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6/4/08 - This coming weekend (June 6-8) the Pot Luck Audio Conference returns here to New Orleans after two years in Tucson due to Hurricane Katrina leaving them without a venue, and Daniel and I will both be panelists at some workshops again. Saturday I'll be on the Home Recording panel, and Daniel will be on the Patch Bays and Grounding panel on Friday and the Tubes and Bias panel on Saturday. Anyone in the New Orleans area should try to attend, as they're giving killer deals to locals who want to go, and it's a wonderful experience that I highly recommend to anyone interested in music, not just recording engineers. Check out the panels listed on the conference website, as there's something for any music lover to enjoy. In studio news, we're excited that we are very close to being finished the new place, and we'll be doing our first recording there in late July. Daniel is finishing wiring everything up, and I have a couple of pieces of furniture to build and some details to touch up, then we'll be ready to go! The winner of the lottery to be the first band to record in the new place is Fatter Than Albert. They're a great local ska band, and we love that in addition to the standard rock instruments that we'll also get to record horns and our Hammond A100/Leslie combo for that first recording. Anyone is welcome to come check out the new space, because I now love being a tour guide and Daniel and I are proud of the effort we've put into realizing our dream! - Chris 1/14/08 - The studio is looking pretty amazing. We're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and hope to be recording in less than four months! We've been painting the studio, and it's such a relief just to see color on the walls. We've been making and hanging acoustic panels on the ceiling and walls of the control room, and we will be trimming it out and installing the gear very soon. I'll be uploading a bunch of photos of the finished space in the near future, so be on the lookout for the updates. Have a great day! - Chris 3/23/07 - Check out the March/April 2007 issue of TapeOp, as one of my photos from the Chicago Store in Tucson during the conference last year graces the cover. Pretty cool. We're making a lot of progress on the new studio. We've been bouncing back and forth between doing finishing touches on the living area and working on the actual studio. The living area is looking great, and I think whoever is recording is going to be very happy to have a place to escape the studio and hang out comfortably. We've also been stockpiling gear as we come across ridiculous deals that can't be passed up. We bought another Neotek Series I console, and Daniel has been busy racking up the modules and selling them, but we kept 10 of the strips and he cut the board down so we can have a 10-channel sidecar. Other purchases include another Otari MTR90, this time a Mk. III. We also bought a Hammond A100 from 1962 that's in pristine condition and still has the original tubes in it! - Chris 6/15/06 - Daniel and I are currently on the flight to Tucson, AZ, for the Tape Op Conference, slated for June 16-18. He'll be on a panel entitled "Basic Studio Maintenance" this year while I get to relax and not be nervous like I was last year. This is a much needed break for us, as we've been working every night after work and every weekend on the studio since around January, only taking a "break" to work on some other task. To answer an often asked question, I have no exact date for when we think we'll be ready to record at the new studio, but I'd be surprised if it was before June of 2008, and hopefully we won't have to deal with another hurricane this year to set us back even further. I know that seems like a long time, but keep in mind that basically two of us are doing everything ourselves, and working full time jobs. It's going to be a great facility, from the living area to the studio to the outside, so the wait will be well worth it in the long run. We're getting a lot of the pieces to the living area puzzle piled up and every week we get another piece to that puzzle in place. Once we finish that, working on the studio itself will seem like a piece of cake. Helping a great deal as of late has been our friend Bob Lorenz, and it's been greatly appreciated. He has no idea how many nights of work he has saved us so far. On the gear front, we drove to Nashville in April to pick up another 2" tape machine, this one being a 24-track Otari MTR90 Mk. II. We now have that and our prized MCI 16-track, plus we'll soon be swapping out our 1/2" MCI 4-track heads for a new Flux Magnetics 2-track headstack from the guys at ATR Services. We also acquired a pair of B&W 802 speakers and Rogue Audio M120 monoblock tube power amps, and I have to say that when I sit down to listen to this combination, I never want to get out of the chair. I've never heard anything sound even remotely close to that setup. The power amps were completely submerged in the post-Hurricane Katrina flood at their former owner's house, and we've been rebuilding them whenever we need a break from working on the studio. Another couple of items we got recently now have an even greater deal of sentimental value, those being a Farfisa and Leslie 760A. They were given to us by our friend Mike Frey a few weeks before he was senselessly murdered in the French Quarter one night while being robbed in the same area where we've been going to hear music since we were teenagers. He had been coming over every week to help work on the studio and was probably more anxious for us to record his album than any other musician I know. He is missed by a great deal of people. -Chris 1/09/06 - Since we're way behind on the news, I suppose it's about time to let everyone know what's been