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Mission Statement:

Our company goal is to provide the highest level of customer service possible, all the while providing you with the best vintage gear available for the money. We feel there are legions of people with smaller studios making very cool music whose recordings would seriously benefit from some quality gear. There are also too many engineers out there that believe that unless a piece of gear has the name Neve, API, or the sort, it is not worth using. Don't get us wrong, many units by Neve and API are one of a kind, quality units which we love to use, but there is also superbly designed and excellent sounding gear out there that will not cost you an arm, a leg, and possibly a vital organ depending on which state you live in. Perhaps you may not have had a real chance to try much of it out, but our efforts are definitely worth your time. We strive to provide the highest quality gear at a reasonable price. For this reason, we stock vintage gear at a wide price range and try our best to meet the needs and pocketbooks of everyone from professional engineers and studio owners to home recording musicians.

Don't be fooled by the lower price tags on some of the rather unknown units. We do not stock gear that we would not use ourselves depending on the application. Sometimes, some smaller or lesser-known companies made some excellent vintage gear that since then has been, for whatever reason, almost forgotten. This is usually the reason for the lower price. Usually it has to do with how many consoles/modules a particular manufacturer made in the past. For example, API and especially Neve made an abundance of quality consoles in the 70's. Their names live on because so many people have had an opportunity to use them. However, we know top-notch engineers who won't let a track of anything that they work on touch a piece of API gear. Why? They don't like how it sounds and especially its fidelity. They say that they had a good sales department, and thus API lives on (we do NOT personally condone that opinion and we personally love to use API for certain purposes). We've heard from engineers who dreaded going into studios with a Neve console in the 70's. They thought everything sounded big but lacked definition once the final mix was completed (again, not our explicit opinion). Why do we bring this up? Brand-name is not the end-all judge of quality sound- you and your ears are. Let your ears be the judge.

Our Credentials:

The Gear Box is an international partnership between an experienced studio, live, and film sound engineer and an engineer and former studio owner turned trained electrical engineer. We are also ourselves gear-heads and also record and produce our own “music” in our spare time.

One of our partners was the owner of American Sector Recording Studio in New Orleans (1996-2000) which boasted an SSL 4000G+ 48 channel console, outboard gear from the likes of Neve, API, Digidesign, Studer, Tubetech, Ampex, Urei, Summit, Neumann, Eventide, Lexicon, Langevin, ADL, and Avalon, and microphones like the Neumann M49, Coles 4038, RCA 77, Microtech Gefell U92, and a multitude of mics from AKG, RFT/ Funkenwerk Leipzig, Neumann and more, as well as a very impressive client list. He was partner in Lucky Cat Studios in San Fran (1994-1999), and in Piety Street Recording in New Orleans (he helped build and wire all three studios). In addition, he has studied electrical engineering at the well-accredited University of Virginia, but most of all, he enjoys intimately making farty noises with his “homemade” modular synthesizer not to mention spending time with his wife and child.

Another of our partners still engineers professionally and works as a studio recording engineer, Pro Tools editor, live sound engineer, film and television boom-man, and post-production sound designer and editor. He is also a member of the I.A.T.S.E. Motion Picture Sound Union Local 695 in Hollywood and the I.A.T.S.E. Motion Picture Studio Mechanics Union Local 478 in New Orleans.

Projects and people with whom we have worked on studio, live, and film sound include:

  • "Ray" (Winner 2005 Oscar for Best Sound Mixing, distributed by Universal Pictures, Feature-film about the life of Ray Charles)
  • "The Last Holiday" (Feature-film from Paramount staring Queen Latifah and LL Cool J to be released in 2005)
  • Cash Money Records (Big-Tymers, Juvenile, BG, Lil� Wayne)
  • 3 Doors Down
  • Erykah Badu
  • Cubanismo
  • New Birth Brass Band
  • "All the Kings Men" (Feature-film from Sony staring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslett, written & directed by Steve Zaillian, to be released in 2005)
  • "Asmali Konak" (Turkish feature film shot in NYC and Turkey)
  • Dave Fortman (Producer- Evanescence, Superjoint Ritual, 12 Stones )
  • Steve Cantamessa (Production Sound Mixer, Ray, Wag The Dog, The X-Files, Primal Fear)
  • Allan Byer (Production Sound Mixer, A Beautiful Mind, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, Raising Arizona, Miller�s
  • Crossing, Blow, The Sixth Sense, The Hudsucker Proxy)
  • John Fischbach � (Engineer- Stevie Wonder, War, Juan-Carlos Formell)
  • Curt Sobel – (Music Editor- Ray, La Bamba, The Flamingo Kid, Blood and Wine)
  • Sheryl Crow
  • Vernon Reid of Living Color
  • John Scofield
  • Nicolas Payton
  • Funkstörung
  • Berlin Electronic Music Festival
  • Little Richard
  • The Temptations
  • New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
  • DJ Shadow
  • Harlem Days Festival (NYC)