Cactus House Recording

09/30/2024

With the help of our in-house luthier Ash we have upgraded our to a compensated rosewood bridge! These guitars have a distinct tone and an important place in the history of American music, so I'm excited to start using this beauty on more of our recordings🌵

09/15/2024

Check out the new Trace of Echos album, recorded mixed and mastered here at Cactus House Recording :)

Trace of Echos released our first self titled album officially on September 1, 2024. We are excited to have our work available on all major stream services worldwide including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora and more. 🎧🎶

The band would like to thank Cactus House Recording (https://www.cactushouserecording.com) working with Trevor Gabriel (Owner and Producer) for creating the album in your studio. We thank you for your guidance and audio expertise to help create high quality recordings (mixing and mastering) that now we can share with the world. 🙏😄

09/02/2024

Thanks to everyone who came to Charlie's birthday show at last Friday! Dark Satellite loved sharing the stage with our friends in Atom & The Breaknecks, Monarchy of Roses and Fancy Dad at one of our favorite Bay Area venues. It's really encouraging to see bands showing up to support each other, thanks to all of you for keeping our scene going strong!

📸

08/12/2024

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the show this weekend! is a wonderful host and his concert series is really beneficial for the independent music scene is the East Bay!

was honored to share the stage with:

ca


Hope we can play together again soon!

Also thank you to and and many more who always show up and support other bands!

A special shout-out to for bringing Phoenix the lizard, I hope he enjoyed the music!🦎

📸

08/07/2024

We had a great time recording this weekend! I especially enjoy working in the studio with bands I've shared the stage with so this was a real treat.
Getting back to my prog roots! 🎵

07/01/2024

We had in the studio this weekend to start recording their new album! I love seeing how the band and their music have grown since their first EP last year, looking forward to more sessions with these guys!🤘

06/27/2024

I had a great time working with over the weekend!

We've been fortunate to have so many new musicians making the trek out to New Almaden to record here, thanks for making our vision a reality🤘

06/19/2024

Check out the new Supernaut single Street's Wrath on their Bandcamp!

Having shared the stage with them twice over the years I was excited to work with them at Cactus House and not only did they deliver a tight live performance on this track, they also brought donuts🖖

track by Supernaut

04/02/2024

Over the weekend I built a stand alone spring reverb unit and a custom maple rack (with walnut stain).
The day after soldering it together we used it for a bunch of guitar overdubs on the upcoming album and man does it sound cool through Charlie's vintage Magnatone!
I have put MOD spring reverb tanks in several amps over the years but their stand alone tube driven spring reverb - The Wave really takes it to the next level and was a really fun DIY project to build🌵

03/04/2024

We recently upgraded our headphone monitoring to an older .furmanpower distribution system, allowing six independent headphone mixes during tracking!

The distribution unit lives in a little side rack that I built just behind our studio drum set, and I cut and wired all the ethernet cables to custom lengths to be as organized as possible.

Running the ethernet cables along the baseboard was easy but getting up and over the huge steel sound door required cutting custom PVC wire molding, but I think the end result looks pretty sleek🌵

02/05/2024

Over the past two months a lot of my spare time has been dedicated to improving the acoustic design of our room! With the help of a .audio calibration microphone, a room EQ and some new workshop tools our room is now within the +/- 5dB professional standard for home recording studios!
A room EQ can help with most frequencies in the human hearing range but for better control of sub frequencies I needed to build two more bass traps and a sub platform (in addition to the traps and panels I had already built last year). I used birch plywood for the shells and mineral wool for the diffusing material inside.
To get these 45 degree cuts that are several feet long I bought a table saw and built a more sturdy redwood workbench at the same height as the saw. While I could have built these materials faster and cheaper I really enjoyed the process and wanted them to fit with the aesthetic of my home and studio!🌵

01/29/2024

We’ve been really busy here with recording projects but here’s a fun update, the new studio bass head! It’s an TD660 with a PSA1 and MXR smart gate in the effects loop.
I’ve gone through several really good bass heads but this particular combination is the most versatile, being able to blend in the extra distortion and saturation while not introducing too high of a noise floor.
I made the head case myself with hardware and 3/4 Birch ply. Building from scratch gave me the opportunity to put metal recessed handles in the sides of the rack for easy (sort of) handling🌵

