EPIC RECORDING STUDIO SETUP 2021 | Vance Powell (studio tour)

so today we're gonna go hang out with four-time grammy award-winning producer mixer and engineer vance powell [Applause] [Music] so vance is a local nashville producer and engineer who has a studio in berry hill here in nashville tennessee it's called sputnik sound he shares it with his friend mitch they both have their own rooms it's an old house and the whole house i just turned into this crazy studio it's wild it's it's really really cool vance has worked with a ton of artists that have been huge inspirations on me personally and probably to you as well obviously a lot of them being very very successful projects just to name a few my good friend tyler bryant tyler bryant the shakedowns the dead weather jack white chris stapleton jeff the brotherhood danger mouse kings of leon and the raconteurs the blunderbuss record and the lazaretto record from jack white were huge inspirations on me absolutely so pumped to go and see this place it's really rad so thank you vance for having me out it was so much fun meeting you and getting to check out all the stuff and how you're using it and some of the cool projects very very cool vance is a very successful engineer and producer so he needs no promotion whatsoever but if you guys want to follow him i put his instagram and his website linked down in the description check that out so if you're watching this right now i'm in los angeles actually working on some new very cool projects gonna have some cool videos coming out of that so if you're not subscribed hit that notification bell on the subscribe so you can get notified every monday when these videos go live i've got some really cool new gear right here let me just show you real quick oh oh we got some cool new gear and i'm really really pumped about that and gonna be working on making some really fun projects using all this gear and i'll put those videos up if you guys want to check them out also i link all of the gear that i think is awesome down in the description they are sweetwater links sweetwater sponsors all these videos thank you sweetwater for sponsoring the videos if you guys watch these videos just because it's fun to watch to see other people's setups that's great if you're looking to get your own gear you see something you like use the links down in the description the way that it works is they are affiliate links so if you click on them and wind up getting either the gear that you clicked on or literally just any other gear that supports my channel through sweetwater sweetwater is the number one online distributor of all this stuff so if you're looking for it they've got it one thing that i really like about sweetwater is whether you're just getting started and you're looking to get a arturia keystep 37 as your first midi controller or you're looking to get a neve 33609 or some warm audio 273 pres or some high-end converters or whatever it is you can get all of it from sweetwater they have everything from entry-level stuff to very elite high-level epic studio gear so thank you sweetwater for sponsoring the video guys use the links down in the description it's a tremendous help from me and you guys have been so freaking awesome i'm i'm very thankful thank you guys for all of the support liking subscribing all that stuff if you want to book zoom consultations we've been doing a bunch of those that's been a lot of fun you can go to andrewmastersmusic.com all of the services listed here are available on that website andrewmastersmusic.com thank you guys for watching and let's go check out vance's studio hey vance hey how's it going i'm doing pretty well we're a little overexposed here that's fine that's all right um i'm always a little overexposed out here at sputnik sound sunny sound yeah here in berry hill thank you for having me you got it well let's let's go in and uh and i'll show you around was this originally this was a house a house it was built in 1942 and then my partner next door mitch dane here he is in there working so sweet out to studio we got to work yeah this side is all his and this is kind of a common lounge area and nice kitchen nice little kitchen yeah so when mitch purchased his house it was only 900 square feet so he had that tracking room on the front it was all again built during world war ii and uh and then this was the back wall of the house so all this out back here was added on okay this was all grass nice out back here so yeah come on back this is uh my world back here so this is um the hallway here this has uh six years worth of work on the walls oh five years will work consultate this is all console tape of mixes things are mixed or recorded uh the white is uh things were mixed and the red is things that were recorded that is uh mike fahey my my assistant he writes like this right and i write like this but this is all his work he put all this together wow and uh there are 1 000 songs here oh my gosh this is our tech shop here where we have you know tech shop stuff um you know we've got the cables connectors hard drives