Writing, Recording and Mixing.

I suppose you could say that I have been writing and recording my own music for over 20 years now, off and on. Here are some pictures of my current set up for this. It has come a long way from the Phillips reel to reel I did my very first multi track experiments on about 25 years ago. With that machine it was bouncing down tracks all the way. Not much use to someone like me, who at that time had no idea about composition, arrangements or production. Not that I know that much about it now, compared to a lot of guys out there, but I have learnt something at least.

So basically...I now use NUENDO 3, from Steinberg. This is a fantastic piece of software. I doubt if I use more than 5% of its capabilities. I use a lot of the Waves plugins for effects etc. These are mind blowingly high quality, especially for guitars and so on. And I use Acid Pro and occasionally Ableton Live 5 for making up drum parts from loops. There's the debate about tape sounding better than digital, but the flexability of this far out weighs the argument... only in my own opinion at least.


I have a pair of Rode NT1 mics. These are wonderfully warm and pick up a really BIG sound. Terrific for vocals and acoustic guitars etc. They cost about £140 each and are worth every penny. I was amazed when I played back the first acoustic guitar experiments I did with them. I owe a lot of the quality of The Learning Curve to these mics and the Waves effects.

I have a Bheringer BCF2000 mixer too, with motorised faders for automated mixing. This makes things so much easier than trying to mix with the mouse. Again, I'm probably nowhere near maximising its capabilities.


For listening I have a pair of Fostex PM-1 montors, some good Eltax hi-fi speakers and a couple of ghetto blasters. It's a good idea to switch now and again to get an idea of how things are progressing. And wise to remember that most people aren't listening as closely as I am, and they probably aren't using a £250 pair of speakers either. So I "cross reference" to more common domestic systems to evaluate how it might sound to people who are hearing it at home.

Then there's the laptop, to produce the podcasts and edit/compile these blogs. More or less all my web stuff is done with this. I just love the way technology has advanced in our time to make all this creativity and communication possible.

More soon

Paul