AudioTechnology App Issue 42

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THE AL L NE W

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Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au Publisher Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au Editorial Director Christopher Holder chris@audiotechnology.com.au Assistant Editor Preshan John preshan@alchemedia.com.au

Regular Contributors Martin Walker Paul Tingen Guy Harrison Greg Walker Greg Simmons Blair Joscelyne Mark Woods Chris Braun Robert Clark Andrew Bencina Ewan McDonald

Art Direction Dominic Carey dominic@alchemedia.com.au Graphic Designer Daniel Howard daniel@alchemedia.com.au Advertising Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au Accounts Jaedd Asthana jaedd@alchemedia.com.au Subscriptions Miriam Mulcahy mim@alchemedia.com.au

info@alchemedia.com.au www.audiotechnology.com.au

AudioTechnology magazine (ISSN 1440-2432) is published by Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd (ABN 34 074 431 628).

Contact (Advertising, Subscriptions) info@alchemedia.com.au PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest NSW 2086, Australia.

Contact (Editorial) T: +61 3 5331 4949 PO Box 295, Ballarat VIC 3353, Australia.

All material in this magazine is copyright Š 2017 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process with out written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974. The responsibility is on the person, company or advertising agency submitting or directing the advertisement for publication. The publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, although every endeavour has been made to ensure complete accuracy. 01/11/2017.

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AUSTRALIA’S LEADING SUPPLIERS OF PROFESSIONAL AUDIO EQUIPMENT SINCE 1976 BEST PRICES • BEST SERVICE • BEST ADVICE • LARGEST STOCK • NATIONAL DELIVERY EDUCATION SPECIALISTS – TERTIARY, SECONDARY & STUDENT PRICING AVAILABLE ONLINE STORE www.turramusic.com.au/shop

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COVER STORY

Internet Famous: How 3 Musicians Cracked the YouTube Code

18

ISSUE 42 CONTENTS

54

Could Digico’s SD12 be the Next PM5D?a

Snarky Puppy Live

44

Studio Focus: SAE Sydney

Apogee Elements Audio Interface AT 6

Thundamentals: Moving Beyond Skip Hop

14

58

Roli Blocks Makes Next-gen MIDI Affordable

Sennheiser XSW1 Wireless Microphone System

38

70

28 64

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GENERAL NEWS

ANTELOPE GOES DISCRETE Antelope Audio announced four new hardware products and a bunch of software to go with it. In all there are two new audio interfaces — Discrete 8 and Discrete 4 — in an entirely new line, and two new microphones — Edge and Verge — to be used as the source for Antelope’s new microphone modelling technology. The big change is on the front end, with the two new microphones. The Edge is a large dual-diaphragm condenser with a sensitivity of -36dB, and the Verge is a small diaphragm pencil condenser with a max input of 132dB SPL. The two mics are designed to interface with Antelope’s impending microphone modelling technology. With Edge, Antelope is promising control

over proximity effect, off-axis response and polar pattern, which can only be done with separate capture of each capsule, like the Townsend Labs Sphere model. Given the success of Antelope’s FPGA real-time modelling, the addition of mic modelling is another big step forward for the company in its ambition to stock recordists’ coffers for nothing.

Federal Audio: 0404 921 781 or sales@federalaudio.com.au Turramurra Music: (02) 9449 8487 or hitech_sales@turramusic.com.au

TC M100 STEREO EFFECTS UNIT The M100 is TC Electronic’s new compact multi-effects processor featuring 16 signature TC presets including studio-grade reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, rotary speaker, pitch shifter and a variety of multi-effects. The M100 operates in both mono and stereo. While the input connectors accept both balanced and unbalanced 1⁄4-inch cables, the output features impedancebalanced 1⁄4-inch TRS connectors. M100’s stereo input level control with LED level indication gives precise adjustment over what you’re feeding it. And if you’re using the M100 live, you can turn effects on and off using the footswitch. An intuitive

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FX selector allows you to choose from the 16 single or multieffects that suit your music, while the Parameter and Tap/Select functions let you control over a wide range of parameters.

Dedicated Mix Balance and Output Level controls help you quickly dial-in the right sound for your live set on stage, or your studio recording.

Amber Technology: 1800 251 367 or sales@ambertech.com.au

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

PRESONUS FADERPORT 16 Users asked, Presonus delivered. A 16-channel version of FaderPort has just hit the streets, offering twice the number of touch-sensitive motorised faders as the FaderPort 8. Eight more LCD scribble strips come part of the package too, along with individual Select, Mute and Solo buttons. Annoyingly there’s still only one Pan/Parameter knob in the upper left hand corner, so it means one extra button push (Select) before you can pan a track in your session. The rest of Fadeport 16’s surface remains largely the same as FaderPort 8. Transport and DAW controls

are sprawled over the right hand side with a jog/selector wheel and automation controls. Tight integration with Presonus’s Studio One DAW is FaderPort’s key calling card and if you’re a dedicated user of the software, FaderPort 16 is worth serious consideration. Other protocols are also supported, including HUI, for use with different DAWs. Link Audio: (03) 8373 4817 or info@linkaudio.com.au

JBL 7 SERIES POWERED MONITORS JBL’s new 7 Series powered studio monitors have newly-designed high and low frequency transducers driven by dual 250W amplifiers. They come in two sizes — five-inch (705P) and eightinch (708P) — and sport proprietary JBL waveguide technology for neutral response and better room-to-room consistency. Built in room EQ gives you a degree of control over low frequency issues. The system includes balanced analogue and AES/EBU inputs. Pair up the monitors with JBL’s Intonato 24 monitor management system for automated calibration and complete control of your monitoring speakers, whether they’re set up in

stereo, surround, or immersive configurations. The Automated Speaker Calibration ‘tunes’ each 7 Series speaker to compensate for speaker placement and room acoustics, delivering a more neutral response at the listening position. The Intonato Desktop Controller provides instant access to Intonato 24’s master volume, scenes, mute and solo, bass management, aux send and talkback capabilities.

Jands: (02) 9582 0909 or www.jands.com.au

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

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LIVE NEWS

ALLEN & HEATH SQ 96K CONSOLES Allen & Heath unveiled a pair of 96kHz compact digital mixers, the SQ-5 and SQ-6, which are driven by XCVI 96kHz FPGA engines to deliver 96k audio with latency of under 0.7ms. The rack mountable SQ-5 has 16 onboard preamps and 17 faders, while the SQ-6 has 24 preamps and 25 faders.

Both can be expanded to 48 inputs via remote expanders and an audio networking slot readies SQ for system integration, FOH/monitor splits and multitrack recording applications.

The SQ user interface marries a capacitive touchscreen with an accompanying set of illuminating rotary controls. Channel and mix layouts can be configured to fit your own workflow, with

colour displays and custom naming on all strips. SQ-5 features eight softkeys, while SQ-6 has four assignable rotary controls and displays in addition to 16 softkeys. Allen & Heath’s DEEP processing plug-in architecture allows boutique compressor and preamp emulations to be added to the SQ mixer and embedded directly within its inputs and mix channels without adding system latency or setup hassles.

Technical Audio Group: (02) 9519 0900 or info@tag.com.au

EV ELX200 PORTABLE LOUDSPEAKERS The ELX200 series is the latest member of the EV portable loudspeaker family, with 10-, 12-, and 15-inch two-way models accompanying 12- and 18-inch subwoofers. Both powered and passive versions are available. The enclosures are made of durable composite material to balance structural integrity with with light weight, while subwoofers are enclosed in a wooden cabinet coated with a protective polyurea finish. The ELX200 series can be controlled with the new Bluetooth QuickSmartMobile app which lets you wirelessly configure the system and monitor up to six

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systems simultaneously. The app makes it quick and easy to dial in settings in real time from in front of the speakers. Additional EVsignature features include SST (Signal Synchronised Transducers) waveguide design for more precise and consistent coverage, and QuickSmartDSP for intuitive one-knob system setup.

Bosch: 1300 026 724 or stsales@au.bosch.com

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

HK AUDIO LUCAS 2K PA HK Audio’s latest portable PA is the active 2.1 stereo Lucas 2K. There are two models available: Lucas 2K15 features a 15-inch wooden bass reflex subwoofer, while Lucas 2K18 comes with an 18-inch sub to offer even more low-end. Both systems come with a pair of eight-inch/one-inch satellites. Designed, engineered and built in Germany, Lucas 2K features premiumquality components, a newly developed 2000W power amplifier and built-in DSP technology. Practical features like HK Audio’s MultiGrip recessed handles and M20 speaker pole mounts make

handling super simple and convenient — the 53kg Lucas 2K15 system can even be transported and set up by just one person — while MonoTilt technology lets you precisely angle the satellites towards your audience. A range of practical accessories like speaker stand add-ons, roller bags and speaker stand stretch covers mean Lucas 2K is ready for any occasion.

CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or www.cmi.com.au

SOUNDCRAFT’S SMALLEST BIG MIXER At just 86cm x 81cm in size, Soundcraft’s Vi1000 digital mixing console is the most compact member of the Vi-000 family.

Combining Soundcraft’s unique Vistonics II channel strip user interface together with FaderGlow, the console operates like its Vi siblings with the Soundcraft SpiderCore DSP and I/O engine.

Gating and compression are available on all 96 channel paths, and audio processing functionality includes the BSS DPR901ii dynamic EQ and Lexicon multi-effects via an insertable processing pool — plus the ability to insert up to 64 external devices. Studer vMix automatic voice mixing is built-in and BSS

966 graphic EQs are available on all output busses. The Vi1000 comes with rear panel local I/O featuring 16 HQ mic/line inputs, 16 line outputs, and two 64 channel expansion slots that allow up to two MADI-based Stageboxes to be connected, or alternatively the slots provide access to an extensive range of D21m I/O option cards. The total I/O count of the console is 212 in x 212 out.

Jands: (02) 9582 0909 or www.jands.com.au

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

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SOFTWARE NEWS

GENELEC & IDA AUDIO GIVE EAR SCANS Genelec has collaborated with IDA Audio to create a one-ofa-kind app that promises “a truly accurate immersive audio experience for professional headphone users.” How? Take a photo of your ear using a smartphone camera and the app scans your ear, upper body, and head to create a cloud-based customised personal audio profile which can then be loaded into your DAW via a choice of third-party plug-ins. Yep, pretty random, and safe to say it’s something we haven’t come across before. The app itself will be available worldwide early

next year as a direct download from Genelec’s website but the technology was on display at this year’s AES show in New York.

Here’s to the next generation of customised immersive audio headphone experiences.

Studio Connections: (03) 9416 8097 or enquiries@studioconnections.com.au

OZONE 8 MEETS NEUTRON 2 Intelligent signal processing, spectral shaping, and Tonal Balance control are just a few of the new features you’ll find on iZotope’s latest evolution of Ozone mastering software. Master Assistant borrows technology shared with Neutron (Track Assistant) to ‘intelligently’ guide your mastering decisions by suggesting targets, signal chain and processor settings.

The Tonal Balance Control communicates with all instances of Ozone so you can shape up a balanced master track. Not only does Ozone 8 talk to other instances of itself, it also communicates with Neutron 2 EQ modules as well. The first

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version of Neutron had this cross-talking capability which helped when clearing problem areas where frequencies collided between two instruments. Now both Ozone and Neutron work together to help you fix mix issues during mastering. Along with an updated GUI, Ozone’s new track referencing feature compares your master reference tracks directly within any instance of itself in plug-in or standalone mode.

Electric Factory: (03) 9474 1000 or www.elfa.com.au

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

PLUGIN ALLIANCE HITS THE VR SPACE Plugin Alliance has partnered with Dear Reality to create two new virtual reality plug-ins — dearVR Pro and dear VR Music. As a complete 3D audio toolkit, dearVR Pro lets you modify shape, dimensions, and texture of each virtual space using controls that adjust its Size, Damping, and balance of early Reflections and diffuse Reverb. In Realtime Auralisation mode, turning six knobs respectively adjusts the distance from the listener of the four walls, ceiling, and floor to match onscreen visuals. dearVR Pro

has a well thought-out GUI that lets you position an audio track anywhere in a 3D soundstage — both behind or in front of the listener, above or below their head. dearVR Music is a simpler version of the plug for entry-level 3D audio applications. It outputs 3D audio in binaural or four-channel Ambisonics format, making it the perfect vehicle for musos and audio engineers wishing to gain more traction on social media by incorporating immersive 3D audio into their mixes.

REASON 10 — THE BIGGEST UPDATE EVER Reason 10 comes toting a rackload of new synths, instruments, samples, and more. Grain and Europa are two brand new synthesizers included in the DAW. Europa is a shapeshifting variety, with a bold red and grey GUI and an equally bold sound.

Propellerhead says it does everything from “stacks of buzzing sawtooths to shimmering, glitched-up sonic explorations.”

You can apply spectral filtering, harmonics processing and even draw in custom waveforms. Grain is an in-depth sample manipulator with a heap of playback algorithms, modulation,

routing and effects that turns any old sample into a world of endless possibilities. A number of new sampled instruments join the line-up as well — Klang Tuned Percussion, Pangea World Instruments, Humana Vocal Ensemble, Loop Supply & Drum Supply, Radical Piano, and Synchronous Effects Modulator. The final release of Reason 10 was out on October 25th.

Innovative Music: (03) 9540 0658 or info@innovativemusic.com.au

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

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STUDIO FOCUS:

SAE INSTITUTE, SYDNEY Tertiary audio education is enjoying some hefty financial investment lately. SAE Institute recently opened the doors to its new $12m, seven-story Sydney facility located at 39 Regent St in the inner-city creative hub of Chippendale, next to Central Station.

General Manager of SAE Australia, Lee Aitken, said the new campus was built to accommodate a growing demand for a range of creative media programs in disciplines like film, animation, games, design and web/mobile. “The new campus has been fitted out with the best facilities and industry-standard equipment to support hands-on learning in small class environments,” said Aitken.

“Our focus is on giving students access to the types of technology and equipment they’ll be using in the workplace, and equipping them with both the technical and soft skills needed to kickstart successful careers from day one of their studies.”

Though SAE’s roots are in sound production, there’s no ignoring the rapid growth of the film, games, and animation sectors, and the opportunity it poses for an educational institute. At the new Sydney campus, film students benefit from five dedicated edit suites including a specialised room for colour grading. There’s a foley room, plus a film studio with cyclorama soundstage dubbed ‘The Wonder Room.’ The Gaming department is well catered for too, with an inventory of the latest VR headsets like Oculus Rift kits and Samsung VR, all the major console platforms, as well as Android and iOS touch devices.

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While audio is a smaller slice of SAE’s pie, it hasn’t been forgotten. Seven studio control rooms are dotted about the premises, along with seven live recording rooms and two 5.1-enabled audio post spaces with Avid S6 control surfaces in each.

Instead of learning signal flow on a Behringer eight-bus, you can expect to sit behind a Neve Custom Series 75 or SSL AWS 948. Two dedicated mixing rooms rely on UAD Apollo interfaces equipped with eight cores of hardware processing via Quad Satellites with bundles from iZotope, McDSP, and Softube to go along with the UAD plug-ins. DAWs include Pro Tools, Logic Pro X, and Ableton Live. There’s even a standalone ‘critical listening room’ where you can bask in the glory of ATC’s SCML20ASL reference monitors.

