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The studio is owned and operated by myself, Dan McKinney, although you're likely to run into a few student interns around here, too. I've been playing around with tape recorders ever since I was a kid, and used my first multi-track recorder in college, an old Dokorder 4-track machine, in 1979. Throughout the '80s and '90s, I spent a lot of time in my home studio, working on projects of my own, mainly using a TASCAM 8-track reel-to-reel machine. I also logged a lot of hours in studios working on projects throughout the years, including eight full-length albums for the Original Sins, and dozens of sessions contributing keyboard tracks to various artists in the Lehigh Valley, Philadelphia, and New York. (See my All Music Guide entry.) I'd always recorded just my own stuff at home, though, up until 1997, when I first got my first clients into the 8-track tape studio, which at that time consisted of a semi-cleared portion of the living room floor in a house shared with two roommates. Not long after that, I bought a house with the idea of putting a studio on the first floor. This was the original "Dan's House" on Seminole St. in Bethlehem, Pa., where I worked from '98 to '02 recording dozens of bands. The drum room was in the living room, the control room in the dining room, and isolation rooms consisted of the basement, kitchen, and first floor bathroom. We made some great recordings here, but the house always lacked enough space - during sessions with more than three players, it was hard to move without knocking someone over (although we did do some live sessions with as many as nine musicians!). We started building a new house & studio in Center Valley at the end of the summer of 2001, with plenty of room for parking, no close neighbors, and enough land to expand the studio in the future. The new studio opened for business in August, 2002, in the first level of a newly built geodesic dome in Center Valley, Pa. It's a beautiful property (apart from the occasional construction scrap heap), and there's enough space to get outside and stretch your legs between takes on the 5.5 acre property. Literally hundreds of artists have been through these doors since the studio opened. I've worked with clients who've been in the music biz their entire working lives, and clients who barely even knows what a microphone looks like. No matter to me - everyone gets equal consideration and attention! A lot of my clients who came in as kids in garage (living room?) bands have gone on to bigger things - music's been improved, talent's been polished, and styles developed. I like watching musicians grow as much as I like to serve people who are already well-established - each brings its own reward. Microphones 5 Shure SM57 - the stalwart 57s are great for guitar amps & drums 4 Shure Beta56 - dynamic mikes great for drums, guitar amps 3 Shure Beta98 - tiny little condenser miks - nice for drums 1 Shure SM58 1 Rode NT1 - large diaphragm condenser 3 AudioTechnica 4041 - high quality small diaphragm condensers 2 AudioTechnica 4033 - high quality large diapragm condensers - these are my primary drum overhead mikes 1 Neumann TLM193 - great vocal mike 1 AEA R84 - ribbon mike, wonderful smooth sound 2 AKG C414 - great for vocals, background vocals, and room ambience 2 Sennheiser MD421 - dynamic mike good for guitar amps, toms 1 AKG D112 - great low end, I use this mainly for kick drum 2 AudioTechnica 31R - small diaphragm condenser 1 AudioTechnica 31 - small diaphragm condenser 2 Electrovoice RE20 - dynamic mikes, the classic radio station d.j. mike 2 Audio DeutchKraft A51S - large diaphragm condenser 2 Sony ECM 22P - small diaphragm condenser Monitor Mackie HR824 - Mackie's powered monitor system Yamaha NS10m Sony MDR7506 headphones - closed phones, good for keeping sound out Grado Music Series headphones - acoustically open phones, allows room sound in Oz Audio Q-mix - a headphone amp that can provide six separate mixes Mixer, mike preamps, signal processors Mackie Control - midi control surface for Nuendo 1 Fearn VT-2 - two channels of super-high end, hand-built tube mic preamp 16 Mackie Onyx - 16 channels of Mackie's Onyx solid state mic preamps 3 FMR Audio RNP 8380 - 6 channels of the "Really Nice Preamp" solid state mic preamps 1 ART Pro Channel - a tube preamp, eq, & compressor 2 ART Tube MP - ART's basic tube mic preamp, also great as direct boxes 1 Prosonus Blue - tube preamp, direct box ART Pro VLA - tube compressor dbx 166 - solid state compressor Alesis QuadraVerb - digital reverb, fx, mainly used for headphone mixes Alesis XTc - digital reverb Biamp MR-140 - real spring reverb Audio Software/Hardware Nuendo 3.1 - multi-track recording/editing software from Steinberg Wavelab 6.0 - stereo wave file editor, CD burning, audio montage, mastering software from Steinberg Waves Renaissance EQ & compression - high quality plug-ins for mastering/mixing 4 UAD1 cards - Universal Audio's "powered plug-ins", featuring vintage compressors & eq, amp emulators, great reverb MOTU 2408 mkII - Mark Of The Unicorn sound card MOTU 24i expansion unit - for 24 inputs at 24 bits 2 TASCAM DA88 - modular digital 8-track recorder 1 TASCAM DA38 - modular digital 8-track recorder 1 TASCAM DA20 mkII - DAT recorder 1 TASCAM 32 - 2-track reel-to-reel PC with Windows XP Pro, two dual-core Opteron 275 CPU, Tyan 2895 motherboard Keyboards Baldwin grand piano Hammond A100 Hammond-Suzuki XK2 Leslie 122 Juno 106 synth Oberheim Matrix 1000 Drums Vintage Slingerland - kick drum & pedal, '59 Radio King snare, floor tom, and rack tom Vintage Ludwig - Acrosonic snare

More on the software... UAD1 plug-ins Universal Audio's UAD-1 plug-ins are modeled after vintage compressor, limiters, and eq's, and can give an authentically "analog" sound to music recorded in a digital environment. UA has gone to great lengths to very accurately reproduce the sounds and operational characteristics of a lot of this old gear, including gear from Pultec, Neve, & Roland. I packed my system with four Universal Audio cards to take full advantage of these fantastic plugins. They've got a Roland Space Echo plugin that sounds so good, I hardly even use my REAL Space Echo any more! It's just so much easier to use the plugin. (Sorry, venerable tape echo machine!!) Along with the cool UAD plugins, I've got the usual assortment of echo, fuzz, flange, overdrive, chorus, reverb, ring modulator, phase shifter, etc. Anything you want to throw at your music, I have.

Check out the studio layout here. Photos are on the way!

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