Guy Michelmore's Studio Makeover!

okay let's be brutally honest I need a makeover looking tired bit sore but draggled a bit fluffy round the edges and frankly it sounds rubbish now I'm not worried about me I'm talking about my studio yeah that's better the thing is I've been in the studio for ten years and it's really hardly had a lick of paint and so it's looking quite the draggled and it's just not a very conducive atmosphere to write music if it all looks a little bit kind of like the spare bedroom you know what it looks like doesn't matter that much but it sort of does because you want it to be inspiring you want to feel you're in a nice place you I mean you've seen the stage my chair and things I mean it's ridiculous but the most serious problem is and that there is no acoustic treatment whatsoever and it's just a concrete box and all the bottom end and everything awesome wobbles about and it's just not particularly good we took down the curtains tonight last year and now it's even worse so now we genuinely have to double down and do something well here's a car born into a nice man in the car mate morning how you doing as doing a blog video again do little video for youtube yeah we do lots and lots and lots of them not so anyway I'm just going to talk to my little camera in the corner what the clan is we're gonna buy an off-the-shelf acoustic treatment pack from a company called gik I've used them before their stuff is really efficient and pretty good value I've had a coup stick treatment done in the London studio before and it cost an absolute double-die fortune and frankly wasn't very efficient I then used the gik stuff at in my shed and it's very efficient and cost a few hundred pounds rather than a few thousand pounds so in a give this a go and try and get the studio sounding good looking good now when I say we this does not mean me if you put a screwdriver in my hand I'm likely to cause all kinds of damage so I'm relying very heavily on my assistant Brad to help me with this thank you very much indeed so in order to get through this and we're gonna need an extra strong a cup of coffee and Brad will be out there with drill in his paintbrush and we'll make the thing look great and then we'll give you a studio tour and introduce you to all the kit and everything else ok let's do it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the New York studio first thing which strikes you about this apart from that the lighting is how incredibly quiet it is compared to how it was before I mean in terms of it's not completely dead but it's a much much more controlled acoustic environment you just hear it or don't hear it as soon as you walk through the door so what we've got is six of these which are early reflection panels which significantly cut down the amount of sound bouncing around the room we've got four of these which have greatly bass traps which you put in the corners because that's the best location for absorbing unwanted bouncy bass and we've got another one which sticks on the back wall and just for a bit of fun we've put these LED rope lights behind all the panels so they're all controlled by remote controls so that I can change the cut which ones this all right here we go shall we have some red lighting no small feat rather I think it's quite funny anyway so so let me now give you the tour of the room so this is my working environment these are bulk standard off-the-shelf office furniture and the keyboard is now discontinuous an M audio oxygen 88 so it's an 88 note weighted keyboard I find it really I really enjoy playing it and the thing I like best about it is it's got all these integrated sliders and buttons so I can map all these to all the controllers I use all the time CC 7 CC 11 got the three up here which I use for spitfyre volume close mics three mics and ambience their pre mapped to CC 24 23 and 22 as inside all the spitfire instruments and I have another controller here which the Akai a PC the APC mini is I think I explained the other day let me to complain and the point of the APC binning is is it's designed to control Appleton life and so it's not it's very cheap it's 40 something pounds 50 quid and so it's not programmable but each one of these buttons comes preset sending a MIDI note message starting at C minus 2 now the advantage of this is with a lot of libraries like Spitfire the controllers are mapped to those C minus 2 and things which is way off the bottom of the keyboard so either you have to constantly transpose down your keyboard or you have something like this which you can use to just literally for doing key switches and things like that so the the sliders the volumes I use in real-time while I'm playing as you've probably noticed in the past and for things like CC 7 and CC 11 so volume and stuff so I can put some sort of wedding into it and the screen I have a raven MTI 2 for ordinary door work like this I don't use it as a touchscreen very much I mean that's partly because I have a second studio which is at home in a home office in the garden and that I've got used to having all my most important functions preset on the F keys at the top the kit an ordinary keyboard because I haven't got a second raven at in the shed there wouldn't really be run and so because I'm so used to that I don't use the Raven for what it's really supposed to be used for when I come here what I do use it for is when I'm mixing and particularly in Pro Tools because then you've got proper touchscreen for mixing and Pro Tools