Joshua Lewis

  How have you acquired so much gear?   Well, we are Pro Audio dealers. I won a company called Little Fish Audio and a lot of the equipment that we get, really high-end equipment we get as trade-in or … We buy and sell a bunch of stuff. We’re also authorized dealers for over 70 product lines, so a lot of the stuff we get pretty heavily discounted. All of the software, fortunately for us, we get for free, so we have, I don’t know, maybe 30 or 40 manufacturers of software and we have all of their software installed on the computer. McDSP, Universal Audio, IK, Waves, we have all of it, and it’s legal. You’re not dealing with cracks which are shutting a session down. That becomes a mess. We own everything outright and we own what we like to use.        

  Do you have accurate monitoring in the control room?   All right. We’ve measured the room and I’ve treated it and listened to it over and over again, moved the subs around, treated first reflections, we have awesome diffusion in the back of the room, bass trapping where it’s appropriate, and the listening position is pretty large. The space where the engineer sits and the artist would sit is accurate. I take my mixes out of the room and they translate. Yeah, I would say so. I like our monitoring very much. We have NS-10s, which give you a goo picture of what’s happening in the mid range, we have ADAM monitors, we have general like 80-50s, and sometimes we get other things in just to play around with, but we have a lot of choices and the room is accurate. I feel pretty confident that what you do here will translate outside.        

  Tell us about the history of the Fishtank.   The Fishtank studios began out of my home when I was working out of my home. I built out a really great room there that was designed by Jeff Headback. It was fantastic and we had great artists, great mixers, come in a do work. Now we’ve set up a retail store and the front of the store is a showroom/studio so basically we have a ton of the equipment that we sell through our retail shop we have. A lot of it is really high end. Over time we’ve collected all this stuff and been able to take our time to build out something that really works well.   The other thing with the Fishtank is that we’ve had incredibly engineers come through and I have just so many friends here in the industry who could use the work and are amazing and they’re comfortable working here.    

  What preamps and output gear are available for use and what sources would you use the most?   We have a whole pallet of preamps. SSL VHD Preamps, we have a rack of those, some Neve Clones, APIs, we have some Earthworks Preamps, which are really super, super clean and clear. Let’s see, Rupert Neve designs, 517, we have a bunch of 500 Series Preamps as well. We also have 500 Series EQs and compresses, API EQs, Purple EQs, a bunch of stuff. We have a Bettermaker EQ as well, which is a pultec model, which sounds fantastic. We also have SSL EQs and compressors, we have racks of these X-Rack compressors, so the actual compressors and EQs from the consoles we have racked. The choice of outboard stuff is pretty much limitless.   What about the preamps models of [inaudible 00:01:11]?   Oh, that’s right. Okay. Also, on our actual interface we have modeling of preamps. The actual preamps is really clean but they’ve also introduced a way of imparting the sound of API, Neve, and a bunch of other brands so you get that vintage sound, as well. We have a huge pallet.   Okay, great.