EPIC RECORDING STUDIO Setup 2021 | Welcome to 1979 (studio tour)

this week we're taking it back to 1979 sort of at the studio welcome to 1979. [Music] so today is a lot of fun i'm gonna go hang out with my friend chris mara at his studio in the nations in nashville called welcome to 1979. chris mara has this really unique studio it's kind of in this giant warehouse that houses a handful of businesses that they run along with the studio so primarily they have the studio welcome to 1979 which is a very unique and cool layout obviously we'll walk through and check it out but not only do they have a studio to record in that's both an analog studio that you can record a tape they provide the tape or you can bring your own tape and you can record to their hd pro tools rig up to you when you book but they also have mastering in-house and they master two vinyl they have a vinyl cutting machine which you'll see in the walk-through and they actually have a tape machine repair and sales company called mara machines where they restore repair and sell tape machines uh four eight 16 24 track machines so very very cool very solid business he has going on a lot of people working in there and it's a very cool setup so i'll put all of chris's links down in the description give them a follow go check it out go book some time get something mastered buy a tape machine whatever it was very cool to get an inside look at the whole facility not just the studio and the gear but also the mastering room and like i said everything else that he has going on there thank you chris for having me out it's a lot of fun make sure to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm subscribe to the channel if you guys aren't already subscribed and of course at andrewmastersmusic.com you can book zoom consultations as well as the other services listed here thank you guys for watching and let's go check out welcome to 1979. all right chris thank you so much for having me you're welcome and welcome to welcome to 1979 we've been here 13 years and i'll just show you around so when you book the studio we give you the code to the front door so you just walk right into your own session there's no reception area that's by design you can just step in and step out really quickly so go to our main tracking floor here this is a classic shoebox shape if you look at older studios from new york and muscle shoals and such uh in la the this design whether the ratio may change but this shoebox shape is really popular back in the day and it sounds great there's a reason it's really loud it's directional i'd say eighty percent of time we do drums here um we also have a dead room here for drums it's like a real tight 70s sound and then there's a hallway upstairs that's about eight feet wide and 100 feet long we can do drums in there too for like a 60 sound oh wow and we've got about 100 places to plug microphones in throughout the building so every room you walk into it's it there's places to record i like the old paneling yeah this paneling is original to the building it was put in 1953. and it sounds really good this is a concrete floor there's concrete block behind that paneling so it's a really loud and tight room and the concept is everyone can physically be in here the singer goes across a hall in that big room there he or she can see all the way into this dead room uh should we have drums in there or upright bass or horns we can track a 9 or 10 piece band easily here all live like drums alt percussion horns background singers or whatever but typically it's a five or six piece band so drums here let's say or in there and then we put bass player here um we've got a great vintage ampeg flip top that we live in the dead room we can plug in have that too and a lot of times an upright base set up so they can toggle between electric and upright a lot of americana acts do that we can put the guitar players here their amps go in big rooms that are down the hall i'll show you and we can tap into those rooms via these sgis here studio guitar interfaces so if it's a combo amp they can come off their pedalboard plug into there it converts it to a balanced signal you don't lose any fidelity or if it's a head and cab we've got long speaker cables too so everyone can physically be in here keyboard player here this is common for us to have a b3 and like a whirly here and the leslie cabinet sits around the corner and they all have headphones so they have a 16 channel headphone box they can change everything we even have reverb set here and delay sometimes and then they can step on these switches to activate these microphones and talk to each other and us at the same time oh nice these are the p16s yeah we've got about 12 of those just everywhere and what's fun is if they move to another room to do a different acoustic guitar so they can just pull their box and go and the mix that they have retains oh that's great yeah it's great yeah it's one of my favorite things and we use this all the time these have line outs right so like down the hallway i've got a couple of them sitting there and we can just reamp the drums while we're recording just solo the drums and crank it up into an amp oh cool it's really fun or i'll run the b3 through a guitar amp or whatever whatever so i'll show you the other space too the entryway we walk through we use a lot for recording we do a lot of horns here mainly because we can set the horn players there with the back to the wall put like an rca 44 here and then that'll capture this live you can hear me talk now it's live room oh yeah and this tight