Recording in the Blat-O-Box

Making the music sound great

The Blat-O-Box is a project studio with a variety of different sounding spaces. Ok, it's not Avatar, The Hit Factory, or Capitol Studios by any stretch of the imagination. But it is a room with personality and some nice gear, and it's especially good for smaller acoustic ensembles. Also available is a boomy room that sounds great with hard hitting drums. Oh, and don't forget the video games... of the hand-held and 8 bit variety!

If you don't give a hoot about geeky studio technical stuff, skip this paragraph. The Blat-O-Box records in Logic & ProTools LE. The converters are from an RME Fireface 800, which has very nice AD-DA conversion. When recording in ProTools, I bypass the converters in the 002, and use the converters in the Fireface. There is a modest collection of top quality microphones & preamps for the front end. All back end is done "in the box," (with a couple of exceptions) using plugins emulating analog gear. The gear collection leans towards the usage of acoustic instruments and a "vintage" sound.

For the most part, the studio is used for my composing and arranging projects, but I have been known to occasionally hire it out for certain projects that fit the space.

Here are some audio examples of music recorded in the Blat-O-Box. The Useless Bastards were recorded live, with no overdubs. The other examples were done in varying degrees of over-dubby-ness. Don't be intimidated by my incredible grasp of technical jargon.

Audio Examples - Note: These examples are Mp3 quality
  • The Useless Bastards - "Useless Bastard" (comp. Bryan Miller)
     
  • "Tell Somebody" (comp. J. Walter Hawkes/Andrew Burns)
    Uses Big Wet Drum Room
     
  • Pre War Ponies - "Heart and Soul" (comp. Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser)
     
  • The Occupants of Uninhabited Space - "Autopilot" (comp. J. Walter Hawkes)