Professional Audio in
Boulder, Colorado and Beyond

Audio's Amigos Recording Studio

Studio Recording

Audio's Amigos is the name of my recording studio in Boulder, Colorado. It is a comfortable space which has been home to many music albums, spoken word projects, and jam sessions. I work with creative people at all stages of their work to create audio recordings which best express the artist's vision.

When I designed and built Audio's Amigos studio, remodeling and extending my large garage, I used well-developed techniques of building for control of sound, but just as important to me was to leave the spaces looking and feeling comfortable, rather than high-tech or exotic or industrial, as a place where creative people could relax and be stimulated at the same time. I wanted a place where they could exercise their creative gifts, and it really has turned out that way.

One of the most gratifying aspects of my career in recording so far is the large number of artists who have done repeat projects, and multiple repeat projects (sometimes as many as 8 or 10 or more) with me, sometimes travelling as much as 1,000 miles (from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Seattle, Sandpoint, Idaho, even Italy–twice!) to work here at Audio's Amigos. Here is a partial list of people who have recorded here, leaving a little bit of themselves, their spirits, their energy, their magic, to enrich the space for the artists who will follow them. You can listen to a sample of these recordings.

Call Fergus at 303-442-3939 to discuss recording your next project at Audio's Amigos.

Equipment

I use a wide variety of digital and analog equipment to capture the best sound. Audio's Amigos is a 24-track recording studio.

In 1983, it was 2-track analog on an Otari MX 5050 B, which replaced the old TEAC and Tandberg 1/4-track machines of my hi-fi days. Audio's Amigos still has analog recording capability, with 1/4-inch, 1/2-track and 1/2-inch, 8-track machines from Otari, but most projects these days are recorded digitally to hard drive. Multi-track digital was done on ADAT for years, and Audio's Amigos still has 32 tracks of ADAT, with the remarkable BRC remote controller, which provides sync, offset, and lock-up to external clock sources, such as for doing soundtracks for video and film. But for superior sound and editing capabilities, I went to Pro Tools a few years ago, when that platform achieved full-range sound niceness with 24-bit architecture. Audio's Amigos' current LE system, running on a Mac G5 with Glyph hard drives, records up to 18 tracks simultaneously in 24-bit fidelity. Mixdown is to the Alesis ML-9600 Master Disk Recorder, also in 24-bit, with data truncation down to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz CD standards (known as RedBook) performed as the final step, to preserve the finest sound.

Digital storage and editing are superior to analog, but in the realm of signal processing, both digital and analog designs can be very useful. Sound is, after all, an analog phenomenon, and processes like equalization, compression, gating and expansion, and others are often best done in the analog domain, particularly when a particular characteristic is desired, such as "warmth", "roundness", "crunch", etc.

EQ from

Dynamics Processing from

Reverbs and Delays from

• Lexicon
• Alesis
• Yamaha
• Roland
• DeltaLab
• an old hand-made plate reverb (with a 3 ft. by 6 ft. sheet and frame by Jane Carpenter and Eric Sampson)
• and some old-style spring reverbs!

In addition to these "outboard" analog and digital processors, the Pro Tools system offers digital processors on each channel, and the Alesis Mastering Recorder features digital stereo dynamics and EQ, with a 48-bit architecture.

Mixers and Preamps

Microphones