The outboard gear list is drool-worthy. JLM Audio products are well represented with five LA500 and FC500 compressors, a Mac Opto compressor, Head 2-Pac headphone amp, and BA2 stereo mic pre. Besides the home grown goodies there’s GML EQs, TLA channel strips, Neve pres including 1073s, a Chameleon Labs 7720 compressor, Drawmer tube channel strips, a Bricasti M7 reverb, ELI Distressors, an SPL Transient Designer, a UAD 1176LN, and more.

For students needing some downtime, one entire level of the campus is a dedicated chill-out area with a kitchen and lounge. They can also head to one of four quiet study rooms to knuckle down and smash out that essay, or brainstorm a big group assignment in the two open plan student

www.sae.edu.au

collaboration and study areas. For some fresh air, the stairs lead to a rooftop recreational space with 360-degree skyline views across the CBD. Building this many studio spaces into a sevenstory campus required judicious acoustic planning.

The solution was to place the studios on the top two floors of the building to minimise mechanical transmission issues. It gave a good acoustic base line before attending to each studio’s needs.

Principal architect Andrew Holmes says, “Innovative technologies were employed to resolve acoustically sensitive areas from the building’s concrete structure to create studios with a high level of acoustic comfort. The overall acoustic design of the theatre, control room and live spaces in the new facility has been directed towards achieving high acoustic performance. Low ambient noise in live rooms, control room and other listening spaces has been given high priority. A chilled beam cooling system was developed for the project to provide a silent form of cooling rather than previous fan driven systems.”

Sydney Campus Manager, Radovan Klusacek, says, “Aspiring audio students look for a variety of things in a tertiary education provider. SAE Institute provides an immersive, hands-on experience that covers every possible level of studio, post, and live production. Students are in the studio learning from day one. Our industry‐focused courses develop technical skills and knowledge, whilst encouraging creative independence and inspiring artistic expression.”

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REVIEW

KORG GADGET FOR MAC Music Production Software Korg’s suite of nifty synths are ported to the Mac and given a stripped down DAW to play in.

Review: Christopher Holder

NEED TO KNOW

I want them to exist so badly.

When Korg first released Gadget as a mobile app environment, its graphic design department breathed flesh ’n’ blood life into the gadgets themselves, looking all the world like real-life tabletop microsynths in the promos.

Stroke of genius really. The fact these little gadgets are small – and by necessity a tad limited – ceased to be an issue. They were adorable and I wanted them to be alive.

They’re not… alive, that is. Their corporeal chassis are imagined; and must live in our imaginations… but just imagine having 20-plus Gadgets on your desk, all sync’ed…

Anyway. Enough of the daydreaming. They

PRICE US$199 intro; US$299 CONTACT CMI: www.cmi.com.au Korg Gadget: www.gadget.korg.com

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sound real enough; and now they’re on your other desktop… your Mac computer’s desktop.

Korg has released Gadget for Mac, matching a full complement of Gadgets with an easy-as-youlike sequencer. Arguably the bigger news is the ability to then export your Gadget noodling as an Ableton Live Project, and Gadgets being available as softsynths within your DAW (VST, AU, AAX).

More on that later.

It’s impossible to exhaustively describe each and every Gadget here, but synth fans will lose themselves for days. Some Gadgets are obviously inspired by classics of yore such as the ARP Odyssey, the Roland TB303 or Korg’s MS20, but mostly the gadgets are utterly novel — providing

PROS Huge range of instruments Huge sonic scope Gadgets look incredible

CONS Limited sequencer Mac only

a palette of flavours that are as extensive as they are delicious. I’ve been messing about with Gadget for days and I’ve not yet felt like I’ve touched the sides, there’s simply so much to explore.

WILL HE DONCA?

On the drum machine front, there’s an embarrassment of riches. From the à la mode dance voicings of London, to the droll DoncaMatic sparce-ness of Tokyo, the sampleled mayhem of Bilbao and Recife to the more buttoned-up drum room formality of Gladstone… oh, and the four-voice Amsterdam, which delights in blowing things up. There isn’t a Gadget drum synth with a step sequencer, which feels strange to

SUMMARY Aficionados have loved the iOS Gadget ecosphere for some time. Now Gadget moves way beyond the constraints of on-thebus sketchpad noodling. Worth it as a suite of VSTs. Perfect as a jamming environment… especially if Live is your DAW of choice.

me; all the playing needs to be mediated through the piano-roll sequencer.

So. Much. Synthesis! From ’70s analogue models, ’80s PCM, ’90s-style sampling synthesis, through to trap and dubstep wobbliness, and anthemic trance hand-wavers. Bass synths. Lead lines. Glassy pads.

8-bit chippiness. When you think you’re beginning to get a handle on the difference between your Marseille and your Glasgow you then get lost for days in the iM1 inspired Darwin… with an array of ‘expansion cards’ all thrown in. (Ah, the M1, my first synth. Playing Patch 001 ‘Universe’ was like being sucked through a wormhole.)

I know I said these Gadgets, due to the petite proportions, have some inherent limitations. And, sure, there’s nothing in here that threatens the sheer heft of a Thor or a Reaktor, but the level of sophistication is still disarming. Often you can toggle between GUIs within a Gadget to access extra parameters. Very often the Gadget will have its own onboard effects. Sometimes the Gadget will have an onboard arpeggiator (I wish more had one, to be honest).

The vintage keys selection of Alexandria (think: Fender Rhodes), Firenze (B3-style) and Montreal (clav and more) are very welcome, as is the highgloss Salzburg piano.

New to this porting of Gadget is the ‘reel to reel’ Zurich ‘universal audio recorder’, which means you can demo a vocal or guitar into the DAW. Speaking of recording guitars; those wielding an axe will appreciate the Rosario effects board.

FULL SWEET!

No, this hasn’t been a full roll call of all 30 Gadgets.

That would be impossible here and they’ve all mostly been around in the iOS world for some time now anyway. Nevertheless, I applaud Korg for not holding any back in this release. Such parsimony may have yielded some additional micro-payment payola but I’ve no doubt Korg will be 1repaid for its EMA_AT111_[Print].pdf 28/07/2015 generosity with word of mouth recommendations,

loyalty to the suite (and any future upgrades), and good press from editors of audio magazines geeking out over the sheer scope.

As for the workflow? Gadget for Mac is a more than adequate sketch pad. Not even Korg thinks you’ll be leaving your main DAW behind, but the four-cornered GUI works well enough. Actually, like the Gadgets themselves, there’s a surprising level of sophistication. The limitations are in the arranging more than the jamming and processing.

For example, each track can access its own insert effects, including a neat side-chain effect for instant dancefloor-pumping compression.

WILLING & ABLETON

Which leads neatly to the Ableton Live integration.

I don’t use Live (I’m a Reason man, and looking forward to v9.5 where I’m banking on being able to use my Gadgets as VSTs within my Reason Rack – please, please, please!) but AT editor Mark Davie does. So I squirted him a quick-fire Gadget creation, which he graciously gave the thumbs up and opened in Live.

Bingo-bango, according to Mark it opened up ‘flawlessly’ as VSTs in Live, where he was able to massage my Gadget tracks. Even the track naming and mute states were retained through the translation. This is really a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario.

As mentioned, for those not drinking the (ever enticing) Ableton Kool Aid, the Gadget for Mac download (which is surprisingly lean given, I 9:37 am guess, the relatively scant reliance on samples)

includes all the Gadgets as plug-ins for your DAW. The drawcard with Live is you can seamlessly segue from messing about with sounds, loops, and broad-brush arrangements within the Mac Gadget environment and retain all that work when you go to incorporate it into a Live session.

Want to share your songs as stems for others to desecrate… I mean, creatively alter? Then Gadget talks fluent Alihoopa as well.

GO GO GADGET

To sign off, I’m (almost) sorry for continuing to geek out about the attention to detail, but it truly is astonishing. These gadgets are gorgeous. Korg could be forgiven for creating Kingston — the perfectly observed arcade homage — and stop right there. It’s perfect: from the Jump buttons that trigger the arpeggiator and its tuning, the old-school CRT-look of the Kingston GUI, through to the coin on Kingston’s dashboard (which, okay, doesn’t actually do anything). Even the colour is redolent of a time (think: Repco dragster, complete with T-bar gear shift and sissy bar… okay, now I’ve lost Gen Y onwards).

You might be forgiven for thinking I’ve been sold the Korg sizzle and lost any sense of what this product is all about — producing music. Fear not, the sounds are all there. The emphasis is on dance music and electronica, undoubtedly, and in this, Gadget for Mac excels. Just don’t begrudge yourself the delight of enjoying the experience that much more thanks to Korg’s team looking after every last detail.

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FEATURE

INTERNET FAMOUS How three musicians have cracked the code and made it big on YouTube.

Story: Paul Tingen

The Internet was once the brave new hope of the leftfield, the trendy, and the creative.

Those of you who were around in the early days will recall the idealism and optimism of everything being free; free to participate, freedom of expression, democracy for all, and a world without boundaries. That same equality also meant anyone could track mud all over the utopian carpet.

Fast forward 20 years and the Internet is blamed for most everything that has gone wrong in the 21st century: trolls, cyberwars, government’s spying on its own people, fake news, the demise of the fourth estate, even the erosion of society because we’re all suckling on social media feedlots. Phew, talk about a bad rap.

The Internet also decimated the music industry as we knew it. For many who were adept at navigating this old model, it felt ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘so sad’. It required a new way of thinking, and new business models to provide artists with a living. For many, that meant retreating to the last line of defence, the road, to scrape an income off the highways.

However, an increasing amount of musicians are managing to make substantial money by using the very disruptor of the traditional music industry business model — and doing so without having to resort to life on the road. These musicians combine the Internet and social media outlets with cheap studio technology and an ear for viral hits to make livings that range from getting by to being rich and e-famous. Yet, even with millions of fans, their success largely flies under the radar of the mainstream media. Welcome to the brave new world of the YouTube musician.

Here are the stories of three YouTube musicians who have managed to carve out a sustainable online career. Each has done so in a very different way, but taken together their stories act as a blueprint of a more common future for artists.

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HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE? Since 2007, the top five most-viewed YouTube videos are music videos. Digging further, of the 80 most viewed YouTube videos of all time, only four are non-music videos. Finding out how much exactly people can earn today from uploading videos to YouTube is bizarrely complicated. Uploaders have to allow ads, then wait to see if YouTube places an ad with their video. If placed, uploaders are paid per click on ads appearing on the same page as their video and per view and/or click on a video ad that appears before their video. Estimates of actual returns vary enormously — from US$0.80 to US$8 per 1000 clicks — and a recent advertiser exodus has slightly drained the pool of money to go around, but a ballpark average of US$2/thousand ad impressions is often mentioned. That may not sound like much, but with some videos attracting hundreds of millions of views (in 47 cases to date exceeding a billion) this can result in payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars per video.

For example, the “Charlie bit my finger — again!” video of one toddler biting another has been viewed 847 million times, and made their lucky parents an estimated US$100,000 in YouTube revenue and another million from merchandise and other ad revenue.

As a result, YouTube music videos have long since ceased to be mainly a promotional tool, and have become a significant source of revenue for big labels and major artists. At this point, the average musician will ruefully reflect on the few hundred hits on their YouTube videos, and netting millions may appear to them as much pie in the sky as landing that elusive big record deal, or as having one of the freak hits YouTube has become famous for.

With big record deals and record companies, going the way of the Dodo, YouTube offers attractive opportunities for any motivated and persistent self-starter with a large creative output.

ANDREW HUANG SUBSCRIBERS: 750,000* VIDEO VIEWS: 87 MILLION* *All figures from mid-April, 2017

Andrew Huang strictly adheres to a schedule of releasing a video through his YouTube channel every Monday and Thursday. His output is a mixture of vlogs — often about music production and music theory — and videos with musical content that could range from original songs, to feats like rapping 300 words in 60 seconds, and his breakthrough novelty children’s song Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing On Rainbows. His ‘Song Challenges’ are also wildly popular, where Huang reconstructs 99 Luftballons entirely from samples made using red balloons, or limits himself to using the notes in CABBAGE to write a metal song… about cabbage, or makes a beat using samples harvested from beets.

Hailing from Ottawa, Ontario in Canada, where he was born in 1984, Huang started playing piano as a teenager and also developed a keen interest in music technology. He went on to study composition at York University in Toronto, but switched to a Fine Arts degree because it allowed him to take courses on a far wider variety of different musical topics. While still in his last year at University he hit on his first Big Idea, which was to sell his songwriting skills on Ebay to the highest bidders. Just two years later, in 2004, when he was still only 20, he turned this idea into a website

called Songs To Wear Pants To. From his home studio in Toronto, Huang charted the trajectory from there to his current YouTube output. “The Ebay thing was my first foray into sharing music online, and yes, it did make me money. The Songs To Wear Pants To website streamlined how people could contact me.

I was songwriting for hire and at the peak I was creating 15 songs a month; for weddings, friends, for all sorts of people, many of which were not even shared online. I also started creating pieces of music for free using the suggestions of site visitors that they really enjoyed and shared. It turned out to be a good business model, because I was reaching more and more people. Over time I expanded into more typical commercial music work. I started my YouTube channel alongside that, and it eventually took over.”

The shift to being YouTube-centric was largely due to the success of the Pink Fluffy Unicorn video, which Huang uploaded in November 2010 and says it, “changed my life.” Perhaps more important than the fluffy music, which is a one-off in his otherwise more adult repertoire, the videos galvanised his visual style. The latter, stresses Huang, is key. “In my early years on YouTube I created some music videos with a few film-making friends that were AT 19

very much in the vein of MTV: telling a vague story with some very stylised performances. At the same time there were fans who were creating animated content to my Songs To Wear Pants To material. So in the beginning my YouTube output consisted of polished professional music videos and fan art. That took quite a few twists and turns to get where I am today; vlogs and music videos that aren’t made with a big team or tons of lights and special locations. Instead they are polished in a different way, and very much about me providing an experience for viewers from which they can take something musical and educational.”

STRIKE ON THE UPBEAT

YOUTUBER TOOLKIT: ANDREW HUANG As far as production quality goes, YouTubers can get access to all the music and video gear required for relatively little money. Underneath each of his videos Huang provides links to much of the equipment he uses, with his main camera currently being a Canon EOS 80D DSLR, combined with a Rode VideoMic Pro camera-top shotgun microphone. His video editing software is Adobe Premiere Pro, which he regrets does not integrate with his main DAW, Ableton Live 9. “There’s a lot of manual work involved in importing and exporting files between these two programs!”

In addition to Ableton Live, Huang’s Toronto studio includes Tannoy Reveal 802 monitors, the Ableton Push controller, Native Instruments’ Komplete Kontrol S61 keyboard, Shure SM7B dynamic mic, Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface, Sonex Pyramid acoustic foam and the RealTraps portable vocal booth for acoustic treatment, and the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synth.

“The OP-1 is definitely an irreplaceable piece of equipment,” adds Huang, “because there’s nothing else like it. It’s small, aesthetically pleasing, has incredible battery life, and the most important thing is that it makes everything a bit more fun. It has a very enjoyable and interesting workflow. It’s a bit less direct. You don’t always know what parameter you’re tweaking, and this forces you to explore more and rely on your ears rather than looking at numbers on your screen.”

