So without further ado, here’s my master list of recording gear, software, and instruments I’ve collected over the past 10 years.
Recording Gear
- MacBook Pro 15″
- MOTU Traveler interface – portable, 4 preamps and lots of other inputs and outputs
- Zoom H4n – the swiss army knife of recorders, great for mobile recording
Microphones
- AT4040 large diaphragm condensers, x2 – great for recording almost any instruments, get two for nice stereo recordings!
- Rode NTG-1 shotgun mic – I got this directional mic for video work, but it’s useful when you need to reduce room tone and get a focused recording of one instrument within an ensemble.
- Shure SM-57 – a swiss-army dynamic microphone, cheap but everyone swears by it
- Shure SM-58 – classic mic for live vocals (but I don’t use it in the studio much)
- Sennheiser Evolution Wireless G3 – I got this lavalier mic for video work, but I’ve used it when I ran out of other condenser mics
- Audix D6 kick drum mic – haven’t used it a ton, but it works well on kick drums
Sound Treatment
I have seven giant monolithic boxes with seemingly random holes drilled in them. They’re called binary amplitude diffusers, and they do a good job of absorbing sound, but also diffusing it in a way that doesn’t make the room dead. You’ll see these in the background of a lot of my studio pictures…
Software
- Ableton Live – my go-to DAW for almost everything, so great for experimenting with electronic music
- Soundtrack Pro – not the best DAW, but it came with Final Cut, so I use it for film sound mixes sometimes
- Finale – user experience is a nightmare for beginners, but you can do any music notation thing you need to with it
- Audacity – I still use this free software for noise reduction
- MilkyTracker – had a brief stint using this for chiptune music
Virtual Instruments
- Ableton Live Suite – comes with pretty great piano, percussion, and orchestral sounds
- Puremagnetik – various synth packs have come in handy, especially their Retro Synths
- Plogue Chipsounds – great chip music presets
- Garritan – these sounds came with Finale, often use the harp from this library
Note: I use the tiny, but effective M-Audio Keystation Mini 32 to record MIDI.
Real Instruments
- Upright piano – with punch-tack attachment built by my friend Mitch
- Fender Stratocaster
- Fender P-bass
- Violin
- Classical guitar
- Steel string guitars – including a fun 3/4 size Martin
- Ukulele
- Hand percussion
- Clarinet – I’m trying to learn!
If you’re interested in music production, you might want to check out my podcast Charlie’s Music Production Lessons, in which I dive into the process of making electronic music.
