Currently I don't have any endorsement deals with equipment manufacturers, so what you see below is what I just happen to own. I'd be more than happy to discuss potential endorsements, but for now the fact that I play a particular piece of equipment should not be taken as any sort of endorsement of it or the manufacturer.

These following pictures are of my studio, which also doubles as my office for my book writing business. As you can see, it is a clutter of musical instruments and computers. I took the first and fourth pictures from the top of the stair case in the house, as this room is a loft that overhangs the living room.

Studio Views

Instruments

I guess I've got a little more than a dozen guitars that I've accumulated over the years. Here are some pictures of what I have along with descriptions (descriptions to the left of the instrument). On the Yamaha keyboard, obviously I'm such a great piano player since I put the note names on the keys! :-) I don't have a picture of it yet, but I also use a Johnson J-Station amp modeller a bit for recording electric guitars and bass direct. I also have a cheapie Rogue 5-string bass now that I didn't have when I first created this page.

My main guitars:

Carvin DC131T
Carvin DC145C

1960-something Gibson Melody Maker-D		1987 Washburn G5-V		1995 Yamaha CG Series Classical guitar
1960-something semihollow body electric		2003 Martin DC-15E		2002 Ibanez RG-120
1986 Yamaha Clavinova CL-20 w/FB-01 MIDI module

Amplifiers

Bogner Ecstasy 101B

Top: 1960-something Epiphone Electra tube amp Bottom: 1997 Marshall 8040 Valvestate 40 watt amp

Top: 1960-something generic solid state amp Bottom: 1987 KMD 60 watt tube amp

Other Equipment

CAD Equitek E-100 small diaphragm condensor microphone		Shure SM-57 instrument/vocal dynamic mic		Mackie 1202-VLZ mixing board
BOSS DR-550mkII drum machine		Stomp boxes! Unpictured: Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive Morley Little Alligator volume pedal Dunlop Crybaby wah pedal

The Multi-track recorder

My current recording PC is a Pentium III-850mhz w/ 768MB RAM. The primary recording hard drive is an 36.8 GB Seagate Cheetah 15,000 RPM ultra160 SCSI hard drive, and I have an 18.4 GB version of the same drive in the computer as well for storage and such. There's also a 7200 RPM Western Digital 20GB drive in the system as well that I use for extra storage/backup for projects I'm not presently working on. The system is running Windows XP Professional.

For soundcards, I use an Event (now Echo) Darla24 audio card, which does 24-bit/96Khz audio recording. For MIDI, I use a SoundBlaster Audigy, which has the very cool feature of being able to use SoundFonts, which are samples that you can load into the card. Makes for much more realistic MIDI instruments.

For software, I record using Cubase SX and process my audio with SoundForge. The combination works well along with the different DirectX plug-ins that you can purchase separately to work with both products.

This recording setup pretty much leaves me feeling not quite unlimited in what I can do, but not too far off (naturally I'd like to have real orchestras and such for things I have to do with MIDI, but oh well). One of the biggest reasons I hadn't recorded much in the several years prior to computer-based recording was the frustration of having outgrown my 4-track cassette recorder, but not having an alternative to it. Finally, computer technology has reached a point where using a PC as the basis for a multitrack studio is realistic. On a recent song, I had approximately 14 MIDI tracks and 20 audio tracks playing back simultaneously without any problems. I have an IBM ThinkPad R51 laptop as well, and intend to replace my aging PIII with it as my primary recording station once I buy a decent recording interface for it.

Monitors

For monitoring I use a combination of Event PS-6 monitor speakers and Sony MDR-7506 headphones. I do the primary mixing on the PS-6s, but use the headphones as a reference point to make sure the mix sounds balanced when played through that type of setup.