that clients haven't picked up new extra q boxes ssl parts broken stuff extra ssl computer broken imac and extra gear it's nice to have a little spot like this yeah well you have to have it in the studio really um and then there's a full basement you're standing on the door there the trapdoor oh wow and there's a basement under the whole front of the house and there's cables connectors storage yeah it's a mess down there this is my b room this is uh this is where all the overflow crap ends up uh my b3 is in here this is also where my assistant mike where his station is is where he does edits and where he preps songs for me to mix and you know sometimes we have amplifiers that don't fit down in the room they end up up here mic stands obviously an extra drum the head of keyboard you run lines in here too so you can there are lines here they literally run across the carpet there for the b3 now in here we just have been working uh it's like i said a little bit of a mess but uh we've been working in here in my machine room cleaning up some racks so there's cables on the floor here there's an extra old 192 in here this is my machine room this has the ssl the ssl uh power supply i'm an atomic power supply i have an actual pair of original the analog ones and then this is the computer there's another spare computer i have up here and then around here is my pro tools rig and raid arrays and all for our backup system that room is putting in the work it is doing some work so and then down here you step down there's four steps here the last one's a little weird you know these are all just posters and things of concerts and records and things that are kind of important to me there's you know a couple gold records platinum records chris stapleton platinum records here and signed one to jackson poster there signed by her that it's real near and dear to my heart come down in here this is sort of we call this kind of the guitar booth we do get a lot of guitar amp stuff in here sometimes we'll do vocals and guitar we'll do that in here and then my tracking room um a lot of times there's my wurlitzer sits over here my drums are kind of half taken apart the mics are nowhere near where they're supposed to be because yeah we've had people coming and going keys over here piano a lot of times we'll use these big gobos here this big gobo and that one to sort of block off the drums and then you know block off people i love the doors and the old windows just hanging oh thanks there's a flat panel up there you see that's uh where the air conditioning runs okay the air conditioner vent is about this big around so that it makes no noise wow and so they couldn't get it in the arc of the ceiling and i didn't want it exposed so it created a little bit of a flutter so these doors were from the original house that was built in 42 these two are the bedroom doors and these two are the closet doors and this was the actual back door into the garage and so i still came in here and laid them out on the floor while the guys were building and i was like you just got to hang them up and they kind of did it they did it and then a friend of mine uh named scott gehen who's a really great artist who's from here has become quite famous but he painted these doors and he free handed all the ceiling because i told him i wanted to look like a starry night but the doors are actually providing a purpose their diffuser then there's um 703 on the top spray painted black oh cool you can't see it but it's yeah it's a soft diffusion on the top and hard down here so this is just an armstrong ceiling tile it's a one square foot ceiling tile that's for suspended ceilings that you send to a guy and he drills it out so it's an 80 cent tile that cost three dollars each to drill yeah it's a 3.80 tile yeah and there are about 3 000 of them in here and originally my original intention is to paint these but painting them is kind of a little bit of a problem so we've actually found that you can dye them there's an ink that'll dye them and but i just never got around to doing it so the curtain rods are kind of a it's a fluke these curtains there's four of them were um originally from a tour some some toured they posted them on facebook marketplace these are velvet theater curtains heavy velvet curtains and chains in the bottom wow so these were drops for a tour they were sold as being 12 by 15 but they're only eight which was a little bit of a bummer once i got them and so we went in and we put these uh wood pieces in and went into this joist and put these uh crossbars in and what's awesome i was going to get them cut i paid 500 for them i was going to get them cut and it was 1200 to get them cut and i was like okay forget that but what's awesome is that these gobos will hold them up so we have done the drumbrella like you bring this bring this guy over right yep and you bring the other one over and you take this one and you drape it up over the top you drape this one up over the top and then make the little drumbrella so yeah you can make a really nice little dead room with them and