On the technical side

The studios Otari MX80 was owned by great producer Douglas Carr and used for recordings with artists such as Meja, Ace of Base, Leila K and Army of Lovers.

Ana­log or digital? 
Ana­log record­ing dif­fers a lot from dig­i­tal, both in pro­duc­tion and sound qual­i­ty. How hard you hit the tape, the for­mu­la and record­ing speed high­ly affect the final result. So why go through all the extra work and also have the lim­i­ta­tions in tracks? The sim­ple answer is: because it sounds so much bet­ter! But there is more.

Dif­fer­ences
The ana­log record­ing process dif­fers great­ly from the dig­i­tal one. Ana­log record­ing is a bit like per­form­ing with­out a safe­ty net. In the dig­i­tal domain it’s easy to edit any­thing and to undo deci­sions. In ana­log it’s quite the oppo­site. Which makes every­body, musi­cians includ­ed, more alert. When record­ing ana­log it is more impor­tant mak­ing a real­ly great take, sim­ply because it’s not so easy to make changes afterwards.

The MX-80 at Omnivox is a 24-track. If you decide to work pure­ly in ana­log, thats the num­ber of chan­nels you have got. (There are meth­ods of cheat­ing – more lat­er). Prob­a­bly rew­er than you are used to, but many clas­sic albums have been record­ed with less. Few­er chan­nels means you have to take more imme­di­ate deci­sions. con­sid­er track-space, and think about whether you real­ly have room for 12 mics on the drums alone.

Prepa­ra­tions
Prepa­ra­tions for ana­log record­ing are more exten­sive than dig­i­tal record­ing. The tape machine is demag­ne­tized and cleaned sev­er­al times dur­ing a day of record­ing, 2″ tapes are demag­ne­tized and pos­si­bly baked.

If you would like to record by ana­log and then dig­i­tize, which is quite com­mon here, you can bor­row stu­dio tapes for free and have them dig­i­tized, after which stu­dio tapes are erased and then reused in oth­er projects.

Impor­tant!
If you want to save your tape-record­ings in phys­i­cal form you must bring your own tapes. If you are plan­ning to bring your own tapes, always con­tact us well in advance as the tape machine might need to be cal­i­brat­ed accord­ing your tape type.

The 2″ machine at Omnivox is set up for recording with 499-tapes.
The 1/4″ machine is set up for 900-tapes.

We often like to track live to tape, dig­i­tize and con­tin­ue work­ing in the dig­i­tal domain. This is not strict­ly puri­tan but you get the best out of the ana­log domain and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the digital.

The con­trol room offers the following:

Mix­ing con­sole: AMEK TAC Mag­num, 26 chan­nels. Beau­ti­ful ana­log mix­er from 1991 in great shape.

Mon­i­tors: Urei 813 + Snake Speakers

Tape machines: Otari MX80, 2″, 24 ch, Stud­er A 807, 1/4″

Com­put­er: MacPro 2013, 48Gb RAM, 8‑core proces­sor, 2 TB HD.

DAW: Log­icPro X

Out­board: UAD LA-610, Tube-Tech LCA-2B, Stock­tron­ics RX4000 plate reverb, Roland RE-501, Even­tide H910 etc. Out­board is eas­i­ly accessed via the mix­ing con­soles Ban­tam patchbay.

Micro­phones: Ehrlund hand­built tube micro­phones, Ehrlund Ehr, ‑D och ‑E micro­phones, + Bey­er­dy­nam­ics and GA rib­bon mics, Shure SM7, SM 57s, Sennheis­er, Rode etc.

Lis­ten­ing: Hear­back sys­tem with 5 per­son­al mixers.

The use of mics and out­board equpi­ment, instru­ments and amps is includ­ed in the stu­dio rent. You can also bring your own gad­gets that you are famil­iar with. Please call and dis­cuss pri­or to your stay at the stu­dio. Phone +46 702 069 918 or email.