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YouTube-specific music content doesn’t seem to become part of a wider cultural discussion, and is often seen as not cool to talk about. This despite the fact that more people may view certain YouTube content than a popular TV show

An significant element that makes Huang’s videos fascinating to watch is his upbeat, easy-going online personality. An appealing online alter (or real) ego is common to all three interviewees in this article, and most likely pretty crucial. However, today Andrew Huang’s business model doesn’t solely rely on YouTube, but also on Patreon—a website allowing fans to act as patrons of the arts—and income from commercial work, both avenues that may also work for the less charismatically-inclined.

“Income from YouTube has never been predictable,” Huang explains. “You have spikes and dips in your views, which depend on what you are putting out and on whether YouTube’s algorithm is friendly to you, allowing your videos to show up in searches. Your income also depends on the kind of ads that appear next to your videos or whether there are ads at all. So YouTube is always there, but the money I receive from it fluctuates a lot.

“By contrast, Patreon is great for me. Though it takes a long time to build up your Patreon fanbase, it now provides me with regular income.

I can set my Patreon page to receive contributions per month or per creation, and I have 600 Patreons who support the videos I put out, and this generates between US$4-5000 per month.

The money I would make from 600 people in ad impressions would be just a fraction of that. But the last couple of years the majority of my revenue has been from larger commercial work for hire.

That is usually the most lucrative. For example, I recently did a partnership with LG, promoting a fridge of theirs, and I composed the music for their campaign and shared about that with my audience in a YouTube video.”

Like most musicians, Huang writes his own music and is eager to promote it, calling himself a “noisemaker/shapeshifter.” He’s released an impressive 40 albums — mostly containing synth-based music and influences from rap and dubstep — which he sells independently on CD and vinyl, or via DFTBA Records (Don’t Forget To Be Awesome, a website specifically set up to allow YouTubers to sell merchandise), with downloads via the usual services. However, he seems quite content for it to be a minor aspect of his income.

“Selling my own music is not the main part of what I do,” he said. “The whole video and marketing has taken off in such a way that music sales can’t compete with that. I am lucky to have a sizeable audience and content that is friendly

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MIXING WITHOUT HEARING In sharp contrast to his normally cheerful, upbeat video style, late in 2016 Andrew Huang soberly revealed a bombshell: he suffers from serious hearing loss. In the vlog he describes how one day 10 years ago he was listening to music and noticed everything sounded thin and distant. After testing his gear, he realised it was his hearing that was the problem. Visits to several doctors gave no clues as to any cause or cure. As someone who was moved to tears describing how much he loves music in another vlog, it’s “a major bummer.” In fact, it’s every musician’s nightmare, and something most musicians and audio professionals do their best to keep secret, as it might affect their professional profile. Huang’s courage in ‘outing’ himself, so to speak, is admirable, but how does he deal with it?

“I have a lot of low end loss, and a little bit of high end loss, and it’s much worse in the right ear,” Huang explains. “Once in a while I get a lot of tinnitus, and sometimes there’s a week where some of my hearing returns. However, for the most part it doesn’t change. ENT specialists tell me I still can hear the range of human speech, so they’re not too concerned. The musical perspective isn’t really on their

enough to regularly get requests for commercial partnerships. I know many YouTubers who have more subscribers to their channels and are reaching millions more people than me, but who are not able to connect with advertisers because their stuff is deemed offensive or in other ways controversial.”

One thing that Huang does have in common with almost all YouTubers is being extremely chuffed with his independence. Like the others interviewed here, he has no need or desire for a record contract. “It’s great to be independent.

I’m in control of what I am making and when it comes out, how I am promoting and marketing it. There still is value in what labels provide, primarily in terms of promotion, but the traditional music industry and YouTube are still separate in many ways. As a YouTuber you’re in a different world than if you are a traditional artist. You put out different content, and you approach social platforms and live events in a different way.”

ART UPSTARTS

Like all artists who work professionally online, Huang’s YouTube page contains links to a whole swathe of social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Soundcloud, Snapchat, etc) and his videos all end with the equally mandatory AT 22

radar. It’s frustrating, because it means I’ll never be a top-tier mixer. It sucks, but I can’t let it get in the way. I’ve had to deal with it, and I don’t think about it too often anymore. It’s just the way it is.

“I do a few things to try to compensate. I use Aumeo [www.aumeoaudio.com], which is an app that comes with a small device with an input and headphone output.

It plays you a range of sine waves and you have to indicate when they become imperceptible so it can create a profile of your hearing. It then compensates for this with an EQ graph. Sometimes when I’m working in Ableton I go through the Aumeo device when listening on headphones. It gives me a closer experience of what a normal set of ears would hear. While mixing I am always looking at the Ableton spectrum analyser, which gives me a live readout of all the frequencies that are active. I also regularly put my hand up to the speakers to feel the amount of bass. All that gives me a pretty clear idea of what my mixes sound like. I’ve recently considered having someone else mix my stuff, which will be an experiment, as it’ll be hard for me to know what they’ve done, and how it compares to what I do.”

bit of self-promotion; asking viewers to like and subscribe to his channel, pointing out his Patreon page, downloads and other content he provides. This inevitable commercial aspect of life on YouTube may contribute to the artistic credibility gap that distances the mainstream media. Moreover, Huang’s own videos, like most content provided by independent YouTubers, lean heavily on the side of entertaining the viewer for a few minutes.

Huang agrees that YouTube does not appear to be conducive to the creation of ‘high art’: “The environment you work in definitely shapes people’s perception and experience of it. Generally speaking, YouTube-specific music content doesn’t seem to become part of a wider cultural discussion, and is often seen as not cool to talk about. This despite the fact that more people may view certain YouTube content than a popular TV show. There’s a widely held view that an artist working on YouTube is not at the same level as, for example, someone signed to a record company. However, YouTube is slowly becoming more accepted as a legitimate outlet for artistic work. That’s a side I want to be part of. I’m 100% into moving YouTube forwards, not only in terms of the number of viewers but also in the quality of work that is available on it.”

As for the future, Huang’s main focus is on further developing his YouTube presence. “I definitely want to keep a lot of variety. I don’t want to settle into a format. I have a love of all things musical and want to continue to share that. I keep track of all the ideas I think of or that are suggested to me by others, and then it’s a juggling game between something I may want to promote — whether it’s my own music or something I’m hired for — or an idea that is exciting, or tagging onto something that is trending — the time to strike with that is as soon as possible.

“It’s also an issue of what I am physically able to produce while sticking to my release schedule of Monday and Thursday. My wife’s brother sometimes comes in a few days a week to help with editing, and occasionally some people come in to help with a shoot. But primarily it’s just me and a camera. Sometimes I will film myself while I am actually playing and singing, at other times I will lip sync. YouTube viewers appreciate that level of authenticity and extra bit of impressiveness that comes from seeing you’re doing everything live, but I don’t hold myself to that. I simply try to find the video concept that will best present the idea or the piece of music I’m presenting.”

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KAWEHI SUBSCRIBERS: 161,000 VIDEO VIEWS: 13 MILLION

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Kawehi is not primarily a YouTube musician, but calls herself a “one woman band” who uses many different web sites, including YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Kawehi.com to release her videos and music. Her YouTube stats are less stratospheric than those of the real high-flyers, but she’s nonetheless enjoying an impressive independent internet-fuelled music career.

Kawehi made a name for herself by performing all the musical parts of her videos live through looping. It’s an impressive feat, but what helped her stand out and flagged as Vimeo Staff Picks were the moving images she and husband Paul Wight created. For example, in the video of her song Anthem she sings and beatboxes each musical part with different versions of her head in cardboard boxes. It is fascinating to watch and an apt illustration of what’s she’s doing. Many of Kawehi’s videos are closer in style to traditional music videos, and some are arty in a way few YouTube videos are. Because of this, and perhaps also because she’s a photogenic young woman, Kawehi gets more attention from the mainstream media than the average YouTuber.

Originally from Hawaii, and part Japanese, Kawehi started out playing ukulele (“everyone in first grade in Hawaii gets a ukelele to play”), piano and violin. She moved to LA in 2002, at the age of 19, because she wanted to pursue music for a

living, and signed a seven-year, seven-album record contract as part of a band. Her ‘dream come true’ quickly turned into a nightmare lesson about the pitfalls of the traditional music industry.

“I 100% loathed the experience,” she rued, “and I left three months into the contract. It meant I could not make any creative content for another seven years that would not belong to someone else. That experience was a tough one. With my hands tied for seven years, I did everything to pay the bills: waiting tables, busking in the streets, writing radio spots. One positive was I met Paul during my time in LA and we got married. After the seven years I tried everything to get back into music. I had a band at one point, and that was a lot of fun, but it’s really difficult to get five knuckleheads in one room to cooperate with each other! I ended up doing the ‘solo singer/songwriter with a guitar’ thing, but I felt I wasn’t getting any better.”

TRICKLE TO REVENUE STREAM

Seven years of laying low and being forced into average day-jobs, followed by creative stagnation is not the stuff dreams are made of. However, being fully committed to their dream of cobbling together a living from making music, Kawehi and her husband began piecing the puzzle together.

Eventually they found some aces in the pack; looping, creating videos, Kickstarter, and a leap

into the unknown, or more specifically, a move to Kansas. Kawehi unravelled their trajectory: “Around 2011 I was getting into looping stuff live, which I found far more creative and interesting. I had to put my mind into being a bass player, and a violinist, and so on, and come at a piece of music from several different angles. Then one day Paul suggested we do videos. That definitely changed everything. I started off not having any videos, and when Paul mentioned that people were doing videos now I realised I needed to stay relevant. I needed to have enough content out there on the Internet and let people see what I was doing.”

Kawehi had tried funding the recording of a first album using Kickstarter, but was unsuccessful.

Then, in April 2012, luck struck with her loop cover of Britney Spears’ Criminal, and Vimeo featured it as a Staff Pick. “I went from 800 fans to 3000 fans and after that I could fulfil my Kickstarter project.

I’d never been able to do that before. But it was all still on a small scale. We needed to put out more content, so one night after too many shots of sake we decided to quit our jobs and work full-time on music. We lasted a year, after which we had to sell our house because we couldn’t afford it anymore.

In 2013 we moved to Kansas, where we bought a studio from the leftover cash from selling our house. Moving from LA to Kansas was a big leap in our favour money-wise. Being able to create stuff without having to worry about paying your bills really was a game changer!”

Not long after moving to Kansas Kawehi and her husband enjoyed a second stroke of luck

when her cover of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box was also chosen as a Vimeo Staff Pick. This time interviews with Kawehi appeared in a wide variety of news outlets, both print and online, resulting in a huge boost in online views and fans. Kawehi has now been able to oversubscribe eight Kickstarter projects for seven EPs and a short sci-fi film, and Eve: A Sci-fi Visual Album is expected to be out by the end of the year.

COVERED FOR CONTENT

Kawehi’s modest 20-odd videos on YouTube and Vimeo are mostly covers of songs by acts like Crowded House, NIN, Sia, Garbage, Muse, and Led Zeppelin, but also contain several originals. In all cases, she puts her own stamp on these songs. She also regularly tours, and the majority of the music she releases as audio-only is her own material.

Although Kawehi has the looks and personality to become a full-time YouTuber, she is instead a musician who happens to use YouTube as a way of promoting herself.

“What I do at the moment is a combination of everything,” says Kawehi. “If you’re not with a record label you need to do everything yourself, and you need to go down every possible avenue to stay relevant and keep your career alive. At the same time, I don’t want to release a video once a week, because it’s not conducive to me developing as an artist. It makes sense if your objective is to provide weekly entertainment for people, but that’s not what I’m interested in at all! It’s also why I stick to Kickstarter and haven’t tried

YOUTUBER TOOLKIT: KAWEHI When Paul and Kawehi moved to Kansas they took over a 200-year old brick building that used to house Black Lodge Recording Studios. Paul now has his own studio there, which is apparently full of outboard and other studio hardware, whereas Kawehi has her own room that contains essentially the same gear she uses live. Though minimal, she’s come a long way from the Boss RC30 looping pedal she began with: “The thing with looping is that you start with one thing, and then you keep wanting to do more. The RC30 only has two tracks, so I went up to the RC300, then I realised I still wanted more tracks and different sounds. So I started to run Ableton Live, and love it. It opens up endless possibilities. I run it through an Apollo Twin interface, and I have the Helicon VoiceLive Touch 2 for vocal effects and to create background vocals. I also have the Novation Launchpad which keeps everything organised and allows me to record and stop and start things. I have a pedal that does the same when I can’t use my hands. The Novation Mini Nova is my keyboard, and I use a Les Paul guitar.

The monitors at my studio are Yamaha NS10s, and my main live vocal mic is a Shure SM58, whereas I use a Neumann TLM 103 in the studio.”

AT 25

I’m doing it live, so if I mess a part up I need to start all over again. All videos are shot in one take

Patreon. My Kickstarter campaigns have been really successful, and I would hate to have to deal with a monthly subscription and a commitment to regularly produce videos. Instead I like the idea of people getting excited about larger and not so time-bound projects.”

The covers Kawehi creates are now a byproduct of her Kickstarter campaigns, because one of the perks for backers who donate over a certain amount is that they can suggest three songs for her to cover. “I work my way through the suggestions and try them and go with the one that works the best,” she says. “I would never have thought of some of the suggested songs, but I ended up having a good time with them because figuring out a different angle is interesting. With a song like that Britney Spears one, I needed to approach it differently. My gripe with pop music is its repetitiveness, but I can find something to enjoy in any song.

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“Arranging songs, so I can play them live with loops takes a lot of work. The arrangement needs to be interesting so people don’t get bored while watching me build it, and it can be a problem if a song has five different sections. Some songs are impossible to loop for that reason. And I can get really picky about the sounds I use. I may spend an entire day on just a bass sound! To be honest, I really enjoy that part of what I do. I prefer working in a studio, looking for sounds and building an arrangement over being in front of a camera or up on stage. I like the behind the scenes part.

“When I think I have the arrangement, Paul sets the camera up and says: ‘OK, let’s see it.’ It’s then that sometimes I realise I don’t have it. I’m doing it live, so if I mess a part up I need to start all over again.

All videos are shot in one take. Sometimes, like with the Nirvana song, I get it on the first take, though with that video I keep thinking, ‘Oh, I wish I had done this or that.’ The video for my song Telescope

was also done live. We recorded it in the fields off the road that runs between our studio and the local town. That was a lot of pressure, because we wanted to catch the sunset, so there was limited time to do it. I record the audio of the videos back into Ableton, but don’t really mix it after the event. The post-work is done by Paul, who colours the videos and touches everything up before it goes out.”

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LEO MORACHIOLLI SUBSCRIBERS: 1.5 MILLION VIDEO VIEWS: 277 MILLION

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Leo Morachiolli’s path to YouTube fame was shorter and more straightforward than that of Huang and Kawehi. It’s taken him only three years to amass his impressive audience, once again, largely under the radar of the mainstream press.

Before YouTube fame hit, Morachiolla was very much like millions of other aspiring musicians around the world. Born in Norway in 1978 to an Italian father and a Norwegian mother, he started playing guitar and singing at age 15, played in bands, one of which had a record contract with a small Norwegian label.

However, Morachiolla concedes, “unless you’re really big, you can’t make money from music in Norway, so I ended up having to do nine to five jobs. For years I worked mostly in kindergartens and did music as a hobby. But when we moved to Oltedal (a small town in south-west Norway) in 2011, I quit my job and built a studio just outside our house, called Frog Leap Studios, and recorded local bands there. Also, after having played in metal bands for years, I had gotten tired of that, and I started playing acoustic shows in the local area, just to do something different. In addition to all that, I began doing music and promotional videos for studio clients, as well as for myself and to promote the studio. I made an okay living from that.”

