By Ralph Stuart Childs, M.Ed.,N.C.C.
ChildsPlay Recording, Chelsea Music Group
Brentwood, TN

We recently had a decision to make at our MIDI studio because we actually had a little extra cash on hand since business has been so good. We wanted to upgrade existing equipment, or purchase new equipment in order to stay competitive. As many of you know, running a studio is a process of gauging where you are in the marketplace, and where you stand compared to what the competition is offering, then prioritizing your needs to best meet the demands of the clients. Knowing how much money to spend is a good place to begin analyzing what would be the best way to get the biggest bang for your buck. What you really need to find out is where the weakest link in your audio chain is and try to beef that up in a cost-effective way that will enhance your sale-ability.

Let's say you have $2000 to spend and you think you'd really like a new board, and you paid $6500 for the one you've got now ten years ago when it was the hippest thing going, but by today's standards is easily blown away by boards costing half as much that do ten times more. But (you say to yourself) it still works okay and I really don't want to get a new board until I can afford the exact one I want. Now you have to look for the next obvious replacement or upgrade need. You start asking yourself things like, "would a really great mic give me a few extra db of tweak, or do I need to upgrade the software in my ADATs first in order to hear the sonic improvement purchasing a really great mic would make?" Or, "should I buy the latest and greatest all-time famous sample library I saw advertised in a magazine for my K-2000," and "you know, my computer sure could use another 16 meg of RAM and another gig of hard drive so I'll be ready when I can afford that new sound card, and be digital all-the-way!" Decisions, decisions, decisions!

The other part of the equation is about knowing where your money is coming from and whether your outlay of cash is going to enhance you enough to justify the expense. In other words, just who are your customers, and what are their needs and wants to keep them happy and coming back for more? This should be your number one priority - keeping the clients you have and letting them know that you're taking their needs into consideration when you spend their money on improvements. I'm not implying that you don't need a long-term plan and should give up your dreams. You still need to look into multimedia, jingles and scoring for movies (the MIDI artist's extreme self-expression medium). First things first is all I'm saying.

We have only one ADAT machine, and I would love to have a whole bank so that we could offer 24 or even 32 track digital services, but my main customer hates ADAT systems because of the multiple tape transports that take too long to sync up. He insists that everything he does in our complex be on one tape, whether it's ADAT, 24 track analog or 32 track digital.

In our MIDI room, we do a lot of "track only's" for our client where a singer chooses five to ten from a library of pre-recorded original songs and comes in to overdub their voice. We transfer the tracks from a DAT onto our ADAT, record the vocals and mix back to the DAT.

When I thought about our client's needs, and what we could do to enhance his operation, I realized that the weakest link in our audio chain was the lack of a really great outboard mic preamp and compressor/limiter (all tube, to offset the harshness of our digital recording medium) so that we could make these vocal tracks really smoke!

We have a great selection of mics from our big room upstairs, some really good outboard processors and a KILLER vocals booth, but I wasn't happy with the limiters and compressors we had to choose from. Our mastering engineer has a girlfriend in the used gear business, and she found a slightly used professional dual-valve stereo mic pre/compressor that lists for $2700, but only cost us $1200 (talk about calling in your favors!). The minute we plugged that baby in, you could hear an immediate improvement in the quality of the vocals. No more "pumping," clipping, distortion, coloration or "dirtyness:" just warm analog richness pouring out of my NS-10's into my near-field ears. AHH! And our client? I don't know if anyone's told him yet, but I hope he hears about it from one of his artists first!

My next purchase, I hope, will be a great outboard EQ that will further enhance the vocals, and then a really super processor like a LARK. The board is still high on my list, but for now, I'm really happy and impressed with what the addition of one piece of high-quality outboard gear can do for your system. Check it out.

See you next time when I'll be discussing the psychology of producing vocals. What Yogi Berra said about baseball is also true of the music business - "90% of this business is half mental."