BOB POPP: [SOUNDS LIKE] Sometimes then it goes bing!

This is a guitar tuner. This is probably one of the most important things that you're ever going to use in a recording studio for all the obvious reasons, and I don't need to get into them. If I have to explain them, we're all in the wrong business. But staying in tune is key.

This is a DigiTech Valve FX, which was created by Mr. Johnson over at DigiTech DOD. He makes Johnson Amplifiers and all that. This is clearly one of the best processors I've ever heard.

This is a Lexicon Reverb and this is a Rocktron Reverb. I don't use a lot of delays and things like that purely because the music that I do, the fast hardcore stuff, really doesn't require it, and the rap stuff that I do doesn't require it either. And I also do a wide span of gospel music including broadcast on radio in Chicago. So, I kind of like to keep everything very simple and very easy to use for everybody involved.

Down here, we have a couple of Furman Parametric EQs. These, if I have a microphone that's picking up something very similar to what I was saying about the graphic EQ over on the other side there, if there is a frequency that is untameable and I can't get it and I can't get the mic placement exact, sometimes I may have to contour that sound to get the exact frequency I'm looking for. Let's say a tom drum that's right next to a cymbal. If I need to cut that cymbal out of that tom drum, I could go right to that frequency which might be 4 or 5k, select the octave to a very, very tight octave, and then cut it right out. Now, that cymbal will be gone from that floor tom and it still will retain all the sound that's in there, so that's why those reside here.

These here are tube preamps. This is a Bellari that I purchased and rebuilt myself. I changed some chips in it, which are the IC chips which translate the electricity to a tube, some other components in it including the filter caps and what not, small filter caps, change them to a higher grade, higher tolerance, and here we have some stock dbx stuff. I happen to like the dbx tube stuff because in the digital world you may want to warm something up. I find my MOTU converters to be perfect for the sound that I'm trying to capture so I don't usually have to flavor or color things too much, but sometimes a certain performance or a certain characteristic of somebody's performance may require some type of enhancement, and that's why I have these tube preamps. I like them a lot. They sound good to my ears. All of this stuff is very presumer level. Everything here is at least $1,500 or less except for my computer, of course, which costs a lot of money to make, a couple of my MOTU pieces are around the $1,500 mark, and of course my mixing board.

When I purchased my mixing board, I bought it on eBay, the gentleman sold it to me out of Florida, and I sent it to the factory in Nashville, and they rebuilt each channel. When I had these channels rebuilt, I had them built to my specs so I know where and what they do and what their different sounds are, and I had some other channels that if I need to make them sound all the same, I can plug the channels in because they unscrew and come apart. That's a modular board. Nowadays, boards really aren't made that way. They're made as one piece but they can still be modified, and there are people that modify them. So, even though you buy an inexpensive board, there may be a chance that you can spend maybe a thousand dollars, maybe $12,000 or $15,000 like I did and get your stuff refurbished and respeced to your specs without having spent $200,000.