The Studio was founded in 1993 as a personal home studio in a small pantry off of my kitchen. The wood in that room was very dark, as my home is very old, so I dubbed it, “Darkwood Studios” I and a musician friend (Dave Copley) started recording our own songs with a Tascam Porta 2. ( a 4 track cassette recorder) We soon out grew that small room so I enclosed a single room in my basement and upgraded to an 8 Track Tascam Cassette recorder. This area has very low ceilings but you work with what you have. (6′ ceilings but sound proof) Ever growing and ever improving, I moved up to a Roland VS1680. As I am a Diabetic, My Diabetes Dr. is Dr. George Borst and he is also a life long musician. He was trying to learn the in’s and out’s of the Roland VS1680 so I started teaching him a bit about the use of the machine. We started getting together once a week during the period that the studio was growing and I decided that he was there so much and such an asset to the growth of the studio that I changed the name to “2 Cat Studios” By the way, at the time, I also had 2 Bengal Cats in the house.
The Roland VS1680 was an awesome machine at the time with 8 tracks of recording at a time and up to 256 tracks total. With this unit, I recorded my band (“The Return”) and we put out our first CD ” It’s About Time” and released it on a site called MP3.com. It managed to go to No. 2 on their site. This brought the attention of several local bands that wanted me to record them.
I upgraded by adding a Digidesign Digi 002 system and soon figured out how to sync the Roland VS1680 with the Digi 002 to be able to record 16 tracks at a time. Things started to explode and I decided to upgrade again to a full blown Protools HD system. Added a separate Control Room and another ISO Booth for Guitar Amps. I kept upgrading my Mics, Monitors, went from a set of Roland TD10 V-drums to a set of DW exotic wood, ( Bubinga ) drums, Kurzweil Keys, Fender and Martin Guitars, Vox and Line 6 Amps and it went on and on.
I have always offered CD manufacturing for our clients and decided about 11 years ago, to try to start my own Record Label and with that, 9 Lives Records was born. With much work and tenacity, I was able to get distribution through an upstart called IODA.
Next, we got accepted in to the RIAA ( Recording Industry Association of America) You may know them as “The Grammy’s” So at this point, we are a full fledged record label and are now distributed through The Orchard. The Orchard is part of Sony Music, one of the largest record labels in the world.
We are fast approaching 13 Million in Streams, Downloads and singles sales. We are churning out over 100,000 streams on YouTube per month. We have signed one of the few prestigious members of the famed Country Music Highway, Don Rigsby. We currently have over 130 artists on the roster and our YouTube Radio station offers nearly 600 tracks for streaming.
Our motto is, “It’s Your Music” and we believe in letting the artist have a hands on experience in the recording process.
Thanks for spending some time here on our site and feel free to visit our other sites, www.9livesrecords.com , www.thereturnlive.com , and check out the link to our DJ, Sound Reinforcement and Karaoke services.
We offer Recording, CD/DVD manufacturing, reel to reel, 8 Track tape, Cassette and VHS transfers to Digital plus DJ, Karaoke and Event sound systems.
At this time, we are running Protools Ultimate with a HDX system with a full compliment of plugins from Waves, IK Multimedia, Toontracks and more along with a rack full of Drammer, Universal Audio, Neve, White, Urie and many other vintage Tube outboard gear, plus a great mic closet that includs AKG, Neumann, Shure, Rode and Telefunken, to name a few. Custom cabling from HotWired of New York, Monitoring by JBL Alesis and Mackie.
Remember, “It’s Your Music”