Castle Ultimate Studios

we moved....AGAIN!!!

  • Welcome to Castle Ultimate Studio's official web site. We are a low budget high quality recording studio in the easy bay that does rock / hard rock / emo/ hardcore / metal / death metal / pop ska / classical / acoustic / whatever. We are Aaron Hellam and Zack Ohren. Castle Ultimate is not one particular place, but in fact just refers to wherever the two of us are currently working out of. We can come to you if need be but we have a home base located in Oakland, California. Here's a brief and not too accurate equipment list:

  • ROOMS:

    - 32x22 drum/live room with floated wood riser(10x10) for nice drum sounds, acoustically tuned and treated  with Auralex acoustical treatment.

    - Control room also well treated with large window into live room and vocal/iso booth.

    - 20x15 extra live room for super live drums/lounge area with TV/DVD/Video games

    - 9x9 Small isolation booth for guitar amps or singers.

    All our equipment is mounted in a lovely Omnirax Force 36 recording workstation.

    COMPUTER:

  • Dual Opteron 4ghz total 64-bit on a Tyan K8W board all in a rackmount case
  • 2GB corsair dual channel 400mhz ECC registered ultra low latency DDR ram
  • 600GB on 4 drives of super high speed storage
  • Matrox Parhelia graphics
  • DUAL 19" NEC monitors
  • RME FIREFACE (main sound interface AD/DA)
  • Nuendo 3.2 (our primary recording software)
  • Cubase SX
  • Wavelab 4.0
  • Samplitude Producer 7.12
  • Waves Platinum Bundle 5 (huge effect package)
  • Blue Tubes Plugin bundle
  • Antares Auto-tune 4
  • Antares Mic Modeler
  • Antares TUBE
  • TC Works Native Bundle 3.0
  • Magneto
  • WARP VST
  • Amplitube
  • Drumagog and an enormous sample library
  • UV22hr dithering
  • T-racks VST plugins
  • Much Much Much More....

    Plus many other various effects.

    INTO/OUT OF THE FIREFACE:

  • Presonus Digimax 8 lightpiped Class A mic preamps
  • TRIDENT S40 Preamp/EQ/Comp
  • TRIDENT S20 dual mic preamp
  • Empirical Labs Distressor
  • Radial SGI studio guitar XLR interface
  • Presonus Eureka Class A channel strip
  • 8/8 RME AD/DA
  • RME Quadmic preamps
  • KRK V8 monitors
  • DBX 386 Dual channel tube mic pre-amp with A/D
  • ART 2 channel tube EQ
  • Bellari 2 channel tube preamp
  • ADA Microcab cabinet simulator for direct guitar recording
  • One Sony MDRV700DJ headphonees
  • One Sony MDR7505 headphones
  • One AKG K271 high definition studio headphones
  • Two Vic Firth drummer headphones

    MICS::

  • 8 Shure SM57s
  • 1 Shure Beta 57
  • 1 Sennheiser MD421II Dynamic Cardioid Microphone
  • 1 Sennheiser e609 Guitar cab mic
  • 1 Sennheiser e604 Drum Mic
  • 1 Sennheiser e904 Drum Mic
  • 1 SM58
  • 1 Audix D5 kick mic
  • 1 AKG D112 kick mic
  • 1 SE Electrions SE2200
  • 1 Audio Technica AT4047
  • 1 AKG 414B-XLS
  • 2 AKG 451s
  • 1 Rode NTK Tube mic
  • 2 Octava 012s
  • 1 Rode NT1
  • 1 CAD K177
  • various misc dynamic mics

    GUITAR/DRUM/BASS/ECT:

    • Peavey Rockmaster--->sonicmaximizer--->poweramp
    • ENGL POWERBALL
    • Peavey 5150 II
    • Fender Deluxe
    • Peavey and Fender bass heads
    • THD 2x12 cab
    • Ampeg 4x10 bass cabinet
    • Misc. 2x15 and 1x15 bass cabs
    • Mesa 4x12 cab(vintage 30s)
    • Mashall 1960AV 4x12 cab
    • Premier 10,12,14 inch toms and 20" kick
    • 14" DW collectors snare
    • 14" Pork Pie Black Beauty remake snare
    • various sabian and zyldjian cymbals
    • 8-bit Nintendo with all the classics
    • modded xbox with thousands upon thousands of games at your disposal
    • 27" television
    • air conditioning
    • heating
    • all sorts of other fun toys....


     


    Designed and Maintained by Mike MacAlvey and Zack Ohren.