Monthly Archives: June 2021

We’ve been doing a lot of work recently recording orchestra parts for Kalevala The Musical, a show inspired by Finnish Folklore. One of the unique aspects of Kalevala is that it heavily features the harp, an instrument far underrepresented considering its caliber of sheer beauty. We were happy to work with harpist Liann Cline to get the absolute best sound out of her instrument. We ended up putting an xy stereo pair at the front of the harp and our top shelf Neumann offset by a 45 degree angle as an additional mono mic.

The result could bring tears to your eyes! Seriously, it was easily one of the most beautiful sounds we’ve had the pleasure of capturing in our NYC recording studio. The harp is capable of deep rich notes as well as the most detailed mids and lighter than air high notes. Liann is incredibly talented, great to work with, and turned out to have roots in Michigan much like our own recording engineer, James Quesada.

After recording the harp parts for every track of this full-length musical, we’re as eager as ever to hear how the final product turns out for Kalevala The Musical! Follow @kalevalamusical for updates and @lianncline for more magical harp 🙂

This week we got a request from an old-school producer to transfer some cassette tapes over to digital copies. Since our Midtown recording studio has the analog gear and know-how to make it happen, we were happy to oblige. He had some live recordings, old demos, and some mastered EPs to transfer which we popped into our Dolby tape deck, connected via patch bay to our Apollo Digital converter, and recorded into Pro Tools.

The transfer happens in real-time which means we record the cassettes at the same, normal speed you would listen to them. In other words, recording these tapes to digital also means a good ol’ fashioned listening session.

This makes for a good opportunity to do some studio upkeep like restringing our Yamaha acoustic guitar. It’s a surprisingly nice sounding instrument for its price class with a balanced to bright sound and all the more capable with a new set of strings.

Cassettes going digital or a guitar donning a fresh set of strings, there’s no better place to give your music a facelift than our NYC recording studio!

We recently had the pleasure of recording Voice Over with one-of-a-kind comedian and actor Mario Cantone. We’re fans of Mario’s comedic style in his stand up and characters like Anthony from Sex and the City. It was fantastic to have him in our Midtown Manhattan studio and see his humor and comedic timing brought to life on our very own mics!