Where legends make records: Blackbird Studio Tour with John McBride Nashville, TN

[Music] i'm john mcbride we're sitting i'm sitting here with vance powell the legendary oh the legendary john mcbride man i'll tell you i mean when i need motivation i just go down to vance's place and hang out for a little bit and it really reinspires my passion and everything else but we're sitting in the kitchen at 2806 azalea place that's a-z-a-l-e-a in nashville tennessee beautiful berry hill berry hill neighborhood it's about five minutes south of downtown it's kind of great though man we got our own police force it's kind of bizarre this little square mile one square mile 500 permanent residence 52 studios thank god he knows well i only know that because we had to do zoning and the guy's like you know how many this is number 52 in the in the neighborhood now of those there's really only a couple commercial studios blackbird being one of them yeah so but this all started about 20 years ago well no it started when we were born i suppose i met that how did we meet man did we meet well we met the first time in uh 84 yeah i think you were mixing clocks or dogs or one of those bands yeah and galena kansas little town in kansas peppers sergeant peppers that was the name of the club yeah mcbride was from wichita i was from joplin missouri galena was 10 miles from joplin and there was rock and roll bands and i would go see these bands and i met him then but i actually remember meeting him but don't really remember us talking about anything other than just like meeting and then years and years later martina well we have another meeting in there jed downing oh yeah jed downing was my roommate jed downing became martinez uh lighting guy and then uh we met on the road had pretty loose morals that he would actually room with the lighting guy we're sound guys i know it's that weird goes against the grain it really did you know and and we fought like lighting guys and sound guys so if an audio guy gets together with the video guy i'm not even going there it wouldn't be oh it'd be ugly it was weird there was a lot of awkwardness about the lawn being mowed and that you know of course but it's again it's a whole nother story but uh i came out and met me met john uh after tl oh wow after tl and i hung out at a martinez show yeah you were out with garth and i came out and we met and then not long after that um okay i was working for tammy wynette touring and um she wasn't really doing a whole lot and john called me and was like hey i've got to go to south america and australia and somewhere around the world with garth or some some place and i need somebody to go out and do this job for martina and oh yeah by the way you're gonna be mixing some of the time which was like suddenly like a lot of you know like oh holy and uh we did that and then uh over over time i went and did jars of clay you went to you went on kept doing this and then um john started calling me and he'd be like man you know bought this bought this house it's got this it's got this tennis court and i don't play tennis so i'm thinking i'm gonna build a studio out there my knees suck yeah he's like i don't play tennis well they're new now and uh and at that period of time we i had just built a little studio for the jars of clay guy we're making a record so we started like commiserating back and forth over really good wine of john's and uh and then it was we both came to the realization that if you build a studio at your house some bass player is going to back into your yard and get stuck all night you know or some the cartage trucks can tear up the yard or some shit's going to happen in the middle of the night it's not going to be cool and so john started looking around and at the time um i was over in this area for some reason he called me one day and he said hey i'm going to go look at this building and uh you give me a meet me there and you know can you meet me i said sure so i can't ever met him and it was this building he walked through and looked at it there was a session going on yeah and uh or some of some sort and it's funny because when they used to do sessions here the history of this place is it started off as a legit studio i think george augsburger designed the a room and brent mayer brent mayer had it and then he moved out and sold it to some ad advertising guys who used it yeah they ran ads sparingly they had a sphere console they had not they didn't do any maintenance so ever the guys who worked here when they went to mix they would take the modules out of the console put them in the refrigerator in your freezer actually yeah put them in the freezer and then they would take them out put them in the console and print while it was quiet because once they got hot yeah they made a lot of noise yeah i love that i mean i'm sorry john had bought this neve desk and had had sort of started refurbishing it and then he bought this building and then we he called me up i was on the road and he's like hey man i you know i need somebody come over here and help me build this place and so i uh left my touring world and came over here and you know it was unbelievable it's fun this is what happened you know man and so uh yeah yeah i remember it started out john's like okay we're gonna keep the budget like i'm looking like maybe a million dollars you know and i bought these microphones and i bought and i found this really nice antique chest we were just going to set up out there and about you know five weeks into the experiment i would call it that thing was full and i'm like okay cool for my phone for microphones we're gonna need like something really nice here to you gotta figure out a place to put mics so so i think the first mic locker was up here yeah still still is a mic i mean there's so much there's so many things about this this was a house this house was built the 40s right this door was the back door that went out outside on the other side of this this was added on that side was the garage so here in a minute we're going to go in studio b that was the garage under the floor of studio b are still the little asphalt tracks about the width of a 1930s car under the floor and then there's like seven roof lines up above all of this we've recently been running fiber yeah and and rediscovering all our roofs that are underneath throughout other roofs there's roofs on top of roofs so yeah it's crazy and all these offices back here at one point were things and yeah so yeah it was it was a it was a crazy time and then he decides to buy the building behind him the students behind him what happened was one i'm home or somewhere and vance calls me and he goes dude george massenberg and kyle lynn yeah i think we're over here and we're i'm giving him a run around the place i broke every traffic light you could break i got here because you know masterburg and really honestly not even knowing how incredible yeah you know but i thought