space so you get a nice splash from the horns there and they're right here and they can see everybody singer band the whole deal wow that's cool and we got the paneling throughout so down this hall is our vocal booth it's nice and big um it's mainly for scratch but we can do keeper vocals in there all the time yeah what's the umbrella for uh for looks of and i should note this is not a swastika that is a peace sign hitler took it and turned it 90 degrees and destroyed the peace sign so i point that out once a while this is nice it almost feels like a green room yeah and you can change the lighting really quickly flip of a switch the lights change uh it's big enough to wheel a piano in here or b3 i have two people in here really simply all right and then you guys have these snakes yeah again everywhere yeah this is places to put microphones in or or route things differently and then this is this a pedal board from a organ yeah from a b3 yeah i just hung it up there so these peg these wouldn't get damaged you see one up here and i just hung it up and i'm like that looks kind of cool yeah and it tightens the room up a little bit and i should mention the control room is upstairs which we'll see in a minute oh yeah and there's cameras so it all works really well my favorite thing is the band is just recording and looking at each other they're not being stared at by a big control guy yeah and i can be going do i want tacos for lunch and they don't think that i'm like do they not like what they hear so here are two of the three rooms for guitar amps you can see those sgis sitting in there and this is a room we use for guitar amps and one of our two upright pianos and this has mic lines and a camera and headphones in it at all times um what a cool little room thanks yeah and this gets booked a lot for photo shoots the whole place does but this is a real good place for photos a lot of artists will bring somebody for photos during their session and just take some time wow there's usually somebody not engaged in the session sure and then that way they can leave with not only music but a lot of content for social media maybe some album artwork yeah so they get a lot for their money when they're here i mentioned this is one of our two pianos everything we purchased kind of has a fits into a certain slot this upright sounds awesome it's bright and really sticks out of a track the one upstairs you'll see is more mellow and it's great for down tempo songs so larger projects um they'll tune both pianos and we'll have them both mic'ed up and they can just switch so it's really great for a piano player sit down play the song with the artist oh maybe not this one we're upstairs ooh this is the one and then it's captured this is a story in clark this is like a 1915. holy cow this this spent years in uh the station inn so it's got a lot of history to it and the one upstairs is the 1890s so these get used a lot they sound really cool look at this wall over here yeah this is unbelievable there was some water damage back in the 90s i guess and i just left it looks really cool yeah it looks crazy this is our kitchen and lounge and behind there is our mastering room i'll show you that later we do vinyl and digital mastering uh all the time so it's not just tracking mixing you guys have other surfaces as well yep so yeah we do we have got three mastery engineers on staff so that room is busy yeah all the creature comforts you know cool fridge pizza maker toaster oven all that kind of stuff so a couple bathrooms down here one upstairs we keep our keyboards out here where they can be pulled into the session and like i said we normally put the lesley cabinet here we've got a couple gobos that make like a heart shape around it and then we put our the amps for the whirly out here because either one or the other yeah so it's great because like tracking live the keyword player can go from whirly and averse to b3 in the chorus and really everyone feels that change it's really cool yeah instead of imagine there's a whirly here sure so then the guitar players playing around that and a lot of stuff gets done here in a you know efficient manner so and this is the artist lounge and more keyboard storage and so people can put their guitar cases in here too so the space we have doesn't get cluttered and hang out oh yeah eat lunch work on some songs and you'll notice the slide that is a way to get from upstairs to downstairs not the other way around correct you can climb up there but it's hard but uh it's just a fun way to get downstairs to do another take was that an addition that you guys had of course yeah yeah we put that in a few years ago now is this uh is this art where did all this because you guys have just a amazing collection of decor and just like random artifacts and art was that all you guys yeah i'm always looking for stuff i don't pass up a yard sale uh this particular wall we were known for our parties and we threw a party where we listened to dark side of the moon in quad oh and had four visual artists paint a painting while it played whoa and we kept them and i kind of just bought this and framed it and kind of made a little yeah oh look at that party it was a really cool party but yeah you have to have stuff on the wall that's interesting i think and then we'll head upstairs and show you the control room cool and other recording spaces so this building is essentially like an industrial warehouse yeah it wasn't a thing it was built in 1953 as a record pressing plant so the studio is about 7 000 square feet and i have a tape machine