When I was down at the Michael Wagener Recording Workshop, it became glaringly obvious to me that the biggest difference between my home studio and Wagener's studio (besides the zillion platinum records on the wall and ridiculous amount of monstrously high end gear) was isolation.

When Wagener was recording drums, you could just barely hear the drums at all when standing in the control room. It was easy to listen to his Adams studio monitors at a very reasonable level and hear exactly what the drums were doing.

You could tweak compression, eq, etc to your hearts content. I couldn't believe how much easier it was to make great sounding drum sounds when you could listen while the drummer was playing. You could make changes real time. Right away, I knew I wanted to have this same flexibility.

No Drums Yet

Unfortunately, there is not enough demand in my area for a high end studio. This is unfortunate, but because of this, I'm not able to build the isolated drum room that I really want. However, I can do the next best thing...build a guitar fort!

My Guitar Fort

I'm not sure why I call my isolation rig a “fort”. I guess I've always liked forts since I was a little kid. While this fort will probably not fend off attacks from the British or Native Americans, it will knock down a tremendous amount of volume from your guitar cabinet. In fact, I think this is the breakthrough of the century for recording guitars at home.

Benefits

• My guitar tone is the best it's ever been.

• It's rare that I don't record distorted electric guitars on 10 now.

• My girlfriend can watch TV just a few rooms away without even noticing.

• The volume of the guitar is knocked down so much that the guitar player monitors off my studio monitors as if he is recording direct guitar.

• It cost me the price of a decent guitar pedal.

• Since I can really hear what is going on with my guitar sounds real time, I'm now setting my amps in ways that I would have considered to be “crazy” before. For example, I recently recorded metal guitars with my Rivera Knucklehead with the gain set on 1.5, lows on 0, mids on 0, highs on 5, focus on 0, presence on 5, volume on 10. This would have never happened if I wasn't able to hear the exact recorded tone of my guitars.

Want To See How I Did It?
You'll need to be a member of my recording form.? Join now!

It's only available to member's area?of my forum! Read about my Guitar Fort.

?