mixer oh yeah it just sounds awesome and I'm surprised that it really you know didn't catch on although you know the price was pretty manly yeah of course I started with with uh Apollo because I've always you know since 1978 I've been a a UA believer and so I started drinking the Apollo Kool-Aid and when Luna came out right in the pandemic I just kind of went full force Luna so uh I'm just getting ready to sell the radar system system that I've had since the early 200 2000s I went a whole hog I love the sound of the converters I love the sound of their Unison preamps and I'm getting really good drum sounds you know so I bought an 8p just for the drums but I'm never going to give up some of this stuff because it just adds such a good color to everything so that's kind of my system right now as far as the U the mastering side we have a links system we use wave lab to do the mastering side so it's basically two different studios in one wait two two different ones in one it's pretty incredible it's very lean you know really good sounding I've even done a bunch of research and my assistant Connor and I have built a system to where I can even do mastering in the van that's a little tricky because I've been used to these BMW 801s for 20 years now the key to being a mastering engineer is knowing your room knowing your speakers having the right amplifier which is a Bryon 4B and really knowing your gear and all of a sudden going to a set of headphones that you know what headphones do you use you know to recreate what you've been hearing so what we have in the headphone department is I went with the uh focal uh clear Pro clears and I have a really good quality d uh called a Mojo 2 um and I've got my laptop and so all the all the plugins that we use give me the same kind of of flow in mastering how is that for you like as a workflow does it feel like like cuz you can go anywhere right you can go anywhere but I'm confident in mastering a single but I'm not confident yet of doing a whole album yeah just because you know again I've been listening to these guys for 20 years and I've been listening to these for like a year yeah and you know the the low end is so important uh mids and Highs are pretty easy to get with headphones yeah but the lows are just like uh you know it's it's harder to do in terms of of mastering uh you know there's a similar flow where you listen to the material you try to get a Vibe of where the folks who are giving it to you who have listened to it hundreds of hours somebody's approved there's a bunch of money and time spent on this stuff you want to do it justice so that's usually for me it's figure out what the the the the Baseline sound is going to be and then work from there with EQ from the bottom up and then compression and then bringing it back uh a to d i mean I could go through a whole mastering lesson but uh uh we'll save that for another video save that for another for another video but but basically then it's a ad conversion and and and make the record sound as good as you can and once I've done that then Connor does the digital deliveries act to the clients and uh it's all it's it it this place works this place works it's a combination of old and new tried true and uhoh what are we going to do next yeah exactly can can we check out some of these booths yes and some of the rest of the space yeah you want to start over the drum Booth yeah let's start in the drum Booth you can see the studs and the insulation this is a double wall with airs space in between double doors I always use inch and 3/4 solid core doors up until now I've always built the frames themselves in this particular one I bought prehung solid corri doors uh with uh thresholds as well just because I'm too old for that stuff oh hanging doors is a nightmare and then getting everything solid and getting everything working straight and straight and oh God right and I've always had smaller spaces so it I kind of look at my recording studios as cabins and and the mobile is the cabinet so to speak again we have 10ft ceilings so we can drop down there's just a single wall construction between this and the regular house and that's the that's really the outside brick wall of the house okay so we're building outside of it so double wall construction this is double wall construction uh and then the the weak point would be the high frequencies if they were you know coming through the doors but you're so far back and it it it's not been an issue Barry and I built just a ton of different baffles and again I'm always using and and I am a proponent of this uh uh craft paper in the front because if you you look at the books you can just see what the difference is in the First Recording School that I started in Minneapolis the first students and I ended up building these things and so Steve Glazer um again a departed friend and and companion um and engineer he came up with the idea of the paper from and to me that's that was a game Cher for working with John's Manel you know 703 so you want to come back yeah yeah yeah okay you know it's a small tight spot uh but it has room I've got my original 1985 AKG 414s and a a bunch of 57s just hanging out everywhere yeah and we got an odx D6 uh and a homemade subkick and on on that and uh it's the original 1967 lwig kit with a really uh wonderful uh Rogers snare you know the original symbols that came with the kit and I've got the original Kick Drum speed King pedal but it you know can't it doesn't really work that well it's okay if you're you're kind of playing light you know like you could see on a beach boys record or something yeah but probably hell Blaine who played on those records didn't even use those very good sounding kit yeah you know homemade 2T Square diffusers or absorbers in different thicknesses so that you're absorbing different frequencies uh and then you just kind of like okay this one looks good that way okay this one looks good this way and you just like set them in and then these guys are just 4 in of uh 703 and then there's a whole bunch of stuff on top that that's just a fabric ceiling that we put together and then there's different layers you know it goes up 10 ft so there's you know it's a good really good bass trap and uh you know more of the RX diffusers the the my mind just blanked you know oralx diffusers yeah that's great so cool you know it's a really good sounding room a nice tight room I like a real dry kind of old school sound um so which works for my music cuz I'm a dry old school guy uh okay so let's go to let's go to another here's a fun room this has to do a whole bunch of things and what it is it's the amp closet Connor's got it wired