restoration company and vinyl electroplating company here too for another five or six thousand square feet so this this is the hallway i mentioned before that we can record in or play shuffleboard but we can do drums up here it's more of a 60 sound like a real floppy kick drum yeah horns sound great guitar amp sound great you can even sing at that far end and see into the control room so wow we have a bar from the parties there's a game room with pinball and foosball and darts there's another restroom up here there's a little hanger around the corner it's great for photos yeah it's crazy it feels like um almost a little bit like a film set like there's all these different sets or places to go and explore definitely for like you said content yeah exactly god you do content for days in here yeah and i think it's a great use of time and money when a band can come in here and leave with a potential album cover or some really good updates for their fans or you know what i mean and as far as the general aesthetics you know working on bands before i had this place you go into a studio and you're like okay let's pretend we're not in studio everyone relax you know what i mean yeah so i decided to build a place that doesn't look like a studio so you don't have to go push through that barrier you know but everything works everything is technical kind of behind the scenes not trying to impress anybody yeah come in i know we hit the nail on the head when bands come in and by noon they're walking around with their shoes off yeah you don't see that they're comfortable yes they're comfortable yeah we have a booth where we can do guitar amps up here so you can be in the control room physically and have an amp up here that's great or two this is a room we use for acoustic guitars um vocal overdubs that kind of thing and this is our other piano i was mentioning the 1890s like a real mellow sounding one typically our sessions kind of migrate upstairs once tracking is done we just set up stations up here so we'll set up a vocal station up here acoustic station in there a couple guitar stations in the control room with amps and we can just do overlaps upstairs that's awesome we can even patch into the amps that we're downstairs so you don't have to move their amps or anything there's wires in the wall everywhere yeah i was gonna say it's crazy how much uh snaking and like the what are those boxes calling in the radio boxes uh sgi studio guitar infamous yeah gi yep okay this is the machine room so we've got a plate reverb we've got a spring reverb power supplies in here my closet and then this is kind of the hub where all the wires run around into the building and this is our control room and again one of the things i wanted in the studio was something different this is a rather large control room oh yeah i think it's 1200 square feet holy cow um it doesn't look that big until you like move that rack and a couple couches and it's huge we pre-covered would regularly do listening parties in here for like the grammy association and for our own parties yeah and you can get 70 people in here on chairs but on a day-to-day thing a five-piece rock band can spread out the room sounds amazing wherever you are because this this drop ceiling the actual ceiling is another nine feet above it and you can see everybody on the screens uh or you can when we're not people are not recording down there you can shut the screens off and it disappears so when everyone's down in the tracking room yeah you can see everybody and they're positioned to see each other so they're looking at the cameras by design so they don't know they're looking at a camera sure got a great restored mci console the same version that was in muscle shoals early on that like rolling stone did sticky fingers on and hotel california out in in colorado was record on that version or wherever it was done lots of great records were done that series and then one fun thing for the engineer folk is we kept all the original mic pres but we added api mic freeze and you can switch between the two while listening so you can be recording a drum snare drum and just want to change it to an api pre you do that turn it up you're done that's awesome we did that on 20 of the channels and then we added a 10 channel trident 80 sidecar so you can do drums over there or all the keyboards over there or guitars or whatever so that's great 38 inputs that's a lot good bit outboard gear focus mainly on compression because between the console mic freeze mci api and the trident adc we just added four channels of some neve variations there and then the rest is compression because compression is the sound of rock i see uh the uta is that new i've had it a few years yeah yep i was one of the first to buy it yeah that's awesome that's a nice piece to have yeah that's cool because we can bring it downstairs and use it for cutting yeah so you got a lot of features that are cutting friendly oh nice like a output level yeah exactly you know meter link uh it's got a vertical lateral or ms sorry ms is vertical lateral for uh cutting and yeah because we do a lot of directed disc which is where we can record directly to a vinyl master so we'll pull certain pieces of gear out of here for that when we do them and that's one of them and then of course tape machines yeah we're known for tape but but and or we have a kick-ass pro tools rig it's 32 io lynx with a mac mini all rack mounted so you can record to tape or pro tools here uh at any time the price is the same you can use our tape uh it's not uncommon for us to track the tape