Here’s a list of all of my recording gear that I’m using for my current recordings.

• Line 6 POD X3 Live
• M-Audio Delta 44
• M-Audio AV30 Studio Monitors
• M-Audio Q40 Headphones
• Korg PadKONTROL
• Behringer BCF2000 Fader Control Surface
• CME UF5 General MIDI Keyboard

When I was recording the Stop The War! album, I had a completely different workflow as far as recording songs. The biggest example is how I recorded the guitar. For Stop The War! I used my old Digitech GNX1 multi-effect pedal, but I didn’t use it to create the tones and effects for the guitar. The GNX1 simply acted as a direct box, and I used clean signals running to my computer. The computer had Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 3 installed, and I ran the dry guitar signal through GR3 to get various guitar tones. If you don’t have a good multi-effect pedal and want to experiment with different guitar tones, I think Guitar Rig is an awesome program worth checking out. They do a great job of emulating a lot of classic and also obscure gear, and you can rearrange the signal chain just about any way you want. So you want that stomp box to go between the head and the cab? Click and drag.

For my 21st birthday, my parents got me a POD X3 Live to replace my road-torn GNX1 (I didn’t use it’s effects for recording, but I did use it live with bands, almost to the breaking point). A few weeks later, on a whim, I decided to plug the X3 straight into my Delta 44 soundcard, rather than running it through Guitar Rig 3. From there, I was sold, and overjoyed that I could free up some computer resources by not using Guitar Rig anymore. The X3 also has bass amp and cab simulators, so I use those in my recordings as well.

Currently, I use the Line 6 POD to create all of the various tones I use on my songs. While it is capable of doing so, I do not use it as an audio interface. That’s what the Delta 44 is for. I run two cables from the Line Out XLR jacks of the POD into inputs 1 and 2 on the Delta 44. Outputs 1 and 2 go to the AV30 speakers. The computer that the Delta is plugged into also handles all of the MIDI traffic with the PadKONTROL (used for drumming), the CME UF5 (used for various midi instruments), and the BCF2000 (control surface).

For a DAW, I am currently using Cakewalk Sonar. In the past, I’ve used n-Track, Adobe Audition, and more recently, I was using Sony ACID for a long time. ACID’s awesome handling of loops enabled me to mock up a song quickly using pieces of riffs before I would sit back down and lay down the actual recordings (I’m opposed to loops in a final song, but for sketching ideas, they’re great). Once I started experiencing stability issues when paring Reason with ACID, I decided to switch to Sonar. Since then, I’ve had no problems whatsoever. Sonar is a great piece of software, and if you haven’t looked at it, I highly recommend it.

One of the most common questions I get asked is what I use for drums. All of the drums I use are software-based, but depending on which of my songs you’re listening to, it varies which drum software I use. Everything on the Stop The War album uses Toontrack’s EZDrummer with dfh Expansion (“Spring used the included base kit in EZDrummer, though, not the expansion). Anything earlier than that, if you happen to have an early early EARLY song hanging out somewhere, it was probably using Acoustica Beatcraft. Beatcraft lets you pre-program drums, and export a WAV that you can then import into your DAW. This worked for a while, but it made it hard to make a change to the drum track on the fly, which was why I switched to EZDrummer.

EZDrummer is a very high quality drum program, and the expansions give the program a great deal of flexibility. Even more useful to me were the pre-made drum loops it came with. This really helped speed up the writing process when I didn’t have to drag and drop each and every drum note one by one. Still, I felt a little limited by the pre-made drum loops, and was a little too lazy to drag and drop even a few notes to try and change up a drum pattern and make it feel a little more human. I decided I needed something that would let me “play the drums” myself, but I didn’t have the money to drop on an electronic drumkit. I didn’t have the space either. After a lot of research, I found the Korg PadKONTROL.

At the same time that I purchased my PadKONTROL, I purchased XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums (there was a huge sale at Guitar Center). Addictive Drums doesn’t have all the kooky bells and whistles in their drum kits that EZDrummer + dfh has, but it has a much more realistic sound to my ears. Each piece of the kit is also highly customizeable, which allows you to create airy, reverb-y arena rock kits, to super tight metal kits or laid back jazz kits. It’s really versatile. It also loads a hell of a lot faster into your DAW than EZDrummer. Addictive Drums coupled with the PadKONTROL gave my songs a much more realistic groove than the prefab drum loops and allowed me to play the drums with the rest of the arrangement, varying them easily and smoothly depending on the emotion or groove I was going for. It put that extra bit of human element into my recordings.

Quick notes about other recording hardware I have. I use the CME UF5 for other projects I work on outside of my usual guitar rock. If something calls for a synth line or piano flutter, I go straight to it. The Behringer BCF2000 is my control surface. It gives me analog control over my digital tracks, letting my ears do the judging about whether a track is too loud or too quiet. It lets me adjust multiple tracks and parameters at once rather than using the mouse to click all over the place. If you’re recording a lot and don’t have a control surface, I suggest investing in one. The BCF2000 is a super-inexpensive option to look at if you’re recording on the cheap. The M-Audio Q40 headphones are the best headphones I’ve ever used, and the AV 30’s are great desktop monitors (although I wish I would’ve gone with the AV 40’s).

Other software I use: Propellerhead Reason for synth sounds on side project and contract recordings. Garritan Personal Orchestra for strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion, and piano on various side project and contract recordings. Adobe Audition CS3 for mastering the raw mixdowns. Line 6 Gearbox to manage and update my POD X3. It also allows me to download tones other people in the Line 6 community have created and shared. It’s extremely useful if I’m looking for a certain sound that I don’t know how to create.

I have and use the following guitars:

• Ibanez S320 6-string Electric
• Ibanez S7320 7-strong Electric
• Fender Fat Strat w/ Floyd Rose 6-String Electric
• Rogue LX205B 5-String Electric Bass
• Alvarez MD80 Acoustic

I use Ernie Ball strings.