This Is My Entire Studio Setup (Bedroom Studio 2023)

so I've been working out of this bedroom studio for almost two years now and those of you that have watched the channel for a long time you know what my old Studio looked like which was an actual storage closet in my parents basement we lived there for a few years to save up to end up buying this place so when I moved in here it was a massive upgrade now since moving in I've made a few tweaks to this room here and there but yesterday we did a complete overhaul on this space I mean every single piece of gear every cable every snake came out we rewired the whole thing reorganized all of the gear for a very specific purpose so this is what we've been working on behind the scenes for the last couple of weeks as you can see we've painted the entire Studio black and it's not done we still have a ton of work to do in here but we're at the point where we want to start using and filming and recording in here So the plan is to get this room treated acoustically and Visually which we're in the middle of doing right now and we're gonna run a snake from my studio bedroom upstairs down here to the live room and basically use the upstairs Studio as the temporary control room for the time being as you can see the actual control room is basically being used as storage right now but we're still working on all that in there now I've got a few projects coming up here starting next week that you're going to see on the channel and I'm really really excited about it no Guthrie and good trouble are coming down for a week and we're gonna start working on new music down here we're going to try and record two new singles and a few performance videos that you'll see uh here on the YouTube channel as well as on the band Channel which will be announced very soon then after that a friend of mine named Susie Jones who's an artist I've been producing for the last year we have a really cool live tracked EP project that we're going to do down here a few days after that which you will also see here on the channel point is I was really tired of waiting on the space to be done and we're just going to make do with what we've got for the time being and start making music down here so so I'm really excited to show you what's going to be happening down there very very soon but in the meantime I thought I would give you a studio tour video now I get questions pretty regularly about my setup various aspects of my production workflow from cameras and lighting to the guitar rack behind me to the outboard gear that I use so this is sort of the end-all be-all My Hope Is that this is essentially the final form of this room and I want to document it as it is now and answer any questions that people may have before we move on now quick disclaimer before we get into the video I want you to understand something you do not need all of this stuff in order to make content or to make music or to be creative I've been collecting this gear for over 12 years now and I'm doing it with a very specific purpose I want to track bands the way I like to work is with musicians in a room capturing performances and to do that you need more gear but you don't have to have all of this stuff to start your YouTube channel or to make your album you can do it with a basic setup and in fact we just built one of the those setups for my production assistant Chris now Chris has been working with me for two years now and recently he needed to upgrade his recording setup so as a thank you to him and all the hard work that he's put into helping me make this channel for the last two years I teamed up with Sweetwater Sennheiser and universal audio to give him a super versatile Pro recording setup that will work in a variety of situations so we got him hooked up with a universal audio Apollo twin and since Chris is currently renting a place he can't treat a room and he has roommates so he can't record and mix with studio monitors we got him a great set of Sennheiser headphones and One mic to record everything the universal audio sd1 Now setup like this is super powerful for Chris he can record his tracks for his Instagram profile which I've linked down below and he also does weekly improv Jam sets around Atlanta that he wants to be able to record and turn into content and posts later so with this setup he can kind of do all of that and the cool thing is Sweetwater has agreed to give an identical setup away way so if you want to enter the giveaway it's linked in the description box down below and I want to thank Sweetwater for sponsoring today's video I will have affiliate links for a lot of the stuff we're talking about in the description box down below you can find most of this stuff on Sweetwater and if you're trying to build your own home studio setup or getting into YouTube content creation or trying to make that next album and you need some gear Sweetwater is a great resource for all of that so thank you to Sweetwater for sponsoring today's video now this has been a long intro and this is going to be a long video so we've got chapter Marker set for each section of the studio build so you can jump to whichever section you're most interested in we're going to cover the amp rack the computers the lighting and camera setup the outboard gear the desk all that stuff's going to be covered so whatever you're most interested in check out the chapter down below and uh let's get started okay so we're going to start with the amp rack now I get more questions about this rack than just about anything else about ever done on YouTube so we bought this a few years ago as a scratch and dent floor model got it on sale from Crate and Barrel I don't know if they even still make this model but it wasn't intended to be an amp rack and when we moved in it was supposed to go in our living room and I hijacked it and moved it up here because I