You did your new album (Piece & Love) on a really low budget. What gear did you use to do it?
Not much. A home-built Pentium II 333 PC customized for recording audio with 128 meg RAM, 2 SCSI Barracudas, a Ricoh CDRw and an Event Gina pci card. Yamaha Pro Mix 01 desk, TLA preamp/compressor with Langevin CR-3A (by Manley), AKG 451 and C1000 mics. Tannoy PBM 5.6s with a Quad 303 power amp. Peavey DPMSP sampler for piano, organ, synth and drum sounds. Digitech Valve FX preamp for guitars. For mixdown I would either send the basic tracks to Martin Atkins (Invisible Records owner & in house re- mixer) to mix on his (better) gear, or persuade a friend, Steve Critall, to come by with his vintage Alice 8 channel analogue desk (which had built-in compression on 4 groups) and his Roland DEP 5.
You can make a grown man weep with your recording equipment bargains. Give us a few secrets to buying second hand gear cheaply!
It's largely a matter of timing and it's also a numbers game. There is always someone out there who is fed up and just wants to shift the stuff and get rid of it. Offer a ridiculously low price and get prepared to duck! You never know — they may just go for it! The more times you do this, the better your chances are.
You use a PC instead of a Mac, are you an insane masochist? Why not use a Mac like a normal person?
Macs cost more and PCs are more flexible, customizable and have more software available. When I started out I didn't have much money but I had the will, the energy and the brains! The customized hot-rod approach to PCs is cool, but you really gotta love it... I no longer like Macs. I find them boring...
You are touring a lot and sold all your old studio gear, How is your 'all laptop studio' build going?
I've got a Dell Pentium 3 600 laptop with 192 meg RAM. I'm using the Egosys U2A USB audio in/out box and holding out till the jury's in on which firewire device to get for audio. I'm looking into MOTU's 828 and Metric Halo's firewire in/out.
What are your top 5 software programs.
