to make music through the year of 2020 while we were supposed to be quarantined . I was making music .
[ WM ] Well , now let ' s talk about the gear in the studio . What did you choose to capture tracks with and why ?
[ Crowder ] I work in both Pro Tools and Ableton . I ' ve always worked this way , but especially in 2020 when everybody ' s at a distance . And so most of the file management was on my end , as people pass it back and forth . I have a couple of go-to ’ s that I use . I ' ve got a Shure SM7 that I do a lot of demo stuff on that I have gone through these B-76 ' s . They ' re like old vinyl cutting pres . I use them as a preamp on the SM7 , because normally it ' s got a lower output and you ' d normally put a Cloud Lifter in between it to boost the gain . Well these 76 ' s already have a gain in it .
Because they are made to cut vinyl , they ' re just the real deal ! So , I wind up with a lot of stuff that I would typically have called writing material or song or demo stuff , working through pre-production . But most of those things wind up to keep as tracks . So , I pretend it is my scratch vocal chain , or my scratch guitar chain , knowing that most likely it won ' t be . And then I also use the Blue . When I ' m really cutting vocals , I use the Blue , it ' s humongous . That is a big , huge tube looking situation . I ' ve had it since back in Waco days and you can change all the capsules out . the space ?”
He grabbed me . He connected me with Gavin Haverstick , who ' s an credible acoustician . And he came down , shot the room , told us where we needed to put our listening place and face it this way . Here ' s where we need to do treatments . And just did the whole deal . We didn ' t have to worry about isolation because it was in the basement already . The neighbors weren ' t really a problem . Or if I have a lot of sound coming in from outside . And so we just got to spend all our money making the room sound good . And then my wife , of course did the visuals to it . And man , it ' s just stunning . And it got done right in time for us to lock down . The weekend I got sent home , they were wrapping the material on the acoustic installation and putting in lighting . And then they walked away , and I was like , “ That was close ”. So , I just got
So I ' m using all of the Universal Audio stuff . I ' ve got a couple of Apollos . And then all of the synth ’ s stuff going through a console all the time . I ' ll have some plugins on most everything that I ' m committing to this . Just because I ' ve gotten to fiddle with what I like and I kind of settled in .
[ WM ] I ' ve seen several of those keyboards of yours mounted on the wall . Tell us about them , are they controlling ?
[ Crowder ] Yes , they ' re all controlling . I think