Rick's Articles

Audio Technology - Volume 1 : Issue 4
If you have to turn off the water, you need a plumber. I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, sometime in the 70’s. Like most families we had a small brick house on a largish block with a garden, a front lawn and, of course, a shed.

That shed and I became good friends. It was one of those freestanding jobs at the end of a long driveway, the kind designed to put two cars in, but my father (like his father before him) managed to fill it full of everything except cars. Of most importance to my father was his collection of wood, tools, and assortment of jars. The jars contained screws, bolts and bits of who knew what - well, at least Dad knew what, he was a 'there's place for everything, never throw it out, it might be useful one day' kind of guy. In short, he was a hoarder - so am I, but nowadays we're called studio owners. After all, you never know when you might need an alignment jig for a 1976 two-inch 3M 16-track head block (well, that's what I tell myself whenever I try to throw anything away). Anyway, the point about the shed was that my father had all these woodworking tools, which was really cool if you were working with wood and knew what you were doing. But as a 10 year old I didn't know that you couldn't/shouldn't cut steel with wood saws or that wood chisels weren't screw drivers, or, in fact, that hammers don't make very good screwdrivers either. Despite all this, Dad, to his credit, didn't ban us from the shed, he just used to scream at us once in a while to put things back where they belonged. Occasionally, after finding a broken tool, instead of shooting me on sight, he would find the 'nuclear spaceship' I was trying to make out of his prize piece of red cedar and show me how to do the job properly. Mum didn't come into the shed much, so it was Dad, me and my brothers, and he'd often mutter under his breath, "Use the right damn tool for the job... always use the right tool".

Well, its 20 years later and now I've got my own shed. I live in a house my father helped me renovate, and, considering I thought he was the world's best tradesman, I was surprised at some of the jobs he wouldn't tackle. He'd say something like, "I'm a banker, you're some kind of studio git - if you need to turn off the electricity it's time to call an electrician".

Currently I'm building some Class-A vacuum tube guitar buffers that will let me send a guitar signal from one end of a building to another and into a vintage guitar amp, without losing any tone. These are simple things with circuits that I've borrowed, modified, and generally ripped off other designers. The circuits work well but I wanted them to look amazing, too. I've been building things since I was a boy, but building good looking metal boxes is a little out of my field of expertise. I'm like the home studio owner of metalwork tradesmen - I've got some cheap tools, but I need more. The job looked simple enough, but little problem by little problem, I'm finding out that I need help. The biggest drama is that I'm working in aluminium, so I can anodise it and make my boxes look way cool. But aluminium is a soft metal, it scratches easily, and cutting shapes into it to hold the various VU meters and knobs is quite tricky. Like most home studio owners I've read all the books and asked all my friends, but nobody really knew the right way to do it - although nearly everybody knew a hard 'bodgie' way (again, a little like home studios). I figured that in metal work you need the right tool for the job, and I had to concede that as a metal worker I make a pretty good oak tree. So I went to a metal milling supply shop and had a chat to the very nice professional metalworker behind the counter. He asked me exactly what I wanted to do and he produced a precision cut cylindrical carbide burr (a soft metal milling bit). It was $60 and, as money was a little tight, I asked if he had anything cheaper. He just muttered, "use the right tool for the job - that's what they're made for".

And that's the point of this article: use the right tool for the job, use the right professional for the job. People are always asking me the same question: "I have $10,000 and want to build a home studio. Tell me, Rick, what would you buy?". I look around my studio, which is not at home and which is worth much more than $10,000, then I ask them exactly what it is they want to do. If they can define what they want to do with their studio, the equipment choices become fairly obvious.

If you want to make recordings, you're going to need recording tools, so buy the very best you can afford. A good starting point is to find out what the professionals used on your favourite records and start there. I know technology is changing at a speed faster then a seagull to a chip in Bondi, but that doesn't mean records are sounding better at the same rate. Some time over the last few months I worked on my 5000th record - that's 14 years of professional mastering, producing, and engineering, with millions of records sold. In that time, I have never used a plug-in, rarely used a pitch shifter, and almost never pressed 'Quantise' on a sequencer.

I might have been 10 years old when my father told to always use the right tool for the job, but it still rings true today. So if you want to know what equipment to buy for your home/project studio, think about my rule of using the right tools for the job, and think about starting in the same place as the professionals. And then, when you're good enough to discern the difference, you can make up your own rules.

My theory on the '$10,000' home studio goes like this:
1. Get some standard reference speakers. A pair of Yamaha NS10s will do.
2. Get a power amp to drive them (sorry, no combo hi-fi amps allowed).
3. Get a DAT player and a CD player
4. Get a condenser microphone.
5. Get an outboard mic preamplifier/DI box.
6. Get a decent compressor. Save yourself the hassle and buy an expensive opto type.
7. Get a simple mixing desk. They're cheap now, analogue or digital, it will be your monitor and mixing board - you'll be using the outboard mic preamp and compressor for recording.
8. Get something to record onto. I guarantee you will outgrow it so don't stress too much on what type of recorder you start off with.
9. Get the biggest fastest computer you can afford and spend the absolute minimum on software. (Do not spend more than $5000 on the computer and recorder.)
10. Get ready to destroy your social life.

These things are in about 95% of professional studios today, they're the tools the professionals use to make records every day. Yeah sure, there are heaps of other things too, but these things are the working backbone of any studio. I know most people cannot afford a 48-track recorder or an SSL desk, but most of the work in a studio is done with the front end - the mic, the preamp, and the compressor. Great EQ is a luxury, and recorders have been changing every week for 50 years, so get the front end right. Buy the right tools, and it will work.

It's been said that if you need to turn the water off, it's time to call a plumber. But more importantly, if you're going to release your music, you need a mastering engineer. Hell, go and see one anyway. And if you're trying to do it all by yourself, well, then it's time you got a friend.

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