i'm going to meet the guy that invented parametric eq or whatever or just you know unbelievable so i show up and the first words out of massive birth messenger's mouth he looks at me and he goes what the is a studio like this doing in nashville tennessee yep and i thought oh boy okay cause i'll tell you vance and i aren't from the midwest but i love nashville and there's great players here there's great writers there's great producers engineers there's great everything here and all aspects of the music business and i'm kind of competitive and i thought we need to build a studio that will kick the out of anything in l.a or new york and you know i'd argue we have and i don't want to sound like some arrogant prick but i love audio i have to be in music he has to be in music we have no choice it's in our dna there's something that happens when you're a baby and i don't know if it's the mom's heartbeat or the sound of her voice mine sure wasn't my french horn lessons i can tell you that well you know what i sucked the piano dude but the only thing the least helpful there was lessons i can tell man right but anyway so when masenberg said that it just totally you know basically was yes i did this for the right reasons because if you can impress george massenburg you're going to be all right so to come full circle brent mayer who owned this building when he sold it he bought the two houses yeah behind and they built a little studio at back there's a double lot there was two houses they built a little they built a little hallway between them and he had a publishing company a little publishing studio so so at some point john walked over you know through the backyard because it was literally just a backyard back there and went over and met brett but i said to george i go hey george you know if you ever want to do something together let me know man and george looks at me and goes so i've had the perfect room in my head for 25 years and i thought that let's build it you know i mean how don't leave it in your head i mean this guy talks to god about electricity you know he's just genius i don't use that word too often but he really really is and i thought here we go and so you know i called the wife hey honey you carefully do some some extra shows this year for the rest of your life the way we're going to do some renovations at the studio just a little few little things man i'd find a great 251 or something i'd call her and i go girl you know because i had some money because i had sold my sound company to claire brothers and and it was going really well but not realizing the kind of money you really need to get into a studio and whatever the budget is two and a half times it and you'll be close yeah i always tell people double it and add ten percent but that's probably right double it and add another half yeah man it is insanity but here's the problem we've got to give the producers and artists and engineers that come in here we want to give them every color on the palette because uh fairchild 670 is a color an rca ba6a or a b86 or whatever you're using whether it's the mic pres whether it's the microphones the rooms you're in these are all colors and i don't want them to ever lack any color for making you know their their vision come true right it's it's a it's a boon and that it's a blessing and a curse yes because as an engineer going into a studio you go okay cool let me see what mics you have you come to blackburn it's like all of them you got okay so what might pre oh all of them what compressors all of them oh you know i mean honestly it's a little bit like well well now i have nothing to blame anything on can't blame that is i can't blame you well you know if i just would have had a 251 for this female vocal it'd been great but you know they didn't have one and now it's like oh no there's 35 of them pick one or pick two or three go through them or six or eight or at one point you know they did 35 microphones did a shoot out of 35 vocal mics all different all different ones oh and james otto yeah and this guy could clip an s757 i mean he had a powerful voice oh yeah what won the rft or something or i don't remember what one i know that it was that there was a frightening closeness between a handheld 58 yep and a 47. yep they were frighteningly close just because you got a u-47 doesn't mean it's great that's part of the deal it's got a history who worked on it yeah and they don't work for everything no yeah the day it was built was it a friday on a three-day weekend well we just did that this week we we tried to 47 on vocal and it didn't work ended up in sm7 yep you know so an sm7 with the telefunken v76 mic pre is that close to a lot of 251 yeah it's really good i'm not kidding cool you want to show them around yeah yeah we should walk we'll talk all day this room is the a control room uh built in mid 70s i believe originally a compression ceiling and we found out that doesn't work called george augsburger back he came in we widened it changed the ceiling and this used to be the back of the room right here and we extended as far as we could to go about eight feet to go to the property line basically the design of blackbird is where's the property line and that's kind of that's kind of what what happens that council used to belong to donald fagan and and it was at river sound in new york prior to that was out on l.a yeah yeah but we turned it upside down and made it as perfect as it could possibly be i called jeff tanner who worked for neve when they built that console we opened the schematics had his initials on him i loved that and he was aware of everything about that console and man we i just never said no and if we could spend more money we did but i felt like this is the heart of what's happening here you know and it's got to be great but let's go look at the my clock yeah let's do that definitely so this is not the original mic locker but this is where we keep most of the high or a lot of the high-end mics um everything's labeled you know a rarest mic is a stereo telefunken 251 i'm not sure if there's another but basically it's a 251 with the additional capsule stereo image right there i like the serial number [Laughter] i actually think that's the that's the replica i think this one which i can't read oh you know where it is it's up front yes yes that's that's an exact replica because see i'll throw this at people yeah yeah uh there is a couple cool things uh percept mics being used but this is cool oh yeah c24 number one number one yes yeah and that wasn't even it wasn't even in the sales pitch that it was number one yeah it's so odd it was part of a collection i just saw number two oh cool yeah that guy in l.a man yeah from warner brothers i think i bought that my collection i think tony fishman was involved in that deal man i've paid retail over the years i'll tell there's a lot of cool stuff in here now this room and the big room which you saw in uh some