Totally unexpectedly, and for reasons that are still a mystery, fortune struck in 2014. Morachiolli

had opened his YouTube channel far back in 2006, and once his studio was up and running he uploaded a number of acoustic covers, and the occasional metal cover, in which he slowly developed his visual approach. In October 2014 he posted a metal cover of Lady Gaga’s Pokerface, which bore most of the hallmarks of the metal covers series for which he’s become famous: his maniacal, wide-eyed persona; the hard-hitting, inyour-face metal style; and the switch from starting the song slightly understated to going full on with screaming vocals are all there to a large degree.

At the time, though, it was just another video for Morachiolli. “I had begun posting videos of my acoustic covers to promote myself in the local area,” he recalls, “and I did a metal version of Pokerface just for fun. After a while I noticed it was getting a lot of views, and within a year it had one million views. That’s when I decided to focus on doing metal covers. I checked out all the issues with licensing and doing everything to the letter of the law, and how you can make money from ad revenue. I really sat down and went for it, and decided to put out a video every Friday.”

ARTISTIC LICENSE

You can trace Morachiolli’s route to Internet success and how he spent a year searching for the right formula on his Frog Leap Studios YouTube

channel, where he’s kept all 500+ videos he’s ever posted. His pre-Pokerface videos have a few hundred to a few thousand views; typical of your regular local musician or studio. Today, presumably helped by Morachiolli’s post-Pokerface fame, the views of his acoustic covers are in the hundreds of thousands. Pokerface itself has 7.3 million views.

However, the views of videos posted in the months after Pokerface are back in the thousands again.

Just before Christmas 2014, Morachiolli uploaded a metal cover of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, and in May 2015 a tutorial on how to play Pokerface, and then in July a cover of Deep Purple’s Black Night. The number of views ran into the tens and hundreds of thousands, good but not staggering. Finally, on September 29, 2014 Morachiolli posted a metal cover of Sia’s Chandeliers (5.4 million views), and suddenly his winning formula became crystal clear. A metal cover of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off followed a fortnight later (3.6 million views) and from that point onwards he’s released a metal cover every week. The pattern is obvious: metal covers of wellknown songs, preferably pop songs, get millions of hits, with the highlight the 30 million hits for his metal cover of Adele’s Hello. Acoustic covers, tutorials, and vlogs are far less popular.

“I now put out maybe two or three videos a week,” comments Morachiolli,” and they can be a vlog, or a tutorial, or just anything I feel like, and then there are the music videos. Deciding on what to do comes down to what I am feeling in the moment, and what is interesting to me. I don’t really speculate on what people want, as long as I’m happy with what I do, that seems to work. Of course, the metal videos get millions of views, but I like to mix it up. It can get tiring to do the same thing over and over. Recently I had a video about going up the mountain close to our house, and I have videos with drone perspectives of the local area, and so on. People like nature here in Norway, so they love these things.”

Morachiolla lives in the middle of some truly stunning scenery, so if his metal covers ever were to flop, there’d always be a job for him at the local tourist office. For now he’s making a handsome living from YouTube, and associated revenue streams. “YouTube’s ad revenue is an important source of income,” he says. “But honestly, I don’t really understand how it works. YouTube takes care of it all. In addition I have a crowdfunding page on Patreon, and supporters give me between $1-5 per video, and they get all 180 songs I’ve done, and other stuff. Then there’s the money I make from selling my covers on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon. It’s the biggest compliment that people are buying my music, both as individual songs and as albums. I also sell some merchandise, but the track sales are now my main source of income.

“The licensing was taken care of via Loudr, and now by SoundDrop. I upload the song I cover to SoundDrop every week, and they contact the record companies and secure the licence so the songwriter gets a percentage of each sale.

SoundDrop also takes care of distributing my tracks to iTunes and Amazon and Google Play.

I’ve been getting offers from big record labels, which is crazy, because I don’t need a record company taking a big piece

YOUTUBER TOOLKIT: LEO MORACHIOLLI Morachiolli: “I record everything in Reaper. For maybe eight years I had a Boss eight-track digital recorder, which kind of worked like a tape recorder and was great to learn on. Then I used Cubase for a couple of years, and when I started the studio someone recommended Reaper because it’s light on the CPU. I really liked it, so I’ve stuck with it since. I like the customisation options that are part of Reaper, and also the bundled plug-ins.

Of course, it’s not the program, it’s what you do with it that’s important.

“I use Reaper in conjunction with the PreSonus StudioLive 16.0.2 16-channel digital mixer, which functions as a soundcard, and has just enough chan-

nels to record live drums. This is cool, even though I normally program my drums using Toontrack Superior Drummer. I also use Toontrack’s EZMix lead vocal pack. The other thing I often use in the box is Native Instruments’ Kontakt, which is great.

Out of the box I have a Novation Remote 37SL MIDI controller, and I mainly record my guitar and bass parts through a Kemper modelling amplifier.

My monitors are the Genelec 10As, which are kind of oversized for this room, but they’re really good and neutral sounding. I record my vocals using the Shure SM7B, which sounds great, and I also use Aston mics sometimes.”

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Things like Facebook and Instagram and so on are just promotional tools in all this. I also put my videos on Facebook, but I link them to YouTube so I still get the views. I’m now averaging between 15 and 18 million views per month on YouTube, and that’s more than enough.”

THE HEAVY METAL GRIND

Like Huang, Morachialli agrees that sticking to a regular release schedule can be hard work and requires focus and discipline. The music videos, says the Norwegian, “usually take me three to four days, with one day for the video, so the audio recording takes the longest. When I choose a song I have to hear something clear and strong in it that gives me a main guitar riff to play. The song also needs to have a strong chorus. I like staccato, chugging guitar riffs, and I don’t really analyse the chords from the original. I may instead create different chord structures that fit me singing the melody. I tend to record the guitars in sections — the verse, then the chorus — and overdub rhythm guitars four times to get that massive metal sound.

After that, I add the drums, the bass, and then the vocals, and finally any other instruments I may use.

Once the track is arranged and recorded, Morachiolli turns his attention to recording the video. His gear consists of a Canon 70D camera, which he says was a “real epiphany, because when you use a DSLR camera suddenly it doesn’t look like a home movie anymore.” His main rig is supplemented by a couple of GoPros and a drone.

His video editing software is Adobe’s Premiere Pro. With all that gear in hand, Morachiolli explains that, “most often I’m just winging what I’m going AT 30

to do. Sometimes I use things that I’ve only thought of while shooting. I don’t plan too much for the videos, I’m really spontaneous.

“I think my visual style has been there since the first metal video. It evolved further with all the costumes, but I’ve always been really crazy when I play live. In the metal bands I was always the guy who gave 120% on stage, even though I’m a really calm person when I’m not playing. I started experimenting with the weird angles you can get with GoPros and in general the videos have become more crazy, perhaps because I’m more relaxed. I think it’s just fun. There are so many musicians on YouTube just sitting on their bed, looking down at their guitar, it’s interesting to see something else.

“There are better guitarists and vocalists than me, but my strength is that I can do a bit of everything; I know how to play, record and mix, and how to film and edit, so it’s the whole package. I’m really content with how things are at the moment. I get my own creativity out in the metal arrangements and by adding original parts to the songs. I’m kind of spoiled now because I have total control over what I do and don’t have to work with someone else unless I want to. I’ve been getting offers from big record labels, which is crazy, because I don’t need a record company taking a big piece. I have my own audience and I reach the entire world through YouTube!”

It seems that some of the original brave new promises of the Internet have come through after all.

I upload the song I cover to SoundDrop every week, and they contact the record companies and secure the licence so the songwriter gets a percentage of each sale

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cmi.com.au/korgdealers AT 31

FEATURE

All-round producer and MIDI guitar programmer, Doc McKinney, explains how he and The Weeknd pulled together 18 songs from 40 collaborators and fashioned Starboy.

Interview: Paul Tingen Photo: Zoe Prinds-Flash

ABOUT DOC Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney was born in Canada, but grew up in Minneapolis, where he started his music career playing guitar in punk-rock bands. It was during his first tour at age “13, 14” that he squatted in Manhattan. Growing up as a black kid playing guitar elicited sneering responses, but “what people don’t understand about me is that I don’t give a f**k,” said McKinney. “I grew up punk rock as hell.”

In 1994, in his early twenties, McKinney decided that there wasn’t much space for him to grow as a musician in Minneapolis, so he moved to Toronto. It was here that he began the duo Esthero, with singer Jenny-Bea Englishman — their debut album Breath from Another (1998) became a trip-hop classic.

McKinney went on to work as a co-writer and producer with artists like Kelis, Raphael Saadiq, Stiffed, and Santigold. Because of his background as a musician and a guitar player he says, “there’s a lot of room for me to be creative when I’m working with new artists.

My main thing is developing artists. I’m not motivated by money, so the music means everything to me. I definitely have a lot of ideas and like to be involved in and collaborate on every aspect, at least in the beginning stages.”

Not one song on The Weeknd’s [aka Abel Tesfaye] 18-song third album, Starboy, is credited to less than five writers. There were 40 credited on the album in total including Daft Punk, Diplo, Max Martin, and Benny Blanco. To help hold it all together, the 45-year old Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney worked alongside Abel as co-executive producer.

Doc McKinney’s relationship with Tesfaye started right at the beginning, in 2011. McKinney co-wrote and co-produced, with Carlo Montagnese (aka Illangelo), five of the nine songs on The Weeknd’s debut mix tape, House of Balloons. The two also co-produced all songs on The Weeknd’s follow-up, Thursday, also released in 2011, but hadn’t worked with The Weeknd since.

McKinney wasn’t involved at the very early stages of Starboy either, but soon got his teeth stuck back in. Besides executive producing, Doc was involved in songwriting, engineering, playing, programming and producing. Some of the songwriting took place at McKinney’s own studio in Toronto, but for seven months they were holed up in Conway Studios in Los Angeles, where they had a lockout of the entire studio and beatmakers and musicians were coming in and out, working in all rooms.

AT talked to McKinney in Los Angeles about Starboy, and he was at pains to credit the contribution of the collective and Abel’s central role. McKinney: “Abel is really hands-on and super-creative, and always working. When I came into this record, there already were quite a few song ideas. Abel is a close collaborator with Max [Martin], and they had already recorded most of the two songs that were to appear on the album [Love To Lay and A Lonely Night]. Abel had also worked on the basics of the song he’d written with Benny [Blanco, Attention]. Plus he’d been in Paris working with Daft Punk. The making of this record was very different to the other records I’ve worked on with Abel.”

AudioTechnology: How did you get involved with The Weeknd?

Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney: “When I first met Abel, he’d already been writing and recording with various people and had put four songs on the Internet a few months earlier. Henry ‘Cirkut’ Walter and Adrien ‘AG’ Gough had been working on one of these tracks as part of a production team I was mentoring called The Dream Machine.

They told me to check Abel out, so I invited him into my studio on the first of January, and quickly established that natural connection which happens occasionally in music between an artist and a producer or writer. I’m quite a bit older than him, I have two kids and a family, and his third mix tape had more sexual content. We didn’t seem to be able to get that right, so I dropped out of making it.

We also didn’t manage to connect for his first two albums, but then he asked me to come on board and produce the new record.”

AT: What is Abel like to work with?

MDM: “Abel is very private. In the beginning, it was just Abel and myself working at my studio. He’s a very strong songwriter but likes to collaborate with many different people. At Conway Studios we had a core team of Abel, Ben [Billions, aka

Benjamin Diehl], Cashmere, Cirkut writing and producing in different rooms, with others dropping by. Sometimes all three rooms would be filled, but it was empty a lot of the time. Most of the production took place at Conway, then Daft Punk did their thing in Paris, Max Martin at his compound, and Benny in New York.

“Writing pop music is very different to traditional song writing now. It’s not like country music, where one person comes up with the lyric and melody and chords and is the sole writer of each song. In contemporary pop, producers and beatmakers have turned into writers. Anyone who contributes an idea, even just two words, gets a credit. That’s why you see many writers per song — Starboy is typical of that.”

AT: How do you start the songwriting process?

MDM: “False Alarm was one of the first ideas Abel and I developed. It started out as a punk jam session, with me on guitar. Many songs resulted from actually playing, rather than programming.

I actually use a MIDI guitar to do all the keyboards and even the drums. I’m lucky that Abel is a big fan of guitars, so many of the ideas we came up with started on guitar

We’d talk and listen to music then start wailing away on guitars, keyboards or drums, and musician friends of ours would drop by and play along with us. We weren’t serious about trying to create a pop or punk song. We weren’t trying to fit things into genres, we just tried to make great music and create something that made us feel something.

“I played some of the guitars in False Alarm and that’s me playing the lead guitar on Sidewalks!

I rarely credit myself for instruments on records. I don’t like these credits that go, ‘hi-hats programmed by X, bass in the bridge by Y.’ It’s too much. Sidewalks started with an idea I laid down maybe a year earlier with a producer called Bobby Raps. I did the drums and guitar and Bobby killed the bass line. Abel liked it, so we worked on getting it to the next level. We got Ali Shaheed JonesMuhummad from A Tribe Called Quest in who did some cool orchestral stuff on it, and Kendrick [Lamar] did an amazing job. I was stressed out, because he wanted to start tracking so fast and I was still in Ableton, so I had to cut his vocals in that. Ableton is not an ideal DAW for cutting vocals on, but it came out amazing.”

AT: Are you primarily an Ableton user?

MDM: “I’ve been working in Ableton for the last 10 years, though I also use Logic and Pro

Tools. Ableton is very transparent for writing and production. It’s very flexible when you’re changing things like pitch and tempo. However, if I was scoring a movie, I’d use Logic, which is great for MIDI and composing. Pro Tools is the best for cutting live instrumentation and vocals.

“I actually use a MIDI guitar to do all the keyboards and even the drums. I also have real drums, bass, and keyboards in my studio, but whether I use them depends on what the project needs. My MIDI trigger is the Fishman Triple Play, which has the fastest latency of any MIDI guitar, short of the ones that work with buttons.

I’ve been working with MIDI guitar for so long that I’m used to latency, but the Fishman is totally workable. I used it a lot on this album, as well as playing regular guitars. I’m lucky that Abel is a big fan of guitars, so many of the ideas we came up with started on guitar.”

AT: There’s a fair amount of Auto-Tune over Abel’s vocals, was that always part of the plan?

MDM:“We had lots of conversations about it. Abel’s voice is beautiful and he doesn’t normally need Auto-Tune. Instead we used it to create a certain vibe. It was not about trying to sound cool. You can be a great guitar player on the acoustic guitar, or you can be a great electric guitar player. They are two different things. It’s the same with singing with or without Auto-Tune. For example, Sidewalk has a classic soul sound and would have sounded derivative if Abel had sung that without AutoTune.

It helped make the record sound more current.

“Many different people cut Abel’s vocals for this record, by the way. If the spirit catches him, every way works. If I recorded him, I used a vintage Neumann U67, which sounds amazing on him, and a UREI 1176 Blue compressor. Sometimes a Shure SM7 or SM57 also works great on Abel. Max Martin or Daft Punk might have used a different mic and recording chain.”

AT: Was there a lot of back and forth between the 40 collaborators over the seven months?

