BOB DIFAZIO: The team of people that we’ve put together over at Skybox Studios is fairly diverse. There’s myself who -- I’m an engineer and a producer, and I work primarily with live musicians. But there are also a host of engineers who do more sort of urban music or electronic music production like R&B or hip hop or house or techno, stuff that is sequenced for the most part. So, there are some professionals who do sequencing. There’s myself and I do mostly studio recording and mixing, and we’re open for business for all variety of clients.

So, I’m working with a solo singer/songwriter female right now with a live band, and we’re also working on hip hop projects, and I’m working on a new sort of urban music project, so a wide variety of different clients, and we really aspire to pull in as many people as we can.

Here we are at the rack of gear, and the centerpiece of any rack of gear is the patch bay, which connects all of the devices in the studio. So, we have a Switchcraft set of 96-point tiny telephone patch bay with D-sub connections on the back, so there’s no sort of soldering going on. It’s all very sturdy connections, and the beauty of all this gear, in my mind, is that you can access this gear while remaining in the monitoring position. So, you can work from the console, turn around, and you are right here at your preamp, which is where you would want to be. If you were changing the level or equalizing something, it makes sense to be in the middle of the speakers while doing that. So, we designed this patch bay so that you wouldn’t have to run about the studio to change levels and come back and see how it sounds. You can stay put basically and there’s nothing that would make you get up out of your seat, which is what I really like about the studio.

The nicer gear that we have here include the Chandler LTD-1 preamp/equalizer strip here which is a high-quality tube preamp/processor, and this is a pair of preamps called the TG-2 that Chandler makes so we have some really clean input channels here.

We also have some real nice compressors: The MC77 by Purple is basically an emulation of the famous 1176 compressors, so anyone who’s used the Universal Audio 1176 compressor will know exactly how this thing works. It’s basically the exact same thing except it’s purple. Okay? [LAUGHING] and then we have a pair of dbx 160A’s, which is like peanut butter and jelly for a studio, you must have those, and 266XL which is sort of a step down from the 160A, but it’s a decent group of compressors. And of course we have a couple of board compressors and a whole host of plugins.

Over here on the leftmost bay, we have our time-based processors. First and foremost, the PCM 91 by Lexicon, which gives you a tremendous selection of halls and plates and rooms and all sorts of ambient interesting effects, chorusing and harmonizing and things like that. Then, a TC Electronic M1, which most of you may know about, is probably the most highly sort of commonly found multi-effects processor. It’s not that top, top of the line but it has just about every type of multi-effects processing that you can have. So, you can connect all your different internal effects any way you’d like and you can see here right now we’re set up for a warm hall or a vocal plate. So, there are a ton of reverbs in there.

These devices here are more of the DJ variety. They’re made by a company called Electrix and we have a MoFX and a Filter Factory, and these do really interesting flanging and modulating and they just really sort of mess up your sounds in incredibly weird ways, which is good because you don’t want to just have the sort of standard studio effects. Sometimes you want to do something crazy that’s hard to explain, and that’s what these devices do. They do these sorts of [IMITATING FLANGING, PHASING, AND FILTERING SOUNDS] weirdo things, all right, which is good.

So, sometimes I mess with these and I don't even know what I’m doing, all right? I just continue to fool around until something crazy happens. With all my training, I still like to just fool around.

And then we have a Filter Pro by Line 6, which is basically a good collection of your basic sort of time-based signal processing.

Over to our Pro Tools interfaces. Here we have our converters and our time clocks. So, we have an Apogee Big Ben master time clock which it provides synchronization for any of the devices in the studio, and it functions as the master clock for Pro Tools. And then we have a pair of the top-of-the-line Pro Tools hardware interfaces called the 192 Box which means that this device can sample at 192 kHz. So, it gives this an adequate amount of inputs and outputs for us to record a band. We can do 16 mics and 24 outputs, so it’s fully functional. And then we have an Intel-based Macintosh which runs Pro Tools and has a host of plugins from Sony to the Filter Factory stuff and Waves bundle, etc., so.

We finally got all the gear all hooked up, and we are loving it.

And I’m not really big on oodles and boodles of outboard gear. Even though I work for Gearwire.Com, you might think that I’m like totally about boutiquey effects and I have to have this particular compressor or that particular equalizer. For me, it’s kind of a moot point. I concentrate on the console and the microphones far more than I do on what’s in the rack. That’s all for mixing for me. I don’t go through a lot of gear while I’m recording. I’m actually trying to be more like minimalistic. Get a good sound out of your amp, use the right kind of microphone, and then after that, all you’re really trying to do is not F it up. So, there’s enough stuff there for someone like me to really get down and dirty.