STUDIO NAME: Basement Recordings, The E Room

LOCATION: Brooklyn, New York

KEY CREW: Trevor John, owner/instructor/engineer; Ernest Graham, instructor/producer/engineer; Margueritte Robinson, instructor

BACKGROUND: Trevor John was a musician with an engineering background when he started his own studio in a cramped Brooklyn basement in the mid-1980s. Young people from the surrounding neighborhood would come to the studio loaded with questions. Tired of answering the same questions over and over, John instructed the kids to come back at a specific time so that he could answer them all at once. And, thus, a recording and computer school was born. Today, through agreements with several music and computer industry corporations, Basement Recordings offers digital audio recording classes and computer instruction for people of all incomes. Basement Recordings is a full-service multimedia facility consisting of several classrooms and computer labs, as well as five studio rooms: the Control Room, the X-Lounge, the Live Room, the Video Room, and the E-Room. The E-Room is their project studio, and is detailed below.

CONSOLE: Yamaha O3D and O1V; Mackie

MONITORS: Yamaha NS-10M, MS101II, and MSP-5

RECORDERS: Yamaha MD8; Sony PCM-2500 DAT machine

OUTBOARD GEAR: Yamaha GC2020C comp/limiter and SPX 1000 effects processor; Lexicon PCM7O effects processor; ART ADA TFX Time Effects; Zoom V9 120 effects processor; Roland SDE-1000 effects processor

MICROPHONES: AKG Assortment, 3900, 3700, and 414

MIDI EOUIPMENT: Yamaha G50 alternate controller

KEYBOARDS AND SOUND MODULES: Yamaha EX7 keyboard, TG500 sound module, MU100R single-rack sound module, and MU8O single-rack sound module

SAMPLER: Akai MPC3OOO

RHYTHM MACHINE: Yamaha RY3O

SYNCHRONIZER: MOTU Micro Express

COMPUTER: Pentium II 400 MHz (128RAM, 10 GB HD)

COMPUTER PERIPHERALS: Iomega 2GB Jaz drive, Zip drive; Yamaha DSP Factory (AX44 and DSP2416 cards, SW1000XG board w/PLG100-DX, PLG100-VL, PLG100-VH plug-in system); Cakewalk/Peavey StudioMix; Agfa 1280 digital camera

COMPUTER SOFTWARE: Cakewalk Pro Audio 8, Overture 2, and Guitar Studio

STUDIO NOTES: Trevor John comments:  

The E-Room is a project studio in the traditional sense. It's set up for sampling and looping. It’s also arranged so that one person can control everything. What really differentiates Basement Recordings from other studios is our 100-MBPS network connecting all of the rooms. With the click of a button, the studio becomes so much more. This intranet allows us to work outside the confines of each particular room. We can even e-mail a file to a studio in Europe, have it worked on over there, and have it returned to us, no problem. Also, most of our equipment is interchangeable between the rooms.

EQUIPMENT NOTES: John continues: I've really gotten attached to the Yamaha 02R, which we have in most of the rooms. Yamaha is like a natural solution in terms of putting it all together. The only thing they don't have is an actual recording device. The O2R has the ability to interface with everything and that's what makes it so powerful. It's also very straightforward and easy to use. In terms of software, Cakewalk is our main thing, and it's getting better and better. We make it mandatory for everybody here to master the Cakewalk stuff. We have Cakewalk in every computer. The potential of that software is unbelievable. The Cakewalk stuff also allows us to pull things into PowerPoint, which is a very popular program. And I believe that [Cakewalk/Peavey] StudioMix represents the future as far as collaborations between hardware and software manufacturers go. Now that I use StudioMix, I don’t want to operate without it.

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