Throughout my career I’ve been lucky enough to work in some amazing purpose built studios, many of which have been large scale, multi-million dollar facilities with multiple rooms, big sprawling analog mixing consoles, incredible vintage outboard gear and microphones and offered the best in acoustic design and construction.
However, it has always been necessary to have some sort of small home studio to work in as well. This would range from a simple laptop with some headphones to do basic editing, to larger spaces where I might be able to mix or do a few overdubs. When I moved into my current house in 2019, I decided to take a portion of the garage and build a more legitimate mixing room to do the majority of my work in. By legitimate, I mean a space that is dedicated specifically to mixing, that is acoustically treated with the caliber of equipment that would allow me to do consistent, professional work from home. It was a long time dream of mine and I’m extremely grateful for it. In fact, at this point I would be uncomfortable mixing anywhere else. My room isn’t perfect by any means, but I know it so well that I have full confidence that whatever I’m hearing in it is translating to the rest of the outside world as I intend it to. Plus, I don’t have to wear pants if I don’t want to and am never too far away from my fridge and snacks.
The studio is great for my purposes, but it was really only built for mixing, with the exception of maybe some simple overdubs. At it’s heart it’s a two channel room. So, if I need to do any real tracking of drums or anything with multiple inputs, I have been relying on renting other local studio facilities. For the most part, that has worked out really well. I’m fortunate enough to have access to some great rooms in town. However, I’ve always wished I could do more at home. Partly because I love my house and don’t like to leave it. It’s a cool place, built in the 70’s with super high ceilings and a big open floor plan, and it’s situated on a lot that has great views of mountains to the East and the coast to the west (on a clear day). It’s surrounded by large pines, which is odd for this area, and feels more like a cozy cabin in the woods than a house plopped in a suburb nestled between two major freeways, a stones throw from a busy intersection with a strip of nail salons, taco shops, and a 99 cent store. I also love the idea of making a record in a house. Some brilliant records have been made that way and there is something quite magical that happens when a record is made in a place that isn’t a traditional “Studio”. Sometimes studios can be foreign and clinical feeling for an artist. It’s like walking into a space ship and being expected to perform your best in front of a glass wall with little green men on the other side. A home is organic and it lives and breathes along with the people who reside in it. In addition, when no one is looking at a clock and worrying about the money it’s costing if you take an extra fifteen minutes for lunch, the experience can be truly immersive. The musicians spend their time together not only making music, but preparing and eating meals together or just hanging out and chatting without anyone worrying about wasting any precious studio time. It feels like a hang, not work. Everyone is more relaxed because a home is a much more familiar and comfortable environment.
Another big reason I’ve really wanted to do a record at home is to actually put to the test something I believe and have been saying to people for years, that you don’t need expensive gear or specially built facilities to make a great record. Great songs will be great songs no matter how they are captured.
Opportunity Knocks
Earlier this year, I was approached about producing an album for a fantastic artist from the north of England named Elaine Palmer. I met Elaine last year while she was on a road trip with her family through the southwest of America and we hit it off right away, with similar tastes in music and seemingly similar approaches to making it. As we discussed the possibility of working together and she sent me some demos of the songs, it quickly became clear to me that this record would be a perfect fit to do in my house. So, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and took the plunge to outfit my home and my studio to be able to do the full album here from start to finish. I gave my family fair warning that we would be taking over the house for eight days in September and we put the plan into motion. The next few newsletters will be all about my journey from budgeting, to gear choices, to setup and everything I learned along the way, along with my experiences actually making this album where I live. Not to give away the ending, but I am absolutely thrilled with how it all went. Not only with the album we made, but with the experience as whole. On top of that, the overall sound quality of the record has far exceeded my expectations. I will without a doubt be making many more records this way in the future.
Blood From A Stone
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for anyone trying to build any kind of recording studio, big or small, is budget. Mine was certainly no exception. It needed to make sense financially for me. This was a gamble and a big experiment and I knew I couldn’t invest too much money or go into loads of debt because there was no guarantee it would even work out, let alone have a chance of seeing any return for my investment. It was also important that I keep the gear list to things that are within reach of the average person. I made it my mission to prove that you can make professional sounding records on a relatively small budget. The past decade has seen incredible advances in recording technology and manufacturing (along with stiff competition between brands) that means truly great sounding gear is more affordable than it has ever been. It was time to put that to the test for me.