going on these past several months. As you all know, Hurricane Katrina paid our region a visit in August. Miraculously, the new location of the studio didn't even lose a shingle. Most of the recording gear is being stored at Daniel's parents' house, which also survived the storm. My house/former studio that we had just remodeled and were trying to sell got a little damage, but it has been fixed and I'll be going to act of sale with the new buyers soon. After that, we will start moving full speed ahead on the new place. Until then, we've been getting things done with the little bit of money we can save up. We've been accumulating some miscellaneous items for the living area, entertainment area in the workshop, and the studio. Daniel bought a 1930's Clarendon baby grand piano last week, and ordered a tuning tool kit and piano maintenance book. It sounds pretty good already, and I'm sure after he messes with it fixing little things between now and when the studio is finished it will sound wonderful. We scored a free Gorgar pinball machine from a business that flooded during the hurricane, but it only got wet on the bottom of the legs. It's from 1979 and was the world's first talking pinball machine, with a vocabulary of seven words. We took it apart and started giving it a good cleaning, as well as replacing the legs and all of the rubber on the bumpers and flippers. Add that to the donated bumper pool table, standard pool table, and ping-pong table, and there will be no reason for anyone to get bored while staying at the studio or stepping away from the recording for a bit. We were also given two nice refrigerators with ice and water in the doors, a stainless KitchenAid range top and hood, Speakercraft ceiling mount speakers for the bathrooms, and a very cool old Wincroft gas stove. -Chris 6/5/05 - This coming weekend, June 10-12, Daniel and I will be attending the TapeOp Conference, here in New Orleans for the second year in a row. This year will be even more exciting, as I will be on one of the main panels at the Orpheum Theatre entitled "Mixing on a Budget". We are 99.37% finished remodeling the former studio, and will start working on the new studio just after the conference. Those of you who have been to the old studio won't believe how the place looks as just a house now. I'll post some photos when we're 100% finished. 2/1/05 - We just wrapped up the latest Sam Sarah LP, and that marks the last recording we did in the original location of The Living Room. We will now start remodeling it and converting it back into a house so we can sell it and get started on the new place. We'll be down for a while, but it's going to be a wonderful facility for us, and even moreso for bands. Larry Crane came back to the studio in December to mix the six songs we tracked for Big Blue Marble, as well as the three he tracked back in September. He could have mixed them the same week he tracked them, but had to leave due to a hurricane evacuation. You have to love hurricane season here! December was a busy month, as we also recorded ten songs for Blair Gimma. She is incredibly talented, and I look forward to watching her music progress. In November we recorded a band full of youngsters called The Way Out, and their CD titled White Lies is now out. We had a lot of fun working with them, and I think the CD is excellent. 10/11/04 - I'm happy to announce that Daniel and I just purchased an old church in Algiers, nearly under the bridge and right across from downtown, to move the studio to. Unfortunately, we won't be able to record for a while, but the wait will be well worth it. The church is 3,500 square feet, and also has a 4,100 square foot shop attached to it that's insulated and has an indoor basketball goal. The future: ; windowHandle.focus())
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8/12/04 - Ginger from One Reason shot some video footage with her camera when they came to record last week. Click on the photos below to see the tape rolling and Lexie's guided ferry tour. You will need Quicktime to view them, and be a tad patient with the download. Thanks, Ginger!   8/10/04 - This is a big review month for the Living Room, as local publication Where Y'At had reviews of the Sam Sarah, Glasgow, and Big Blue Marble albums that we recorded, all in one issue! One Reason also informed me that they received a flattering review in Punk Planet issue PP62, which I immediately bought and scanned. You can read it here. Speaking of One Reason, they came in for two days last week and recorded two songs for a split 7" with Defiance, Ohio that will be released by Anti-Creative Records out of Southern California. The songs came out great, we had a great time working together, and I think another band is sold on analog now. The Silent Cinema album is complete, and I have to say that it's one of the finest albums I've played through my speakers, and that's not just because we recorded it. Any label with half of a brain should scoop it up and release it. I failed to mention in prior news posts that Glasgow got their CD's back from being pressed. After hours and hours of hard work by Jack Craft (bassist), the layout came out nice, and it's a fun disc to listen to. This is a very promissing young band, and I can't wait to work with them again. We finished our second LA-2A compressor clone, with this one being a stereo version. Daniel handles all of the electronics, and I do the plate designs and cut and drill them out and paint them. They sound extremely good, and act very close to the original LA-2A. Dan's the man! Also on the way are two dbx 160x's that we scored off of ebay. We're working on taking new photos of the studio once we get all of the gear in order in the racks, and I'll post some photos of the gear we've built, as well. 7/16/04 We finished restoring