thought it would look great and work great as an amp rack and I was right now since doing this I've actually wanted to figure out a way to team up with a carpenter or Furniture Builder to create some plans for people who are handy to be able to build this themselves and actually it might be a cool thing to try and collab with somebody on I've been a huge fan of I like to make stuff since like 2016. I've been watching his channel uh and I know he's a guitar player so Bob if you're watching this and you want to work with me on this project I figured we could design and make something similar to this and then maybe release the plans or something out to you guys for those of you that want to build your own amp rack now all of the amps that you see here and on top of of this sidecar here are all run into this piece of gear down in the rack this is sort of the brains of my guitar amp situation this is the amp heat 88s studio and this is an amp in cab switcher so essentially what you can do is plug eight amp heads in an up to eight different cabinets in and this piece of gear will handle everything as you know guitar amps when they're on they need to see a load so this handles all of the impedance and and the load and you just run out of your guitar or out of your pedal board into the front of the amp heat and then you just bang through and pick whichever amp you want to go into whichever cabinet now because I'm recording in a bedroom I don't have the space to be able to use actual cabinets in here very often occasionally we do but for most of the time I'm running through the aux so the first cabinet output of the amp heat is going into the aux and then I'm going stereo out of the aux into my patch Bay which we'll get to and just a minute so most of the guitar sounds that you're hearing when I'm playing an amp are the aux or the torpedo captor X sometimes I'll switch back and forth depending on the setup some interesting pieces here that are new I've got my Granville the Port City Grandville this is a collaboration that we did with Port City last year this is based on a 1959 Gibson ga50 and I'm actually really happy to announce that these are now going into production this year we changed the aesthetic a little bit uh but if you're interested you can order a Grandville and then uh the 201 this was a gift from my wife Tilly this is an amazing tape Echo unit and I've been looking for one for a really really long time this one sounds amazing it does need a little work the Reverb is not currently working so I've got to get it serviced this is my tube di this is the Zod di built by my friend Dan durlo uh up in Minnesota and this is a really really killer tube driven DIY with a massive Transformers in it we use this on base a lot I use this to record synth and sometimes I'll send guitar through it or vocals through it as well and then this is something that I bought in Nashville this past week over at Carter vintage guitars drink I actually don't know what this is I may end up doing a video on this very soon so it's in an old projector amp but someone built a guitar amp into it and I'm not sure if they used some of the original projector amp circuitry or if they completely gutted it and the people at Carter actually didn't know either they just said whoever built it brought it in asked if they could sell it and uh they did I bought it it's kind of tweed-esque but it's got a lot more gain than a Tweed amp does and it does this really cool like low mid thump kick kind of thing it sounds amazing um so really excited about that and then I also picked this up for a really good deal from Carter this is a fender tube Reverb tank so there's a tube preamp in here air that drives a spring reverb tank you can put it in front of an amplifier but the main reason I bought it was to use for mixing and recording I want to be able to put vocals through this put drums through this any other thing where you want a really Lush drippy spring reverb these are really cool and this is a silver face one from the 70s which are more affordable and easier to get than the original late 60s units but they sound great then down here I have my studio pedal board this is the pedal board that I use most the time when we're making videos in here it just sits on the floor stays patched into the amp switcher stays powered back up there so I can just plug my guitar into it and then because there's no Loop switcher or anything like that I can just pop up the pedals off the board and swap in whatever I might need for that specific video so I still have this set up from the Scofield video that we shot the other day we were using the rat and the mule near for that and then here we have the guitar rack and these are all the guitars that I use most often so they live next to the desk I have another rack in the closet which is stuff that's important but gets used less often that stays back there but yeah that's basically the whole amp rack and setup okay so let's move on to the desk now the desk is from Gator and I got this about two years ago when I originally set up and built this room and I've been using it basically every single day since then and I have to say it's held up incredibly well I was using a desk that I bought from Guitar Center for a few years before this and it was good but it didn't hold up to daily use nearly as well as this Gator desk has it's got a ton of rack space and one of my favorite things about it is the cable management system under the desk which we utilized really heavily yesterday when we were rerouting everything but it's a really good size it's easy to work at the rack and the monitor platform are at a really good level for me so the monitor is in a really good position for me and it's got my computer screen and everything I need in the right place it's super ergonomic comic in the sidecar section which I'll show