"I may not have much gear, but I really want to master the things that I do have as opposed to buying each new flashy thing that comes on the market."- Michael, talking about his studio configuration
Tucked away in a corner of his Brooklyn apartment, Michael's home studio,
"In an apartment situation, there's always the noise/annoying your neighbors factor so I've assembled the gear with that in mind. If I need a sample of a live instrument performance, I'll try to record that on location or at least during the daytime. Late nights, most everything that I do is generally routed through a good-'ol pair of studio headphones."
Michael enjoys using the studio setup as a "sketchpad" for ideas.
"It helps me to get my ideas down so they don't vanish from my mind. More great ideas are lost that way… And then, I figure that when the time comes to actually maybe do something with the ideas, I would consider assembling a group of musicians to help me, and I'd head to a professional studio. I could probably afford about ten to fifteen minutes in one ;-)"
Gear Listing:
Yamaha Clavinova CLP 930 — "This gives me some of the most lush sounds in my collection, even though there's only eight of them. Plus, there came a time when I simply could not survive without having an instrument with weighted-key action. The feeling of the Clavinova is remarkably realistic."
Korg X5-D — "The first piece of professional equipment I ever got. It gives me a nice large bank of sounds to use in my MIDI compositions, and I also gig with it."
Mackie 1202VLZ Mixer — "The core of the studio. Solved every problem I ever had with recording, and even some problems I didn't KNOW I had!"
M-Audio Oxygen 8 Controller
Event TR-6 Studio Monitors
Computers and Software:
Dell M4400 Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz 4GB RAM
Dell Dimension 4100 PIII 1GHz 512MB RAM
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Audio Interface
Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA
Cakewalk Sonar
Sonic Foundry Soundforge 5.0