of our shots um was added after the fact so after about a year and a half of of studio a being open right uh we decided we needed we that he decided we needed a bigger room uh and so part of it was well we really need a secure place to put the microphones and so in this room all the microphones went and what ended up happening was at some point when across the way opened up we had to have one over there too so what you see in here is actually you'll see holes where things are empty and that's because they're in the other room or they're in place yes they're being used elsewhere there are some really cool kind of dumb rare things in here obviously uh and 101 there's a pair of pb31s down here yep and these are the original the very first ribbon mic this is a ribbon these were made solely for radio city music hall and uh john came across there's a couple of them down here a buddy of mine runs radio city and he called me and said they were selling these mics that have been in there since it opened basically and but i mean know i know you three a's yeah i love yours ku2a's down here oh boy something's stuck underneath it um tell you two a's these are skunk i like this lackluster you know what i think it's i think it's something i think it's temple oh it's down below it is yeah i screwed us with them okay well you know what we'll get to this look at somebody we'll pull that drawer out yes absolutely but there's amazing stuff in here 47s these are all 47s 251s c12s these are all c12s 650s 269s i love these mine yeah m50s i'm a huge m50 fan i'll tell you i think we only have like well it sounds horrible i think 14. yeah um i sold a couple pairs i've regretted selling anything i've ever sold every time every time i love these mics these are an old neumann measurement mic called it's an mm3 i think yeah this is a three wheels five yeah and there's al they make them four also i don't have any of those yet but the capsules up here the bodies down here they put this in so that reflections from the body wouldn't affect the question and click and clicked and it's the it's an omni it's similar to an m50 really it's the best way to describe a similar capsule yep and they uh they're flat from a ridic it's ridiculous it's like 16 to 22k or something and you know way probably above what i can hear these days but when something stays flat to 50 or 60k you hear it whether you think you hear it or not you know the difference it's pretty amazing here's one you're not going to see very often know what this is a quad 69 sm69 now we're trying to get a new um atmos mic built that has 16 no i'm kidding all right i don't know yeah all right there's 16 capsules in this one but anyway i love love love microphones it's become one of my big passions um the beetle rooftop mics we've got that whole mess to see oh one of my faves telefunken 1932. ribbon mike and you know it's amazing how that sounds on a kick drum or a vocal i'm not kidding it's really good it's really crazy it is the other thing we try not to delodium oh yeah the melodiums are great man that was in radio city also oh really yeah two of them we got two of them here an old french yeah it's french frab yep what other good mic stuff do we have laying around vans um well there's actually some back here that are in cases yeah yeah um we've got duck sacks uh sheffield's right uh there's some of those in cases back here um there's a um what's that thing that ams mic the uh oh yeah yeah the ams um sound field yes as a sound field that's pretty cool and then you know i mean yeah and what happened was over the years we bought a lot of gear because i just didn't and i'm a road guy so a roadie with the a scary thing you know man or you know i wrote it with some pockets it's it's scary and obviously without martina this place never would have been built but she was behind the idea and has regretted it ever since no i'm kidding i'm gonna say that's not true you know it's funny because i got an offer and not that long ago somebody called and wanted to talk and i brought it up to her and she goes you know that well you know now it's sort of like uh yeah you know it's uh i'm going wait a minute you've tortured me for years we could have been retired 10 years ago no i'll never retire i don't think you will i mean when you love what you do and we love what we do why would i retire this brings me so much joy especially tracking i love tracking days you know what retirement is retirement is getting to do the gigs you want to do and and then everything else you don't have to do right right that's what retirement is i'm not that i'd see that not there yet me neither but you know like when you can you know do what you want to do and yeah and then you can the rest of the time you can you know off in however way you want to off and you know nashville i don't want to sit here and be a you know a commercial for nashville but the fact is we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of great and i mean great players not good great good is the enemy of great you know you think good yeah that's okay well that that doesn't get anybody's attention you know what i mean so the fact that i get to come in here and work with people like bucavac and oh you name it glenn warr for dan doug moore or whoever you know it's just and then we obviously a lot of players come in from out of town i've gotten to become friends with vinnie cagliutto and steve jordan and a lot of people and i've even met some beetle engineers and gotten hang out with them which is to this day still blows my mind got to hang out with eric that day that was awesome yeah let's go look at b yeah let's do that this room is tiny so we needed a small console i found this api it's 48 big faders 48 little faders a lot packed into a small package love it a lot of great stuff has been done in here yeah uh the dixie chicks record richard dodd did was done here oh yeah the one all the grammys yeah that chili peppers i think got a little record space there's a little reverb chamber back there there's a bathroom vents did an entire album in this room drums in that room guitar amp in the bathroom base direct in here yep awesome i mixed uh murder the mountains a red fang in here and jeff the brotherhood and all kinds of recorded buddy guy in there yeah buddy guy in 2004 came and made a record here no a five probably because it was in d and he told me i went over to meet him finally been here a couple weeks and i'm just not a politician i just can't i don't go over hey you know but i had to go over and go listen we're so happy you're here and he goes john i'm never going to make a record anywhere else and he's been true to his word it's unbelievable this would have been seven might have been you know that record yeah and it was it's so good was that the one that had 74 years young that's the next one oh that was the second one yeah yeah i did two 74 years young and that was how long ago yeah exactly