Bob James

Welcome to Unicorn Studio,

We have a fairly simple setup for Mr. James' personal studio. There are lots of neat goodies in and around the studio, but we are always changing and trying some new things out! Enjoy the Studio Tour!

All the best to Eddy, Rick and the whole IMC team. And, thanks for the great interview!

David Marchione (Engineer and Assistant)

and

Bob James

The centerpieces are the Yamaha Disklavier C7 for tracking and playing back MIDI/Acoustic piano and a Yamaha Montage 8, which controls various rackmounted hardware synthesizers at Mr. James fingertips.

There are a pair of Motif Racks, and two Korg rack units. Between these we are able to harness a lot of sounds that we still find useful in tracking. They also come in handy when Mr. James is in the middle of composing a new idea and needs access to various sounds quickly to get the sketch working.

When using software, synthesizers and instruments, we gravitate towards Omnisphere, and Motu MachFive 3, along with Stylus for its beat-making tools. Mr. James has also been a fan of using Jay Gradon's "The Famous E Electric Piano" for some of their phenomenal Rhodes sounds.

The main DAW is Digital Performer and Mr. James has been a longtime user of the program, and loves it for its extremely powerful MIDI orchestration ability and integration with all the hardware elements of the studio. We use MOTU interfaces to connect all the gear with plenty of analog and digital IO for projects/gear that always continues to shift around. We have 2 Qcon fader banks in a center mix position, and a dual monitor/keyboard setup so an engineer/producer can work side by side with Mr. James and not interrupt his access to the computer and his instruments. This provides seamless transitions when Mr. James goes from self-producing (which he is QUITE adept at!) to needing a quick punch in or certain edits/mixing addressed, and then back to self-producing.

Recently we were given a MOOG One polyphonic synthesizer to try, and we've been using it for some exploratory sounds that will be coming out on releases in the year 2022! There are various mics in the studio and mic pre's living in the rack. Currently, depending on the flavour and color needed, we can go between our A-Designs Pacifica, a Great River MP-2NV and different stereo pairs of microphones to get different tones from his grand pianos. The other piano in the studio is a Hamburg Steinway D 9' concert grand which has plans to be relocated to a space that is currently under construction.