you in just a minute is my favorite thing about this desk it's got a pull out slide here for my MIDI controller which we use when we're programming drums or putting down Keys parts for tracks um but yeah it's been an excellent desk it's held up super well the Finish is still intact there's no scratches or wear and tear on it and we haven't been gentle on this thing at all so I gotta say I really like it and also while we're here let's talk about the computer setup now I've been a Mac User for 10 years now when I started my channel I was using a 2017 iMac 27 inch and a few months ago I switched that out to an M1 MacBook Pro the just the regular one not the max or whatever the highest spec is and that computer has been great I was using it with a dock attachment from OWC that I purchased and it was really powerful super good I like the M1 stuff a lot but just recently a few weeks ago I purchased the Mac Studio now this is not the top spec it's just a mid-tier Mac Studio it's 32 gigs of memory and you know kind of mid-level the one thing I did spec is a one terabyte internal SSD I do that for all of my computers because I like to store all my programs my plugins my my sample libraries everything is stored on the computer and then when we're editing we do all of our recording and editing on external ssds this is a really important workflow thing for us whether we're working on music or we're working on video and it's important thing for those of you that might be interested in starting out in content whether you're doing YouTube or Tick Tock or Instagram whatever basically when we start a new project we create a folder for that video on an external SSD and all of the footage all the assets all the audio and the edits the actual sessions for Pro Tools and for final cut or Premiere live in that folder for that project this helps to keep everything organized and then for backing up And archiving footage right now I I'm using these old school you know deep and cheap spinning disc storage drives I know it's not great I'm trying to work on a better archiving and storage solution some kind of network access storage I'm trying to learn about that stuff right now if you have any recommendations for that let me know in the comment section down below but yeah external ssds is what we work on I'm a big fan of the Samsung t7 I bought this one a few months ago off of Amazon this one's great but for a long time we've been using these G drive this is the G Drive SSD these are great for video editing if you were doing content creation Now for programs we're actually switching things up right now uh for recording for my Daw for the last few years I have been using Luna from universal audio and I like Luna a lot I specifically like the way Luna sounds it's designed to basically be an analog recording console in the box and it sounds great the tape emulation the console summing the bus compression on every channel is really really great but we started to run into issues a lot recently with Luna that we're really starting to impact my production and my workflow pretty serious software issues now I think part of it was switching to the M1 Max studio it's on the latest uh Mac OS right now and I think Luna wasn't really playing nicely but it was enough of a concern that we have now switched back to Pro Tools I'm on the latest version of Pro Tools I learned how to record on Pro Tools it's sort of what's most comfortable for me it's what I like and for the studio downstairs it's going to be our Daw of choice because we're going to primarily be live tracking full bands down there and if you're working in that environment Pro Tools is the way to go and Pro Tools is the industry standard so if I want to record something here and send it off to someone to mix I can send them the Pro Tools session or I can go to any recording studio basically anywhere in the world and be working on a Daw that I'm familiar with as far as video editing goes I'm also making a switch there for the last three years I've been working in Final Cut Pro and I never really liked it I learned how to make videos in Adobe Premiere Pro and I switched to Final Cut three years ago because my iMac was starting to get a little sluggish and Premiere Pro wasn't really working fast enough specifically on export times on that old Intel machine so I switched to uh Final Cut because it's Apple native and it ran much faster specifically export it much faster but now with this M1 it's not that big of an issue anymore and I've started running into some software bugs with Final Cut as well so we are going to be switching back to Premiere Pro here in the coming weeks and that's the computer and software side of things I do have a Mac Mini set up behind me which I will show you whenever we get to the side car but this is my main production and recording video editing setup right here so now recording interfaces since about 2020 I've partnered with universal audio and I've been using the Apollo series of interfaces and I have to admit I genuinely love them I know that it is sort of sponsored I didn't pay for any of these Apollos universal audio gave them to me whenever we were doing Backstage Live my live stream concert series during the pandemic but I'm sold on the UA platform this is what I'm going to be using for the foreseeable future so what we have here are a pair of x8ps and an X4 so these are all tied together via Thunderbolt 3. so essentially this top Apollo is the brains of the operation this is the main Apollo this is what my monitors are plugged into and then I'm using my X4 here on the desk as a monitor controller so I don't have to you know cut and boost my monitors there I can use it here and then this bottom x8p is there primarily just for channel count now I've thought about swapping these two units out for an x16 just to save the rack space because as