In what used to be a bank building in Muscle Shoals, AL, The NuttHouse Recording Studio lays down tracks and mixes many music genres.

GRAMMY-winning engineer and NuttHouse owner Jimmy Nutt earned his chops with Fame Studio and went on to work with Jason Isbell, The SteelDrivers, and more. Since 2008, he’s operated The NuttHouse with a laid back vibe and phenomenal sound.
 
 
Studio setup
Just a short drive from Nashville, the studio doesn’t box itself in to recording any one particular genre. They record and mix “bluegrass, country, rock, a little bit of hip-hop, R&B, everything,” Jimmy said. The NuttHouse Studio setup consists of one large live room recording space, several isolation booths, a control room, a piano room, and the old bank’s vault.

Some days he’ll have a band of five or more musicians recording, other days he’ll focus on overdubbing, mixing, and editing. “It kind of changes from day to day, which I like a lot. It keeps things interesting.”

The studio tends to keep equipment and instruments set up in place, ready for musicians to walk in and record. The setup includes seven Hear Back PRO Mixers and one Hear Back PRO Hub.

Signals from ProTools route through converters to the Hear Back PRO Hub, which then sends channels to each Hear Back PRO Mixer for every musician to control their own headphone mix in real time.


Jimmy also keeps a Hear Back PRO Mixer in the control room to monitor musicians’ mixes and listen to the PRO system’s intercom function, which allows momentary communication between anyone with a PRO Mixer and all others with a mixer. He also has a Virtual Mixer Card installed in the Hear Back PRO Hub, which acts like a PRO Mixer without the knob interface, and it can serve as an alternative and enables listening to mixes and intercoms.
 
 
How the Hear Back PRO helps
“This PRO system is just incredible,” Jimmy said. “I get compliments on the headphone mixer(s) all the time.”



Having 16 channels on the knob-based personal headphone mixers reduces limitations and adds flexibility to the setup. He also said the new PRO Connect app that controls and updates the system on desktops, phones, and tablets has been a huge step up.

“I can’t say enough good things about [the Hear Back PRO],” he said. “It really does everything I need it to do.”