the MCI tape machine in May and we had some friends come over to be guinea pigs. After Daniel did some tweaking, it sounds incredible! I will beg every band from now on to save some extra $$$ for 2" tape so they can record on it. Going back to ADAT's will be painful. It blows my mind that studios are ditching analog for Pro Tools. Silent Cinema is our first full project using the MCI. We've all been working very hard together during the tracking process, and we're starting the tedious mixing process tonight. The album is going to be wonderful. Eric Rogers from Sam Sarah came by in June and played drums on three songs for Joey Carbo. I was supposed to play on those tracks, but he's a much better drummer than I am and I decided to give him a call to see if he'd do it. It worked out perfect because he just picked up a new drumset that he wanted to hear on tape, so I got some stuff to barbecue and we hung out all day and had some fun doing some unorthodox drum recording. We also got to try out synchronizing the tape machine with the ADAT's, and it worked flawlessly. A few weeks after that we finished mixing Joey's project and we'll be mastering it next week, along with the new Spickle. The last weekend of May was the Tape Op Conference, right here in New Orleans at the beautiful Fairmont Hotel and Orpheum Theatre. I can't even begin to explain how great of an experience it was. I met a lot of wonderful people, including several people whose recordings I've cherished for so many years. Just after the conference, Larry Crane from Tape Op and Jackpot! Recording Studio in Portland, OR, made plans to come here in September to work on a few songs with Big Blue Marble at our studio. He came by a few weeks ago to check out the place and make a list of what he should bring, and also helped us get a few things we needed for our tape machine. Thanks, Larry! 4/15/04 - I'm happy to report that last Friday Daniel and I drove to Shreveport to pick up an MCI 16-track 2" tape machine! I never thought the day would come where we'd get to record on 2" tape, but it will be happening very soon. A squirrel had gotten into the storage space where it was being stored and made a nest in it and chewed up some of the wiring, so we decided to disassemble the whole thing and go through it. While Daniel has been re-capping it and working on the wiring and other bugs, I've been sandblasting the cabinet and preparing it for a fresh coat of paint. Since the machine was built in 1975, I decided to paint it a metallic brown from a 1975 Dodge passenger car. It's going to look great and sound even better in the near future. In recording news, we've been working on the latest Glasgow album. We're in the mixing stage right now, and it's coming out great. We tried some new mic techniques on the drums that came out wonderful and match Glasgow's sound perfectly. We also recently finished the latest Rat In A Bucket release, so keep an eye out for it. I still don't know how they can play what they play; those are some talented dudes. The future Spickle release is also in the mixing stage, and promises to be a great record. A couple of weeks ago Daniel and I had the pleasure of recording something besides a band: a motorcycle. Grant and JT from Confederate Motorcycles brought one of their incredible Hellcats to the studio so we could record audio of it for the company's website. I can honestly say that I can't remember ever seeing something that contained as much fine craftsmanship as that motorcycle, and I've been around a ton of race cars and shops in my 29 years of existence. It makes me happy that something that fine is built right here in New Orleans. Go to their website and check out the sounds. Make sure you crank up your speakers, because it's awesome! Unfortunately, both Blair Gimma and Hawg Jaw had to postpone their recording dates, but we will be working with both of them in June. Recording Hawg Jaw is always a good time, and I've been dying to work with Blair's solo project since the first time I heard her voice project into a microphone and come out of my monitors when she came to lay down backing vocals for Mahayla. She is one gifted individual, and it was nice working with her on the first Big Blue Marble recording. After borrowing a Blue Baby Bottle microphone from our friend Kirk, Daniel and I decided that we had to own a couple for ourselves. We both have nothing but good things to say about them, and have been loving using them for drum overheads and vocals. 3/5/04 - Well, it's been a while, so I figured I'd leave an update about what's been going on at the studio. Daniel and I have been as busy as ever, working on projects, working on the studio, and trying to keep up with our girlfriends, full-time jobs, and other hobbies. We've done a lot of work in the control room, and it's now as spacious and comfortable as ever. Daniel built a custom compressor, based off of an LA-2A schematic, and after some tweaking, it sounds incredible. We also bought a Blue Baby Bottle microphone, after borrowing one from a friend and hearing how great it sounded. The new Sam Sarah release came out very very good, along with the latest releases from Antenna Inn and Big Blue Marble. We've mixed most of the future release from Joey Carbo, and as soon as I lay down the drums on three songs and we mix it, it will be complete. So far it sounds wonderful. 10/27/03 - Since the last news update, we picked up and installed a new console to replace the Neotek. It's a wonderful 32-channel, 64-input Otari Series 54 with Diskmix automation. Only one recording was completed entirely with the Neotek, that being the new Original Three release that's going to be on 7" vinyl. We liked the sound of the pre-amp and EQ in those old Series 1 modules so much that we took the console apart and mounted eight of them in a rack and are currently wiring them into the patch bay. If anyone is interested, we're going to be selling another group of eight in a custom rack-mount box, complete with power supply and phantom power, and another group of four in the same configuration. 