The unexciting reality: when it comes to studio essentials, sometimes a hard drive backup system matters more than your dream microphone.
I’ve been rudely reminded and humbled about the fact that, above all, a session and recording studio needs to run smoothly. A vintage tube microphone can sit in its cradle, modern, powerful preamp ready for a vocal, but if they’re not easily connected and accessible, you’ll be stuck reaching around behind a rack. A dark mess of cables will hinder you from plugging them in. Once patched, your artist needs a headphone mix and… your cables are tugging their headphones down. You manage to get through the session and hit save, only to return to the session the following morning to a corrupted hard drive. That expensive tube mic is the least of your worries now!
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There’s a handful of unexciting but necessary purchases that I’ve learnt can keep your sessions running, your data safe, and your clients happy.
Headphone extension cables
These are worth their weight in gold (especially so with gold contacts!) A headphone extender is a simple, passive way to send signals further. Generally, a male ¼” TRS connection at one end and a female at the other, these simply plug into a headphone amplifier and allow headphone connection at the other end via the female TRS connector.
While your existing headphone cables might be fine for most use cases, this is the kind of investment that you don’t need until you need them. An increasing number of drummers are using their own IEM-style earphones for recording, and those cables are short! Vocalists distracted by a short cable tugging their head to one side can’t focus on their performance, and you’ll be left with an unsatisfied artist and a lacklustre performance.
Reasonably easy and cost-efficient to make yourself, headphone extensions can be customised in length, and both male and female connectors are cheap!
Boss LS-2 line selector/mixing pedal
Admittedly, a more fun addition to the list, this little-known pedal is great for creating unique guitar and bass tones. Typically used as a Line Selector, as the name suggests, the LS-2 features two separate loops for different pedals. It also has a handful of modes, including “A+B Mix”, allowing you to use the “A” and “B” controls to blend different amounts of pedals, i.e. drives or distortions, before they sum at the output stage and are sent to your amp. This enables the ability to combine different sounds into something entirely unique, instead of using pedals as they were intended (boring!)
I’ve had great results blending no pedal (i.e. a clean tone) with a dirty RAT-style distortion, or different drives for guitar. You’ll find yourself leaning on this for a unique sonic identity!
Patchbay
At the top of this piece, I discussed the nightmare of accessing the ins and outs of outboard gear, as well as the ins and outs of our audio interface or converters. A patchbay serves to allow connection to everything in one simple place, more seamlessly allowing you to plug things in and out, as well as audition sounds to make sure you’re on the right track.
A patchbay will be used on every session, and it’ll be a piece you won’t know how you lived without. Be wary of how your gear will be connected to the back of the patchbay, and the cables you’ll need to patchbay it all together. There are ¼”, XLR (male and female), as well as bantam/TT style patchbays, with an array of connection types available on the back. This is another example where soldering and doing it yourself can come in handy. Cabling is expensive, and there are a lot of patch points per patchbay!
A second set of monitors
Long days in the studio can be really tiresome mentally and physically, but there’s no shortage of critical listening to be done at the start or end of the day. For this reason, taking a break from listening is a great tool for the busy engineer, though for those of us who’ve been in the rabbit-hole of mixing and mastering, you know that you can’t be taking breaks all day.
For this reason, a second set of monitors is a great way to have an extra source to reference your work, as well as reset your ears. Think of these as a palette cleanser for your ears, something quick to adjust your perspective before you dive back into your main monitors. When using them in this way, even low-quality monitors will do the job. Cheaper monitors can also expose overloading low-end or harsh mid-range, the infamous Yamaha NS10 being perfect for exactly this, though a pair of these plus a power amp might begin to push the budget!
While we’re at it, you’ll need a monitor controller to toggle between two sets of monitors, and a controller with a ‘Dim’ switch is another great way to cleanse your ears as well as reset your perspective! The lower volume of the ‘Dim’ switch will exaggerate the balance of your mix very quickly. Damn, the snare is still too loud …
Hard drive backup system
There’s nothing more terrifying in the digital world than a hard drive failure. If there is something more terrifying, I’m yet to experience it, so it may very well be in the next list of necessary purchases. This fear of drive failure has pushed me to search high and low for a consistent and easy-to-use backup system for my digital files, and personally, I’ve landed at ChronoSync.
My system is as follows: I have a main working drive and a mirrored backup drive of the working drive. For long-term backup, I have a drive that stays at my studio, as well as another backup that comes home – this being mirrored to the studio long-term backup. This means that (except for the moment of recording) my data always exists in two places, with regular long-term backups extending to four places in two locations. In the case of a catastrophe at home or the studio, my data is still saved somewhere.
What attracted me to ChronoSync was the ability to easily mirror drives very quickly; a day’s work on a USB-C SSD backs up in seconds. While I don’t have a cloud-based backup system, they’re also available and widely, though keep in mind that the more space you use, the more money you’ll pay— though this isn’t too different from buying new drives every year or two!
Now I’m off to back up my drives. Writing about this all so confidently has me feeling paranoid!