then here on the piano you see i just sort of pile the thing up on top and let it fall down the sides there's microphones on the back so they're just sitting up here on top of the piano you know yeah yeah and i just do the mic press here on the piano and then we just send line level into the other room because you you're doing probably one of the few guys still doing a lot of live stuff yeah almost everything i do yeah it's like a lost art man it's awesome well it's weird how that's a lost art but yeah a lot of people don't do that anymore it's fine it's very cool it's cool they can call me and this is call me and this is a really cool space to do it in because some rooms are like way overkill over the top i wish this room was bigger yeah but it can't be because the city wouldn't allow us to build it any bigger we had to have parking in the back and then drainage and all the stuff they did we this is as big as it could possibly be i mean i've i've done a six-piece band in here it gets a little crowded but you know what it's so what it's fine yeah man so what i mean i've done a couple records uh i did a couple toddler bryant records where we just put the drums here and then we put amps on either side and everybody just played in the room live my original idea again was for all this to be painted another color but yeah all the wood is from a 160 year old barn up in kentucky it had all been dried and treated so there weren't any bugs or anything and then it's hollow behind it so it's just a it's just an air chamber behind it okay so it's a trap what are some of the um common practices i guess in this room dry mics are pretty simple uh you know i usually either do um some sort of i kind of like mono overhead or a stereo or like an xy overhead sure uh which is usually an r88 or a kohl's oh yeah um km84 on the hi-hat 57s on the snare the kick drum d12 and then i've been using this paluso 47 or i have a fat 47 yeah uh i kind of been liking these little uh earthworks mics for toms pretty cool yeah what is that that is a little that's a little special sauce of mine a little special that's an ampex 1101 it is i think an omni wow it was a microphone sold for reel-to-reel recorders in the 60s it was made to hold in your hand and talk into with your family yeah you know that kind of thing at some point i bought one i just found it to be really awesome for this position here yeah for vocals in the control room uh harmonica because i originally bought a harmonic i have a harmonica version of it with a volume control and again we're not really set up here sure i've got i really love symbols yeah so like yeah symbols that go like yeah you know but i've got really great high hats and i do have a bunch of good symbols but you know i like broken stuff and i peeked on this kick drum real quick uh because i i thought i had the same one i think this is a 20 or 22 right it's a 22 22 i have the i think it's an 18 of this right but it's a 65 champagne this is about 65 yeah and the toms are 47 ladies and i have that kit it's not that one it's this one over here i have a 20 inch lady that's from the early 60s i have the 47 lady which is a 24 and i have a 49 back there that says crazy dan that's a 49 lady that's a 28. and then this little red kid here those red toms those one of meg white's kids oh cool from uh the hardest button to button video where there was like 19 kids moving around it was just in a box i asked jack if i could buy it he's like no but you can have it this is um this is where all my headphone headphone amps and all that stuff are but this is also where a bunch of like kind of the weird and weird of woolly mics and this is uh this is one of those 1101s oh cool look at that that's crazy this is a wireless microphone clips but the only thing that fits and then the reason i bought it is that i actually bought one of these which has been modded to have a volume pot for harmonica yeah and it's really good for that and i just have a lot of weird stuff back here some some of it's weird some of it's not weird and the very first microphone i ever purchased in my life section 57 that was uh painted by a friend of mine who's an artist bird cage copper phone i got a couple of those couple bk5as a ball and biscuit an old turner telephone microphone uh old a static i actually use this quite often this is a little piezo pickup and just clip it on things and plug it into amplifiers makes things sound really bad and awesome and this is a furman system right it's a furman yeah it's a mixer hrm16 yeah yeah yeah that's what the mixers are called yeah this is my little uh little tiny booth here we just small room here my my wurlitzer's in here at the moment but a lot of times we'll do guitar amps in here yeah yeah and then back here this is where microphones pedals snare drums uh old tape echoes full tones full tones bongos headphones and microphones are and more pedals more microphones some amplifiers some ribbon mics down here pedals pedals volume pedals d-i's keyboards drum machine and my plate right here oh nice the echo plate 3. i use pedals