MDM: “Sometimes it takes five minutes to come up with a melody and a chorus, but then you can play around with it for a week, or a month, or longer.

Sometimes we’re close to the end and the bridge still hasn’t been written, or it’s not quite right, then you have that moment of inspiration. We play with pitch, tempo, sometimes we try a melody or a song over a trap beat or a house beat; you’re constantly playing with it. The production may change, which may prompt a key change, which inspires another change, and so on.”

AT: The final track list is 18 songs. With so many collaborators, how did you get it all to gel?

MDM: “Drawing together all that material was difficult. We spent a lot of time on pre-mixes.

Cirkut made rough mixes of each track in Cubase before transferring the sessions to Pro Tools and handing them over to Manny Marroquin and Serban Ghenea. There are few artists, perhaps only Prince and Michael Jackson, who can go from pop to rock to hip hop and be convincing. Fortunately Abel is comfortable in all those genres and has the ability to use different aspects of his voice and contrasting vocal sounds. Above all, he has the ability to remain excited about songs after working on them for five months. He really is a visionary.”

AT 33

FEATURE

TYCHO RIDES WAVES’ EMOTION

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Tycho’s music might be chill, but operating monitors is not.

Naturally, we were intrigued when we spied Waves’ eMotion LV1 touchscreen system at the position.

Story: Mark Davie

Before Scott Hansen started making ambient electronic music under the Tycho moniker, he was a graphic designer with a different pseudonym — ISO50 — working for Adobe (the makers of Photoshop and arguably the epicentre of the design universe). Naturally, visuals play a big role in Tycho’s live show — proportionately relying on the landscapes looping onscreen as it does the soundscapes looping onstage.

It’s equally dependent on screen visuals behind the scenes too. Panning across the trestle tables assembled at side of stage at Laneway in Sydney, there’s a Macbook Pro running Arena — a visual playback engine, a PC laptop taking care of playback via Reaper, and two Dell touchscreens controlling a Waves eMotion LV1 mixing system for monitors.

It’s still rare to see fully-fledged touchscreen-only mixers in the high-stakes world of touring audio, but they’re scarce as hen’s teeth at the monitor position. The de facto standard for digital monitor consoles is probably still the Yamaha PM5D. It’s been hard to shake off its perch not because it sounds superlative, but purely due to its workflow, and plethora of physical knobs and faders.

However, all those tactile bits and pieces come at a price; size. A luxury Tycho doesn’t have, explained monitor engineer Sage Plakosh: “We chose the LV1 because we’re doing a bunch of back-to-back fly dates, and we needed our own console that would fit in a really small frame.”

Beyond that, there were two other main selling points: the ability to use Waves plug-ins, and the sound quality. “I have an SSL bus compressor and PAZ Analyzer on every output, and I find it runs Waves plug-ins better than other consoles out there,” said Plakosh. “And the sound quality is really on par with a DiGiCo SD9.”

However, the switch to the LV1 wasn’t without a learning curve. “I started in the business when analogue was king,” continued Plakosh. “Going from tactile to touching the screen for fader moves was definitely new to me.” In fact, he’s already planning on taking a look at some control surfaces when the tour hits Europe and they won’t be doing as many fly dates. The SSL Nucleus is high on his list to check out, as a couple of fellow engineers he knows have used the same combination with success. “I’d like to get to that point for monitors, because of speed,” said Plakosh. “Right now, if I want to get to a channel, I have to select the channel page, select the mix, then select what I’m doing. Half the gig is being able to respond to the musicians’ needs as quickly as possible, and I could be quicker if I had a dedicated surface.”

We chose the LV1 because we’re doing a bunch of back-to-back fly dates, and we needed our own console that would fit in a really small frame Sage Plakosh peers out through the smoke to make sure everyone’s happy onstage. His dual screen LV1 setup gives him touch access to all his channels and Waves plug-in parameters.

ORDER FOH TWO

It doesn’t stop there, Tycho’s entire console system is LV1 dependent. “We’re using three DiGiGrid IOX interfaces; two in my rack and one on stage,” outlined Plakosh. “Then we have a DiGiGrid IOC at FOH for routing back to the PA. There’s just a CAT6 cable that runs between us to connect the devices. We share inputs and head amps at the moment, because we don’t have enough I/O to split the signals.”

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Scott Hansen is a vintage synth aficionado, yet the diminutive Korg Monologue has found its way into his arsenal.

I find it runs Waves plug-ins better than other consoles out there, and the sound quality is really on par with a DiGiCo SD9

One of the downsides of flying your console is the TSA can mess with it. Luckily it all worked when Plakosh plugged his DiGiGrid iOX’s back together.

Bryan Berge making final preparations to his LV1 setup before the Tycho show begins.

All the little boxes keeping all the computers in sync — Reaper running playback, and Arena taking care of visuals.

AT 36

Plakosh said the first week setting up the system was tough. Because the LV1 platform is open to configuration, when the rig arrived from Brown Note Productions in Colorado it took a while for the crew to bed in their preferences. “You can set it up to play so many different roles,” explained Plakosh. “It was initially configured so when I’d mute something, it’d mute it at FOH. We had to work out a lot in rehearsal.

“From a hardware standpoint, these IOXs get toasty hot. When they originally came to us, they were racked one on top of the other which would generate a lot of heat and start to degrade the reliability, like most electronics. Putting space between them helped a lot. Once we got it under control, we’ve been having a good run with it.”

The Tycho show comprises 16 channels of playback, with cues on top of that. On the live side there are 10 drum inputs, two stereo guitars, mono bass and loads of keyboards, including Korg’s recent Minilogue, which gets a run alongside Hansen’s vintage synth collection. Both positions run a Waves Extreme Soundgrid server to power their plug-ins. It’s almost overkill, as it can run up over 500 instances of a given plug-in. Plakosh uses the LV1’s own EMO plug-ins on all the live inputs, “even if it’s nothing more than high and low pass,” he said. “I also have a basic comp/gate and EQ if I need. The EMO stuff is good. I’m using the SSL EQs for drums because they sound amazing. I’m using the dbx 160 on the kick, which takes a little of the punch out of it, and the API 2500 on guitars, which sounds amazing.”

Out front, engineer Bryan Berge, was bullish about the benefits of using Waves’ LV1 system, saying the sound is, “cleaner and has more headroom,” than other systems. “You can run the Extreme servers on many other systems, but when it’s built into the network, you get super low latency.” Berge explained LV1’s virtual rack system, saying, “you have eight plug-ins per channel, and when you switch over to the next song, you have the same eight plug-ins. It’s more like a rack with built-in hardware. I’ve never really run into any issues, you can get slick with how you route things so if you need something in addition to the eight, you can send it to a matrix or a group and have an additional eight on top without any added latency.

“There aren’t loads of people using it: Dweezil Zappa has it at monitors and FOH, Flume’s using it at monitors, Pitbull at FOH. It’s still pretty new. The nice part about that is we’ve got 24-hour access to Waves’ support team if we’ve got any issues. We’re also giving them input for design and build for the next version.”

AT 37

FEATURE

Artist: Thundamentals Album: Everyone We Know

THUNDAMENTALLY SOUND

Thundamentals aren’t afraid to show their stripes on Everyone We Know. Relying on familiar engineer Dave Hammer to knock their diverse influences into line.

Story: Mark Davie

AT 38

In the early 2000s I went to an MC battle at Melbourne’s Hi-Fi Bar and witnessed a kid get mauled for one simple, yet contentious, taboo. I remember cringing when the first words flowed out of his mouth and something was conspicuously missing… that Aussie twang. You couldn’t get more Metropolitan than a Swanston Street basement in the middle of Melbourne’s CBD, but because he didn’t sound like he’d walked onstage wearing a wife beater, stubby in hand, he was lyrically assaulted by his occa rival.

For most of the last decade, mainstream Aussie hip hop has been militantly self-referential. At first the manifesto simply read, ‘you speak in an Aussie accent, you should rhyme in one too.’ Then as the Skip Hop sound cemented into its own genre, branching out from the breakbeat-heavy, string-laden, party anthem sound to incorporate influences from overseas was largely frowned upon.

Thundamentals have been pushing back against those restrictions for their last two albums, to the point where their latest, Everyone We Know encapsulates trap and grime alongside breakbeats, and even indie rock. DJ Pon Cho, one of the two producers in the band, reckons it’s all a bit of a croc anyway. “Everyone in the scene definitely listens to American hip hop, but no one really wants to go there because of the backlash,” he said. “American hip hop is where it started and that’s where all the innovation is happening.

That’s where trap came from.

“Heaps of stuff is taboo in the Australian scene.

It’s impossible to do anything without someone being pissed off about it. There are still a lot of purists who say if it didn’t come straight from vinyl onto an MPC then you’re a hack. I beg to differ.

People who are successful and creative understand that it doesn’t really matter how you did it as long as the end result is cool.

“People liked our last record, So We Can Remember, because we were stepping outside of what people were comfortable listening to on the Australian hip hop spectrum. I don’t want to make a blanket statement, but most Australian hip hop before that record was more in the vein of pianos, live drums and violins — uplifting tunes. That Hoods sound is iconic; people love that sound, and it’s a good sound. We’re trying to use more influences we listen to. Still stay true to what people like about Oz hip hop, and the band, but pay more homage to that musical American stuff.”

EVERYTHING YOU DON’T KNOW

DJ Morgs, a longer-standing member of the band and the other producer, has always tried to keep Thundamentals diverse, “rather than having Oz hip hop sounding albums,” he said. “On our earlier records, we had surf influenced songs, and darker ’90s hip hop songs as well as Middle Eastern style tracks. I still buy and sample heaps of records from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, which can lead in strange directions. There’s four of us and we all have different tastes and switch between what we like at any given time.”

There’s a bit of a yin and yang vibe going on between the two producers. Morgs’ sample-heavy

background balanced by Pon Cho’s jazz training.

While one reaches into the vinyl crate, the other will be scrolling through his soft synths.

“When I first started, I was obsessed with making everything from record samples,” said Morgs. “I would sample bass lines and spend three days trying to tune one bass note. It was hell. Pon Cho’s come from a jazz background and is always looking for a soft synth. Out of those two things we work easily together.”

Both Morgs and Pon Cho don’t profess to be masters of the diverse range of genres and styles on Everyone We Know, but they’re quick studies.

“A lot we figure out by trial and error,” said Morgs.

“Also, so many people are uploading their ideas on the internet, you might hear a reverb trick and not be too sure how to do it. Then in two seconds, someone’s got an instructional video on the internet teaching you how to do it.”

Pon Cho explained the process of making beats is usually a personal tutorial in some technique: “Most beat makers would probably feel the same way. You listen to something and wonder how they did it. THEN YOU FIGURE OUT HOW THEY DID IT, MAKE

Heaps of stuff is taboo in the Australian scene.

There are still a lot of purists who say if it didn’t come straight from vinyl onto an MPC then you’re a hack

THREE OR FOUR BEATS USING THAT TECHNIQUE, AND ONE OF THEM REALLY STICKS WHICH BECOMES ‘THE ONE’.

“An example would be My Friends Say. Around the time we wrote that I’d written two similar beats before it where I’d drawn volume automation on the synth to get that swelling sound. Usually when I do synth stacks it’s two or three sounds. That one was mostly just Serum, it was before I started stacking synths with V Collection to make it sound a bit more unique than just the power saw patch.”

BREAK BEAT & MERGE

While diversity is the aim, there are some fine breakbeats on the album too. The song Sally features one, and Morgs said the funk track Never Say Never has two breaks merged together. “I had the pitch at about +8,” he recalled. “Then I brought them into Maschine, chopped them up and got the groove I was looking for.” From there it’s a process of layering to take them from ‘good enough’ to a place where the original break isn’t identifiable.

“We went further with the breakbeats to make sure people weren’t going to hear it on the record one day and think, ‘oh, that was the break from that.’

USUALLY WE DO A HIGH AND LOW CUT ON THE BREAKS THEN LAYER THEM UP WITH KICKS AND SNARES. We also layered some hi-hat because we had Gusto’s [from Hermitude] kit in the studio.

Pon Cho played trumpet on that track, and the bass was cobbled together from a real bass they sampled in the studio. None of them are bass players and while they were trying to work out how to get the right impact in the bass line they naturally turned to sampling. They were working out of Glebe Recording Studios, Col Joye’s old place, and he had “a really nice bass hanging on the wall,” said Morgs. “It had old strings on it and sounded really clean and smooth, but it wasn’t really the sound we needed. I had an old Yamaha I bought for $50 that had been sitting in my cupboard for five years. It needed a battery, so we

MASCHINE GEAR Both Morgs and Pon Cho heavily rely on Native Instruments’ Maschine in their workflow. Here’s how they integrate it: Morgs: “I’ve still got an Akai MPC1000 that I used heavily on the previous record, which is weird because I’ve got Maschine. Now I’ve switched to almost solely working with Maschine in the studio and using the MPC live.

Every now and then, if I’ve got my turntable setup but not my computer, I’ll record it into my MPC. However, I’m so obsessed with Maschine because it’s easy to use.

“Sometimes we sequence in Maschine, but we always end up bringing the multi-track out into Cubase. I started using it when I was 17, and it’s stuck with me. I moved to Ableton Live, then Logic for a bit, but I’d keep going back to Cubase for little tasks, so I just decided to stick with it. When we work on stuff we’re generally working out of my system. Pon Cho will usually keep his demos to about six tracks, then bounce them out and bring them over.”

Pon Cho: “I’ll sketch an idea out in Maschine because it’s easy to get a loop going without copying and pasting audio; you can click and unblock stuff which makes it heaps faster.

Feel is always important in hip hop. It’s nicer to play it in on pads and get in touch with the groove a bit more.”

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You’ve got to be really careful of hitting plug-ins too hard; they can sound bad, real fast

found one and tuned it up. WE ENDED UP USING THAT, RECORDING NINE DIFFERENT BASS NOTES AND PLAYING IT ON MASCHINE BECAUSE WE KNEW HOW WE WANTED THE BASS LINE TO FEEL.”

There are always a few live layers in a Thundamentals tracks, whether it’s bass, percussion or live guitar, and they made use of Glebe’s reamping system to send sounds out through guitar amps or capture the hall reverb. Hermitude also have around 30 analogue synths set up and patched in, but Pon Cho tended to resort to Arturia’s V Collection of soft synths. “I’ll probably piss lots of people off by saying this, but I didn’t really notice any difference between the 30-odd analogue synths Hermitude had in the studio and the Arturia V collection,” said Pon Cho. “I’m sure there is a difference, but by the time it’s been through the hands of a really talented mix engineer, they can kind of get back some of that crustiness and warmth you might not have in a soft synth.”

RIGHT ‘TOOL’ FOR THE JOB

Dave Hammer is the mix engineer Thundamentals have been relying on for their last two records. “We did preliminary mixes of all the songs, but in the end, felt more comfortable handing it off to Dave,” said Morgs. “We had a space in mind when we were making it, but once Dave got in there, he created more width in the songs. It’s why we were so keen to get him back onboard. To have someone solely concentrating on the mix added another perspective.”

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ABOUT DAVE HAMMER Talking to mix engineer, Dave Hammer, on the phone I detected a slight New Zealand accent. “Don’t hold it against me,” said Dave. “I came here in about 2000. I was looking to get into the music business and it felt healthier here than in New Zealand. It was hard kicking off but 17 years later things are going okay.”

