SSL Duende Mini: An In-Depth Review -
Casa Nova Studios and Will Hensley put the SSL Duende Mini to the test for our friends at Sonic Scoop!
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It’s been a good long while since we’ve done any blogging out of our lovely Casa Nova Studios, but it’s not without good reasons. Let me give you a little recap of what’s happening in our crazy world of audio.
The biggest thing to happen in the past year is our current transition into a new studio. Yes, after 4 years we’ve decided to move on from our home behind Main Drag Music and move….a half a block away!
Why would we do this? Well, I tell you!
Over our years in our two previous spaces, we’ve had a lot of ideas about of the things we want to accomplish in both audio and multimedia. We’ve been involved in throwing events/music and art shows, producing bands and singer/songwriters, creating a huge amount of music for corporate sources (commercials, movies, trailers, product releases, events) and had a wonderful parade of all walks of life be a part of our studios. We feel very blessed and lucky to have done all that we have up to this point. But even with all that, there was a lot missing from how we wanted to be able to work, and most importantly, the scale of what we wanted to accomplish. Its always been our dream to be a much more capable video/photo facility as well as a full fledged audio production company, and now, it seems as if our dreams are about to come true.
So we’re officially announcing our relocation to our good friend Zach Gold’s visual facility, Lovescool Studio. We’re taking up an audio residence inside this beautifully bare 4000 sq. ft. studio with full lighting and video facilities and intend to bring a new level of sophistication, crazy, and technology savvy to their already intensely high level of production value. Be sure to check out their links and see what sort of amazing projects they’ve been working on over the years.
With this merger, we’re going to complete our path to becoming a much more wide-ranged facility and are already embarking on some very amazing projects with them, a couple of them being scoring a short film and some high-profile ad work. We couldn’t be happier about the full potential of all of this coming together, and will most certainly be announcing an opening party which will show you what we’re made of!
This also, however, means we are in the middle of building our new studio, which means we’re not fully tracking capable in the month of March. At this very second, I’m typing and composing music from an undisclosed location in Williamsburg with our two Pro Tools HD rigs and a rack of toys while we wait for our wonderful new facility to be constructed.
There are a TON of things going on, and I’ll be posting a lot in the coming days and weeks about our adventures. In the meantime, here are some images of our tearing down and moving the studio, only pictures can describe what sort of endeavour that was!! A big thank you to all the friends who came to help us haul stuff down the street in the middle of a blizzard. It was trying, but we made it through unscathed and are stronger for it.
There will be more pictures coming in the upcoming days, we’re just getting really settled in the new joint. Building progress pictures to come as well!
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you know what’s really fuckin hard? coming up with a band name in 2009. Even if you’re amazingly brilliant, well read, and have more internet geek knowledge than 50 nerds, chances are, most of the cool or semi-cool ideas you had for bands names have been bands that suck for a long time. True story.
I named my own band, Nova Clutch, years ago walking through this cool neighborhood I’d been to one other time at that moment, DUMBO. I thought it was so mysterious and so fucking New York. That’s basically all gone now, including the namesake of my band, which was torn down so douchebags can park their Hummers in a paved lot. The Nova Clutch building was one of the first buildings on the waterfront at the turn of the century. When I was leaving the neighborhood after having a rehearsal in an underground theatre with my at the time unnamed band, I looked up at this building and said, hmm…Nova Clutch…I think that’s the name of the band now. Well, we’ll use it until something cooler comes up. But nothing did. And years after, I’m glad nothing else did. It still makes me happy to think about it, especially after moving there another 6 months later, it became the spiritual home of my band (the neighborhood, not the building), and it was there that it grew (and I grew) to become what it was to become. I haven’t lived in DUMBO for years now, and neither has my studio been there, but to this day the name continues to have more meaning for me. Not bad for looking up and seeing a sign, literally.
But when being asked to name new projects or other friends’ projects, damn, its HARD! I’m sure many of you have gone through this same process, maybe resorting to dictionaries, encyclopedias, wikis, etc etc. But to find a truly good name, it just kind of has to hit you. Last night I named a new project, which will be announced soon, and after searching for days and weeks for something, my brain sort of combined all the things it was looking for in one name. This was the video that led me to my conclusion:
Dude, its been a long time since I’ve done any blogging, what gives? Well, I’ll tell you, things have been crazy for me and Nick here at Casa Nova Studios, but we got to take a MUCH needed vacation in the Catskill Mountains. It may have just become my favourite place in the world to be. We’re thinking about offering vacation/songwriting packages out to there, more on that as it develops.
In the meantime, we’ve been developing a few songwriters and finishing up a few records. There will be announcements on releases in the near future. We’re going to be ramping up our web presence as well, so you’ll be seeing a lot more coming from the little control room we call home, including videos, interviews, demos, and more! Our goal is to bring you deeper into the process of how we create, and in some way, making us seem a little less anti-social than we really are.
We’ve done a lot to the studio in the past few months to streamline our operation, and we’ll be updating the gear on our page to reflect this. We’ve been getting rid of anything we don’t need and turning that into things we DO need, and also really making our workflow very very efficient. A lot of how Nick and I work relies on the usage of two computers (sometimes 3!) working in tandem, constantly exchanging sessions between them, and sometimes even synching them between and taking both audio and midi from each computer and having them interact. This process can get confusing fast and we have taken great strides to work out a very straight-forward process to the best ways to do it.
Anyway, its late. More to come, I’m back on this blog thing.
There is one thing in life on this planet that you can always count on, and that thing is change. It always comes on fast and most times completely unexpected. Your worth as a person and citizen is measured by how well you can adapt to that. Some might go as far as to call it Natural Selection, which it most certainly is. Sometimes you win, but most often you don’t…does this mean you lose? Maybe. But fuck it, you’ll get another chance. Life is the perpetual chance you are given. So far, I think I’m ok. Here’s to another chance at winning the game your head creates for itself.