which is absolutely great what I really like though is the way it it sits on the desk so I can see it but it's down so it's not actually getting in the way of the the monitors which are behind so this is so again a really good it doesn't interfere with the acoustics yet it's right there in front of me so I can I can work very fast and efficiently with it if you see what I mean the only thing which hasn't arrived yet is the chair look I'm still on this awful hook chair at some point today my backside is in for a real treat I can't believe I just said that but we're going to have a new chair a new office chair it's going to be great let's talk about monitors and things like that now what you'll see round there oops let's get stuck in okay as you can see whoops I have three of these generic 80 thirties up the front they sound absolutely fantastic I've got a five-point one monitoring system most of the time I'm working in stereo so I'm just listening to left and right but when I want to work in 5.1 I've got these three up here and I've got two more older Jennings at the back of the room now these I've had these leases and Mo do i'm dinah audio em - it is absolutely every bit as enormous as it looks I mean it's I used to monster on these all the time and what I started getting tinnitus it was so loud only because I have no self-control when it comes to these things and it was just like the world's most deafening pair of headphones so I don't frankly use them very much anymore but they do look nice the I spent 90% of my time listening to the Gen X I also have a pair of Sen highs 650s which are open-back headphones which are really good for monitoring or that's what I used to listen that's what I used to check my mixes with and when this room was like a concrete box and but if you can hear the fact that it really isn't like that now and one of the many downsides of doing surround sound is you need something like this and these are really expensive this is an SPL surround-sound controller just to have a big volume knob for 5.1 it's really complicated and expensive I've got lots and lots of acoustic instruments and some of which are around and about I do have a very nice Beck Stein grind piano which sits here due for a bit of tuning as you can hear I have a whole load of more exotic instruments got a strat that was twelve string got a corer with machine head's which I got from wonderful bloke in Brighton who makes these fantastic instrument if only I could play it as you may remember from a previous edition what about this friend up here oh I also asked people what this is it comes from Madagascar it's a valley huh many years ago I did a wildlife series for the BBC which was all about primates and the first episode was shot entirely in Madagascar so I took myself there with recording equipment and recorded all these amazing local musicians and choirs and it's absolutely fantastic and one of the musicians gave me a velika I mean what a nice bloke anyway when it comes to the sound card I'm still using a motto 24:08 it's an old card interface it sounds fine I mean it's probably due for an upgrade but frankly the chair comes first in terms of computers I've got two in the back here oh this little rough is where all the horrors now live in this little room this is actually where we record voiceover when I clear this out I mean it's literally got these foam tiles on the wall and it's very effective right what do we have here we have doom this is a map of an old 2009 five common one Mac Pro it's twelve core it's not got much RAM and it's got 32 64 something like that not huge this thing on the other hand is a a beast it's an 18 core PC with 128 gigabytes of RAM running Windows 7 and what I I used to have lots of slaves pcs but now I've just got the one because it's so big and it's just much easier to run with one machine rather than dozens of them if you have four or five machines that's four or five times as much chance of the more going wrong believe me I've been there okay so we're not going into the software side of things today that can be a different little occasion but so I'm running Cubase on the Mac in here and then I have all my templates set up running on a PC slave which is here and works great the actual software setup is more it's quite complicated so I've got three I've got four monitors I mean video monitors I've got that one from the PC I've got the Raven here I've got the movie up in front of me and I've got a spare monitor there which I tend to have the mix-up on a lot of the time so I can just see what see what's going on but one of the problems I've found and I still haven't found a perfect solution to it is if you have all these screens they get in the way of the audio monitors now the Raven can can recline elegantly like that look which is quite fun and it works you know it's useful and so you can get out the way of the sound if you if you need to but the other term I need to find a new solution for that so this is it's a very nice working environment I really like working here but I also have a second studio which is at my home because now the education business thinks based education is getting larger got over a hundred postgraduate students in 30 countries it takes people to look after them and we've got quite a few people working here and I prefer writing music sometimes when it's just me and nobody knocking on the door so I've set up a studio at home let's go have a look at that now my other studio is here in the garden of my home