Dave’s not solely a hip hop engineer, lately he’s been producing and cowriting with Megan Washington, and he’s been involved in producing and recording contestants over several seasons of The Voice.

“I just love music in general,” explained Dave. “I try not to be within one genre.

There are things I don’t really do well, but the concept of how I think about music can be applied to a few different areas. I get off on sounds and songs.

I’m all about a song’s journey from beginning to the end — long-winded pieces of music can sometimes lose my attention. It’s the listener’s mentality in the pop world. The only challenge is when I have to bounce around between projects and capture different headspaces. You’ve got to get a feel for whatever the artist needs, otherwise it doesn’t come across right.”

He owned Def Wolf Studios until selling it recently, and now rents a production space there. “It suits my needs, which is mainly production and mixing,” explained Dave. “If I want to do a band I just hire out a larger room.”

He’s got a Bricasti reverb, a couple of Chandler preamps, a few compressors, a Manley reference cardioid microphone, Barefoot monitors, a piano and a bunch of analogue synths. However he mostly mixies in the box and has bought so many UAD plug-ins over the years it feels like he’s trying to collect the whole set. “I’ve bought way too many plug-ins,” he said. “If you pull up an 1176 on UAD and compare it to an outboard, it doesn’t quite sound the same.

But it’s probably as good as it’s going to get and as long as you don’t hit it too hard, they sound great.”

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Dave Hammer isn’t worried too much about Oz hip hop politics, after all, Dave said, “that’s why hip-hop is an exciting genre because people that make hip-hop aren’t worried about whether the instrument or the sound fits into the genre. They’re more interested in experimentation and trying to find sounds that are different to other people.”

Hammer doesn’t have a set hip hop mix process with 808 presets dialled in, and kick chains ready to go. Mixes can take a couple of weeks of back and forth trying to build the mix around the hook, which Hammer can identify anywhere. On Reebok Pumps, it wasn’t the beat or the vocal that hooked him, it was the comical lyrics. “The raps in that are hilarious!” he said. “I was just getting off on that.”

With the low end, he just “mucks around until I find a good place for it. You’ve got to be careful when you’re compressing low end. Sometimes I’ll let it go straight to the master bus, other times I’ll parallel process it, or send it out of the box through something to give it character without losing mass.

“It generally changes track to track. When you’ve nailed a sound you think you can deploy to every other track on the record, you move onto the next song and it doesn’t feel right when you apply the same principles. You’ve got to rebuild the ideas within the context of that mix.”

FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT

NEUMANN, NO MAN Pon Cho: “We used Hermitude’s 25-year old Neumann U87 for vocals. In the end it made it slightly difficult because we were experiencing some sibilance issues in the mix.

We used to use a Shure SM7B, which works well for rap. We also used the U87 for every female part on the record, except for Peta & The Wolves, who recorded themselves and when my partner did some backing vocals on Sally, which I used an SM7B for.

Dave wasn’t as fussed by the choice.

“Sibilance is a crazy thing, sometimes I hear commercial records and freak out about the sibilance, then I hear some international rap artists and their sibilance sounds super-silky and almost beautiful. You’ve got a sibilance issue to deal with in every vocal chain. I don’t feel like any microphone records sibilance correctly.”

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Hammer tends to keep his processing as streamlined as possible, finding that clarity helps the arrangement shine. “I have a love/hate relationship with EQ because I can hear the phase movement,” he explained. “I try and do as little as I possibly can.

Sometimes filtering can help. Depending on the arrangement, I would probably filter out the low end of a kick drum to find the soft spot. There’s no real formula for hip hop sonic arrangement either.

Some songs will have a lot of low end in the kick drum others will have none, so getting the low end right is super-important. It’s not like a rock band where the kick drum is virtually the same sound and sonic arrangement for each track.

“Sometimes I’ll replace the kick drum or add another, but generally I try not to. On a couple of the songs I ran the kick drum out into a preamp to distort it. I ALSO HARDLY EVER PUT A COMPRESSOR OVER THE DRUM BUS TO MANIPULATE THE GROOVE. THE GROOVE SHOULD BE IN THE ARRANGEMENTS AND SEEMS TO BE MORE ACCENTUATED AS A BYPRODUCT OF PARTS COMING THROUGH CLEARER.”

Throughout his process, that’s Hammer’s goal; to make sure every part of the arrangement can be heard. “They do a great job and the sounds are all there,” he continued. “My job was to bring a bit more colour to it, give it some mass and make sure they’re heard in the mix rather than letting sounds add up on top of each other and becoming a wall of sound or noise.

“I like to pan things as hard as I possibly can while keeping mindful of what should live in the centre, which is vocal, kick and snare. The kick in hip-hop should be massive so I filter out anything that doesn’t have important low end information to bring up my headroom.”

There’s no real formula for hip hop sonic arrangement, so getting the low end right is super-important.

MIX PROCESS

Dave outlined the way he builds up a mix, starting with bringing everything up and crafting a balance: “Once I have a balance that sounds close enough to show the guys, then I tweak that, clean up audio, carve up sounds that need more attention, and try to match those kicks and snares while making sure the vocals have got space to pop over the top.

“To keep those vocals out front, I start with some EQ to clear out the gunk, and maybe use some tape saturation or distortion, running in parallel.

Even though it’s a form of dynamic processing, distortion can bring things forward without having to compress it. You’ve got to be really careful of hitting plug-ins too hard; they can sound bad, real fast. I generally don’t hit them hard and bring them in parallel. It seems to have the same effect without the sound of the plug-in deterioration.

“Some vocals will have a compressor on the track and there’ll be another compressor running in parallel getting the compressed feed. It’s a great way of controlling close-ups. BY MESSING WITH THE ATTACK AND RELEASE OF THE COMPRESSOR IN PARALLEL, YOU CAN REALLY SHAPE THE CLOSE-UP SOUND AND MAKE THE VOCAL MORE ATTACK-Y OR MORE LAID-BACK. I might use an

optical-style compressor over the lead vocal track to smooth it out while letting the transient through.

Then run a FET in parallel to mess with the attack and release and bring back the explosiveness.

“I love dry vocals, and the juxtaposition against wet vocals. A dry vocal feels even drier followed by a vocal that’s super-wet. Sometimes the effects returns might get a bit of stereo widening, so the room sound on the vocals gets a bit of width.

Other times I might mess with the old trick of dropping it down an octave, distort it and blending it in. It worked on one track, then I did it with a group of vocals and they told me to turn it off! You try a bunch of things and some work, others don’t.”

COMBINED EFFORT

Knowing that Everyone We Know combined so many influences, Hammer spent a lot of time making sure they’d all play we’ll together on the same record. “I get really obsessive over how album’s sound, I reference how every song sounds against each other,” he said. “There are a few different sounds on this record, there’s the breakbeat laidback Aussie hip-hop style, and then you’ve got Reebok Pumps with a big 808 and trapinspired bass. It’s a major consideration, to try and get those different sounds on the same record.”

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FEATURE

SNARKY PUPPY LIVE: EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED Jazz/funk collective Snarky Puppy are all about improvising, even their console and mic choices.

Story: Preshan John Live Photo: Anna Madden

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Midway through their popular tune What About Me, Snarky Puppy frontman Michael League calls out, “Hey, it turns out half the band tonight is from Dallas, so we’re gonna let the Texans jam while the rest of us take a water break.”

With that, he and half the band walked off the Melbourne Recital Centre stage, leaving the remaining four to improv their hearts out for the next six minutes.

From what I understand, a ‘typical’ Snarky Puppy gig is anything but typical. Each live performance is refreshingly unpredictable; one of a kind. Adding to the intrigue, you’ll never know which of the roughly 40 member-strong jazz/funk collective will form the lineup each night — or how long they’ll stay there apparently. It matters not, because only players at the top of their game make the Snarky Puppy roster. So even when the band is broken down based on state of origin… or colour of their pants, or favourite food… it’s evident from the first minute of the show you’re in for a treat.

It’s fun to watch talented musicians ditch the script and jam, but I wonder whether that unpredictability rubs the sound techs the wrong way? When I ask Michael Harrison, FOH for Snarky Puppy, he says he doesn’t mind one bit. In fact, he’s learnt to embrace the unexpected when out on tour. Same with monitor engineer Matt Recchia; it seems the improvisational culture of the band has been adopted by the entire crew.

COMMON MIDDLE GROUND

Originally from Scotland, Michael Harrison has a surprisingly relaxed demeanour. Surprising because his job requires mixing 11 musicians who are all improvising on upwards of three instruments each; it’s not a snapshot-able affair. “Snarky Puppy is a heads-up band to watch,” observes Harrison.

“Things happen. They don’t play the same set list in the same order with the same songs in the same way every night. There’s a healthy level of variation in their performances.”

You’d think that means active mixing and non-stop fader popping, right? In Harrison’s case, not at all. He has a unique, almost set-and-forget approach to mixing that’s rooted in trust — trust in the musicianship of the band members to basically mix themselves.

Harrison walked through how he sets up the console, which represented a musical rather than technical approach to the concept of setting up gains with faders at unity. “I leave every fader at 0dB at soundcheck,” he explained. “Then I get up and walk around the room. While I can’t judge the mix properly in an empty room, I can still hear the dynamics of the band represented knowing the faders are all set at 0dB. I don’t have to make a mental note and think, ‘right, that’s how it sounds when the overheads are back such and keys are up such.’ No, this is my dead centre for everything.

“It’s like line check is sensing the median dynamic for every player, and placing the median dynamic along this line. So when they play up, it’s appropriately over that line. When they drop back, it’s appropriately below that line. So everybody can oscillate around this happy middle to form a

balance. When the whole band’s playing, rarely do I shift anything more than a few dB in any direction.

There’s definitely a happy middle line. If there’s peaks or troughs, or large swings, the players create them. It’s very little fader riding during a show.”

MIC CHECK

Over the past four years, Harrison and Recchia have gradually refined the band’s mic collection.

“The mic choices have progressed more and more towards getting the sound as soon as you bring up the fader, and not actually having to carve out the sound with EQ,” said Harrison. “It saves you a lot of time at soundcheck.” However, in step with the band’s improvisational spirit, if a venue’s mic locker bares a few treats they’ll happily jump at the chance to set it up. Matthew Recchia says, “When you walk into a new room, if they have something nice — like an EV RE20 — we’ll set it up. We’re all about playing with nice toys.”

The band feels the same way about instruments.

Before the Melbourne show, one player uncovered a Korg MS20 in the venue’s back rooms. It wasn’t long before it was onstage.

CONSOLE-ATION

Snarky Puppy usually doesn’t have spare budget to spec consoles for Harrison and Recchia. Probably because they spend all their budget hiring and lugging around Hammond organs, Leslie cabinets, a room full of exotic percussion instruments, and the rest of their seemingly never-ending instrument list.

“The priority is always getting the correct backline,” says Recchia. “By the time the costs are

added up, it’s usually well beyond where Harrison or I could request anything.”

However, neither engineer is complaining; it’s actually worked in their favour. They’re so used to nutting out unfamiliar consoles with the tour manager yelling “soundcheck in 10” that it doesn’t matter what’s in front of them anymore — they’ll make it sound good.

“We’ve seen most, if not all of the popular console choices out there at some point or another,” Harrison says. “It’s not like having one or the other is going to dramatically change our day.” If pushed to voice a preference, Harrison says he digs Midas gear and Matt is partial to Digico.

It also helps they’re not heavy plug-in users.

For Harrison, it’s actually a pet peeve: “I don’t tour with my Waves plug-in pack or some other suite of plug-ins. I’m a pragmatist. I simply want things to work. Years of doing sound hasn’t left me with an appetite for putting too many extras in. With Snarky Puppy I’ve got 45 inputs to move through at soundcheck, it’s not like there’s time to be whacking plug-ins on all of them.

“It’s not that any particular plug-in manufacturer’s suite is a sore point for me, I’ve just never gotten into using them. I’ve also got a dislike for some of the situations I’ve seen other engineers in. Real ‘toys out of the pram’ situations where their flying rack isn’t recognised by the host desk, and he says, ‘oh my god, that’s my show over.’ I don’t want to be having that day. I just want to mix the band. That said, when I’m at front of house and everything is running fine, if there’s a nice reverb unit sitting there, of course I’ll try it.”

ENGINEER OLD SCHOOL When Michael Harrison isn’t on tour he runs his own production company, E H Sound Ltd, back in his homeland of Glasgow. Matt Recchia’s day job is house engineer at the Georgia Theatre in Athens, GA. He also tours with drum and percussion duo GhostNote.

Harrison worked Melbourne Recital Centre’s Digico SD5 like an analogue board; soundchecking one input at a time, none of this thumb stick business. The SD5 runs via Optocore to an I/O rack located to the side of stage. Main outputs go to a Meyer Galileo DSP system processor on the way to the d&b amplifiers.

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Given Melbourne Recital Centre hosts far more variety than purely classical performances, it needed a PA capable of more than simply reinforcing acoustic instruments. Ground stacks are employed for most contemporary shows, each comprised of three d&b V-Series line array elements, a Y7P infill, and a J-Sub per side. The top three elements of the T-Series left/ right hangs cover the hall’s balcony area.

Phillip Pietruschka, Sound Technician at MRC, says, “The idea of what the PA is supposed to achieve has gradually changed over time, from something that was principally there to reinforce what’s already happening acoustically on stage to a more conventional amplified concert approach.”

Keyboardist Shaun Martin’s vocoding skills are as entrancing as his keyboard chops. Shure SM58s cover vocal duties and that rubber pipe feeds into an MXR TalkBox.

A D112 on snare? The unlikely pairing works a treat to accentuate that in-the-chest oompf on Jason ‘JT’ Thomas’s second low-tuned snare drum. Other kit mics include a pair of Neumann KM184s on overheads, Shure Beta52 and Beta91 on kick, Sennheiser e604s on toms, an Audio-Technica 2035 on ride, and a Beyerdynamic M201 on main snare.

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Matt Recchia used Melbourne Recital Centre’s Digico SD8 to create 11 separate monitor mixes for the band. Wedges are the go here; IEMs are nowhere in sight. Mixes are sent to nine d&b M4 15-inch wedges and two subs for both the drum and percussion risers.

The percussion setup gets a riser as big as the drum kit’s.

There’s a lot going on here, from congas, bongos and djembes, to tambourines and pandiero. For the most part, percussion instruments are spot miked with Shure dynamic mics. A pair of SM81 condensers capture everything from shakers and chimes, to cymbals.

When a band takes a Hammond B3 and full-sized Leslie cabinet on tour, you know they don’t compromise on backline. The rotary cab is miked with a Shure SM7 down low, and two Rode NT5s to capture the spinning horn.

The Moog Voyager comes in via DI. Keys form a big part of the Snarky Puppy sound — organ, piano, synths, the full gamut. Besides the B3, the input list includes a Fender Rhodes, Moog Little Phatty, Moog Voyager, Korg Kronos, Yamaha Motif, Nord Stage EX, and Clav. Halfway through soundcheck someone discovered a Korg MS20 which was promptly added to the lineup.

It’s not often you see the original Shure Beta 57’s unique grille design. Harrison and Recchia like to use it on Mike Maher’s trumpet. Chris Bullock plays both saxophone and flute during the show, with a Sennheiser MD 441 on sax and a Shure Beta 87A on flute. But you’ll find an additional SM58 sitting next to both of these mics — that’s for effects. Both Mike and Chris run these ’58s into their own, everchanging string of stompboxes and reverbs to create unique sounds during the show.