yeah well there's a whole story there we'll get over to you i'll tell you there's some fun stories this is the other mic locker this one is ear storage and there's a lot of mics in the in these drawers let me get a key here and everybody knows where the key is i love it and if a door the dancer did just hit it you know but where do you want to start here just open yeah oh i got to show you this mike and it's mate which is right behind it they're both in still the original boxes and consecutive serial numbers and we never use these only because they're sitting up here we got a bunch of 77s in different places but just the condition of these is that beautiful i mean it's just kind of beautiful i have one of these i love it and it doesn't work ah bomb yep ball and biscuit yeah so this kind of gives you the idea this is this is full of mics after mike's after mike's after mike's this is even more so we just kind of go down the line here these are all you know d25s uh cmvs oh here's our creepiest mic oh yeah i've done this before but so it wouldn't be original material but i had this mic for a year part of the collection i bought from europe and one of my guys goes hey john the nazi party stamp is in the top of this mic and i thought no wonder nobody uses it i don't know it's just kind of crazy and creepy but it's here you know and we i became a good information i became a big rft fan and i i would buy any rft i could find for years until finally one of my mike guys who works here brian said dude we don't need any more rfts i go why because we have 43 of these things but i really like them they're a lot like a you know like a 47 it's a the power supplies in the tube or in the the bottles 220 just yeah and it takes m7 the bayonet style capsule you know an m7 and m8 and m9 if you want cardioid figure 8 or omni you know but they really really sound great martina's whole timeless record she did with one of those mics and it's fun and we got tons of capsules i love that we got a bunch of white it's a 421 000. it is but the cool thing is if you get cancer okay it's gone cool you know that's i love that should we go back down here oh god so we have a tech shop which believe it or not is probably this is the cleanest i've seen it and i was going to say in 20 years yeah well it's because of nick yeah oh and we're now making our own neve uh caps you know our knobs knobs yeah we 3d print a bunch of crazy stuff i think most of this stuff works still already and there used to be gear piled everywhere now those are telefunken mike pries i'm a big big fan of those this room there's a massive this is a mess but this is where some of the telefunken mic priests are i think we have 137 all together and that would be v72s v72 a and b d77s v78s v76s of course we have eight oh i know yeah yeah we've got a bunch of m's would you like a line amp 74's i think like a line amp and then we got a spare 16 channel expander for a 1608 sitting there on the shelf because you know we're i don't know why you know part of having a studio is you got to be able to maintain it and and finding tubes and i remember 15 years ago i bought 25 never been used ac 701s but great ac 701s and it was like 500 bucks a piece and i went i am the stupidest guy on earth but i'm getting these and guess what now they're 1500 or 2 grand and you probably use two or three of them that's all we've used yeah and we still have 23 left man i love the ac701 tube oh there you go so here's the real one we just showed you everybody where it is um and the serial number is actually 101. yeah the 101. black and what's interesting is um the finish never got polished so it's like a satin and uh yeah that's that's the original one right there i love it and it sounds fantastic it does so although you know what i'd probably still use two mono 251 so that i have more freedom with placement but you know what it's nice to use that just to say you did you know sounds good i don't know another one on earth and you know it's funny from the outside this looks like just some other little house in berry hill yeah i remember kid rock going i pulled up and i go what is this somebody's house but he goes then he came inside and it got better yeah yeah we added you can see what we added to the building because it's got a different texture obviously and then we're beetle fans around here and one of my daughters uh has been painting some of our doors and it's usually a beetle lyric is that emma or yes emma yeah also we bought the transformers from the city of nashville so no one else can tap off that one or that one and you'll notice there's three wires coming off each and that's us that's our tech power this one is the regular power that's a thousand damp service yeah it's a three-phase thousand amp and they added this telephone pole which goes down about 25 feet i'm not joking and out here in the middle of this out out here in the middle is a huge star ground it's like 10 16 foot copper pipe copper rods driven in the ground with two gauge welding cable all welded and a big huge cable going up into a room we'll show you later and this is the first place that tech power and house power meet is underneath this driveway yeah ah that's the e room and so we used to line out a baby you're a rich man tuned to a naturally happy to be that way now a was mine it's a man cave me and vance made it a man cave but this building martina got involved and that's why you feel dainty and elegant and all those things anybody indeed i don't know man let's take a look looks like the school and we could probably run through real quick you know what let's go into the lounge for two seconds we got this uh p is it a 31 or that mic it's a it's a 77a yeah it's and it's mate is in one of the other mic lockers but people have actually used it for overdubs when you come to a studio you don't want it to be like going to the dentist you want it to be like i feel inspired and i feel you know with these rich colors and you know chic what's that bordello chic yes yeah it's like going to a nice poor house that's a good way to describe it um now there's a there's some kind of nutty things here you guys can't really see it but i want to explain real quick this floor and that floor and that floor and that floor do not connect this this little booth is a float of solid concrete sitting on nine or ten inches of rock wool sitting on another nine inches of concrete on another foot of gravel so this room these walls are floating not touching any of the rest of the building even though it looks like it we're fortunate because this we built from the ground up so every room is separate you know everything is a floating slab i wanted to keep the rooms not influencing each other these are all eight inch inside rooms they're eight inch block filled with concrete outside is a a 12 inch block or 18 inch block i don't know it's huge usually 12 a foot of air and another foot of solid concrete yeah crazy