The majority of Earth Born tracks were recorded and mixed in two home studios: Don's place in California and Bridget and Martin's place in England.

Don On His Studio Gear

Digital Audio Workstations

The central piece of my home studio is a Pro Tools|HD 3 digital audio workstation. It was used for multitracking all the songs. This included mixdowns and final production. Some of Candles was the one exception. The initial tracks were recorded and mixed on my Orban Audicy DAW. The Audicy was my main DAW before I switched to Pro Tools, and now mainly sleeps.

Two Friends rhythm tracks in Pro Tools

I'm running Pro Tools HD 7.4 software on a Mac G5 (although almost all of Earth Born was done with 7.3). The system includes three hardware rackmounts: a 192 I/O, 96 I/O and PRE I/O. I do all my sessions at 88 kHz, 24-bit (although most external material comes in at 44.1 16-bit). The PRE was used for recording vocals by Daevid Allen, Karen Anderson, Alison Lewis and me. It's also used for recording electric instruments like Teed Rockwell's Warr Raptor or my keys. I have a Digidesign Command|8, which I mainly use for recording automation moves.

The Orban Audicy VX was used only for Candles. It's my previous recording system, but is now mainly a scrubwheel for real-time varispeeding and scratching.

Keyboards

Most of my keyboard work was done using my M-Audio Axiom 64 MIDI controller, but I did use my Kurzweil K2000S keyboard/sampler and a borrowed Waldorf Q.

Studio Keys

Virtual Instruments (Plug-Ins)

I use lots of virtual synths. For Earth Born, I used the following:

Other Plug-Ins

I also have a stable of dynamics plug-Ins. Lately, I've been using the DigiRack compressors and eqs. I sometimes use the Aural Exciter and Big Bottom enhancers too (fnarr fnarr (ed.)). I have a soft spot for distortion. Toward the end of the "Earth Born" sessions, I was able to use the new Digidesign Eleven plug-in. Very cool on non-guitar material. Before Eleven was available, I did use Amplitude and Amp Farm. Besides light distortion on non-guitar elements, I like the amp tremolo effects. Which means, that I also like using the VOCE tremolo plug-in.

For Reverbs, I lean towards the Digidesign ReVibe (which is good for vocals as I like to use it's chorus). I used to also use the TL Space plug-in for vocals, but I've been starting to relegate that to instruments. It's my favorite convolution reverb. I seem to like placing a guitarist in a forest, or an organ in a Swiss cathedral. I do use various delays (including the ones in the verbs, but as the project moved onward, I started to use the Digidesign Reel Tape one more frequently). Then again, most of the vocals leaned on my one real piece of outboard gear, an Eventide Ultraharmonizer. I probably mix multiple verbs more than I should, but I seem to like the combination on everything from vocals to synths. I can almost hear them breathing and growing into new creatures.

Other Gear

Studio during off hours

When we started the Earth Born sessions, I would have thought that I'd do more with the plethora of percussives in the house. But, in retrospect, I don't think I touched anything. No tone drum, no Nigerian Udu, no tubano. Not even a nut shaker. Maybe for our next CD...

I do have a bass here, a Carvin 5-string. But again, it never surfaced for this CD. Which also meant that I never got out my favorite stomp box: an MXR Phase 90.

The only mic I remember using was the M-Audio Sputnik. Comes in a silver attache case!

For monitoring, I use Sony MDF-7509HD headphones and Mackie HR824 speakers. I have two of the Sony headphones (and a couple AKG ones too) to cover any recording session with multiple musicians.

Finally, I should mention my JVC TD-W220 Stereo Double Cassette Deck because this was pretty important. The songs of yore were recorded from old cassette demos to the computer.

Click here for a complete list of Don's home studio gear.

Bridget and Martin On Their Studio Gear

Getting Started At Home

Well we can't really compete with Don in terms of knowledge and armoury. We started thinking about some home recording gear when Stephen Palmer of Mooch invited Bridget to record some vocals on his Dr Silbury's Liquid Brainstem Band project. There was too much distance between us to make travelling to record feasible so we started investigating home recording gear. We already had a reasonably powerful home PC that Martin had built a couple of years previously. So we added an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 soundcard. We bought the most affordable condenser mic, a Behringer C1 and a little Behringer Eurorack UB802 mixer, mainly to provide phantom power and a pre-amp for the mic. Oh and some cheap Behringer headphones (honestly, we don't work for Behringer it just came recommended at a cheap price). I think we got setup for about £200 ($400).

We downloaded a (16-bit) trial of nTrack 4.0 multitrack audio recording software and stared blankly at it for quite a while as it all seemed so foreign (Bridget in all her years in bands had never got involved in the production side of things so this was all new). We had all sorts of frustrating issues with routing, monitoring and recording in the beginning and got a lot of advice from helpful folk on different forums.

We were amazed at the quality of the tracks we recorded with this setup and although nTrack could be a little buggy we paid and upgraded to the full featured 24 bit version. About this time Don contacted Bridget and before long we started work on Earth Born. Ashbury Acoustic Martin used his Ashbury folk acoustic guitar to record the backing for the title track (his first ever recording). This was trickier than recording vocals but it was those original recordings that made it onto the CD.

This difficulty of getting a good acoustic sound led us to start investigating other guitars and we started looking at the Variax modelling guitar as it modelled some classic 6 and 12-string acoustics and could be directly recorded. Strangely this led to us buying a Line 6 TonePort quite a while before buying a Variax 300 guitar. The TonePort UX2 seemed to be ideal for recording guitar and vocals as it modelled a mass of amps, cabs and FX units and some classic pre-amp models for recording vocals and other acoustic instruments. It has a USB interface which worked well in nTrack too.

Line 6 TonePort

Bridget didn't take to the TonePort straight away but the majority of vocals on Earth Born were recorded through it, as well as clarinet, sax, Matt's (Dowse) trombone, Jasper's (Pattison) bass, guitars and others. The TonePort had the nice feature that Bridget could monitor her singing with different FX like reverb and EQ but record a dry vocal (just a bit of compression and gate, that she prefers) to send to Don.

Instruments

Rich's Korg Electribe We've mentioned the Ashbury acoustic. The double tracked reversed guitar on Earth Born is Martin's Admira Capricho Spanish guitar. The Variax was used on Always, modelling a Les Paul and uses one of the Line 6 Presets with Jazz Clean amps and cabs, some digital delay and sine chorus. It was used on Storm Shelter as a 12 String acoustic and a 1967 Epiphone Casino electric, added to beef up the guitar sound.

Rich Chadwick's Apache drum was recorded acoustically using the C1 and TonePort and we had fun using nTrack to sync his Korg Electribe using MIDI and route the audio output, which we recorded for Earth Born and Two Friends.

Bridget playing her Akai EWI4000s Bridget played her Boosie and Hawkes clarinet on Candles, a neighbour's (Jack Redmond) Yamaha sax on Dancers and Evening, but has gone onto buy her own Conn sax, which will no doubt feature on future work. Another important instrument is Bridget's Akai EWI4000s wind synth that we bought about a year ago and have recently bought some new patches for. This is featured on a few tracks and Bridget even experimented with it using some weird guitar effects on the TonePort on the beginning of Hit The Moon. Oh and Bridget uses her gran's genuine Chinese Gong on the same track.