Menegroth, The Thousand Caves

photos gear audio resume booking/rates

studio rates
tracking / mixing / mastering for projects recorded at Menegroth: $70 per hour
mixing / re-amping / mastering for projects recorded at other studios: $70 per hour
mastering for projects recorded and mixed at other studios: $70 per song (email me if your songs are much shorter or longer than average)

email: colinmarston at gmail.com


location
The Thousand Caves is located in Woodhaven, Queens, NY
It is easily accessible from the 75th st. stop on the J train, or 80th st on the A train, as well as the Jackie Robinson Parkway

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Planning a Recording Session

The studio is generally booked 3 months in advance, but feel free to get in touch any time since
there are often holes in my schedule.

A deposit in the amount of 20% of the estimated total is due in advance of the scheduled session start-date.
The session dates will not be considered fully confirmed until the deposit is received.

The entire balance must be paid at the end of the session.
No files, mixes, or masters will be released to the artist or label until the balance is fully paid.

Hourly billing begins at the session start-time that we agree on in advance.


Planning a Mixing Session

If you are spot micing (close micing) the drums:

Please include some kind of distant room mic or room mics on the drums in addition to the close mics. if there's a way to place the room mic/s
outside the tracking room with the door open out of sight of the drums, or facing away from the kit towards the wall, that would be great.
i want as much diffuse sound and as little direct sound as possible in the room mics.

Please mic top and bottom of the snare.

24bit wav or aiff, 44.1khz please.

All tracks should be exported from the DAW from the same 0 sync point (i can't use a pro tools, cuebase, logic, or garageband session, just raw audio tracks).

Please disable any plugins and automation.

Please check all tracks for audible edits.

Please make sure that mono tracks are exported as mono tracks and stereo tracks are exported as stereo tracks.

If each song/piece is recorded in a separate session, please make one folder of raw audio stems per song. the folder should be labeled as the song title,
but the audio files within, should not also carry the song name. tracks should appear like this for example: "kick," "oh L," "bass 414," "gtr U87" etc...
not like this: "very very very long song title drum overhead left." if the track names are too long, all the useful identifying text at the end will be cut off.

If all songs were recording in one session (i.e. with all songs sharing the same kick, snare, etc,, tracks) that is totally fine as well: you'll just need to send one track per mic for the whole album.

Please mail or file-transfer all the tracks well in advance of the mixing session if possible. often problems arise when transferring files from one system to another,
so this will give me a chance to catch them with enough time to let the recording engineer know and fix any issues.


Planning a Mastering Session

Please provide me with the final mixes at the same bit depth and sample rate at which they were recorded (usually 24 bit and 44.1 - 96 khz)

Please do not heavily compress or peak-limit you final mixes
leaving plenty of headroom will allow me to provide you with a better-sounding final master.
Digital audio still sounds pretty good when its dynamic range is greater than 1 db!