Heart Of The Operation
I started by making a list of my goals, and then a list of what I thought I would need to achieve them.
I wanted to be able to record the full band live, at least Elaine and the drummer and bassist together, which is a huge task. Elaine would be playing guitar and singing, so that means Drums, Bass, Guitar and a Vocal simultaneously. These were all seasoned professionals and incredible players, and I knew that I wanted to be prepared to keep any performances by anyone, so nothing was going to be considered a “scratch” take. This would mean isolation between everyone, microphones, stands, cables, mic pre’s, inputs, headphones and headphone distribution, DI’s and lots of other things I had yet to think of.
The heart of my mix room is a Universal Audio Apollo Twin X. A small, dual channel interface that has excellent converters, world class mic pre’s, powerful internal processing and is very portable so I can travel with it and potentially mix from anywhere. I love this interface, but it has some limitations as a tracking solution. It only has two built in mic pre’s, and the only way to expand it is via a single ADAT input. My first thought was to add an 8 channel mic pre amp with ADAT output to give me a total of 10 channels. If I was minimal with my micing, I could probably pull that off, but I quickly realized that it would be fairly limiting. Having enough inputs and mic preamps was the biggest and seemingly most expensive hurdle to figure out and for a while, I was stumped on how I was going to pull it off within any sort of reasonable budget. My savior came with the release of a brand new line of recording gear by a smaller, but well trusted and reputable company, Audient.
Enter EVO
Before I had the Apollo, I had an Audient interface called the iD22, which is actually quite similar in features. It was a simple two channel interface, but it didn’t offer any of the processing power of the Apollo and was limited in it’s sample rate options, which ultimately led me to replacing it. However, I was always really impressed with it’s great build quality and especially the sound of it’s built in Mic Preamps and it’s converters. It was every bit a professional piece of gear in my opinion and I recommended it to a lot of my friends and colleagues.
When I heard they came out with a new line of interfaces called EVO, I was intrigued. But, this line seemed to be geared as a no frills, budget friendly option, and frankly, wasn’t too enticing to me at first. But, when I started doing a little digging and starting reading some reviews, my interest perked up real quick. They have a few similar small, portable interfaces, but their flagship of the line is called the EVO 16. It’s a full recording interface that includes 8 internal mic preamps, a monitor section with two independent headphone outputs, and is expandable via ADAT to 24 channels. The kicker is that it does all this for around $550 USD.
I’ll be honest, my first thought was, “It must be crap if it’s that cheap”. But, as I dug into it a bit more (and watched a few YouTube videos of people using it and favorably comparing it to much more expensive units) I started realizing that they were keeping costs down in some pretty ingenious ways, by omitting a few features that a lot of similar interfaces have. But as it turns out, mostly features I didn’t particularly need.
For one, it’s as simple as it gets. It has combination jacks for inputs that accept 1/4” TRS or XLR connectors. It doesn’t have external phase switches, high pass filters, pads, or any other bells and whistles you might typically find on multi-channel mic pre/interface. They use a single switch to select phantom power per channel instead of having them on each track. It doesn’t even come with rack ears (though you can buy them cheaply). The whole thing is designed to be as streamlined as possible with as few external knobs or buttons as they can get away with. It is actually a great idea. By eliminating the costs of adding all the extra doodads, they could spend the money on the the things that matter most, mainly, preamps and converters. Granted, those elements are different designs than their higher end options, and undoubtably cheaper to manufacture, but the fact is, these things operate on microchips, and microchips of all kinds have only gotten smaller, cheaper and way more powerful with every passing year. The truth is that the cheapest new chips made today will far outperform the most expensive chips from several years ago. That’s true for phones, computers, TV’s and even audio gear. What a time to be alive! So, I took a shot on it and bought one as the hub of my now multi-channel home studio. But, 8 channels wasn’t going to be enough to get me there, and wouldn’t you know it, they thought of that too.