you'll see in a minute I'm primarily using outboard gear outboard mic preamps and everything but it is really nice to have the Unison mic pres in these xaps it gives me more options I can get different colors for mic preamps or what we do a lot for bass sounds for example is plug di into the Apollo and use one of the uad bass amps like the B15 or the SVT now these units have held up incredibly well I will say in the effort of transparency that this Apollo did have a hardware issue the Thunderbolt card on the back of it went bad and caused me to have issues with connection but I got in touch with universal audio support they sent me a new Thunderbolt card and I just pulled the old one out and stuck the new one in with a couple Allen screws and that fixed it now directly above that this is a brand new piece of gear that we just installed yesterday and this is going to be for the new recording set up the studio build 1.0 if you will this is a Behringer PowerPlay 16 module and this is a monitoring system for the recording studio downstairs I have a series of Behringer p16 personal mixers so all the musicians downstairs can dial in their own personal mix with up to 16 channels and so this is the sort of brains of that monitor system it's connected via Adat Optical out of both of these Apollos in the back so I have 16 channels that get sent through this CAT5 or Cat6 cable downstairs now the cool thing about this is because it's attached to the Apollos we're not just monitoring we're hearing all the processing that's happening as well so any uh processing that's happening with compression or EQ either in my outboard gear or in the uad world we're going to be able to hear in our monitors so for example if I have you know Noah singing and he wants an EMT 140 plate Reverb on his voice we can pull that plug-in up and console and we'll actually be able to monitor that in real time which is super cool now speaking of monitoring let's talk about the speakers on the desk here these are the Yamaha hs7s I got these and the matching subwoofer when I moved into this room and the reason was at the time when we moved in I was still using the space at my parents house for recording and rehearsals and so my original monitors which I was using are the event ps6s which unfortunately are no longer made anymore but I needed those events to stay over there so we could continue to record and mix and keep the projects going that we had over there but I've been using these for about two years and I've been really happy with them I think they're a good all-around monitoring system uh they're not the best sounding thing out there but they're affordable and they work for a variety of rooms and variety of situations now I like using a subwoofer personally but you don't need one to mix or to monitor on and in fact depending on your room you may not want a Subway offer Subs are not perfect for all mixing situations especially if you're in a small bedroom like this and in fact I should probably rely and use mine less but I just like having that subwoofer and that sub bass information coming through now I've enjoyed using the Yamahas for the last few years and I've gotten good results with them but looking ahead at some of the projects we've got going up and some of the mixing that we're going to be doing I wanted to go ahead and upgrade my monitors ahead of finishing the control room downstairs so reach out to Adam audio and they sent me a pair of the new a77 H's to check out so these are the a77 H's they're designed to be set up in this horizontal configuration here which is going to be great for the room downstairs but it's going to be a bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to fit them into my current setup over here but we'll figure it out now these are cool they're active so they have built-in power amps much like the Yamahas do but these have DSP built into them as well for room adaptation for kind of shaping the sound and the response of the monitor to fit the room and in this room that's going to be very very important because acoustically it kind of sucks in here so this is a 12 by 16 bedroom but it's got an interesting feature which is the ceiling line over here the ceiling is about I don't know maybe 20 feet high but by my desk it's eight and a half so basically the room is kind of shaped like a big wedge now as you can see we've put acoustic treatment up which we did when we initially built this room and it's the clear Sonic room treatment kit and it's done a good job but as you can hear through the mic on my camera the room is still pretty live and when we're actually recording for videos and using my shotgun I have to use some plug-ins to kind of Tamp that down a little bit now that's not necessarily an issue for mixing you don't want a completely dead space to mix in but the big issue in here that we need to address is the base build up when you're sitting at mixed position it's not that bad it's a pretty balanced overall sound but as you start to walk back in the room over here or as you start to sit on the couch here the bass is unbelievably loud but I definitely want to treat this space a little better get it a little tighter better for recording videos in and vocals in but specifically better for mixing in so if you have any suggestions let me know in the comments All right so now let's talk about the outboard gear here in my studio the term outboard gear basically is referring to any type of recording equipment or any piece of recording equipment like a mic preamp for example that exists outside of a console it's outboard now my plan for the studio downstairs is to have a large format recording console in the control room that's my dream I don't know which one yet but for the past six or seven years I've been recording within using mostly outboard gear so we're gonna start with my mic preamp rack