Our main recording room features a 144 square foot dead room (see note below), with enough space to bring in the double kick drum rig, or just to do vocals.
Cubase SX3 is the recording platform of choice, with Ableton Live and Reason rewired for extra creative flexibility. We use the new state-of-the-art SSL Duende to offer 32 channels of the legendary and must have SSL sound. A UAD-1 card provides high end emulations of analogue units such as the 1176 compressor, LA2A limiter, and Pultec and Neve EQs. The Waves APA-32 is used to host some of the best impulse response reverbs available today. Additional drum editing is done with Zero-X's Beatquantizer, and Melodyne is used to clean up and pitch vocals and instruments.
We use a pair of active Tannoy Reveals with a Tannoy 10" sub for our main monitoring system.
It also features an electric drum kit with high quality sounds (courtesy of FXpansion's BFD drum library module) for those in a rush to get scratch drum lines down.
There is also access to the studio's comprehensive sample cd library and large vintage record collection for sampling and mangling.
<<But why a small, dead recording room?>>
With the quality of reverbs available, extremely high and convincing results can be achieved for a fraction of the cost of hiring out a properly tuned live space. By simply removing any reflections and unwanted ambience during recording, they can be recreated in the mix using a "sample" of a great sounding room via a high end impulse response reverb plugin, such as the Waves IR-1.