9/8/03 I have some big news. Daniel Majorie, a longtime friend of mine, is going to join forces with me. A graduate of Middle Tennessee State University's recording program and an experienced studio engineer, he brings a great deal of knowledge and experience to the table, and I am very confident about our future working together. I am also very pleased to announce that I have purchased an old Neotek Series 1 console to replace my Behringer Eurodesk. I had been having intermittent problems with it that have recently delayed several recordings that I've been trying to finish, plus I've been long overdue for a mixer upgrade. Daniel and I are going through the Neotek right now, making the 23 year old console work like new again. The pre-amps and EQ sound amazing, and I can't wait to start recording again. When the studio gets cranked up again, recordings by Antenna Inn, Erased By The Sun, and Big Blue Marble need completion, and future recordings on the books include Spickle, the Original Three, and a solo record by Joey Carbo of Encompass and Stalemate fame. 4/16/03 - Boy, have I been slacking with this news business. Things have been pretty hectic for me recently, with recording, photo work, and business planning consuming all of my time. I recorded a wonderful band called Silent Cinema in February. Micah is a great songwriter and has a beautiful voice, and Mike works very well with him on drums and various other instruments. They played their first show recently and I have high hopes for them. Also, a band called One Reason came down from north Mississippi to record 12 songs that will be released on Planet X (Soophie Nun Squad, The Devil Is Electric, etc.). We will be mixing it in less than two weeks, and the tracking so far sounds great. Just last night I finished mixing a four song demo for Outlaw Order, which features members of Eyehategod, Hawg Jaw, and Soilent Green. A full length will follow shortly. Encompass and Stalemate also passed through the studio to record a new full length. We had a great time, and it came out wonderful. It's a very promissing release that will be out on Fort Hazel Records. 1/29/03 - During the week this week and last, I remixed 2 Hawg Jaw recordings that we tracked back in 2000. It's always fun working with Gary on mixes, and it sounds better than either one of us remembered or expected. It will be released by a label out of Spain on double-gatefold vinyl and CD. I've been working the last couple of weekends on overdubs for the new Erased By The Sun release, and it's starting to come together very well. We should be finishing the vocals soon and mixing. 1/28/03 - I finally uploaded my new photo site. Click on the "Photography" button above if you'd like to check it out. 1/8/03 - I have a photo show downtown this Saturday (1/11) at the ARK (511 Marigny Street, 504-947-0982). Other featured artists will be Mary Nova (art), Brice Bischoff (photos), Eric Martinez (photos), and a couple of others. The show starts at 7pm. Paul Webb and I finished working on his project last month. He's a special talent, playing drums, bass, and guitar for his release. We've now worked together several times, and are in the preliminary stages of opening a studio together at another location. I'm very excited about our ideas. It should work out great. Last week I started tracking for Dear Diary, I Seem To Be Dead. Everything sounds good so far. We'll be recording the vocals and start mixing soon. 10/28/02 - SPECIAL NOTICE: The phone number on the Contact page has changed. The new number is (504)236-2772. I apologize to those who have tried to call the old one. 10/28/02 - Things have been hectic around the studio since the last update. I'm wrapping up the solo record by Durel Yates of Suplecs. The project will be called Automatic Mind Command, and features Durel on guitar and vocals, Paul Webb of Spickle/Hawg Jaw/Dulac Swade on bass, Paul O'Conner on drums, and guest vocals on a few songs by Mike D. of Hawg Jaw. It's been a very relaxing and smooth project that came out excellent, and I've had a lot of fun working with them. Keep an eye out for the release in the near future. Hawg Jaw recorded 9 songs in the middle of this month for an upcoming release. We'll be tracking the vocals at the end of this week, and mixing it next week. I've recorded them several times, and this is by far the best sounding one. They've benefited greatly from equipment upgrades and personnel changes over the years. Gretna Sewing Circle recorded the basic tracks for two songs, and we'll be recording the last one tonight. We should have a 3 song demo CD out soon. Our show at Twisted Hair Salon for Art For Art's Sake on October 5 was a lot of fun. I sold some photos and we had a good showing. Thanks to all who came out. I did some tracking for Mike Rogriguez in September, and we'll be finishing up in the next month or two. It's interesting stuff, and Jason from Focus 21 will be laying some drum tracks on top of it before we're done. 9/13/02 - Lately I've been working with Samsara, and I am very pleased with the results. They're young and they rock, so keep an eye out for them. I will be mixing their recording this weekend, and I'll be wrapping up the Chas Brosco recording this coming week. I have an extremely busy schedule coming up, balancing 3 shows with our band (see the list below), several recordings, and a photo showing for Art For Art's Sake on 10/5 at Twisted on Magazine St. Upcoming shows for the Gretna Sewing Circle:
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