these are 500 series modules now 500 series is a format it's like a size format of module that was created by API back in the 60s 70s I want to say but it's become kind of an industry standard when it comes to outboard gear not just for mic preamps but all kinds of stuff eqs compressors effects utility things like breakout boxes and dis now the way lunchbox systems work is you have some kind of rack system that holds each one of the modules and it provides power and Signal it gets the signal in and out of the actual mic preamp and then each one of these little modules here you can swap in and out per channel so this is eight channels of mic preamp these first four channels are all from a company called Cappy now Cappy is a really cool company they do a lot of API style mic pres and eqs and compressors I bought my first few Cappy preamps from Rick piato years and years ago and they're cool because you can either buy them pre-made like these units or if you're handy you can buy them as kits and assemble them yourself so if you're new to this and you want to get a couple of mic preamps to start recording with but you want to save some money and you want to learn a little bit about how mic preamps work you can build your own pre now a few years ago Cappy reached out to me and loaned me these uh six channels of mic preamps and there's three different styles of mic pre and three different stereo pairs so we've got the vp312s PTA we've got a pair of VP 28s here and then the fd312s now these fd312s are my favorite mic pres I've ever used 99 of the time when you hear my guitar on a video coming from the amp or even when I'm using a modeler the guitar is going through this pair of fd312s I'm not exactly sure what these are based on or if it's Cappy's original design but these are really really special preamps I'm a huge fan these are the whr4 models I could have a whole rack a whole 16 channels of just these fd312s and I'd be super happy and then we have another pair Channel 7 and 8 of Great River Mike trees these are the mp500vs and these are another personal favorite of mine these are more Neve style they're supposed to be in the flavor of like a Neve 1073 so these four channels together here the two fd312s from Cappy and the mp500s from Great River cover the Neve and the API sound really really well but if you're looking to get into outboard gear and you're doing a lot of recording at home a good mic pre is a great place to start even if you're just recording guitars or you're using a modeler for example I like taking a digital Sound Source like a guitar modeling amp Kemper XFX whatever and running it through a really good pair of mic pres have good Transformers in them and using that to kind of warm up and saturate my guitar sound same thing with the aux or if I'm miking up a guitar cab outboard mic pres are really cool place to start and they're a lot of fun to play with if you have them in this 500 series format you can change them out relatively easily depending on what you get they're pretty affordable you can pick them up use they're a really cool place to start if you're getting your feet wet in the outboard recording gear World okay so now we're onto this rack and I've got another four channels of mic preamp up here this is the 4710d from universal audio this is another really great place to start if you're thinking about getting into outboard recording gear for the sound and for the workflow basically what this is is four channels of mic preamp with built-in 1176 style compressors so you're basically getting four channels of mic pre and compression in a 2u rack space what's really cool about this though is the mic preamps can be either Tube Mic preamps or transistor solid state mic preamps or a blend of the two you have these blend knobs on each channel that allow you to get more of a warm saturated tube sound or a little Harder Faster transistor sound you also have dis for each channel so if you're recording base you're recording guitar di you can do that and then if you want you have two settings for compression for an 1176 style compressor there's a slow or a fast attack time setting and the other cool thing is there's insert points on the back for each Channel now what this means is if you don't have a patch Bay you could basically treat this as the center piece of your studio and create sort of a permanent signal chain if you've got an EQ or effect like a Reverb or delay for example you can patch those into each channel on the back and then you have a switch to be able to turn on or off the insert on the back so again if you're someone who is starting with you know like an eight channel interface and you want to start to get into outboard recording gear at home and maybe you're a drummer or you need to record up to maybe four mic sources at one time the 4710d I think is a really really cool piece of gear and it's a great place to start and build your studio around now sitting up here on top of the 4710d is is a cool piece of gear that I'm just trying out you may see a review of it here on the channel this is called the elk bridge and essentially what this is designed to do is connect you to other musicians over the internet via an online interface and this box here to be able to play in real time with almost no latency remotely now I just got this set up we haven't tried it out yet but I'm going to be trying it out with my band good trouble to see if what they claim is actually true if you can actually play with musicians over the internet now down here in the rest of the rack we have three channels of compression and an EQ so starting at the top we have the warm audio tube EQ this is basically warm audio's clone of a Pull Tech eq1p now below that we have the warm audio W a 76 this is their 1176 clone now the 1176 is a staple piece of gear in my opinion if you're one of those people