My current studio rig is in somewhat of a state of flux. The most current photo I have of it is at left, which was taken in 2002. Since then, I’ve made a lot of modifications in an attempt to minimize the equipment footprint – JJ and I are planning on moving back to DC, and unless I hit the lottery, that means an apartment.

At the moment, the studio is located in the basement, in a nice huge room that would either be a rec-room or a playroom in a normal person’s world.

The current gear roster consists of:


Guitars:
• 1963 DanElectro Bellzouki (12-String) Electric (read my review here)
• 1975 Ovation Viper, Electric / GK-2 for guitar synth
• 1982 Epitaph DV-8 Electric
• 1982 Vantage VS695 Electric (read my review here.)
• 1984 Strat Elite Electric
• 1985 Marina 12-String Acoustic
• 1987 Yamaha SA-2000 Hollow-Body
• 1987 Fender Gemini III Acoustic
• 1995 Yam FG-411 Acoustic / Electric
• 1998 Yam RBX-675 5-String Bass
• 1998 Ovation FCM-408 mandolin
• 2000 Sakis Bros Baglama
• 2002 Woodrow Custom electric dulcimer
• 4 homebrew guitars, a fifth a-building...

Keyboards:
• Roland JX-305
• Yamaha CS-101
• Korg Poly 800

Sound modules:
• Roland GR-50 Guitar Synth (read my review here)
• Korg MS200R (an awesome-sounding unit!! )
• I`m looking for a Morpheus module, if you have one you`d like to part with. SONAR has a few nice soft-synths, but they`re waaay too fiddly for me to gunk around with.

Percussion:
• Roland TR-707
• Boss DR-770 (for sale, or swap for a Morpheus module - contact me!)
• I sold the R-8. Sonar has the "Session Drummer", but it`s a tad quirky in just the wrong places... so I`m saving my quarters for a Zendrum or a Roland electronic kit. Meantime, there`s lots of other things arond here on which to bang... including my head against the equipment rack: makes for some nice Foley.

Effects:
• Korg A2
• A few random DDL's compressors, MIDI Patchbays, etc.
• Boss GT-8
• Native Instruments Spektral Delay, which is an odd little program with big potential.

Microphones:
• Studio Electronics C1... and folks, believe the hype! This thing is fantastic! Sure SM57
• A couple Audixii
• Various other no-name dynamics.

Mixer: Behringer UB8222FX - the Tascam board in the phot above was sold to buy a Mackie 8-bus, which is now retired in favor of the smaller Behringer.

Tape decks: The TASCAM has been sold; all tracking is now done via SONAR and Ableton Live 5. I also use a JVC TD-W709 for general cassette duping.

Hard disc recorders: SONAR system was installed on November 2nd 2001! Big props to my best friend Mike Masquith (home of Barkin` Beaver Studios) who has been so instrumental in helping me sort out the myriad and ongoing technical issues... and there are a lot of them. I have spent 4x more time debugging my system in the past year than I have recording! Ableton Live 5 was installed in December 2005.

Monitoring system: My primary monitors are KRK Rockit-5's, active. I also use a Harmon Kardon AV25-II amp, driving NS-10M`s and several sets of miscellaneous other "audiophile" speakers for real-world reference, 3 boomboxes for same.

Computers:
The SONAR Tower: homebrew PIIII 2.7mHz, IG RAM, Layla 24.

Music software:
•Ableton Live 5. Yeah, yeah, yeah! Buy this program - it's cool!!!
• SONAR. Tedius and counter-intuitive, but works well if you can put up with its vagaries...
• Sound Forge, various
• Soldier of Fortune for "attitude adjustment". Yeah, it's not music software... but sometimes you just feel like killing people.
•NI Spektral Delay


Other equipment:
• Various DDL`s, Compressors, Gates, a couple homebrew tube line amps, some PaIA kits, MSB MIDI patchbay, 4-channel light sequencer(for the proper studio ambiance!), yadda yadda...
• The PEDALBOARD FROM HELL - was sold in 2005 to raise capital for Ableton and the GT-8.
• 2 Native American 6-hole Cedar flutes
• Soprano, Alto, and Tenor Recorders
• A small, inexpensive accordion
• A no-name Uke… but there’s a new one I have my eyes on…
• A couple harmonicas
• A Selmer Tenor Sax that I couldn’t quite get the hang of - so I gave it to my brother.
• I would also be remiss in failing to mention Maximus the Puppy, whose sweet little countenance and faithful, happy puppily nature has saved me from beating some of this oftimes-cranky equipment into it`s consituent Quarks - more than once.

Here are some of the many iterations of my studio rig over the past years:

This is me and Mike and Sandy, at Mike’s Mom's place. At the time, we didn’t have a recorder – we were each still using the “bouncing cassette” method. This particular afternoon, I had carried a lot of my stuff to Mike’s, so we set it up for this goofy shot.

