Layout

Orchard Sound is in LaGrangeville, NY, which is in the Hudson Valley about 70 miles north of New York City. It occupies the garage and part of the basement of a ranch-type house that is moderately isolated, if on a fairly well-traveled road.

The acoustic room is the garage, and is acoustically untreated. There is a gobo, and that's about it. Scott has to move his mother's Volvo out of the garage when he's tracking! The control room is down a set of stairs in the basement. It has a 7' ceiling, and is approximately 18' wide by about 24' long. The only concession to modernity is a small vocal booth.

The multitrack is an elderly 2" Soundcraft 467 24-track deck that makes quite a racket (it added 10 dB to the noise floor - when I first came in I thought it was a dehumidifier running!). The console is a well-used Harrison 3232, with MegaMix VCA automation available. Monitoring is via Yamaha NS10s with tissue paper taped over the tweeters, and Auratones. The outboard gear is pretty typical, with some older tube stuff and some digital FX. Mixdown is to DAT and cassette. There's a typical collection of microphones: 1 Neumann U87 and 2 KM 84s, 3 AKG 414's, Sennheiser 441s and 421s, Shure 57s and 58s, an EV RE20, some Beyers and Crown PZMs.

Acoustic treatment? A sheet of Sonex on a side wall, a couple of traps in the corners. That's it! Hardly anything at all.

So, it's all pretty basic. Anybody could set this place up. Scott bolted it together on weekends, with lots of cutting and trying and a general indifference to issues of professional appearance and audio political correctness. There is no flat frequency response, no carefully calculated reverb time, no painstakingly developed control room. It's plain and simple crude - microphones in one room, equipment in another - so there!

And it works, Glory Be! Scott has all the work he wants, the equipment's paid for, his clients are happy (more about that later), and he has a lot of fun working! When you get right down to it, there's not a whole lot more you could ask for.

Obviously, there's got to be more to this. What's going on here? Now, for the rest of the story ...

Post a Comment