2012 marked the completion of my new recording studio at the Tritschler Precision Engineering Headquarters in Enon, OH, and this page has been assembled in response to numerous requests for more information about my scratch-built console, microphones, and other stuff I used to make The Doctor Is IN!. I've been recording almost as long as I've been playing guitar, and building recording equipment nearly as long as I've been tinkering with amplifiers; the two have truly worked in parallel from the very beginning. I'm proud to report that this is the first studio I've had the freedom to design without being constrained by apartments, landlords, or living with my parents.

One of my objectives in the design of the studio was to have the absolute least amount of gear possible. In an age where imported, mass-produced recording gear and instruments are so incredibly cheap and it is so tempting to want to equip oneself with as many tools as possible, I wanted to get back to an age where the gear was largely handmade, cost a serious fortune (which it still does for the real-deal stuff), and was built to last a lifetime. To that end, I've resorted to designing and building most of the studio gear myself.

One aspect of the studio that may surprise those familiar with how this stuff works is that my entire operation is high-impedance, unbalanced, and totally transformerless, inspired by the hi-fi approach the Sax brothers pioneered with their Mastering Lab in Hollywood in the 1960's. Another thing is that I don't use equalization. If I had to characterize my overall recording aesthetic, I'd say that I simply prefer raw, natural, unaffected sound. Which isn't to say that I won't put a little compression on a lead vocal or tape-delay the echo chamber, go for a slightly dirty bass sound; hell, even flange a whole mix if the feeling is right. But as for the audio shenanigans that became very en vogue a few decades ago and still haunt popular music; no thanks.

Finally, I'd like to emphasize that although I often come across as an audio elitist and indeed run in some extremely pretentious audiophile circles, I firmly believe that whatever sounds good is good and this is just my particular path.

At the heart of my control room is the console I started building in the summer of 1996, before my senior year of high school. At that time, I had just gotten my most prized posession; a perfect-condition Ampex AG440B-8 1" eight-track tape machine, "permanently loaned" to me by an attorney in Lorain, Ohio, who is now a judge. Why did I endeavor to build a mixing console as a teenager? Enthralled by old photographs of bespectacled recording engineers sitting at these gorgeous battleship-grey behemoths that cost as much as a mansion and made some of the most incredible recordings of all time, I just couldn't get excited by some little thing you could buy in a music store. It got even worse when I looked at the schematic of one and saw more integrated circuits than you could shake a stick at. So I decided to build a mixer with tube microphone preamps and the rest discrete-transistor; eighteen channels just in case I ever got a 16-track 3M M79 tape deck like my hero, Henry Hirsch. I bought a bunch of surplus rack panels at Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio and got to work.

Well, the console turned out to be the never-ending project of a lifetime, until I finally finished it in November 2009. I had actually machined the panels and gotten all the mike preamps working by the time I graduated high school and had mostly designed the rest by 2001, even built the case; but it seemed like every few years I'd get a better idea for the audio circuitry and redesign it. At some point I decided enough was enough and that I needed to get the damned thing working before it entered a third decade of incompletion. I ended up sticking with eight tracks and scaled the console down to twelve channels, making a somewhat-reasonable package that fit on a chopped Steelcase desk.

I record to analog tape and always have because it's the sound and workflow I greatly prefer. I've also worked in digital studios and made records for other people on Pro Tools and all that stuff, and it's fine; I certainly appreciate other people's preferences and have heard some mighty good-sounding digital recordings. There may not be any tape recorder manufacturers left, but there are still at least two companies making high-quality recording tape and a number of people manufacturing and refurbishing things like tape heads and precision transport components, so I intend to keep working this way for a long time.

I've had the same two-track analog tape machine since I was a third-grade kid; a Crown SX-722 deck my father picked up in the early-80's from the WOSU radio station in Columbus, Ohio for 100 bucks. No, that wasn't a typo; my dad really gave me an industrial tape recorder in a giant grey rack when I was eight years old. I made all kinds of hilarious overdubbed home recordings right off the bat and later cut my tape machine maintenance/setup/modification teeth on that thing; figured out how to modify it for 15 inches per second and got the equalization and bias right the same summer I started my console. John Haines, who was Crown's service manager from 1965 to 1977 and started a business in Goshen, Indiana supporting old Crown decks some 30 years ago, has been selling me parts and keeping my machines tip-top from the very beginning; he supplied me with new drive motor bearings and NOS Nortronics heads for this deck and pulled together all the parts needed to build two essentially-new portable SX-722's, which I keep for live recording, backup decks, and for the real tape flanging on the tune "Snakebite!" on The Doctor Is IN!

The electronics in my main recorder are very heavily modified and have been rebuilt a few times, and there's no question that these decks have their own mechanical peculiarities that I've learned to intuit and work with over the last 25 years, but I still prefer that old thing over anything else I've had here, including Ampex AG440B's, Otari decks, and even the Studer A-80 I used at SoundSpace in Yellow Springs when I worked there. Maybe I'm just sentimental. On the other hand, the Crown Pro-700 transport, which came out around 1967, is so bone-simple it doesn't even have relays, let alone transport logic or tension control, and yet for some reason I feel the large belt-driven flywheel makes for a solidity of sound that's just different and special, like a Thorens TD-124 turntable.

The mono deck in the portable case sitting on top of my main deck in the control room photo is one I built for my Master's Thesis in 2003. It's a Crown Pro-700 transport and a gutted tube Crown RP-3 electronics unit (relax, it was already trashed), rebuilt with a special tube recording circuit I came up with called the sigma-transadmittance amplifier. I thought I was very clever, electronically summing the bias and audio signals into a low-distortion transresistance amplifier driving the record head with no traps or resonant circuits, but it turns out Tandberg did something along those lines - albeit with solid-state circuitry and probably a lot more stages - in the 1970's. Oh well. I've made mono rockabilly records on it and mainly use it for slap echo and pre-delaying my echo chamber, and there's something about the sound that makes me want to build stereo and multitrack decks with that circuit; maybe someday when I have some free time (!).