At the time, the only two members of this "band" who could play were Mike, who was alreay pretty hot on guitar, and Sandy, who played the acoustic and flute. I was "pretty much a wannabe", but I worked hard at learning.

Mike lived in Arlington, really close to the WEAM radio tower, so - using the primitive technology we had - all of our recorings had either Trumpets or News in the far background. Still, we whiled away many happy hours, guzzling cheap champagne and experimenting.

Few of the recordings we made still survive, and those that do are so sonically inept I'm embarrased to offer them to the public... but they sowed the seeds of not only an obsession, but of a lifelong friendship as well.

Livng in Brandywine ("Dyson Manor", the big house out in the field behind Gwynn Park HS), with my Dad, was a blast. First off, my Dad is about the best guy in the world. Second, that huge house was occupied by just he and I and the two ghosts. Dad set his boundaries; I set mine - the two-room "suite" on the second floor. One room was the bedroom, with a fireplace, bed, chair, desk, and the omnipresent picture of Lisa Tesi (my HS and post-HS Severe Crush), and a couple cabinets with all my Art and Photography supplies.

Edward and James, the ghosts, got the rest of the secong floor, the third floor, and the basement. I always invited them in on the cold winter nights... and they were welcome anytime, as long as they didn't disturb my tracking (remember, just about everything was done via microphones at this stage!).

Still no multitrack, but what a cool place for a workroom! The bulk of the equipment lives on the shelf, essentially a glorified home stereo, and the home-made mixer is back there somewhere. This is vintage stuff, even before “Metal Men and Crystal Roses”.

I was DJ'ing pretty heavily at the time, and my two turntables and TT mixer are up on the high riser straight back. I've always considered that getting the turntables up high - near to eye level - not only makes for more accurate tonearm placement during "the fray", but also allows some slick maneuvers to "pop" the mix. My secrets; no, I'm not gonna share them.

Golly! Still no multitrack! Still a glorified stereo! Many happy hours spent here, though! Some of the later songs recorded here made it onto “Metal Men”.

If you look really closely, to the left, you'll see the third unit down from the top is an actual Eight-Track Recorder - and I mean the old eight-track tapes, not the multitrack kind! I actually had a rather lucrative trade going on, recording New Wave music onto eight-tracks for the poor shlubs who hadn't migrated their car stereos into the twentieth century.

A few days after this incredible action photo, I went out and splurged a paycheck on a Roland TR-606. It was a tremendous leap over the RS beatbox I was using until that time... and Mr. Goof here celebrated the event by spilling a beer into the 606 the first night I owned it. That little box had the right attitude from then on!

Faced with a rather drastic change in Venue! Here's the slimmed-down version of my gear... most of it off to the left in the white cabinet that you can't see - but this is the only photograph I have of this studio iteration.

It's not very photogenic, to be sure, but the beauty of it is that t's compact, simple, and easily-transportable... even off to Chicago Tech, were one so inclined.

I'm digging that new TASCAM deck. Yeah, the sound quality of the finished work was still rough, but with four tracks to play with, I could now bounce 60 times instead of just 10…?! This is where the bulk of “Some Summers” was tracked.

This photo was actually shot at 800 East Capitol Street - an apartment building since re-modeled and now a single-family residence on the National Historic Register - but hey, I enjoyed it while I lived there!

Just before Christmas (note the lights), I'm holding my just-completed (custom-built) Epitaph DV-8, which is actually a heavily-modified Teisco Del-Ray, with advanced electronics, a re-radiused fretboard with Jumbo fretwire, and a custom cherry-lime-cherry finish that this photo really can't do justice to. (Pardon the dangling participle.)

Imagine returning to the world after being asleep (or otherwise academically engaged) for four years. This is the predicament I faced here.

This is actually Mike’s place, with the firetrap foam on the walls, but I spent a lot of time here working on tunes, having pooled resources with him. Material recorded here was used on “Some Summers”.

Mike and Sandy were kind enough to host me during a rather "unsettled" interlude in my life, but I really treasure the days I spent there.

The fascia you see it not really butted against the wall - there's acutually an aea behind it for guitar amps, drums, and storage.

I began tracking "After the Crush" here.

The prescient Web Surfer may well ask: "What Crush?! Was it Lisa?!"

I must answer no. By now, it was somebody else completely, a huge mistake, and cost me many years of my precious-short life. Sure felt okay at the time, though... and, y'know what? It doesn't mean I ever terminated my Lisa Jones.

Stress Palace was a group-house I lived in at 14th and D streets in Northeast DC – a really rough-and-tumble neighborhood. On one side of us was a drug dealer, and on the other was a bordello. The dealers were fairly quiet, but the bordello was something else: all acoustic or vocal tracks had to be timed to fit precisely in-between the comings and goings. The local gangs were always yelling, smashing things… everybody seemed to have a pit bull locked up in their muddy and decrepit backyards. I recorded a short rap loop for the answering machine:

“There’s dogs barkin’ out back
there’s punks walking the street
There’s kids breakin’ bottles in the alley
But we diggin’ all the nice cops we meet!

