F.A.Qs -

Do you have pro tools?

No. The Analogue V Digital debate goes on all over the place all the time but it's mainly centred on the sound comparisons, or the Pros and Cons of the abilities of the 2 formats and not the 2 totally different approaches to recording and production. When recording to analogue you're planning the final mix from the 1st minute of the 1st day of the session. There's no dithering and no "It sounds crap but we'll sort it out in the mix". Well recorded analogue tapes sound great before the mixing and mastering stages, the speed of the session and the instant good results keep up momentum and produce higher levels of focused creativity. Digital's infinite options often just leave you pasting together a thousand pieces of crap. We've never owned Pro tools or similar. But that said clients have brought their own set up and transfered the track(s) so far... built in analogue on tape... then transfered back to their computer for the mix. Rob Ferrier can work well in both analogue and digital. I'll do transfers but won't record to digital... a girls got to have morals!.

Cheap digital recording technology has been available for over a decade. That decade has seen the least amount of musical progression since the 1940's. The standards of musicianship, song writing and production have dropped. I'd go as far as to say that even engineers and producers that I worked with before the digital take over, that have spent the last 10 years staring at a computer screen have lost some of their craft and all of their nerve.

Musicians come to us besotted with nostalgia for the way things use to be, but are sometimes genuinely shocked at their own looseness and inability to deliver performances of the standards they've grown up listening to on their favourite records, they're not used to doing loads of takes and nothing being kept from any of them until they really capture the magic. It's a pressure they didn't realise they had never experienced before.

When people ask me why I never embraced digital recording and I don't have the time to relay this whole rant I just say "If it's not broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broken"

Can we all play live in one room?
Yes. I've worked in lots of well known studios and always found recording a live band in a room, with their amps miked in separate isolated places a compromising struggle. So it was our mission to build a studio that could effortlessly do that. Other studios achieve this by putting the drummer in a small dead drum booth, but as a building Analogue Catalogue is so big and solid that we've a choice of rooms, each with a different timbre reverb. So we firstly choose the right room for the drum sound and then place the other players facing the drummer with screens and their amps in different rooms/ spaces. Those amps are placed and miked for 'Keeps' not for 'guides'. no D.I-ing necessary. Vocals are often done as a guide so they can be concentrated on as on overdub.

Do you do mastering?
Live sound, studio recording, mixing and mastering are all different crafts. Our engineers are master craftsman in the world of recording and mixing. But when it comes to mastering I would prefer to lias with a reputable mastering engineer on the clients behalf. We do this free of charge as part of commitment to making classic sounding records.
Here's some good reading on the subject, Radio Ready - The Truth is a PDF of a very enlightening extract from Bob Orban's book Mastering Audio - The Art and the Science.

Also this article from Stylus Magazine is a great rant about the Loudness Wars and why so many recent records sound awful.
 
Feel free to fire any tech questions to me.
Julie@analoguecat.com