Joey Sturgis

I have a Mac with a Digi 192 interface just in case a band arrives with Pro Tools demos,” reasons Joey, "but we'll immediately convert them to Cubase. One PC is an old system that runs Windows XP and that stays at 37 Studios. For all three PCs I use the RME Fireface 800, which is the interface that literally never has any problems. And we use a Countryman DI box straight into the RME for guitars, bass and any instrument that uses a cable. I'm an in‑the‑box person, so if we record vocals, for example, we go through a preamp and leave the compression for later. If you are editing a vocal and it's already compressed, you can't really touch it, so I prefer to compress afterwards.

I have a Mac with a Digi 192 interface just in case a band arrives with Pro Tools demos,” reasons Joey, "but we'll immediately convert them to Cubase. One PC is an old system that runs Windows XP and that stays at 37 Studios. For all three PCs I use the RME Fireface 800, which is the interface that literally never has any problems. And we use a Countryman DI box straight into the RME for guitars, bass and any instrument that uses a cable. I'm an in‑the‑box person, so if we record vocals, for example, we go through a preamp and leave the compression for later. If you are editing a vocal and it's already compressed, you can't really touch it, so I prefer to compress afterwards.

If I'm in a studio that has some really nice compressors, like two Urei 1176s that have serial numbers next to each other, I might put the room mics through those. I use very widely spaced, large‑diaphragm condensers for my room mics, and I have those pretty loud in my mix.

I've used a lot of Waves plug‑ins and there was a time when I was using the UAD2 PCI card and the plug‑ins that ran on its DSP chips, so from my experience using those, I was able to find certain attack, release and ratio relationships that gave me my 'sound', and that's what I've factored into the vocal compressor.