up so that we can either go with two mics on one we've got some buyer 101s and a buyer 69 and an re20 for the base we really don't use that hardly at all yeah so I maybe we'll pull that and start using the re20 on something else uh cuz we mostly go direct or a B15 plugin yeah yeah pretty good and storage and whatnot going all the way up to the ceiling you guys have a bunch of instruments in here and they're all connected to this thing over here tell me about it so this is Frank we refer to him nicely as Frank it's the Franklin di made in Australia it's just a six switcher di box all stereo so you got six stereo di inputs and then you can just switch between them and then you're getting fed whatever you have selected and right now we have the through of it hooked up to a Leslie pedal so anything we select here goes right to the lesli so we can have the wave drum go through the Leslie we can have the corg organ the Nord there we go okay or any of that and it's super easy and I highly recommend that okay so it's going to a DI but it's also going through to the pedal that goes to the Leslie yeah it's a most di got their little di through on them and you can run it to an amp or whatever but in this case we're like Leslie who doesn't love a Leslie let's do that and then you have mics on the Leslie so you can get the DI and the mics all we have to do is hit input it's all normal then through the bay and we're done it's easy two buttons I love it yeah cool thanks man so awesome um and then we've got the galley and the Leslie closet uh should I come in or do you want to yeah sure okay so this is storage of my CDs and the Leslie which again is Mike surely so to speak and then we're saying goodbye to this nice piece oh my God I love you you know I've played hundreds of gigs live with with this particular beast and it's still going strong and we got a little sink and a little refrigerator and and storage and things and copies of old strip tapes from albums you know I just remember Bia that had to have been fun putting that little kitchen net in there huh yes yeah actually this top in here were the only things that I saved when we ripped out everything else and so we ended up building around it the deal of going 4T out from this outside wall was because we could all of a sudden have a room that could be symmetrical and also have get the boots yeah and going up here you can a lot of Records On The Wall here lot of yeah again the reason that I build Studios and work in studios and master other people's records is to be able to record my own music and so uh I started chili dog records in 198 80 if you go to Tommy Wiggins dcom you can basically listen to everything except the one that Dominion entertainment owns and won't sell me back the rights to come on you guys it's not making you money I I need it it's mine but um I've had you know chili dog records is uh is about ready to release it's we're in our 40th 48th or 49th album wow yeah or release of which maybe there's 36 full length albums of my music so it's like come on that is a ton and then up in here up here if you if you care is uh my office and the storage in the archives and uh one of the five EMS that we uh were earned for um the television shows uh Crooked River Groove and words and music that I hosted for 12 years man what a cool office it's it's pretty viby it's nice to just have another space for you know stuff like this but also for storage that's not in the same room you're working in exactly and there's what the there's the archives for one of my next projects is to organize the archives and I'm The Keeper of the uh flame for our first band from 1972 which is Freeland we actually have a trio of Records we first made in that basement studio in 72 we got together again maybe about Midway and this last year we finished our swan song album and since then two of our guys passed away oh man so but but six people who original music was that was what we lived for yeah and these guys started me off and I'm getting Goosebumps just thinking about it uh because they started me off as in songwriting and recording It's a Wonderful Legacy and and those records are also available on the band camp it's basically Tommy wigs.com goes to our the band camp site and you can just like you know there's millions of stories millions of stories so anyway that that's kind of the the size of uh of this and uh hello this was a Goodwill find in an urban Goodwill oh nice I think cool yeah you want it that work in your your place I am trying to get rid of things okay we have too many things to move already my wife says I should be getting rid of things too so I just you know it'll go to a good home eventually so now the last booth that we're going to go see is the vocal booth I do a lot of my vocals and acoustic guitar in here and also we have a our complete acoustic percussion Department I'm a for anything that makes noise and rattles just little little trinkets little little sparkly and I also have been practicing yoga for about uh I don't know getting on 20 years now and I've created instrumental albums of of that kind of music so I might take some Loops or something and then I'll add different parts or maybe just this becomes the rhythm part and then we do instrumental music uh as well also available uh at the band camp site Link in the description great exactly and thank you for doing all that yeah of course how can I build a bridge to [Music] you it's not impossible to do start by finding common ground something solid something [Music] sound I will listen to your heart if you vow to do your [Music] part he my story too it's all I'm asking you nothing there to prove building Natural Bridges Natural Bridges hey I'm Tommy Wiggins and I've had just such a great time with being part of the Epic Studio man what a tour and thanks for including me and I hope to see all of you guys down the road somewhere this is a new song of mine that I wrote in this van last year and uh my good buddy Phil Solem from the rim Brands produced for me check it out on the the website love yall and uh keep on that home recording Natural Bridges

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 36,964

Keywords: home studio, studio tour, home recording, mixing, how to, ribbon mic, gear review, recording tech, producing music, investment, recording studio, recording, audio engineering, music, mixer, home, diy, uad, plugins, soundtoys, studio, drums, big drums, sounds, sweetwater, session, andrew, masters, dangerfox, studio desk, Epic studio gear, guitar, Tommy wiggins, mastering

Id: pkDPXN0LryE

Length: 39min 49sec (2389 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024