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FEATURE

Craig Field jumped at the chance to record an Australian-made 9½-foot, 102-key Stuart & Sons grand piano, despite it being in a farm shed under the critical eye of founder Wayne Stuart.

Story: Craig Field

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I first met New Zealand-born score composer Alan Griffiths and Ukrainian-Australian concert pianist Evgeny Ukhanov when they both came up to record in my Blue Mountains studio with high hopes. Hopes I’d helped raise. They’d had a number of very disappointing experiences in studios around Melbourne when trying to record their body of classical compositions for solo piano.

Alan sent the files to me to have a listen, and I was quietly confident we could do better. At the time an arts trust had installed a Steinway Model D concert grand in Underwood Studio’s main room, and I assured him we could do a far better job with our Steinway and studio combination.

Boy, did I eat those words.

A piano’s sensitivity, touch and ability to communicate its rich harmonic vocabulary comes from the culmination of all its 12,000 moving parts working together harmoniously. Crucially, the piano’s ‘action’ — its hammers, keys, and how the two combine to strike the strings — is the pianist’s key to unlocking that vocabulary. The Steinway we had at the studio had three prepared actions: one for predominantly classical players, one more modern (Wessel, Nickel & Gross) action for jazz and other projects, and one premium action awaiting the likes of Mr Ukhanov!

The day finally came for our first session and the wonderful Steinway Model D — King of Pianos!

Lord of Sound! — with its new premium action meant for the silver fingers of Mr Ukhanov… stuffed up. Yep, it totally stuffed up. The technician had forgotten to make a few crucial adjustments to the new action and as Evgeny tried to play, the piano continually did not strike or struck too much. Slowly Alan Griffiths, patient saint of a man that he is, began to lose his sense of humour. The piano needed adjusting after almost every other take and by the end of that first day we decided to call the whole thing off.

SECOND CRACK

Over dinner that night, after a few drinks lifted the pressure and disappointment, a friendship was formed through the day’s adversity. Alan and Evgeny later listened back to the recordings I had made and agreed they sounded a great deal better than what they had, even though the actual performance takes were unusable.

Thankfully, life’s always offering second chances.

Five months after that disastrous session, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from Alan. Soon after, I was heading a few hundred kilometres west of Canberra at daybreak to record his work Introspection, again with Evgeny.

This time on a 91/2-foot 102-key hand-built Stuart & Sons concert grand. There was one catch: the piano was located on a farm in a huge tin shed.

How Aussie can you get?

“Oh, and Mr Stuart wants to meet you,” Alan said. “He wants to sit in on your recording setup and watch what you do. Seems he really dislikes sound engineers as they always mess up his pianos in recordings!”

It’s not something we as engineers or producers often get to experience; the instrument maker

leaning over your shoulder while you try and capture an image of their creation. I was a little nervous, for sure.

FARMING OUT THE WORK

The farm was a spectacular 500-acre property and the owner, artist Peter Crisp, was very amiable and excited for the recording to happen on his property. Alan wasn’t understating it; the shed was just a shed. The piano had some boards placed behind it, but whether they helped with the overall sound is doubtful.

Once the team had all arrived, Mr Stuart took some time to talk to us about the piano. He took Evgeny through its range and explained the fourth expression pedal, which can be used to catch additional harmonics in phrases if used correctly. It also has 102 keys instead of the usual 88.

After the rundown it was over to me.

When it comes to miking up fine acoustic instruments — whether live, location or studio — my first move is to listen to the instrument and allow that sound to linger in my thoughts.

It’s important to have a clear mental image of the sound you are hearing as it is in the space. At times, I could sense the others waiting for me to actually do something, but you need to put that out of your mind and focus.

In my studio I have my desk and setup in my main room, similar to Paul Epworth’s setup at The Church. I’m not separate from the performance or the artist and I find it’s a good thing. I’m sure of what I hear in a performance by getting it direct, and therefore know exactly what my recordings need to translate. Likewise, on location I want to be close to the action without interfering.

CREATOR DIFFERENCES

Because there’s so much detail in the design of a grand piano I find its best to mentally divide the instrument into three elements: performance, sound and interplay.

Performance is the transferral from the artist into the instrument via the keys and hammers striking the strings.

The sound is just that, the sound. If you listen within the instrument you will find its decisive centre. Fine pianos like the Stuart & Sons have no discernible crossover between ranges, though if you listen closely you will find an area on the sound board where the top and bottom seemingly — and seamlessly — meet. Try and focus on that centre sound.

Interplay is the space away from the piano where both those sounds meet. Depending on the environment, there may be a number of places that interplay occurs.

As I began to make decisions Wayne Stuart, the owner and maker of the piano, stepped in.

“No, no, no,” he said, as he started directing me with his experience of mic placement. “Listen, this is what we’ve done previously in the studio.” This man knows a thing or two about sound, so I let him shuffle me here and there for about three hours.

We tried different mics in different places, and then made sample recordings and listened back.

It was a very respectable setup, with an Earthworks PM40 PianoMic internal bar and a spaced pair of Earthwork QTC50 omni microphones. Earthworks microphones are amongst a handful that can respond to the substantial frequency range of a grand piano this size. It also makes a great deal of sense to have a smaller diaphragm surface area that will respond to sound and pressure then return extremely quickly to its original position. We also tried spaced pairs of Neumann KM84, AKG C451 and Beesneez Lulu Fet cardioid condensers, as well as a pair of Earthworks QTC 40 omni condensers. I have a late ’60s pair of Neumann KM84s I like to use in the studio, but the later model ones I had on this job didn’t really work, as they seemed to have a slight 400Hz build up that distorted the image of the piano.

ABOUT STUART & SONS Stuart & Sons are the only legitimate piano makers to rise in Australia since the demise of the last of the post-colonial builders Beale & Co and CE Davies whose origins date back to the early 20th century. Deregulation policies since the 1970s shifted complex labour intensive manufacturing industries off shore leaving a void filled by imported products and stencil duplication of old brand names.

Wayne Stuart, a Tasmanian by birth, was fortunate in being selected to participate in the first institutionalised training program for piano technicians at the NSW Conservatorium of Music in 1974. This led to post graduate studies in Japan and Europe under Australia Council study grants. For the past 40 years Stuart has committed to building his own vision for the acoustic piano in the 21st century. His work is famous around the world for its unique vision and achievement. Stuart believes that the piano has not been perfected but rather, has become moribund by reproduction of proven forms and a market place infatuated with brand names that serve business models of mass production.

Stuart is part of a miniscule group of artisans worldwide who endeavour to push the boundaries of musical instrument technology beyond the status quo.

He has pioneered many innovations and pushed the frequency boundaries beyond historical limits. He has been responsible for adding almost two octaves to the ambitus of the acoustic piano in his lifetime, a challenge never before attempted.

The magnificent 102 key, 2.9m concert grand, veneered in rare Tasmanian blackheart sassafras is one of 11 instruments with this ambitus currently in the world.

Learn more at www.stuartandsons.com

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ABOUT UNDERWOOD STUDIOS Craig Field owns and operates Underwood Studio located in Wentworth Falls, just over an hour’s drive from Sydney’s CBD. The studio was built with the help of an acoustician from Macquarie University in 2010.

The studio has a Yamaha 2016 S6 7-foot Concert Grand. The piano was purchased new from Yamaha and uniquely voiced for the main room of the studio. www.underwoodstudio.com.au

Each time we tried a new arrangement Wayne seemed to be getting closer to a sound he was happy with, but I had a feeling that we could do much better. I decided to speak up after many hours of fussing and many takes, which is always tricky with an experienced client.

“I think we can do better,” I said.

There was silence, then relief. See, Wayne is the kind of man who has relentlessly pursued excellence, so rather than hurting his pride, those words brought him joy. I went about a whole new setup and about four hours later we had our new sound; one which everybody agreed was more faithful to the sound occurring at that moment in that space. Until then, Wayne had predominantly been exposed to spaced pair setups. It was the first time he’d both had the pleasure of working with ribbon microphones and had an engineer attempt to capture his piano with a Blumlein pair.

In our final set up we kept the Earthworks PM40 pair over the hammers to capture the ‘Performance’ aspect. We complemented that with a pair of Royer 121 passive ribbon microphones in a Blumlein stereo setup to record the ‘Sound’ and a pair of Rode NTR active ribbons in a similar Blumlein pair for the ‘Interplay’.

The extremely fine corrugated aluminium strip of ribbon microphones makes them so unique.

By having such a low mass diaphragm, they can respond to very subtle changes in sound pressure.

Ribbon microphones naturally exhibit a bidirectional pattern, and while many multi-pattern condenser microphones can arrive at a similar pattern, the use of complex active electronics to achieve bi-directionality can impart noise, distortion, and undesirable off-axis artefacts.

Because of the environment, I didn’t stray too far from the piano to avoid collecting unwanted sources. That’s where the Blumlein technique has an advantage. Because bi-directional microphones are heavily beholden to the influence of proximity effect — tending to lose detail in the lower frequencies the further they get from the source — they normally give optimum results when used at closer distances to the source. When it comes AT 50

to mixing Blumlein mic setups you can tune the lower frequencies by gently adjusting the panning.

HUMMING ALONG

The piano was such a large instrument, and if it had occupied a more controlled environment I would likely have tried omni microphones in a Decca tree configuration.

However, when things are less than ideal you really need to keep positive and steer the project in the direction you want to go.

Attempting to ‘fix’ recordings in the studio is never a good idea, so I had to accept and embrace the imperfections of the environment. It was a far cry from the controlled rooms and customised silence of my own studio, so I had to set the microphone gains to not only respond appropriately to the piano and performance but also avoid too much ambient interplay.

Being a farm, beyond occasional visits from resident animals there were a number of obstacles I had to contend with. A water pump on the farm seemed to sporadically switch on and create a hum in the electrical lines. With a bit of vigilance during the sessions I noted the times it switched on and off, and by the third day I was able to organise discussions and review times around its routine.

Occasionally the farm workers would come by on a bike or tractor to stop in and see how the recording was going. Which it usually wasn’t by the time they poked their head in.

I won’t deny I was stressed at times trying to capture such a large score of complex material with technical problems, deadlines and all those interruptions. Nevertheless, it’s not an experience I would have traded. However unusual it was to record a concert pianist in a tin shed, being outside of the studio environment was a unique and rewarding experience for Alan, Evgeny and myself.

The Crisp family’s hospitality, and sharing our space with the sound of the surrounding 500 acres of farm and nature, helped create a truly great living and work environment. The Australianmade Stuart & Sons piano seemed right at home as its magnificent open sound echoed the almost endless landscape.

Thankfully, it went better than the first session.

Even Wayne Stuart agreed, who sent me this note: You have achieved extreme clarity and dynamic range without harshness or a too metallic tendency. It really is quite impossible to achieve this level on any other piano and not get harshness of all sorts. The subtlety/flexibility of the sound envelope is unique.

Thumbs up, Wayne Stuart.

More information on pianist Evgeny Ukhanov can be found at www.evgenyukhanov.com.

More information on the composer Alan Grifitths and the album Introspection can be found at www.griffithscomposer.com

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REGULARS

PC Audio Have you ever considered your PC itself as a source of audio material? Prepare to enter a strange new world of magnetic fields and mechanical interference Column: Martin Walker

This ‘PC Audio’ column is getting a bit meta.

See, typically I write about how to get the most out of your PC for recording, but lately I’ve actually been recording my PC! Let me explain. Electromagnetic fields can be found all around us, yet they all remain inaudible and invisible to us until converted into waveforms using a suitable pickup. Some fields — like the earth’s own magnetic field, and that around a bar magnet — are static, but the alternating currents (AC) produced by most mains electricity supplies produce time-varying electromagnetic fields. It’s those fields we can pick up from suitable electrical appliances — table lamps, radios, TVs, mobile phones, microwave ovens, even personal computers — and turn them into sound.

My own journey started last year, after I bought a couple of ‘induction coils’ (aka telephone bug mikes, available widely and very cheaply online) that pick up these electromagnetic fields. After plugging the bugs into my mic preamp and waving them around inside my PC, I was amazed at some of the alien, robotic sounds they picked up from its CPU, the R2D2-like hard drive activity, frantic graphic card updates, scratchy mouse movements, and motor buzzes and static bursts from CD/ DVD drives. Moreover, because you’re capturing magnetic fields, absolutely no handling vibration or wind noise appear on the recordings — a rare treat!

KICKSTARTING PC SOUNDWORLDS

I found myself so fascinated by this new world of magnetic fields morphed into audio that I ended up supporting a recent Kickstarter project from Koma Elektronik, for their Field Kit (koma-elektronik. com/?product=field-kit). It’s a handy little box that not only contains four preamps suitable for induction coils and contact mics, but also synthlike modules including an LFO and envelope follower, a CV-tunable radio that can receive broadcasts on AM, FM, and shortwave bands for use as another audio source, plus analogue and digital sensor inputs so you can use switches and varying voltages to trigger or modify sounds.

Hang on, I hear you say, what’s this got to do with PCs? Well, the Field Kit also has a DC Interface with pulse/PWM adjustment you can use to control the speed/of small electric motors or AT 52

fans, or the impulse/strength of solenoids, electro magnets, relays and the like, in order to generate free-running or tempo-synced mechanical noises.

As an inveterate experimenter and PC builder, I’ve accumulated several boxes full of computer components over the years, so I was able to dig out old computer cooling fans, LEDs, motherboard buzzers, motors from a CD drive, all of which could then be controlled from the KOMA Field Kit to create new sounds. I even found several multi-finned CPU heatsinks that sound like minicymbals when pinged. Robotic drum kit anybody?

FLOPPY DRIVE MUSIC

Even more bizarrely, further Internet research into the possibilities of creating audio/music from PC components led me into strange new worlds of mechanical music emitted by arrays of retired floppy disk drives turned into musical instruments. I found myself listening to wonders like the James Bond 007 theme played on an array of 13 floppy disk drives and one hard drive (youtu.be/jEzXjJN1RH0). If your taste tends more to classical music, try George Whiteside’s Phantom of the Floppera (youtu.be/dmoDLyiQYKw), a sophisticated four-part rendition of Bach’s Toccata in D Minor for two 3.5-inch and two 5.25-inch floppy drives.

Now these are somewhat more sophisticated fare, requiring a specially-designed floppy disk controller that waits for MIDI data, determines the corresponding frequency, and then repeatedly instructs one of the drives in the array to move its data head back and forth at that frequency. The most advanced device in this genre I’ve discovered was built by Polish hacker Silent, and consists of a massive 64 floppy drives, eight hard disks (on percussion), and two scanners, and has been christened ‘The Floppotron’. Listen to it performing Smells Like Nerd Spirit (youtu.be/GwuCQ3u2N_A), and prepare to be amazed. Yep, these techniques are geeky in the extreme, yet I have a genuine respect for people who can re-purpose PC hardware to such exotic ends. By the way, if you want to go further back in time PC-peripheralwise, try this dot matrix printer playing Eye Of The Tiger (vimeo.com/58200103). Clever stuff!

MAD SCIENTISTS UNITE!