there's there's so much concrete in this place i often wondered are we gonna sink you know do you guys mind if we step in for a minute can we interrupt you for a minute well we're not going to interrupt you just keep working we're just doing a quick tour cool and then um [Music] so for the d room we got a 96 big fader legacy plus and 96 liters we can go from the first chorus and then the outward racks the general smattering of usually it's bike trees and and things over on that side there'll be a lot of compressors and eqs in here effects and compressors over here we have over 100 channels of neve outboard uh for channel strips if people want to use neve in a room like this and we have one bcm10 oh yeah there's some 1073s sure are you either using the chamber no we're not cool let's go in the chamber all right yeah so this is one of my favorite rooms in the whole building oh and if there's a tornado this is where you want to be there's more concrete between us and the outside world then you can take a stick this room this room is an accident in a way this was supposed to be above us here ac and while they were building the room again these were all separate walls and all uh somebody told john that you know hey you should make a chamber and he came over and went okay well we did the same thing in a and we should we should have looked at that because in a i didn't oh yeah i don't i don't want the big room to always sound the same i don't want the chamber to always sound the same i want to have some variance so with the one in a the ceiling goes up and down and you can get it down to here and you're in the shower yeah and you take it up and you're you know but let's show you that's really cool check this out [Music] so if these guys were more experienced they'd have a stereo mic in here that door open picking up there's about eight and a half nine seconds really beautiful it is beautiful although i couldn't afford to put another moving ceiling yeah no it's okay actually this is this is better so it's just oh and these doors are the equivalent for sound isolation of a foot a thick uh foot of solid concrete i don't even know the manufacturer but they weigh about 400 pounds yeah okay and when you leave this place if you're here for a week or more your right arm looks like arnold schwarzenegger and your left arm is all spindly yeah yeah they're magnetic magnetic seal and it's their way of time literally that way that's very heavy that wall uh behind the drummer is three feet i don't know it might be two feet of solid concrete and it's at an angle because and then and then behind it is a trap yeah so the room is trapped behind it it's really pretty pretty pretty michael cronin designed and i love talking in here and then and if you talk as you walk out the difference it just dries right up no no no man no we already got a couple crotch shots and wanted to no i'm kidding yeah but that's that's what i was talking about and we use the skyline diffusion on the ceilings this wood on the walls is called flutter free but when you clap your hands in this room that's awesome you don't hear any weird reflections he'll give me a little snare yeah okay now and check this out just single stroke string [Music] so if you can hear me put a mic in the chamber and open the door booth booth piano room booth three amp lockers behind the piano room so that we can have more people in here because eye contact is important and that's the only drawback to a really for me is that when we added on that great big room we put a lot of players in that room but the piano is separate and the vocalists depending on where they want to set up we should go down the hall all right we'll be back thanks no problem thank you we did that buddy guy record yeah oh you had more i had that guitar amps in here in this room yep all wide open all connected on it's crazy ing may's got nothing on buddy guy i'll tell you that right now there's three three little amp lockers back here this is a storage and uh and a little mic locker back here just some storage and then this is slow gear is up top overflow rental gear you know it's funny when i gave bob ludwig a tour he came through and he goes hey i used that in the 60s and then in the 70s and that in the 80s he goes my whole history is here yeah wendell jr sitting up there oh my god yep i like this room yeah okay one of the big differences or a difference between blackbird and most studios we have a lot of band gear a lot over 60 guitar amps we've got five ac 30s um one new one come on in come on and a bunch of old ones uh two with top boost we've got some dumbbells in here we've got some old watkins we have oh we have a 69 marshall super lead and one of my favorite things i've ever heard about that is when steve jason from george the clay hit a hit accord on i think it was les paul maybe and he goes through that 69 super lead and he goes that's why they call rock and roll the devil's music right there and by the way it's christmas day because we work year-round i'm just letting you know we're all doing this on christmas okay let me get a light on here okay thanks fans let's see i know i can find something there we go this is the former george masonburg office yes wow i've forgotten that man so we have enough gear that we decided we might as well rent some gear out if we're not working because if we're not working people are working at home or somewhere else they still need a great mic chain so we started the rental department back in i don't know 2004 maybe probably three or four and a lot of the favorite mics of people they all have names in here uh betty getty yeah sweet yep yellow yellow yellow yeah blue man and then we have some of the more kind of esoteric gear it might be in this room there's we've got a couple of old motown eqs these are from the first 25 that were ever made mike uh oh he's in his 80s and he's still alive mike came through and we took the tops off and he looked at him going yeah he's the first 25 we did this this is you know and then back here if you can fit got some cooper time cubes i've got some helios i love these i'm not i still have to figure out why you can have a 15 to 5 ratio a 24 to 8 ratio or a 3 that's three to one yeah yeah fifteen to five seven three one two i'm not sure how that works i love a cooper time cube this is uh garbage compressors rolled up in a box with a mic on one end and a and a uh speaker on the other yeah two two guard well one's a garden hose one's a pvc hose yeah yeah pie compressors from pie studios i love those pies this is these are emi eq modules out of mastering desks i bought one from abby abbey road this is a rack with two eqs two compressors i got offered a lot of money for this rack but i haven't sold well i have two of them one i actually take with me on the road live which is insane i shouldn't do it but you know what i got to cheat any way i can i got to stack the deck in my favor to sound good and