EVO SP8
What really pushed me over the edge to go for this system was the EVO SP8, which is a stand alone 8 channel Mic Pre with ADAT ins and outs that integrates flawlessly with the EVO 16, and costs $499. Same mic pre’s, same layout, and gave me a full 16 channel recording studio for just over $1000. And, if I find that isn’t enough (it is), I can add another SP8 (or any other ADAT equipped preamp) down the road for a full 24 channels. Mental.
Now, I know, $1000 isn’t chump change. But when you factor the cost per channel for an all in one solution, you’d be hard pressed to find any cheaper option, and as I found out, especially one that sounds as good.
Perfection Is Boring
For a budget studio, it would be unreasonable to think it was 100% perfect and there weren’t some compromises along the way and some things I wish were different, but I am truly blown away by this setup, especially for the price. The mic pre’s sound great, have enough gain and clean headroom, and are very quiet. They don’t give you any “vibe” per se. They are clean and sound like the source they are recording. They aren’t going to bring any coloration or to the table, but honestly, the magic should come from the source, not your preamps. And, if I need any fairy dust or coloration, I’ve got a million plugins designed to give me that.
I sometimes missed having a high pass filter on the pre’s, but again, loads of options post recording to deal with any rumble and realsitically I may have used them on one or two sources. Most of the time, I don’t use them anyway.
Thankfully, the software that comes with the EVO system does give you a phase button for each track, and if you read my previous couple of newsletters, you’ll know that was pretty important. Other systems, like the offerings from UAD, Apogee or Antelope, offer some form of processing and plugins within the control software that can be applied to channels before it reaches your DAW, but I personally have always found those setups to be unnecessarily complicated, and prefer to bypass all that anyway and go as cleanly through them as possible. Perhaps in future updates, they may include some of those other features that could be software controlled, but it really isn’t necessary. At least for me and my caveman brain. The simplicity of the system is one of its strong suits.
My only real complaint about the EVO is the output section. The monitor output as well as the headphone outputs are significantly quieter than my Apollo. I like to record at moderate input levels and keep my main output bus at a reasonable level with ample headroom, and found I really had to crank things up to get a decent monitor volume. I even ended up turning up my monitor inputs to compensate. Again, not a deal breaker, but would love to have some more gas in the tank. Especially on the headphone outs. I ended up running headphone feeds directly from Pro Tools outputs instead of the built in ones for fear of not having enough juice to drive the phones for the drummer.
There is a difference in the quality of the monitor outputs as well. Even when level matched, and monitoring the same source audio, the Apollo output just seems to have a bit more depth and clarity, but it’s a super subtle and nerdy difference. I will still be doing all my mixing using the Apollo interface, so for tracking, the difference is negligible.
Next Time…
This turned into way more of a long gear review than I intended, but the EVO really did impress me and kind of made the whole project possible. In the next newsletter, I’ll get into all of the other things I needed to get the project running and how I found some affordable solutions to fill the gaps in my gear. There are always a bunch of things you don’t think about until the last minute, but luckily, I live ten minutes from a Guitar Center and the Amazon delivery drivers became very familiar with the route to my house.
Again, I’m not affiliated with any company, but I do like to give credit where credit is due and will always recommend things that work.
I’ll also talk about what it’s like to have a bunch of people in your personal space for an extended period of time and juggling being a good host along with being a producer, engineer, musician, and still sort of a decent husband and father. Oh, and I had a gig I had to prepare for and play in the middle of it too. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Until next time…
Thanks for reading!
About The Author
Mike Butler is a professional mix engineer, guitarist and producer currently based in Southern California. His list of credits range from The Rolling Stones, Phoebe Bridgers, The Pretenders, The Shins, Ray LaMontagne, Five For Fighting, Reba McIntire, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers, Eminem and many more. He recently mixed the music for the hit HBO animated series, “Batwheels” and has produced music for commercial clients including Shure Microphones and Progressive Insurance.
Nice!