12/29/2023

Nestled in between my 535 and Pultec EQs () is a new passive inductor EQ I built from
Since my Pultec pair is always on my master bus I wanted one more channel of something similar to put on individual tracks, and this kit delivers. It’s perfect on bass, vocals, and acoustic guitar especially. I built this with the optional discrete opamp upgrade, which is inspired by the API DOAs that are in my Pultec stereo pair!🌵

12/01/2023

A couple months back I built an 1176 clone kit from and it’s become one of my favorite pieces of gear!
I usually use it and my 6176 on kick and snare, both can be heard on the latest releases from and many more to come🌵

#1176

11/27/2023

Here’s a new rack I built for the Cactus House Hi-Fi setup!

I have been getting more into woodworking lately and really enjoyed this project. This was my first time using a dowel jig and countersinking screws, but the results with both are definitely very sleek and worth doing!

Now one of the Cactus House bands needs to get a vinyl pressed so I can add it to my collection!🌵

10/13/2023

Some memories from our wedding in June. Thanks to everyone who came out and helped make our big day happen!🌵❤️

🥘
🍻
📸
🎸
💐
🍷

09/08/2023

**PORTLAND!!!** 9/8 Friday

Dark Satellite will be playing Portland for the first time this Friday 9/8
At the lovely

We stoked to share the stage with &

We already know this is gonna be wild one 🖤

08/25/2023

Check out the new Dark Satellite music video for “Death of A Classic”!

Recording, mixing, mastering, and video editing done by Trevor Gabriel at Cactus House Recording 🌵

Official music video for "Death of a Classic" by Dark Satellitelinktr.ee/DarksatelliteSuper 8 Footage filmed by Claire Donohue ( Rainbow Tunnel Films, SF)Pro...

01/20/2023

Check out the album release show tomorrow at ! We have freshly printed CDs of our new album “Death of a Classic” in wallet cases you can buy at the show or order online🤘
We will be playing with our friends and 🍻
Thanks for booking the show!

This will be my first show rocking my new 210/115 bass cab! It has a set of JBL clones that pair with my old Acoustic 370 perfectly. I had to drill out the mounting holes on the speaker frames for the bolts to fit but with my drill press that was pretty easy.

11/04/2022

is playing at tomorrow with and come check it out!🤘
———
While I was teaching at I picked up a great sounding little Zinky combo amp they had been using for demoing guitars at the shop. It didn’t come with a foot switch though and surprisingly none of the two button TRS switches I had worked for it so I made one with a an old enclosure I had. Kinda funny now that my smallest amp has the biggest foot switch 🤔

10/25/2022

is playing at tonight with and 🤘
BotH is one of my favorite venues in SF and I haven’t played there since 2016 so if you’re free tonight in the city swing by!
——
I swapped out my Slate Raven board for an touchscreen and it’s all around a nicer display and sleeker. The only advantage to the Raven boards (which are made and marketed specifically for music production) is the software the company makes for programming macro commands that appear in a customizable bar on the bottom of the tpuchscreen display. This feature would be incredibly useful for a Pro Tools-based rig but in the wonderful world of any key can be assigned to any custom script so Slate’s software wasn’t as useful for my setup🌵

10/05/2022

is playing tonight at with and 🤘

I’ll be test driving my newly modded old Stingray! I put a on board distortion circuit in and a killswitch for fun. A little routing of the control cavity was needed but overall this was a straightforward installation :)
I tried a couple variations and settled on the volume pot being before distortion but the tone after. Because the the .047 capacitor (big orange boy in photo) I can turn the tone k**b down about half way before I notice a change in the clean bass tone, but in doing so I can roll off any hiss from the onboard distortion🌵

09/09/2022

is playing tomorrow with our friends in and 🤘
This will be an amazing lineup and I’m excited to be sharing the stage with these Bay Area legends!
Thank you for putting this together 🔥

08/26/2022

is playing our first Sacramento show at tomorrow with and
6 PM all ages, $10 cover!🌵

08/03/2022

has two new bangers coming out soon, recorded mixed and mastered here at Cactus House Recording!
I’ve played a couple local shows with them and they’re great guys, check them out next time they have a show near you!

may be a at heart but he’s really pushing himself in this band🤘
Producing these tracks was a lot of fun, looking forward to the next ones!🌵