in the morning do overdubs and pro tools in the afternoon so it's how you want to record so 24 track correct and then you guys restore and sell tape machines is it do i have that right yeah i own a company called mar machines and we sell restored mci tape machines just like that one and we do all the major formats and that's a rather large company we sell about 60 machines a year and they ship all over the world so it's the largest tape machine restoration company in the world much like saying you're the best bobsled team in jamaica no we've got a lot of great clients super famous ones too brand new ones which is great i love that mixture that's amazing yeah the few sessions that we did here together was a blast cutting yeah and punching yeah you know doing the whole chart thing exactly it was a blast so um ns10s obviously with uh crown amp big big dc 300 which is great and then um this room is large as i mentioned but i visually didn't want to have huge monitors so i shopped and bought these uh focal sm9s and had steve derr come over and tune them and he added a very large subwoofer that is barely even on so i said i don't want a subwoofer that just sounds like it's just throwing low end around yeah and the only reason we had to add that was just the size of room to get 110 db in here those speakers were working too hard so that took some of the strain off of the of the focals and it sounds great you every day i look to make sure the subwoofer's on which is what you want yeah yeah we'll mix records we do direct to disk which is no remixing and the records get released all the time we'll both mix records in here and the tweaks we get back are edits yeah not anything to do with frequency response yeah that's amazing yeah so it's a really good sounding room a tribute to that is the size it's so large that yeah the common issues that control rooms have didn't even come into play here we don't have any base build up it's huge it's interesting because you know it's a large room and as you said the drop ceiling has so much space between it and the existing ceiling but everything as far as like the stuff in the room is like such drastically different material getting all the natural absorption and diffusion but the walls are also all different materials yeah exactly paneling is that drywall on the front yup drywall paneling and acoustically those walls don't really exist from a low frequency standpoint what is all this tape and i guess you have a record collection here is this all archived stuff no it's tapes that we use for our clients so we kind of rotate around that the second shelf from the top is current projects and we just let people use the tape here we transfer to pro tools they can go home continue to work on it or we mix in the box or mix hybrid and uh reuse the tape clients are welcome to bring their own reel of tape as well yeah lines of their tape and sweet yeah if they have tones printed we can over it up onto their tapes if they already started a project but you don't need to provide your own tape most tape sessions we do here use our 499 stock tell me about this guy i saw this at summer nam you bro yeah so this is this usually lives over there as our mixtown deck but this is a mar machine quarter inch two track that the studio owns today jeremy's using it to do tape transfers we do a lot of archiving of artists libraries or odds and ends it's a perfect mixture between the studio being known for tape and our skills at utilizing old tape and restoring old tape and owning mar machines which has restored machines were the perfect place for to do tape archiving just for anyone watching who might be looking for tape machines but not maybe doesn't know where to go whatever you guys have a website for that yeah it's mara machines dot com mario machines dot com and you guys sell both two track and 24 track two track four track eight track 16 track oh okay cool yeah and they come with a warranty and lifetime support oh wow so that's awesome what is all the this stuff more keyboard usable that is great for photo shoots and for kind of like a graveyard when people bring their kids i just sit on the floor and they can flip switches but this these all these keyboards work they get used in sessions all the time so it's really fun for them to old lend drum and it's hooked up lindrum profit five ob8 you know juno so it's great for those last little sprinkles of overdubs you know i like to refer to those people collecting the sounds here a lot of engineers will spend another half a day and kind of pull our plate and our tape delays and our echo chamber into their pro tools session yeah and just call it kind of gathering why spend all the time writing a unique song and a have a unique take on it and then just use the same presets and plug-ins all the time right a couple couches um and the slide is around the corner and goes down through that table and then coming out of the control room there's two ways to get in out of the control room which is really nice and then this is the quick way downstairs this is where the slide oh this enters see right here right down yes and you're ready to do another take don't bring any recording equipment down the slide and we often will put not that often we'll put a guitar amp here and a microphone down there and use it as a chamber well let's go check out mastering see what maggie does cool all right so this is the mastering yeah so we're set up here to do vinyl mastering and we're one of the busiest in the country as far as vinyl mastering goes holy cow that's a 1973 neumann vms 70 and