Services
Preproduction
Let our production team help take your musical ideas and turn them into radio ready songs. We enjoy working with rising artists to take a melody, or even just lyrics and set the words to music, or set music to the melody of the words. Between Marco and Dillon, we can produce any genre of music you wish to record. From Christian to Rock, Metal to Country, Pop to Gospel, Blues to Reggae, the list carries on. One of the biggest elements of a well recorded album is preproduction. This is the time that the artist will work with the Producer, Marco, and layout the song, the tempo, the chord structure and make any initial changes to the song from a production point of view. This also includes working on vocal parts, helping the artist find their own sound in the music, and making sure that the key brings out the natural tone in the singers voice, rather than just being easy chords to play on a guitar.
Recording
Our studio is built on the legendary Avid Protools platform. We feature the highest caliber and quality of digital front end found in the RME Fireface UFX interface. Our Mic selection includes brands such as Rode, AKG, Shure, Sennheiser, and Audio-Technica. Cabling is provided exclusively by ProCo cabling from Sweetwater, as well as high-quality mic cables from Blue. Our premise for recording is to take a clean, minimalist approach to micing musical instruments and vocals. The sound of the instrument is what you hear, and the sound of the singer is what is recorded. Clarity and transparency are key elements of a great record, and this is something we strive to achieve at Solid Rock Studios. Dillon Hinkle is our studio session guitarist and has a wide background of music allowing him to work with Marco in playing and writing musical parts to accompany your songs. We staff Dillon as our guitar tech here at the studio as well, and any repairs or adjustments needing to be made to amps and guitars while at the studio can be taken care of. You can read more about Dillon and Marco under our staff pages.
Editing
All editing is handled in Protools 10, the newest edition of the industry standard recording software. Boasting many new features and an expanded list of plugins this DAW is regarded as one of the best on the market. We desire to provide the highest detail and precision of cuts, fades, and crossover edits in the music that we record, and the in-depth editing features of Protools 10 allow us to accomplish this quickly and easily.
Mixing
At Solid Rock Studios, Marco takes a different view on mixing than many other engineers. He desires to start with proper micing technique, and EQ and compression on individual tracks, as well as mix busses and auxes. This gives him the ability to mix with the faders mostly flat, and allow the EQ and compression to bring forward the sound of the mix, instead of constant mixing and faders flying everywhere. Major plugins utilized are from Avid, Massey, iZotope, Waves, Native Instruments and many others.
Mastering
Music is mastered for CD, DVD, Radio play, TV, and more at Solid Rock Studios. Listening is provided by Mackie MR5 Reference Monitors, as well as Shure SRH440S headphones. Both have very even toned sound and detail without piercing brilliance making them a highly regarded choice for mixing and mastering music. Digital mastering is handled with EQs, compression and brickwall limiters. Plugins include iZotope, Massey, and Avid. Our personal favorite is the L2007 Mastering Limiter from Massey.
Vocal Overdubs
We provide services for vocal overdubs for screenplay, commercials, spoken word, and many other applications where vocal dubbing is needed.
Composing
Marco is greatly gifted with perfect pitch and perfect rhythm, and he uses this to his advantage when composing and writing parts for artists. He has also composed music including layering parts with orchestras, guitars, band parts, or other instruments.
In-studio video shoots
The studio space also doubles as a live video shooting stage, and can be seen in these pictures: Stage front, Stage Side
To hear some of our demo sounds, click Music on the sidebar.