just going through these without even using any eq makes it sound better the circuit sounds incredible but yeah lots of old stuff i didn't know you bought a sound gas 636 yeah wow that's cool i got an echo wreck from those guys too yeah and that i don't know man very cool yeah ebo is a local guy who uh eric borash who builds spring reverbs for guitar players but he's starting to make them rack mount units and everybody loves them those are springs yeah well you know i'm a spring fan oh i haven't you know and that 636 is grampian 3636. i have a six six six six six six yeah nice the devil's boing yes i think fairchild makes a six six six something also might be a well ev makes a six success oh they do that's true yeah yeah and we can't get out pull pull yes that's why we can't get out yeah it's weird yeah if you went to your control room we have nine different rooms if you went to your room and you didn't find what you wanted you just go i need this and this and this and we'd come over here and you'll follow me if you want but we've got just stuff and more stuff 33 609s three out of the four metal knob here is that a shadow hill mastering compressor i believe we've got a lot of chandler gear i love wade gokey i love him uh some neve channels in here you've got we we have i think 65 pultecs and over 60 1176s we have la-2as lots of different compressors la3as la 4as and then back here there's even a little more bunch of langs yeah oh yeah those are rare man i know i know they were hard to get 15 years ago over since we do have all this we have 100 guitars in-house also and these are all guitar pedals and you'd be shocked how often somebody asks for whatever pedal oh yeah and you know we need to put those things on them where it beeps if they go out the door i'm kidding yeah i've lost a couple pedals man that's an rca bk5 it might be an a because the b's i keep for guitar it's one of my favorite electric guitars i've got a bn and a yeah i'm going to be honest with you they're kind of about the same are they yeah because the b supposedly goes flat to 15k yeah 50 to 15 and the a is 80 to 10 or something like that they say they're pretty good they're pretty similar they needed a bunch of a's they go it we got these bees ready stampin in that thing all right let's go all right emts i'm a huge emt fan 250s yep and we have a bunch of 240s we've got even a tube 240 that we just have to get working and we've added an extra attack and we're getting so much stuff caught up right now it's really good that's the api anniversary 2500 up there they took something good and made it even bigger you're right i love those guys though man i do one other thing i want to point out that unit right there that's a an iq air medical grade air cleaner they're about 1 300 bucks but they pull point zero .003 micron out of the air we've had relatively no cova to speak of in this entire facility between the school and the clients and the staff it's been amazing we also built a bunch of custom uv lights that you can't be in the room when they're on but you can do an entire console in 30 minutes and you're not sitting there with alcohol taking the paint off of it or whatever those berlant mic priests yeah it's being rebuilt for me right now one of the nice things oh man i tell you what i love i love well it's just the colors and you know it's so many great colors it's funny when al came through i gave al smith to her about 10 years ago probably and he goes john i'd heard but i had no idea i go out we just want to give you what you want man you know of course then when he came to record we only had a few m149s and he likes those of the newer neumanns i had three so i ended up buying four more to make al happy because you will do whatever it takes to make al happy i promise you if you have any ounce of anything in you you're going to make all happy get some nice just long the la 1a yeah that voice of america you don't see yeah yeah and everybody's always on my ass get rid of this sell it sell it and i go you know really internal machine yeah uh space station oh or some major yeah and yeah if you need a nurse major space station to get the exact sound you want then i want to have one for you and a spare hopefully you know emt uh reverb and i know you have uh emt compressors somewhere oh there it is right there that's a smashing compressor yeah yeah i love these yeah it's been a while since i've been down this rack scamp rack man yep wendell some telos units i think we did a van halen door on this side yeah we did of course yeah you got to got to eddie van so this is a little overdub at a room called h and it's um the control room's there the record space is around the corner here that's the machine room there's a 1608 in there a little bit outboard stuff you know um looks like we got an eve channel or two and yeah it's basically overdubs yep but it's it's it feels like you get away from everyone in here you know it's it's nice in a way then my brother-in-law is a photographer and he did all these pictures that you're looking at the old jim morrison and dylan and ginger baker and janice joplin and different people yeah step down here not much to it though but allison krauss spent six weeks in this room you know not too long ago on another record what we did i wanted to have a great monitoring rig for whoever the players are so everybody gets just a 24 channel mixer even though 16 faders four stereo returns and what we'll usually do is put bass and drums through one and two pan it and then you'll have kick snare hat bass keys guitar acoustic you know it's the dig yeah vocal et cetera et cetera et cetera so that each player can set up their own mix because we need the players to be inspired we need them to hear what they want to hear when you have only one or two mixers going to the the whole band a lot of times people want it different yeah they yeah so that's what we did and then on the stereo returns we have reverbs talkback volume and a couple other little things a little built-in workshelf i just locked it that locks in and out if you need a music stand there you go and we built them out of wood also for vocal booths because gordon moat would notice if we had a metal one because gordon hears everything four pairs of headphones and crown d75 this sea room when i talked earlier about george massburg said he had the perfect room in his head for 25 years and i said let's build it well what we're about to see is what that was and what we did what there is there are a hundred thirty eight thousand six hundred forty six pieces of one by one inch wood coming off the walls no two are the same length that's sort of true there's two that are the same is there yeah yeah so when they built all this they started this wood would expand and contract they went all the way around the the number that george picked and when they got to the end right here they were one short so they so george said i'll just duplicate