where it's not very far from the sea on the Sussex coast it's just just a short 30-second drop across the garden and you end up with my perfect place this is my shed many of you have been in here before not physically but virtually and so I thought I'd give you a quick guided tour and try and explain why I find this the best possible place to write music right so first of all let's have a little tour of the of the shed itself and the shed is a twelve by twelve home office set in a corner of the garden it's got glass on two sides as you can see which it's acoustically not great but we've got more of those acoustic panels on the wall here so you can see that I'm at least making an effort but clearly acoustic this room is not going to sound fantastic but the reason it's so great is having this glass around you allows you to see outside and most of the day I just get the most incredible view of hundreds of birds coming to the bird feeders I'm a very serious battle I do lots of surveys for the British Hospital mythology and things like that and we have some fantastic birds in the gun you know we get ramblings and siskins and red starts and black red starts and gold more real and honey Buzzard and all those other things which are the birders go oh where is the rest we people go not interested okay but look so the physical environment however I would contend is very important in making a happy composer and a happy composer makes great music or at least makes less bad music okay no yeah no so let me talk you through what we got so we have and one single computer it's down here it's a 14 por i7 128 gigabytes of RAM and it is a beast but it works really really well let me just before we go any further Chile can I give you a quick word from our sponsor if you want to write better music better tunes more interesting chord progressions and fully develop your ideas then check out my online course how to write music six hours of video tutorials free downloads a supportive online community and a comprehensive course text take your music to the next level with how to write music god it's so good I'm gonna buy you stop ok where well yes and here we go let me show you forget task manager app you'll see up there go so it's currently I've run both VSL ensemble Pro on here which is absolutely fully loaded with all the instruments I could possibly want in and absolutely the enormous template and it's currently running with ninety eight gigabytes out of its 128 gigabytes of RAM used ticking along with a very incredible 33% of CPU I mean this is a very big template thirteen hundred and forty five tracks why would you know that if you're doing big music and we will talk about template some other time in more detail but if you're trying to do a big piece of music which is supposed to sound you know where you need all those resources it just takes a very very long time to set the thing up from scratch particularly because of all the routing if you get into here I've got it going to five or six stems I've got all kinds of things going on separate reverbs all all sorts of things which make it difficult to set up on the day so I have a number of ways of working as those of you who've followed this blog will know a lot of the time I just start from scratch with an empty project but sometimes I do need to use the big template you know if I was going to start on an epic piece of music I would start with normally I'd start with the big template but anyway that's and we'll talk about that a software and things like that really on another occasion because there's quite a lot to say about it all let's look at the physical hardware um again I'm using an oxygen 888 keyboard which I like the feel of it's discontinued now apparently it is very lively it's quite hard to pay very low velocities which is a problem when I come to replace this I'll probably go for a Native Instruments s88 mark 2 which is by all accounts what I played one but not for any good time but by all accounts it's a much it's a it you have to try a lot harder before you hit the maximum velocity so it's much more responsive in many respects now a lot of you are have asked about the various keys and things like that I've got going on up here so let me talk you through it it is very important to be able to have access to faders and things like that which can give you real time you want to be able to adjust cc7 the volume let's put that down there CC 7 the volume CC 11 expression if you use that and then you can set any number of others I've got 18 21 22 23 24 which are preset to the these Spitfire audios mic positions which I find very useful this is a controller called an icon platform m+ and it comes with software so you can configure it yourself it does every I mean I'm using it at its most basic level but it is a very powerful it motorized faders it's got you can custom all customize all these controls it's really really good not cheap it is not cheap but it is really good and the a PC mini I talked about before the Maschine Mikro for those of you who are into the drum pads and things like that it's it's a very good small compact unit works really well I don't use it all the time but I do use it from you know time stein and finally of course there's the monitoring I have the same monitors I've got in my other big studio which are genic 80 30s the sound card here or the audio interface I should say is a focus right claret it's four in four out it's absolutely fine it sounds great and I I've recently gone on over to