we also do mastering for streaming and cd obviously and then as i mentioned upstairs we are one of the few places in the world that can record directly to a vinyl master so that means the band's recording live getting mixed to the console the console outputs go right into this analog chain in maggie's rack and right to the vinyl master so that's so cool if i can ask what's what's uh some of the stuff in the desk here uh so this is a massive passive by um manly labs so they make a lot of really good like tube gear um it's a pretty standard mastering compressor um and this is a compressor i had custom made for me um by iron sup chicken magic death eye um so it's a it's a kind of like a very moon compressor um with a couple extra features that's awesome you guys are using the aurora and is this the monitor control yeah it's the dangerous monitor okay yeah and then uh oh the tc electronics meter right there a lot of people have that it's a pretty it's the best i think it's the best meter that you can get kind of in that price range that's great and this is mara machines which we talked about earlier this company we've been doing this about 15 years we sell restored mci tape machines so these get tore completely apart you'll see one here this is part of our process tear it completely apart rebuild it re-solder it recap it and then it ships ready to use with a warranty and lifetime support and we sell about 60 of these a year all different formats all mci a big part of our company is education you know so yeah the vast majority of our clients have never owned or used a tape machine before right so we send a video show how to use it and we just love it we love it that's amazing so don't go on the forums yeah just email me oh dude i was gonna say there's i know a lot of guys who are like just give me a tape machine and then they get there and they're like all right all right hit record yeah it's super easy it's so easy so uh yeah so our business model is we only talk to our clients so if you have a tape machine that isn't an mci or is it a mar machine yeah we don't server source report it yeah and we do that not because we enjoy saying no to people yeah but so you're in our club if you have a problem you've got our resources yeah so it works out great over here is the second step of making a vinyl record so when you saw our vinyl mastering suite that's step number one of making a vinyl record that's cutting the lacquer on that neumann vms 70. the second step and this is very rare to see this this is called electroplating so these lacquers come here from downstairs and all over the country and we process those into metal masters so these are a negative of that lacquer that lacquer has grooves on it these all have ridges and are going to be sent to a pressing plant put on a press squeezed and then these ridges will make grooves onto some hot pvc vinyl so the business model here is quality right so when a lacquer gets cut it immediately starts to want to go back to its natural state which was to not have a groove on at all so the first thing you lose is high frequency content which if you're into music is kind of where it's at so lacquers come here we process them the same day to capture that once it's metal it can sit on the shelf for decades and not change but that lacquer is soft and wants to go back to its natural state we are involved with about 200 000 to 300 000 then records a month out of this room so if if somebody's trying to release vinyls how are you guys involved in that so people come to us for two in two different directions they come to us for vinyl mastering and then we do the vinyl mastering do this step hook them up with a pressing plant or more commonly they'll find a pressing plant that we work with on a daily basis and they'll they'll reach out to the pressing plant and the present plant in turn will hire us to do the vinyl mastering and this step called electroplating so the only thing we don't do is press records so we've got about six people to work back here six or eight uh we work we work uh seven am to about seven pm and again it'll be huge projects that i can't talk about and it'll be independent bands doing 300 records i want everything yeah you know we're accessible to to every artist we can be first off thank you for having me out and you know doing the studio tour for everyone we'll see is there any particular website or social media or anything people can go to follow you guys or to reach out or book time it's welcome to 1979.com or we're on instagram and facebook just welcome to 1979 with a few more months of 2021 we're offering a free day when you book a project you can add a day to any booking oh wow we're really helping people get back on track we know cove would really hurt the independent artist because it hurt us yeah as our way of kind of giving back so reach out um we're super affordable we're built for bands you can come in in two or three days and get a lot of stuff done track a record do a bunch of overdubs you know you're one of the engineers here right yeah i'm staff engineer here so if you reach out to 1979 the booking email a good chance i'll be on the session with you awesome all right well thank you guys so much it was a lot of fun hanging out so i'll put all the links to the website and all the social media down in the description thanks andrew appreciate it see you guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Andrew Masters

Views: 35,673

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: uxj9MUmnJVQ

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021