Our car’s been stolen or vandalized
The muggers have followed us home
But if ya’s got good news, my man-
Just leave ya message at the tone!”

Once inside, it wasn’t too bad – the walls were brick, and would stop a bullet. You just had to keep clear of the windows on hot muggy nights, or during Full Moon. Toward the end of my stay there, the landlords decided to sell the place – you can imagine the sensation my answering machine message caused, when prospective buyers called to schedule a tour.

Nasty as it sounds, I had a good time living there, and actually wrote / recorded quite a lot of material, including my first “Happy Christmas!” album, all of “After the Crush”, and other material that would either serve as “studies” for my later “Covers!” album, or would eventually emerge on “Theory and Escape”.

Kit-wise: now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve added some polyphony to my rig, and things are starting to look like I’m almost a musician. The studio evolved in two phases – while I lived there, a previous housemate moved out, so I upgraded to the larger room. The composite photo above shows the two stages. The first stage was on the right – here, I’m tracking guitar and vox for a bluegrass project, assisting some friends. On the left is the later evolution. Most of the gear in the foreground is home stereo, but the TR-707 drumbo sits atop the stack. If you squint right behind the guitar neck, you can see the top of my equipment rack. I had recently shelled out a grand for a Yamaha REV-7… livin’ large! My Poly-800 is on the stand behind me, and the shelves contain miscellaneous outboard gear, with the wires snaked down inside the drywall – the landlord loved that one, too!
High up on the top shelf are my soprano and alto water tubas.

After moving out of Stress Palace, I felt like getting out to the ‘burbs for a spell… so I found a group house out in Lanham, MD. It was a room down in the basement, paneled, and almost entirely underground. The owner of the house, Dave, had a room upstairs, and another room devoted to his hobby (collecting political buttons, of all things).

The rest of the basement had another room with another Dave roommate in it, a small rec room, a workroom, and another area closed in and lit by special high-priced bulbs, shining brightly down on a crop of humongous marijuana plants. This caused a certain amount of trepidation on my part; I thought the idea pretty silly, what with the MD state police flying in helicopters looking for the characteristic wavelength of such lights – they were like a “lighthouse, guiding your way to a felony distribution count”.

So, I stayed in my room a lot. A one point, Dave, bored with his life, took a vacation to St. Lucia, and returned with a bride, and an adopted son. This is where the term “Casa Goofy” came from. The little kid, Jud, would masticate bananas in his moist little fingers, and while I was at work he’d nip into my room and slather my guitars with the goo. Despite the rage these antics engendered in me, Judd had this really cute little sing-song St. Lucian way of saying “Goofy!!” The name stuck.

The high point of the period was when downstairs Dave moved out, and Michael “Sedge” Cantori moved in. Sedge became one of my very best friends, and we had some real times together. He played drums, and assisted me with a lot of percussion and vox, he was a member of “Nudda’ Beer”, and also filled in on some tactical gigs while I was a member of another band whose name I’ve forgotten. The only things I really remember about that band were:
1. We opened for Grateful Dead at Wilmer’s Park
2. When I signed on as rhythm guitarist, they gave me a cassette of their songs. One of those songs had the classic “Funky Edit” (if you’re a musician, and can play against the solo in Del Shannon’s “Runaway” or Gin Blossoms’ “Cajun Song”, you’ll know what a Funky Edit is.) I was the only member of the band that could play their Song exactly as it was on their album.

Strangely, the only shot I seem to have of Casa Goofy is this one, with me and Sedge at about 4AM, tanked on Bacardi, munching popcorn, listening to King Crimson, and charting out the storyboard for a rock opera I have yet to write. The equipment spans the far wall. As for Sedge… I lost track of him a few years back. Bud, if you stumble across this site, pop me an e-mail.
After Juli I got married, I set up shop in our apartment on Capitol Hill. Juli graciously donated what would’ve been our dining room, so I hooked everything up in there (after upgrading the electrical wiring in the apartment, which might’ve met code in 1923, but not since).

Along the way, the TASCAM had suffered a fatal motor failure, and was deemed beyond economical repair. Juli discovered a TASCAM 288 deck (8 tracks on double-speed cassette) on sale at Veneman Music, so I took a leap up in capability; at the same time I started striping SMPTE and locking up a sequencer. I’d been using MMC for a couple years, but the sequencer thing was brand new to me. It took me a year just to learn how it worked, but I finally got going.

CH2 was, by far, the most productive studio iteration I’ve ever had. I tracked a lot of music there.

This shot shows me, and our darling little cat Ludwig, who had an innate sense about music: anytime I’d hit a clinker, she’d give me The Eye… the rest of the time she’d be purring happily away atop the mix board.