that's looking at getting into outboard gear and you want a really great outboard compressor especially if you're a guitar player or bass player on 1176 I think is a great place to start now the warm audio stuff I think is pretty good I've enjoyed using it over the past couple months I will say you can tell where they're saving some money the build quality is not quite as nice as a higher end piece of gear like the 1176s for example I used to have a pair of purple audio 1176's they were called the mc77s I wish I never sold them but just the fit and finish the quality of the knobs and the switches are a little bit cheaper and Imagining the quality of the wiring on the inside is probably not as high-end as something that you would get from a company like purple audio or a vintage Pull Tech but the price reflects that so if you're on a budget and you're looking to get into outboard gear and you don't want to spend a ton of money warm audio is a good place to start I think the warm audio stuff for me is good like proof of concept stuff for example the EQ and this 1176 I've been using every single day I use it on my shotgun mic to record vocals for my videos so it tells me yeah this is a really useful piece of gear so it might be worth me looking into upgrading to the higher end units for durability and that little extra sound quality over the warm audio stuff but yeah no real complaints I think for the price they're really great now below the 1176 I have my distressors now I bought these about seven or eight years ago from a studio that was closing up I got a really great deal on them and the distressor is another staple piece of gear you're going to see these in recording studios all over the world and they're great because they're not just compressors but they're Distortion units as well that's where the name distressor comes from Distortion compressor now it's not going to be like a fuzz box or an overdrive box for example instead what it's doing is emulating tube Distortion and Transformer Distortion and the upper order harmonics and harmonic Distortion that you get from pushing tape or pushing a Transformer but they're incredibly versatile you can make them sound and respond like an la2a you can make them sound like an 1176 6 you can make the compression super subtle and just use it to add some saturation or with the nuke setting you can take a pair of drum room mics for example and just crush them and get a really really unique sound that way and now we're on to my second lunchbox setup now the first lunchbox was mic pres and this is EQ compression and utility stuff and it's here on the desk because I've got a lot of stuff here that I need to be able to look at and read pretty easily so the first two slots these are eqs these are Harrison 32 eqs from Great River then over here we've got a pair of compressors from Great River these are the pwm 501s then next to that we have another pair of compressors from Cappy these are the fc526s and these are really like the color and sort of the saturation you get from these when you really start to push them these are killer on base I've been using these on base a lot recently and I'm excited to start using them on drums more specifically drum overheads to see how they respond now next to that I have a pair of radial ecstasies basically this allows me to patch any guitar pedal either in mono or stereo into my patchbait and use it to mix with or to record with so typically guitar pedals want to see instrument level signals which are pretty weak and pretty low gain but once you're recording through mic preamps and going in and out of your interface you're working with line level which is significantly louder and more powerful most guitar pedals especially Distortion boxes fuzz pedals can't handle line level so what this box does is takes the line level signal converts it to instrument level and then you have an effects Loop here you send to the pedal and you come out of the pedal into the Ecstasy where it gets converted back to line level and then into your Daw using my stream and Deco one of my favorite pedals I can patch it stereo in to this and send drums through it or to send my entire mix through it if I want these are super cool they're worth having around they also make it in like a floor di box so you don't have to have a 500 series unit as well if you're mixing and recording a lot and you have a few guitar pedals I highly recommend getting one of these or a pair of these to start experimenting with it's so much fun you're going to start to like take pedals that you haven't used in a long time and start experimenting with them and putting them on your mix or your keys or your your base or your vocals whatever these things are awesome so now we're onto the side car attached to the gator desk here and like I said this is one of my favorite Parts about this desk you have this pull out slide here which typically houses a pedal board that I use and then in here I have my Mac Mini which is my other computer and this sort of section is like my podcasting and live streaming rig so this Mac Mini is attached to my old focusrite Scarlet interface here so whenever it's time to record my podcast with Zach dipped in tone which link down below if you haven't checked it out I don't want to have to break down or re-patch a bunch of stuff that I might be working on at the time for a video or for a song so I have this system that's independent of my recording and YouTube computer so that lives here in this sonnet rack mini uh rack mount which is cool because if you have two Mac minis you could put two in here I don't really know why you would but but the main thing I want to focus on here is the patch Bay so this is the Hub of the studio everything that we have talked about so far from the amp rack to the computer to the interfaces and especially the outboard