Strawbale Studio

Strawbale Studio is a solar powered, completely off the grid recording studio. It was built with, you guessed it... straw bales. Because of its unique construction and location in the middle of the forest, there is a very special atmosphere here. This is a place where the rules can be bent, broken, or rewritten. The studio was built inexpensively as a way to capture music for music's sake - not to have to record commercial projects to pay the bills. Hopefully, the projects recorded here will do well in the marketplace, but that is not the highest priority...

The real magic of the studio, though, is a great room in an amazingly beautiful place. It's a peaceful and relaxed place to create and capture music. Another reason it is so relaxed is because it's inexpensive - inexpensive to run and so inexpensive for our clients. The vibe here is musical rather than technical, we realize, though, that recording is a technical process and we have enough technical savvy to insure that what is recorded here is, in fact, musical.

Location:

Northwestern Montana, although it's surrounded by woods, it's still an easy hour drive from Glacier Park International Airport or 45 minutes from the Whitefish Amtrak/Greyhound stations.

Recorders and Mixing Boards:

Alesis HD24 24-track 24-bit/96kHz hard disk recorder, 16 track Yamaha AW4416 hard disc recorder, Tascam CD-RW4U, Tascam CDRW 2000, Tascam PORTASTUDIO 424mkll, Behringer 3242X, Eurodesk MX9000, XENYX 1204FX

Monitors:

Alesis M1A M2, Roland MA 8, AKG K66

Preamps / Effects / Processors:

Symetrix 302, Presonus Blue Tube, Presonus Digitube, Sansamp, Reamp, Lexicon Jam Man, Gibson Oberheimer Echoplex, T.C. Electronics D2 digital tap delay, T.C. Electronics Gmajor, Fatman Tube Compressor, Empirical Labs EL7 Fatso jr, T.C. Electronics M3000 Studio Reverb, Virtulizer Pro DSP2024P, Ultra-Graph Pro Dual 31 Band EQ, Ultra Gain Pro Tube Pre Amp, Composer Pro Dynamic Processor, Ultra Curve Pro 24bit Dual DSP, Sansi RA-500 (reverberation amplifier), Lexicon MPX 100 Reverb Unit

Microphones:

AKG C414B-ULS, Blue- Blueberry, Earthworks Tc 30s, Shure 57s and 58s, Audix D1, Audio-Technica drum mics

In the arsenal:

A few didgeridoos, guitars, guitar tube amps, a healthy dose of drums and percussion instruments, a Hammond chord organ, various keyboards, double bass, an accordion as well as a few other musical things lurking around the studio.

Live Sound:

We love making music and part of music is making it sound good. We try to keep things simple. Being musicians ourselves we keep our prices as low as we can with the understanding that most musicians don't make that much money from making music. We work mostly with singer/songwriters, duos, trios, and smaller bands, but we do have tons of experience working with larger bands 10+ members.

Rates:

We charge $25 an hour for in-studio time with an engineer, contact us for on-location recording and live sound prices.