Why Should Your Band Record With Us?
We record, mix and produce some of the best recordings for bands and artists of the Midwest. Some of the bands that we have recorded are Midnight Carnival, Trio of Hosts, 90’s for the High, Behind Smoke and Mirrors, Counterfeit Digits, The Departed, Our Dilemma, I Hear Sirens, Sidelined, and many others. We have worked with bands that have recorded songs at Noisebox Studios that were played on local radio stations as well as having songs show up on TV commercials.
We invite you to compare our demos with other comparable studios. We are confident that you will find our recordings to be fuller, warmer, punchier, clearer, wider, deeper and more creative. We are also confident that we can get you those results fast–meaning you will pay less for better quality. We have invested in audio tools that make our work as efficient as possible.
We have the ability to record a 5 piece band together or separately. This decision should be careful considered. Most of the time it is actually faster, easier and you get better results by recording each member separately.
Our Pro Tools HD system (with TDM plug-ins) allow you to record in realtime with effects engaged. In other words, when you record your instruments or vocals, you have the ability to hear your track processed in the mix. This means that you can hear the reverb (digital room ambience), delays, chorus effects, compression, EQ’s and etc. on the track that you are recording. This makes a difference because you will be able to perform better and be inspired by the way that your track sounds.
We can pretty much do any effect you hear on the radio. We have tons of the highest end plug-ins available today making it possible for us to do pretty much anything. If there is an effect that you hear on an album that you would like to use in your song, we can help you achieve that. Our experience has taught us how to do some of the most advanced effects in the industry from reverse reverbs and delays to auto-tuned vocals.
Drum Features:
We have a Yamaha Stage Custom drum set with a large variety of Zildjian and Sabian cymbals including riveted cymbals, Chinas, Splashes, Dark and Thin Crashes. You are welcome to use all or part of the drum set to record with. We also have a huge amount of mallets and sticks as well as some percussion instruments including shakers, tambourines, wind chimes, cowbell and etc.
On average, we record drums with 12 microphones. Our microphones and preamps are some of the top sounding gear in the industry.
The latest versions of Pro Tools allows us to Quantize your audio tracks quickly. Quantizing is the ability to tighten up your timing so that your drum track creates a solid foundation for the rest of the band.
We have several ways of enhancing your drum sounds so that they are HUGE. People subconsciously judge the quality of your entire recording by the fidelity of the drums. We use industry standard tools to get your drums sounding amazing and commercial.
Finally, we have Stylus RMX available to add some of the coolest grooves to your music. If you haven’t heard of Stylus RMX, check out some of the videos on You Tube about it. You will see why it is used by so many big name producers. It can add organic sounding shakers and tambourines to huge electronic grooves.
Bass Features:
We have a few Bass amp emulators available to shape the sound of your bass. Our favorite is a software plug-in names Ampeg SVX. You have likely heard of Ampeg amps as they have been a staple in the music industry for years. This plug-in is modeled after these amps and it rocks! It can shape your bass tone anywhere from aggressive and gritty to round and deep. We have found this plug-in to be the perfect solution because it gives the advantages of plugging in direct, but all the colors that a tube or solid state amp can offer. Plus, you don’t need to haul your bass amp to the studio.
We have an ADL 600 tube preamp (3 tubes per channel!!!) which can capture your direct signal beautifully. Our Vintech 473 is also a great preamp for Bass for a wider yet aggressive/thick sound.
Finally, we have other techniques we use to make your bass audible on smaller speaker systems.
If you are a synth bass player, or you may just want to have synth bass instead on parts of your song, we have many synth bass sounds available.
Guitar Features:
Unless you are married to the sounds of your guitar amp and effects, we have a huge variety of guitar emulations. We have all of Line 6’s sounds in a plug-in as well as Digidesign’s Eleven Plug-in. Both of these plug-ins have some great sounds and tons of flexibility for changing the sound. When we use these plug-ins, we record your dry signal which allows us to later change the sound to best fit the mix. If you love the sound of your amp, we can record a dry signal from you while we record your sound through your amp. This will allow us complete flexibility in the future if we need to change your sound for one reason or another.
Our ADL 600 Tube Preamp excels on electric guitar. So if you choose to mic up your amp, we can get some great sounds with a SM57 or AKG C414 XLS microphone. We also have a long extension cable to allow you to play the guitar in a separate room from where your amp is (saving your ears).
Delays and room reverbs are set-up inside the Pro Tools session making it easy to adjust the space and sync up delays to the tempo as needed.
Acoustic Guitar is recorded in our Whisper Room which keeps the track very clean and quiet even with the most sensitive playing. We usually record acoustic guitars with our Vintech 473 and our Michael Jolly modded Oktava MK 012 stereo microphones. We have several great sounding compressor plug-ins that can also thicken up and bring out the detail of your acoustic guitar.
Keyboard Features:
We have some amazing Samplers available to put into your songs. We can put in a realistic sounding orchestra (East West Orchestra Gold Expanded edition), B-3 organ, variety of the top Drum Samplers (Superior Drummer 2, Stephen Slate Drums Platinum and Stylus RMX), the highest quality grand piano samplers (Synthogy Ivory’s Italian grand and Akoustik Piano) and tons of synthesized sounds including a hardware Roland XV-5050. We also have 1,000’s of loops ready to inspire creativity.
We have a CME UF8 Midi Keyboard controller. This 88 hammer weighted touch sensitive Keyboard has several adjustments to its sensitivity and lots of control to be able to manipulate LFO’s, fliters, Resonance, and control the Leslie of the organ and etc. You can trigger any of these mentioned Samplers with this keyboard.
Vocals Features:
We realize that in most cases, the vocals are the most important part of the song. We do all that we can to give your vocals the star treatment. We find our AKG C 414 TLII microphone to be outstanding on vocals. It isn’t too sibilant yet it really brings out the presence of your vocals with tremendous detail.
We use several tricks to make your vocals huge (and we are not talking about lots of reverb either). We have several different 3rd party software plug-ins that we use to give your vocals the attention that it deserves.
We have two forms of pitch correction available. Melodyne Editor and Auto-tune. Melodyne is very natural and allows us to only tweak the pitchy spots if desired. Auto-tune is great for back-up vocals or for quickly tuning up a vocal if there isn’t time to use Melodyne. Auto-tune can also be used as an effect to create less natural sounding pitch effects such as Cher and T-pain as well as effects in between. We have pitch corrected over 1,000 vocal tracks and have an ear for this type of thing. Otherwise pitch correction can easily be pushed too far creating unnatural results.