gear are all connected in some way to this patch Bay now if you're not familiar a patch based job is to take all of this gear specifically the outboard gear and the interfaces and bring it all into one place because if you notice all the gear we've looked at so far doesn't have input and output points on the front everything's on the back so what that would mean is if I had to set up a mic to record a vocal I'd have to take a bunch of xlrs and get behind all this gear and Connect into one then out and then into another and then out it would be a huge huge pain and actually would be impossible for me I can't get behind this desk every day so instead what we've done is use this patch Bay and brought the inputs and outputs of just about every piece of gear in the studio to this one place so I've got everything labeled here and we break it down in eight channel chunks so each one of these eight channel blocks is a different section of gear so for example this first eight channels here and here that is my top Apollo you can see I've got it labeled x8p line in the next eight channels are my second Apollo now where it starts to get interesting is as we move over to this side of the patch Bay so if you Pan the camera over you can see on the floor there I've got a snake an eight channel snake and that's where I patch in thing like my shotgun mic or my podcasting mic up here so to kind of demonstrate this I'm going to patch my shotgun mic above me like I would if I was recording a YouTube video so right now you're hearing the mic on the camera so the microphone is plugged into channel one of my snake on the floor over there so the first thing I'm going to do is take this patch cable this is called a TT tiny telephone connection and I'm gonna go out of channel one on the studio snake here so as a general rule your patch bays are organized with inputs on the bottom row and outputs on the top row at least that's how we've organized this patch Bay so I'm going to take the output of that snake and now I have my microphone signal coming down this connector here and I'm going to pick a preamp so let's say I want to send it into this preamp right here this vp28 on the desk well I know because I have it labeled that it is this patch Point here on the patch base so it's vp28 input which is the bottom row so now I have my microphone going into that uh unit and as you can see as I'm talking up here I'm actually metering so now we know I've got input going into the mic preamp but it's stopping there because I don't have anything patched on the output so now what I do is Right Above It I patch the output of that mic pre now my signal is coming down this cable and I want to send it to my EQ I want to go into the tube EQ up there so I go input of the tube EQ now it's going into the EQ but it's not coming out so I have to come out of the EQ and then from there I want to go into my 1176 right under it so I'm going to go into the 1176 and if I start talking you can see that now the meter on my 1176 is jumping telling me that I'm getting signal in and so now what I want to do is take it out of the compressor the 1176 and I want to go into one of my Apollos so I'm going to go output of the 1176 and I go line input of the Apollo and if you look up on the desk you'll see the meter on the Apollo jumping now again a patch Bay is not something that you need to have a nice recording studio setup in fact there's a lot of great Studios that don't have a patch Bay at all but for me in my workflow where I'm doing a lot of different types of recording sometimes in a single day I'll record voice over for a video then I'll work on a track where I'm recording guitar bass vocals drums Keys then I'll work on a video course then I'll go back to working on another track in the course of one day I need to be able to change my signal routing at the drop of a hat and that's what this patch Bay does for me okay who are you and what do you do hey I'm Philip Conrad I play bass with Rhett a lot and I have my own YouTube channel but when I'm not doing that I work in the film and television business and I do sound on movie sets what are some of the things you've worked on I don't know if I should say what what you're in the credits like like give me two examples of something okay I have done a week on set for stranger things as a secondary boom up I've done to work on dear Evan Hansen I've worked on second year for Jungle Cruise I did a show for Paramount plus called the game it's a football drama a handful I did a lot of She-Hulk if you saw the Marvel She-Hulk um I've done a handful of things for Marvel so anyway a couple years ago Rhett asked me to help him set up a good mic for his YouTube videos and I recommended this uh Sennheiser this mph-50 so this is a hypercardioid or like a super shotgun it has a really nice pattern it's concentrated it would be cool to do this where like I could talk and you could see the pattern but basically if we're at sitting here wait hold on we can we can make this happen hold on so okay sweet so what I do on set is I'm holding this microphone on the end of a pole and I'm trying to get it just outside of the frame of the camera but as close as I can to the actors right so this microphone is designed to have some reach but still to maintain the Lush full frequency content so I guess yeah you guys can hear this mic okay I can hear it but as I'm moving towards it you hear how rich and full that is but then as you move out of the pattern not only are you losing volume but you're losing some frequency so what that means is this microphone's proximity getting it really nice and close to the person talking it's going to sound awesome this one is today like if you if you go to a movie you probably are hearing this one because it has a great low end and it has a really nice pattern so it's just a great microphone so as you can