one so they did so this one that's why it sounds worse that no it's duplicated and the crazy thing is the guy who duplicated it he duplicated the first one so if you look these two right now okay i learned things new things about the studio every day the corners are 50 cycle diffusers uh oh man what is it peter antonio peter antonio is it rpg is that what it is called so the room is based around diffusion obviously there's between 80 and 100 000 pounds of wood on the wall there's a giant i-beam in the middle of each wall that these things connect to because otherwise yeah who i can't even imagine but um and we have this special service they wear these little french maid outfits and they come in with dusters and clean them about once i'm kidding they're very smart [Laughter] we have a man lift um you not believe how many people have come in and said god who does this we're like oh i say don't hide your drugs in there you'll never find them yeah it's impossible to focus on the wall because of is it because of the little darkness yeah so one of the things they had to do is all this they they sealed it so at one point they came in and they tested it they tested about an eight foot piece they sealed it all spray sealed it they had to seal the doors and make a tunnel and guys in monkey you know like like spacesuits and then they built the rest of it and so you'd come in and you'd look at the rest of it and be like oh that's cool but then the eight feet they sealed it tripped your mind out and i think george kind of figured out that where they sealed it on the edge it kind of makes a line and it confuses your brain on the shadow and so it makes you feel like but it was weird because everywhere they didn't seal you didn't get that feeling of like whoa but where they did seal it you did so now the funny part is the all this wood is four by eight sheets of one inch formaldehyde free mdf in 2004 or five when we built this room this is a 40 by 28 shell it's huge but not so much after you get all this treatment um at that point in time microsoft excel did not talk to a cnc router so we paid some guy in hawaii 14 grand to write the code between xl and the router and we had a local company cut this wood which they would never do again that's exactly they actually said that we'll never do this again don't ever ask and we could get about what six inches of wall a day maybe maybe i don't know i mean it's they're two sheets high because we're about 15 feet high on on the yeah one's an eight foot sheet one's a seven foot sheet yeah and george this was a 10 000 page excel spreadsheet but you're building this and you're going is this gonna work i mean because you know thank god it was really really cheap to do it so i wasn't worried at all you know but there's a blind piano player named gordon moat who i brought up his name earlier but he'll go over he works in a a lot and he'll go down that hall by himself doing this because he hears the walls he hears the door it's unbelievable it really is unbelievable this guy will hear things i've accepted it finally that i'll never hear but if you forget to go get him he'll just show up in the control room and you're like oh i'm sorry gordon goes oh i found my way he'll just get up from the piano he'll be like oh there's a door he'll go through the door he'll be like oh there's something here and he'll come all the way in the control room but john brought him over here and i took him by the arm because i i explained what's going on i said what we have is we've got a room we have diffusion going on in here especially from about 400 to about 4k i think you know a lot of what we hear in the general day and i had him by the arm and there's really not much of anything in here so we come walking in and he's going like that i go okay gordon we're about to the middle of the room okay we're oh he goes i hear that was a mic stand not even a boom arm just a straight bank stand i went i'm gonna choke you man i moved it out of the way i go okay now we're okay i go we're getting closer to the wall and he's doing this and finally he touches a piece of wood he goes oh my god i'd kill myself in here and i went yes it works it works because if gordon didn't hear it it didn't hear so in a lot of ways you come in this room and it's a little bit like being outdoors with the floor in the ceiling i think is one way to put it you know i only really hear the floor in here yeah i guess we could get some rugs well that's funny every time i mixed in here i put a carpet down then what happened a couple of years ago we get a call from me or from a dolby and we had also done a sony demonstration in here of the 360. it's mind-boggling i call george and i go the room found its purpose he goes oh no it's always had that purpose we just didn't have the technology yet you know cause and you know what i'm not gonna argue george i know you can see into the future whatever but um and george liked the room this setup i was scared shitless the george is going to come in here and go ah you know this that what you know but dolby we got together talked about this atmos room i go well i'm i've become a big fan of atc speakers i go i really need it you know i can't do it half-assed we got to really do it right if we're going to do it and so it all worked out we we have a 9.1 room here nine at eye level first number point one is subs even though we have six subs i think they all get the same information and the point six is six speakers above our heads two in front two beside you two behind you with the atmos software you can remix or mix any song and you can place things and move things while the song is playing they have these objects which are these little ball looking things on the on the computer screen and you can assign any sound to an object like a vocal or a vocal verb or a guitar and then you can proceed to move that around the room and it's quite an enlightening experience the higher quality at which you experience music the more emotional it becomes and i don't know anyone that listens to music without mo emotion being the main driving force behind why you listen to music because music makes you happy and sad and angry and everything else you know but um we got the mastenburg seal of approval which shocked me and george actually comes in here and mixes different projects i know he was doing an alicia keys thing recently we've got this little area called bird house we call this where we'll do listening parties in the winter time we can drop the sides and heat it but it's uh it's nice you know in nashville what bands about 15 days a year it's perfect yeah oh we got to go in here yeah this is our our tech ground indoors we have i think how many 200 there's nine nine or ten yeah and then we've got about 40 or 50 probably portable units uh for balance power and so all those wires you're seeing those are all from the slabs and from the walls the output of that goes out to the