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Nestled in the Piney Woods just north
of Magnolia Texas, Piney Woods Studio is an 852 square foot facility featuring
a 392 square foot main recording room, fully climate controlled, with an
impeccably maintained 7 foot Kawai concert grand piano. Both electronic and acoustic drums are
available for rental, but most clients prefer to bring their own kit. The drum “platform” is free-floating and 6
by 9 feet. We have 2 isolation booths
with glass doors, one is a full 12x14 room for harmony vocalists or horn
sections, and the other is a trapezoidal shaped lead vocalist booth. We can accommodate a full 8-piece band
playing live in the studio.
As you can see, we
have not tried to “deaden” the room, but to give it the classic sound and feel
of the midrange studios of the analogue tape era, LOTS of wood in different
shapes. We’re especially proud of the
way acoustic instruments record in this room.
Although it is no
longer cost effective to record with analogue equipment, we strive to maintain
the production values of that period by means of intelligent design…we trust
our ears to tell us when “conventional wisdom” is rendered obsolete by changing
technologies, and realize that microphone choices or preamps that worked with
analog recording simply don’t work when recording on digital equipment. That’s one of the reasons people critique
digital recording as “harsh” or “soulless” or any number of other disparaging
remarks. Our digital recordings just
don’t sound like that. They sound quite
“analog”, except without the tape hiss…
Our main recorder
is the Alesis HD24 hard disk recorder, with an analog Carvin S/L24 console, 48
input, 8 busses, 8 auxiliary sends. We
use vacuum tube preamps by ART, and effects by TC Electronics, Yamaha,
Behringer, and Aphex. Our premier vocal
mic is the Neumann TL127, a razor-flat high-end condenser mic that works better
for digital recording precisely because it does NOT have the high-end “bump”
that was so prized for analog tape recording.