a lot earthquaker those these guys are awesome uh they hooked me up with a few pedals and they've been just really awesome just the best yeah best seats and then here it's the control room now i've done a lot of uh videos and things in here and a lot of people have seen it but 827 at the moment it's kind of just holding my this is a tool box by the way it's got little tools in it that says cookies and it's kind of just holding things right now but i do use it quite often yep and that's remote of course this is originally started out as tape storage and diffuser for the back of my room and it's sitting on a big trap underneath here there's a big trap down below here it's turned into a wall of memorabilia it's a pressing version of revolver up there uh apple records version of abbey road thank you cards you know some old cheesecake pinups um the flying i was given a flying okay i mean when people say i don't give a someone actually did and they gave it to me it's pretty great little grammy shelf over here well it's just yeah that's beautiful yeah congrats another one over here and these are the second place trophies that's when you get nominated but you don't win and then you know um care some of the things that you know my console i have a this is a ssl 6000e um it has no mic pres it was a film desk so it's line input only so a lot of this a lot of this gear is mic pres yeah because the console doesn't have any it actually does have four but i never use them yeah because i listened to them once and was like yeah we're never using those yeah bae's end there is a real one there's two real ones oh yeah and then rca is down here the ba11s and then these are basically a ba11 but with a tilt control but these were made for pa systems yeah they're a little a little bit less gain and so that's cool obviously a bunch of cappies flickingers apis chandler aea's burls spectrasonics and then i have uh i have a 12 channel neotec this is my old desk which the rest of it's in a you know wrapped up in cellophane this is my old neotech it's a 12-channel sidecar how long have you been using the cappy stuff uh i've been using for quite a while you know that's six seven years something like that i first met jeff about six seven years ago and actually uh jeff built uh custom boards for me for my ssl for the routing switches those are all custom boards and switches all new switches and leds and what is this thing i saw this and i wanted that's an apple set that's my it's my monitor controller because the ssl i just leave the monitor wide open yeah i am in the market for monitor controllers right now so i hear they're three years out you can buy one if you order one now they're three years ago oh my god because the semiconductor shortage and all that well this is not a g it's an e oh okay and it's a six thousand not a four thousand okay so the six thousand had a film matrix here which basically was three stereo busses in dialogue uh right dialogue effects music uh and these it didn't really ever sound very good to me so i took that out so underneath this panel is a api summing bus with actual cappy 2520s nice yeah the jeff steiger made so it is a custom console to me you have this sound anchor what's it called dw workstation or something yeah i think it's just called it works this thing is like one of the most industrial i can't see very well but yeah like i have two of them yeah it's great i just had um re-umbilicaled this so i haven't quite got all this sorted out but the one of the optical thunderbolt cables that i had stopped working so i had to buy this new optical usbc thunderbolt cable which by the way is quite expensive well that's a how about yeah yeah owc it's great owc okay yeah so so basically this just comes in provides usb there's a usb hub here yeah so it provides usb but it also allows me to patch in another monitor here it allows me to patch in something thunderbolt thunderbolt 2 thunderbolt 3 it has an sd card reader it's got um a usb um like a usb 3 on the other side just four on this side uh it's got an optical out here for audio optical audio and that's just one thunderbolt 3 going to the one thunderbolt three going to the computer i have two of these long cables another one's back here and then i have two thunderbolt two cables on adapters back there yeah and then i have a uh 50-foot 8k uh hdmi cable oh my gosh this monitor will only do about 4k but it's everything's really small so i can't really see it and then i have a 50 foot usb 3 optical i don't ever work off client's drives ever so if a client brings a hard drive which they do often and they're and they sometimes they just leave them here they're in my drawer here now i can plug them in here without going to the machine room yeah and i get full speed transfer speakers what do we got here all right well um i have a set of atomic reactors it was built by the late great norman drews i also have an atomic power supply on my atomic industries i should say a power supply um norman was uh as crazy mad scientist and he built these they're they're built around looking