star ground yes but i really truly believe that our electricity is three to five db quieter than that it's very quiet we've been just doing a quick run around the place well this is the best room yeah it is it really is how you doing man even though paulie how many kids do we have in the warehouse 25 or 30 yeah at least we have 60 plus drum kits in this crazy place which is our latest one yeah this uh yeah have you seen them no i haven't curly maple yeah and i'm just working on a 1980 gretch snare right now that's showing the we got a wall of snare drums right that way and paul you're going to explain them if you want they go from 1917 to today yeah there's it's a very special collection like right up here we've got all the kurt waltrips joyful noise lots of brass copper maple wallet keplinger snares i'm a big greg kepler fan he's a seattle guy that makes these drums out of iron that's what we use the other day steel we use that keplinger you put in the control room yeah that one was uh steel yeah and on those on the inside of every drum it's stamped [Laughter] like 1930s it's a broad collection old lead wigs down there then we've got some radio king slinger lens crazy there's even a lady kid up there when the old before they had tunable bottom heads and i think that's from like the 20s era made something like that did you use a candle to tune them you get them hot yeah use a candle i'm a big three fly fan in the 50s scratch brown badge were three-ply and in the 60s they went to six ply and they're great too but the three yeah 50s 50s 60s 50s this is very special kit the copper mist it's range kick it's pretty rare anniversary sparkle kit but you can come here and beat the out of it and then there's 60s ludwigs we have several of these that's a great yeah one of their mahogany kits oh yeah here's all the probably auto snares up here i think we have 165 or 70 all together it's kind of symbol collection a lot of old zillions i mean everything really a lot of old zombies is and then two smaller storage what 10 by 20 or whatever they are pretty yeah there's and then the the live school we have some stuff a bunch of stuff up there in fact i think this is going to go over there but this kick drum i didn't realize it when we got this but it's 20 inch deep wow killer i love it 22 by 20 like a cannon it's awesome the 22 inch three ply gretch round bed from the 50s you kicked that kick and i think you should go when you say what's a kick drum it should be that sound it just gives every time there's a note it's it's beautiful yeah it's so good and symbols well you can tell them i mean yeah we were just showing i was just showing them this we we a drum company or drum dealer will come to us like the last batch we bought were a bunch of one-off beta testing symbols and we sent a room and hit them all day and then you have the yes pile the maybe bottle and the no pile and then i can't hear any more piles right right happens by noon yeah you know all the zildjian prototype stuff they had um piles of them that was a fun and by the way we might as well make it official the finest tambourine ever made is a 60s ludwig double row yep they've got one yeah got one for ten dollars i've got do we have any here ten dollars at a poncho they're uh dude i'll give you 15. i'm a climate control box yeah man mine had mine had one mine had the top had the top head on yeah with the clip on yes and so and the head when i went to take the head off it was the original head it was it was stuck on stuck onto it peel it off this was the same deal here you can see where it had that yep yes now that is what a tambourine is supposed to sound like do you know who you're you know if you're on if you're looking to see who you're bidding against who stapleton oh morgan and chris yeah they buy these every time really well you know what dude maybe you and me can give him one for christmas or something this year this is a power room and there was a guy with the with the electric with the company that did all the pipe work in here and it's just a work of art those are two 600 amp panels for audio because there's so much distribution we only have 600 amps single phase for audio for this building but it needs to be distributed in so many places that we filled up a panel in a hurry and added a second in the schools over there when you come to school here you do two weeks in the classroom but in the classroom there's a 1608 api a couple racks of gear a couple little record spaces everybody ha gets an ipad as part of their tuition they get an ipad at every desk is an apollo we've just upgraded to the x8 x8 and then mark has a 16 i think yeah and um there's pro tools logic every every ua plug-in on the planet in these units and we learn how to get great we we and then you spend two weeks later then you do two weeks in the rooms and you get to learn in the same rooms where we're making hit records all the time which is you know i just feel like the best way to learn is to have your hands on the gear and know what it feels like and know what it sounds like and you also have to be aware of how great it is when you put the perfect mic in front of the perfect input in a perfect room perfect ish you know i should say that because what's perfect i don't know and then you realize it sounds like this the bar is up here yeah when you leave here you're going to try to get there you're going to move mikes you're going to try different mics you're going to you know but we can get an incredible sound with three sm57s and apollo so you know again you need a great drummer that helps too a lot john where does the studio name come from oh i'll give you three guesses singing in the dead of night take these broken wings and learn to fly all your life there's your ghetto i'm a beetle freak i can't help it i've always been a beetle freak and with my personality i discovered at one point i had 25 000 vinyl beetle records what i ended up doing was because my parents died and i thought my brother about lost his mind and they didn't have tons of stuff but they had enough stuff to wear somebody out so what i did i sold half the collection to a a record chain in japan called oh god well i i don't i can't how many butchers did you keep 159 one first state stereo yeah one two for state monos three sealed second states i gave one to jeff emmerich oh that's cool i paid through the nose for those things but i don't care i'm a beetle freak it changed my life this place would not be here if it weren't for the beatles yeah and you got to do what you got to do yeah man crazy [Music] you

Channel: pureMix

Views: 44,431

Keywords: music production, puremix, blackbird studio recording, blackbird studio c, nashville studio, music, john mcbride blackbird, vance powell, the beatles, telefunken microphone, blackbird studio, john mcbride, recording studio

Id: OwFC9pKjDR8

Length: 70min 53sec (4253 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021