Kevin Augunas: X-Series Converters
Posted on: September 18, 2008
Posted in: Artists, Products, Video, X-Series
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Producer//Mixer/Engineer Kevin Augunas explains his recording process while showing off his rack of Apogee X-Series converters and his unique one room recording studio. Augunas has worked with great artists like Cold War Kids, Butch Walker, The Vandals, and Lost Prophets, and has been using his Apogee converters on every session.
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Video Transcript
“ Hi, my name is Kevin Augunas and I’m here in my studio in North Hollywood, California. The way I tend to record here is mostly to tape, I prefer the sound of tape for the records I make. I use a 16 track 2 inch and sometimes I use a 4 track 1 inch also. When I’m using tape and the Mic Pre’s on this console, or some of the outport gear that I enjoy listening to and using, the Apogee’s I find are very transparent and the minimal amount of loss or digital conversion comes through using those… to my ear.”
“I’ve tested a lot of digital converters and I really find these to be the best for my setup. So I can kind of fly back and forth between the tape machines and computer, and really not lose anything in my quality of signal going through those converters. They are very valuable to me in that process.”
“This room is a very large room, it’s an old soundstage so it’s got an awkward sound to it because it’s so big but it may be hard to tell in this recording but it’s very dead sounding, there is not a lot of reverberation. This is the control room, but it’s also the live room, so it’s one big setup so it’s a really specific type of recording. I prefer that, I find that I’m more comfortable in the environment, I find the artist is more comfortable, especially if they are younger musicians or younger artists that haven’t made many or any records before. It has a more of a feeling of being in a front room together, and i think it’s less like being under a microscope and having to record.”
“I do pretty much everything I record in this room with the exception of … drums I will record at another studio if I want more of a bigger room sound. This last Cold War Kids record that I recorded, we did drums in many different studios just to kind of capture different room sounds for different songs we thought were appropriate. We went everywhere from Ocean Way to Sound City to Sound City, and did some stuff here too.”
“Needless to say, if they didn’t have Apogee’s I would drag mine with me but most of the time they do have Apogee’s so it made it very convenient. And in those environments I would record the same way, I’d record the tape and immediately transfer down through the Apogee’s to Pro-Tools and I would bring it back to the studio that way.”