like an altec 6 10 or 6 13 or something like that they're a three-way speaker with sub on the back and uh which you can see there wow they're really amazing for uh just a two-way speaker there's a there's only a crossover on the sub yeah they're passively crossed over they just i'm really really amazing sounding and then proax studio 100s i have three sets of these i've been using these for 15 years pretty much wow and then it has tents these are my original ns10s i bought in 94 wow something like that and they've never been reconed or redr re-drivered and they have the yamaha amp and the cool thing about the yamaha amp they're running is that the very first pa system that i ever worked with about 10 years after it had been sold off i found that amp from that pa system no way it was it used a yamaha 2200 and i bought it and i am using it to this day what are you using this ipad for oh it's just the pro tools control it's for it's for place markers and play in that kind of thing and then i love that you have the fader port well the same thing it's just for transport transport but what's nice is that you know i have a couple clients who really love their car and so i'll set up audio movers stream it to my phone and then i'll take the ipad and we'll go out back and i'll hit play with the ipad out back it streams the audio movers in their car yeah they listen in their car and they're like can you bring the vocal up a little bit and i can yeah yeah i can wow and just do it here with faders but obviously still going through all the good yes i think i saw something with jack or white yeah where he was yeah he was doing that with uh we were doing that with a radio transmitter how long have you been in this building in june it was seven years so a little over 70 years and you guys did all of the construction we did what had happened was the people who bought it bought it after world war ii all these houses in berry hill were built to house officers and workers at the airport which there was a consolidated there was a big plant they built planes and on the other side of the cemetery there was the uh naval and army air corps selection center if you're world war ii and you get drafted and you go i'd really like to fly and they've got good eyesight they went oh really and they sent you here to see if you actually could and the reason it's called barry hill is because nashville's airport at the time was barry field and then later it became nashville airport the airport code if you ever fly into nashville is bna barry nashville airport this was outside of nashville this was not nashville at all right and uh and they have their own laws and and zoning one of the things they zoned all of berry hill mixed use so berry hill can be residents oh right it can be a business that's right there's 400 permanent residents and there's 53 studios wow in one square mile i was really curious when i saw how you were using pedals you had sort of them stored yeah they're stored on the side here these are my frequently used they're on the side here this side of this is all velcro and so i can pull one off and i've got the tape echo on here got some stuff back here so you can um let's say line out pro tools right or send from the desk or something yeah yeah it comes from radio up here yeah and then comes down into there's two loops so yeah and i can just patch whatever i want here and then like the flanger doubler has and that's on the front and then i made this sand zamp with an output so i can patch it right in yeah this is actually xlr this is the plasma rack it's really great that's awesome and you got the old the classic yuris yeah yeah have you used this much i haven't used it yet just got them i'm excited and i got the delay too somewhere around here okay and then you got the little laps yeah so you can kind of i have two of those split it out everywhere do you have any stuff that just came out recently or coming out soon that you uh we can tell anyone about yeah probably [Laughter] i think you can find my wikipedia page yeah and my management page i tend to not sort of self-promote sure things are coming out i sort of would rather people find out about it there are a couple things there's some puremix.net stuff coming out there we go so i really do uh do a lot of stuff with them there's some content coming from them be on the lookout a couple really cool mix breakdowns okay and then remixes things i did and then probably next year there's a huge start to finish that we did and it'll probably be 16 20 episodes maybe wow and that's pure mix puremix.net puremix.net okay yeah i'm a mentor on there so check it out sweet awesome well thank you so much for joining us great to meet you absolutely absolute pleasure coming in here and checking it out well all right be safe and uh stay out of trouble kids all right later [Music] everybody [Music] um [Music] business

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 277,008

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: lSoJxzQno8M

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021