see when Rhett's sitting here talking to the camera let's say the camera was here uh this would be just out of the frame and uh this is a game of millimeters because like as as a boom operator you're trying to get this in the safety like if if there's the frame around someone who's talking on where it is where's my hand so what I would want is to have the microphone just just right there because if you can get it right on the edge of that frame it's going to sound Lush and full and great and it's gonna also it's gonna sound a whole lot better than a lavalier a lot of people like to use lavaliers which have their application as well but it's like comparing like a cinema camera to your iPhone like which one's gonna look better like the cinema camera right the diaphragm on this mic is so much bigger it's just designed to sound awesome and to to Really capture the likeness of the human voice so it's great mic mkh50 okay so now we're going to talk YouTube setup starting with my cameras now since I started my channel I've been shooting on Sony cameras I really love Sony um I'm not sponsored I've bought all these cameras at full price over the years I started on an a 60 500 I think was my first Sony camera and then not long after that I moved into these and I bought a pair of these which is a Sony A7 III they're a little outdated now but they're incredible cameras they're super powerful this is now my B camera that we use for b-roll or a tight shot on a guitar when I'm doing a video course or a lesson and my former a camera which was also an A7 III just went to my wife Tilly who is starting her Channel now she's a film photographer analog photographer and she needed an acam so I gave her my a camera and then just recently upgraded this camera to the A7 S3 and I've been super happy with this camera it's a pretty big step up I think from the A7 III in terms of quality and features and the image quality is better but the big jump is in low light performance when I'm filming especially downstairs now where everything is black and super dark these S3 is unbelievable in low light it's super good the lens that you're currently on now is the 24 to 70 G master I bought that with that new camera whereas before I've been using a combination of Sigma lenses so this is the Sigma 35 1.4 art lens great lens for the money but really heavy heavy and kind of bulky they're not good lenses if you're doing a lot of vlogging or running around that kind of thing for the wide shot that we've been using for this video so far this is the Sony 14 millimeter G Master 1.8 and it is super wide in fact for most things that I do it's actually too wide and it's really small and lightweight so for vlogging and walking around you can just throw this on the camera and it kind of doesn't matter where you're pointing because you're going to get something in the shot now my lighting setup in here is actually something that I feel like we just recently got really dialed in so my key light is an amran 200x it's the budget version of the aperture like 60D that so many YouTubers are using when I initially bought it I had the big light Dome attached to it and it looked nice but it was just so big and bulky in here it really took up too much space so since the walls are white in this room I literally just turned it around and fired it into the ceiling in the corner behind me and now basically my wall and my ceiling are acting as a soft box so my key light is much softer because it's coming from a really wide Source up there and that could be a really cool way if you're just starting out you don't have a ton of money to spend on lighting getting one really powerful key light and if your walls are white or white-ish you can use your wall as a big soft box and then set your white balance on your camera accordingly now for the hair light or the rim light behind me I just replaced that that's a nan light Forza 60. I bought that recently and I don't really like it it looks good and it's plenty powerful but it has a built-in fan that constantly runs and it's loud enough that my shotgun mic picks it up and then back in this back corner here I've just got kind of an accent light sort of lighting my background that's one of my old Amazon LED light panels that I started with a few years ago it's just there to kind of light my background light the amp rack a little bit and highlight around me so when I'm sitting here in my main position talking to camera the wall and area behind me is lit which helps me kind of stand out from the background a little bit more especially if I'm wearing like a lighter color shirt which I typically don't do I only wear black shirts I'll try and Link some channels that I really love for this kind of stuff where I learned a lot of this DSLR video shooter is one of my favorite channels um I don't know him at all but I've learned so much from watching his videos over the years about lighting and cameras and all kinds of stuff so if you're interested in getting into this kind of thing I would definitely recommend his channel so this is my uh Studio setup I hope you enjoyed it like I said if you want more information on the gear and stuff that we talked about today there are Sweetwater affiliate links in the description box down below huge thanks to Sweetwater for sponsoring today's video if you want to be entered to win that Pro home studio setup check out the link in the description box down below be sure to subscribe I'm really really excited about the projects that we have coming up in the studio build 1.0 if you will downstairs the black hole let's go do it for today's video thank you so much for watching and remember there is no plan B

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 192,654

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Id: OdCCeIdkOXI

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023