this and it was I'm really pleased with it sounds great I went hopefully also because it records at 192 kilohertz and those high sample rates are really useful for when you're going to pitch things down and things like that and now elephant in the room I bet you can hear how live and bouncy that sounds so how on earth do you mix in a room like this um it's challenging what I do is I get the mixed more or less right and then I move over to these they're open-back headphones it's if you're used to working with closed back headphones like a on like these DT 100 DT 100 is a fantastic for recording because they don't there's no spill whatsoever and really really useful for field recording things like that if you want to mix I can hear the ambience around me and it somehow makes a huge difference I mean these are earthy yeah these are HD 650 s5 Sennheiser Ok Go on it's trying to line up on my face rather than mine and adding term they sound fantastic and I can certainly mix on these and then if I have any serious doubts I go into the other studio and either mix it or just try it out and see how it works and we use Dropbox to synchronize projects between here and the main studio cause Brad my long-suffering assistant who is responsible for the amazing transformation the main studio a lot of the time I'll write a piece here sticking on Dropbox he'll then take all the stems off and start packaging up making movies and sending them off to the client for example and so we've got identical here and in the other studio have identical software setups so the template here is identical to the one at the other end things like that are surprisingly difficult to get right and it takes a long time because nobody's really optimizing their software to allow for esoteric things like people with two studios so you do have to work a little bit but look it's you know there's lots of imperfections about working in a box in the gun you get chainsaws you get people shooting outside you get you know shot shotguns as in going and game shooting and also because in the countryside you got this glass onto stuff but I just can't tell you how good for the soul it is to be in such a lovely place and frankly if I write a better piece of music which is a bit wonky in the mix it's better than writing a rather dull piece of music which is beautifully mix that's my take on it anyway would be good what you really want obviously obviously dirt as my 15 year old would say is a great piece of music brilliantly mixed so so what one does is you bounce out all the tracks well whenever I mix things properly as opposed to just got to get it out the door I always bounce it to audio and having done that I can put it in Pro Tools back in the main studio and mix it properly there I just it's very long-winded way of doing it but I do find it a lot easier and you know it forces you to go through things line by line and find out if they're really right but that kind of you know time luxury is not something we always have so that will talk about workflow and other things like that on other occasions but I'll put a link to all the bits of kit in the description underneath because I know some of you particularly have been interested in this thing I'll may look at that a little bit more detail on another blog sometime but you know so this is this is my shed and I should mention it's very hard to keep a shared tidy because it's small look we've got ukuleles guitars Appalachian dulcimers we've got bass pan pipes we've got boxes full of those chiefdom whistles and all kinds of other things ah and of course there's an acoustic piano an acoustic piano wherever I go is really important and so let me just see if that works yes probably does okay so this came from my mother-in-law's house and it's got one of those damper pedals and I just love that soft felt sound why is it that we find it easier to write on the real piano rather than samples I do anyway I'll omit so I can sit here and I can write stuff out or I can just come up with ideas and I can record straight into the door if I so wish to so it's pretty wonderful really I'm incredibly lucky and Oh Larry the pheasants back I should introduce you briefly to Larry before we go any further and Larry is a cut above the average pheasant go slowly not just going off and you see all the others are running around in the fields around here trying to find their own field their own food and getting shot Larry is cleverer than that he's worked out if he comes here I feed him and there's always no chance of him being shot well I wouldn't shoot him can't speak for the rest of the family but I'm so Larry is a very bright pheasant and I'm looking forward to his company for many years to come as long as he's not stupid enough to wander off into the fields around and about so look I hope you've enjoyed this sort of whistle-stop tour of my hardware and if you enjoy this kind of thing we do lots of reviews of gear we do lots of scoring things like that do remember to subscribe to the channel and you know it'll be very nice to have your company on future episodes of this little blog so from me for the time being from the heart of the West Sussex countryside in the South of England see you very soon you

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 102,903

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, Studio tour, Studio, cubase, room tour 2020, keyboard, midi controller, music education

Id: O3XlxiHpeXo

Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020