I had an interesting trip last week. I flew to Indianapolis, Indiana for a few days to work with some clients. I'd never been in that part of the US, so I was looking forward to it. These guys have been good customers, and have bought a lot of sweet gear from me. I emailed them about the TLS Intensive Recording Workshop in January 2007, and got a reply saying they'd be busy racing, but could I come to them for a few days and go over their studios, and also work with them on some recording techniques, music production, and gear selection and set-up for different applications. Give 'em a mini workshop.

Now, these guys are interesting. They have an Indy race car team. So, I got a fun trip and a nice gig out of it all rolled into one.

So, here we are cruising in the car to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

These guys have a lot of time on their hands when they're traveling between races during the race session. So they came up with a way to use their time on the road: Write country songs for Nashville artists. The owner of the team already knows a lot of people in Nashville, so they already have the all-important connections. Now to knock out some songs.

The first order of business is to go to the singer's place. This room is behind a secret panel on the backwall of the owner's office upstairs at a luxury car dealership. The room has workout equipment, theater, and a vocal booth they recently had built.

The way they work is to track vocals in this little studio, and then take the tracks back to a home studio.

So, here's the singer belting away. The singer's using a Neumann M149. They use SAW Studio on a laptop, and then take the files to the main studio and dump them into a desktop computer.


A few nice toys in the vocal chain, including a Pendulum Quartet, and Lavry Gold AD converters.

After we spend couple of hours tweaking the mic position, vocal chain parameters, and also worked on production for tracking the vocals, we take off to their "shop". Shop's probably not the right name. It's a huge building that houses everyone and everything to run an Indy race car team, including 6+ Indy cars in various stages, two huge buses all pimped out with everything you could need, semi trucks, workshops, offices, meeting rooms...

So, we pop into where they had a few cars from last year's race season.


They'd told me on the phone they'd let me sit in one of the cars. It sounded fun, but I had my suspicions that I probably wasn't going to fit. These are tight spaces, and the drivers are small and might weigh 130 lbs. I probably could have managed to squeeze in, but I didn't want to risk pulling a muscle or getting stuck. I had more important things to do - like work. Well, I didn't exacly sit IN an Indy car, but here's a pic of me sitting ON an Indy race car.

The next order of business was spending time back at the home studio. This is where we did most of the work over two days. The room was done fairly well, but there was too much Auralex foam on the walls. It wasn't dead end/live end. It was dead end/dead end. So, we pulled the foam off the back walls. Instantly better. Russ Berger-designed Auralex Space Array Wooden diffusors have since been added. The panels behind the monitors will be replaced with something of higher quality.

A guitarist came over and we spent a few hours trying out different mics, pres, amp settings, etc. Also did some bass work. Downloaded and added Drumagog to the SAW Studio system. And generally played around for hours evaluating, testing, listening, and tweaking.

A few things in the pic include ADAM S3A Monitors, Lavry Blue AD, Weiss ADC-2, Crane Song STC-8, DAV BG 2, Great River ME-1NV, John Hardy M-1, Dramwer 1968, REDDI DI. This studio also now contains a LaChapell 992 Extended Gain preamp. I had LaChapell ship it out to them for my trip, and they loved it so much they bought it on the spot.

cool thread Dot
pity you didnt get to rip around the race track!

T

There were a lot of things they were doing well. Drums wasn't one of them, and they really don't have the facilities to track drums right. This last Tuesday I was at our studio in Myrtle Beach - which is currently being renovated and just had hardwood floors installed - producing a session where we tracked some drums for one of their songs. More on that kinda' stuff later...

One thing I wasn't totally happy with was the singer's vocal sound. They haven't been particularly happy with it either. He's got some chest tone that I heard in the room, and it's needed in order to get the right sound for him. I basically said, "We gotta get the singer in front of a bunch of mics and try them out." The best place to do that is a well-equipped studio with a great mic collection. Also need to try some different pres and compressors - so we'll wind up with the ultimate vocal chain for the singer.

Right after Thanksgiving we're all meeting up a Blackbird Studio in Nashville, where I've locked out Studio B for a day.

I'll also be bringing some toys, including my trusty Millennia HV-3D reference preamp, and two LaChapell Audio 992 preamps - one Standard and one Extended Gain with Telefunken and Bugle Boy tubes.

So, stay tuned for Dot Goes To Nashville. : )

Blackbird Studio B with API Legacy Plus console, ATC and NS10 monitors.

Sounds like a great trip. Those guys at Blackbird are quite a lot of fun. Can't wait to see the pics!

Wow, cool pics! Sounds like fun!

I lived in Indy for a couple years, and I always enjoyed it. There's a lot going on there musically, at least more than here

I also got to go to a couple Indy 500's. I still go to races except now they have legs instead of motors