Inventive people are also harvesting parts from elderly PCs for future projects, such as the powerful rare earth magnets and motors from old hard drives (vimeo.com/2155213), or turning their insides into mechanical LFOs (vimeo.com/66666625), while DVD drives can yield laser diodes and stepper motors (youtu.be/JtZ0Zx2-XMg). However, we are now straying from our original ‘PC audio’ remit. Some musicians are really serious about using computer parts to make real music, a classic example being Sonic Robots, who built ‘Glitch Robot’ (vimeo.com/105351395), a robotic music instrument dedicated to glitch sounds, which they describe as ‘Sounds from the in-between of error and prediction, little sounds that are amplified, small sounds made big’. This installation uses an array of old hard drives to create snare drum rattles, solenoids pinging towards drum heads and metal tongues (for basslines). Accompanied by melodies courtesy of a MIDI keyboard, this is a tour de force!

LEITMOTIF

As you can see, the world of PC Audio needn’t be restricted to traditional recordings via audio interfaces and soundcards. My next wave of experiments will be using a sensitive light modulation sensor that picks up changes in light levels, so I should not only be able to capture sounds like 50/60Hz audio buzz from mains light bulbs (boring), but also hard drive activity directly from the flashes of my PC’s front panel LED, fluorescent display soundplay from digital synths and CD players, and the infra-red signals sent out by multimedia remote controls. This time however it’s a handheld device whose output can be plugged into my Zoom H4N digital recorder and taken out for field experiments — I’m hoping to record the play of reflections from a nearby reservoir on a sunny day, and to explore inner city collages of luminal digital activity, as demonstrated in this fascinating What You See Is What You Hear video (vimeo.com/13617192) from Daniel Fishkin, in which street sign advertising and illuminated shop displays in Times Square are turned into a ’symphony of light’ by his sound camera. Not too flashy for you I hope!

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REVIEW

DIGICO SD12

Digital Live Console With two of everything — touchscreens, master faders, operators, talk loops, and power supplied — Monitor City thinks the Digico SD12 could be the PM5D replacement every monitor engineer’s been waiting for.

Review: Mark Davie DUAL 15-INCH TOUCHSCREENS — With a one-to-one ratio of onscreen channels to faders, and two sets of channel processing encoders, the SD12 workflow is lightning quick and functional. Bottom line, says Barnard: “It’s inherently more simple to have a channel strip in front of you with a fader at the bottom of it.”

LIGHTBAR — No need to go scavenging for console lamps, the integrated lighter is just one way the SD12 keeps things compact and neat.

HIDDEN TIL LIT — A feature gleaned from Digico’s flagship consoles, HLT aligns the onscreen colours with the LEDs rimming the rows of encoders. If they light up pink, you know you’re dialling in your aux send levels.

The two banks of encoders also let you toggle between a locked preference and the last used row. For instance, if you always want to easily access gain and pan on the two encoder rows, simply hold the encoder option button while selecting the gain or pan row, and it will store that preference so you can easily jump back to it after you’ve adjusted send levels.

NEED TO KNOW

DYNAMIC METERING — 10-segment dynamic gain reduction metering is a nice touch, giving the user a more accurate rendition of the smaller onscreen visual. It also meters all the way down to -24dB. The metering beside each fader is also a big step up from an SD9, with full fader-length 20-segment metering in very fine gradations.

PRICE Systems under $60k CONTACT Group Technologies: (03) 9345 9133 or info@grouptechnologies.com.au

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PROS Dual touchscreens Highly expandable 25 assignable macros Two freely assignable master faders Visual feedback, HLT

CONS No onscreen Waves plug-in control

SUMMARY The Digico SD12 is a best-of-everything console for applications where you want SD5 and SD7 control without the physical size or cost. As if the flagship features weren’t enough, Digico decided to double up — dual touchscreens, dual master faders, dual encoder sets, dual talk loops, dual power supplies. There’s plenty to go around.

Ade Barnard walks us round the back of the SD12: “We’ve gone with [the optional] Optocore because we think it’s the future. MADI obviously, and we’ll put some DMI cards in it as and when needed. The Aviom DMI is great.

If a client says they want to stick it on their Dante network, or integrate it into pre-existing infrastructure, to have the option to put DMI cards in that deal with that is great.”

Recently, when I was covering Tame Impala’s live show and ogling FOH engineer Adam Round’s neat dual Digico SD11i setup, we got talking about the new SD12 console.

It had been released a month earlier in a worldwide multi-city launch — the morning after my AudioTechnology colleagues attended the kickoff event at Group Technologies’ HQ in Melbourne, I was standing in front of a newly minted SD12 on Digico’s NAMM stand. During the launch video, Digico MD James Gordon gradually built a virtual SD12 with Minority Report-style flourishes. As he dragged in each module bitby-bit, you could see much of the SD5 and SD7 flagship DNA come to bear in a smaller footprint; multiple banks of macros with LCD scribble strips, Hidden Til Lit colour-coded encoders, and dual assignable master faders. Feigning the reveal was complete, he saved the best till last — a second 15inch touchscreen to ensure every physical fader had an onscreen channel strip right above it, just like the SD5 and SD7.

Other than Digico’s own products, including the budget-friendly S series, only a few manufacturers deem it necessary to align faders to onscreen controls. There’s the Avid S6L and Soundcraft’s Vi series. Allen & Heath’s D-Live almost does it, Yamaha is beholden to its Centralogic style of operation, and Midas consoles are generally lower on screen real estate. Depending on how important that one-to-one connection is to you, Gordon’s onscreen reveal ticked a whole lot of boxes.

INVESTMENT ROUND

Round, and Tame Impala, are heavily invested in Digico; as well as the dual SD11i FOH setup, they were using an SD10 at monitors. At a surface level, it seemed the SD12 could potentially replace Round’s carefully cultivated setup, specifically because it had dual 15-inch touchscreens. It’s also got dual redundant power supplies, another feature Round’s dual console setup affords him. There are a couple of ways in which the SD12 doesn’t quite stretch to the redundancy level of Round’s setup.

Mirroring two SD11i’s means he has two engines in case one goes down; a feature only the SD7 has implemented in a single console. The other limitation of the SD12 is its Waves integration.

While there’s an optional DMI card for 64 I/O over

SoundGrid, it doesn’t have onscreen control of plug-in parameters. This is a direction the entire SD series seems to be moving in, offloading plug-in hosting and control from the console to an external touchscreen. Although not quite as neat, it makes sense that touring engineers would be responsible for their own plug-in updates and control package, while hire companies provide the console interface.

While the SD12 might not exactly replicate everything Round has managed to eke out of his two boards, it’s certainly going to cater for a huge range of FOH gigs, and is also heavily suited to life at the other end of the core. The first

It’s a very powerful board. It has a bunch of functions that are very similar to the SD5, and a huge step forward in Digico’s game

SD12 console sold in Australia went to Monitor City, so AudioTechnology headed down to the factory to chat with owner Ade Barnard about the new acquisition. Being a monitor engineer, he immediately saw the new console’s potential.

“There’s a gap for a monitor board, especially in international touring,” said Barnard. “The [Yamaha] PM5D has gone away, and nothing has replaced it. People have been using the [Avid] Profile, but it doesn’t work for monitor engineers.

Most monitor engineers don’t particularly care for using Waves. Whatever that person onstage is generating, they want to give it back to them as it sounds so they can make reasonable decisions — based on what they’re hearing — as to how they play. I thought that gap would be filled by the SD10, but this is a better monitor board than the 10.”

In the six weeks since purchasing the board,

Monitor City had already featured the SD12 at a number of high profile events, sometimes partnered by distributor Group Technologies’ demo board.

“This weekend it’s going out on Hot Dub Wine Machine, it’s been out with Dan Sultan and a bunch of other acts, we had it down at Port Fairy Folk Festival on the main stage doing monitors, and a second one at FOH on the second stage,” rattled off Barnard. “We’re very happy with it.”

Barnard, in particular, is a big fan, especially of its one-to-one, onscreen channel-to-fader ratio. “As a monitor engineer, I like it on my end of the core,” he explained. “It operates very similarly to an analogue console in that everything is directly above where you’re operating. When I’m mixing monitors and have a drummer waving at me saying, ‘I want more of him, please’, I’ve got to be fast because he’s got a limited window of time to communicate before he has to get back to his primary job of drumming.

To be able to be in the position where I’ve got everything I want in front of me, and fast, is great.

Mixing monitors is about speed and workflow, and both are really good on this console. The ‘aux sends to faders’ function, which is across all the boards now, means if I’m working on the downstage right mix, I’ve got 24 channels I can work with. I’m not just working on one bank of 12 faders while the aux mix page is open.”

DIGICO SD12 SPECS • 72 input channels, 36 buses, 12 x 8 matrix and an LR/LCR master bus, all with full processing including dynamic EQs, multiband compressors and Digitubes.

• 12 stereo FX units.

• 16 graphic EQs. • 48k or 96k internal sampling with no loss of processing.

• UB MADI 48-channel 24-bit/48k USB interface (half that channel count when the console is operating at 96k, even though UB MADI continues to record in 48k).

• Stealth Core 2 software, making it compatible with all other SD series sessions.

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SD12 AT THE FOREFRONT Nick Burns, owner of Forefront Productions in Newcastle, recently commissioned a Digico SD12 and D2 rack for the Civic Theatre in Newcastle. The theatre already has an SD9 with two D-Racks, and the new gear will add to the theatre’s inventory, allowing them to move consoles between the Playhouse and the theatre. The ability to spread I/O around the theatre is a key consideration for the theatre said Burns, “the SD12 has at least two MADI I/O ports, plus two DMI slots which can add 64 I/O of any flavour, plus the analogue and AES I/O onboard. It’s 72 inputs immediately took care of the theatre’s I/O count, but it was more about how many racks they

Having two touchscreens, two sets of physical channel encoders and the ability to mirror and rearrange fader layers also means it’s possible for the SD12 to be operated by two engineers at once.

It’s not something Barnard immediately sees a use for, but envisages a role for it in a complex scenario limited by space.

In the spirit of neat pairings, the SD12 also has two talk loops integrated into the console. “It’s really useful,” said Barnard. “You can have one talk loop going to FOH, the other going to wedges. For FOH you could send one to monitors and another to the stage manager if you wanted to talk to them.”

could have. They use two racks, plus they wanted the ability to do Waves I/O.” Like Barnard, Burns also appreciates the flexibility the one-to-one channel/fader relationship gives FOH operators: “With Digico consoles, you’ve always been able to have any channel strip on any fader layer, and now having the full channel strip processing control on each screen is an extension of that usability. You can mix the way you want to, with quicker access to things.” Burns also appreciates the small things, like having an integrated light strip so you don’t have to hunt around in drawers for console lamps. The small

form factor is also a big consideration for a theatre looking to squeeze as many chairs in as possible.

“It’s one of the smallest footprints for the channel count it has and the channel count it’s likely to take on.” He’s referring to Digico’s recent Stealth Core 2 upgrades, which upgraded the available channel count and amount of onboard processing across its console range for a small fee. “For two or three grand you bought a new console,” he said. “From anyone’s point of view, buying a product where you can extend the life of it with an update is great. In the past you’d have to pay the price of the initial investment. I don’t know if anyone else is doing it to that scale.”

BANKABLE MACROS — By adding scribble strips, Digico has multiplied the usefulness of its macro buttons by five. The SD12 has 25 assignable macros, giving the user far more flexibility and feedback of what they’re controlling.

SNAPSHOTS — The snapshot system also has an LCD for feedback, letting you know which snapshot you’re previewing, pre-loading, or firing.

MASTERING THE FADERS

There’s one more pairing to cover besides dual screens, dual power supplies, dual operators, and dual talk loops — and that’s the dual master faders.

In practice, they don’t have to be master faders at all. Barnard threw a few uses around for the second fader; a lead vocal, lectern, or whatever input is crucial to your show, even a talkback in. For monitors he appreciates the ability to use one for in-ears and one for wedges: “If you’ve got the faders configured as your two solo buses and ‘Solo Choice’ activated, say you’ve got your keyboard player on in-ears, you can send her to Solo 2 and everyone else who is on wedges is sitting on Solo 1. That way when you pull up Solo 2, it goes to your ears rather than all the wedges.”

Barnard, and Monitor City, aren’t strictly monitors-only. For FOH applications Barnard suggested you could “use the two master faders to control your main PA hang separate to your outfill or front fill. Which would be really handy if you had a singer who jumps off the front of the stage.

We did Nick Cave the other day, and he was on and off the stage the entire time. In fact, they built a platform just so he could climb down and talk to the audience. To have your front fill on a fader would be incredibly handy. He was sticking his microphone in it all the time, but the engineer did a great job and we never heard it scream.”

The routing flexibility is a big plus says Barnard.

Beyond the master fader programmability, the matrix is also incredibly flexible. “To be able to send anything, anywhere is big,” he explained.

“You’ve always been able to move stuff around, but to be able to feed the matrices from anywhere — including feeding the solos to the matrix — means you can do almost anything with this board.”

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MACRO SNAPSHOT

Being able to have more than one bank of macros is also a big boost to the console’s flexibility. The LCD scribble strips allow you to have multiple macros associated with the same button. Digico has opted for five banks, giving 25 macros in all.

Previously, when Barnard had to mix on a console with only one bank of macros, like the SD11, he had to really plan them out. “Now you can have 25 controllable macros at the touch of a button,” he said. “You couldn’t do that without the LCD scribble strips, you’d need five bits of tape running down the side. The way the toggles work is more intuitive now, too. The mute function works more like a standard mute. You hit it, it turns on, hit it again and it turns off. The overall macro setup is a lot cleaner, too, and using it with an iPad gives you access to those macros as well as everything else, which is really powerful when you can adjust EQ standing on stage.”

Pairing the iPad with Digico’s ‘EQ All’ function is another one of Barnard’s favourite time savers: “If you’re EQ-ing a stage, as long as all your wedges

are the same — which is what you’d expect — I can select EQ All in the graphic EQs,” he said. “I stand downstage of the centre pair, and EQ those wedge, then all your monitors across the stage have been EQ’d. They won’t all be right, but they’ll all be real close. That’s just saved me 15 minutes.”

A lot of the DNA from Digico’s flagship SD5 and SD7 consoles has flowed down into a console package worth around the $40-50,000 mark.

Whether its bankable macros, dual assignable master faders, dual touchscreens, two sets of channel processing encoders and Hidden Til Lit technology which lets you identify exactly what onscreen encoder you’re tweaking, it all translates into one of the best workflow experiences in a console at this price point. It’s price puts it in direct competition with the SD8, making it a choice between more faders and processing, versus dual screens, flagship control and DMI expansion options.

“It’s a very powerful board,” concurred Barnard.

“It has a bunch of functions that are very similar to the SD5, and a huge step forward in Digico’s game.

We’re very happy with it. It’s a great console.”

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REVIEW

APOGEE ELEMENT

Thunderbolt Audio Interfaces It’s back to basics with Apogee’s newest interface family, delivering an elementary audio experience that doesn’t skimp on the important stuff.

Review: Preshan John

NEED TO KNOW

Like Mama always said, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. Solid advice when choosing friends or baking a pie, but it turns out it’s a good philosophy for designing audio interfaces, too.

When it comes to pro audio, Apogee knows a thing or two about making products with high-quality insides. Continually delivering impressive spec sheets has required paying keen attention to every component in the signal path, every time. Apogee does a good job on exteriors too — the Duet and Quartet set standards for interface design.

PRICE Element 24: $959 Element 46: $1449 Element 88: $2399 Control: $339

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However, if we had to pick, we’d probably all agree that an interface’s sound is more important than its looks, or even its physical controls. So would you forfeit the latter for the sake of affordability?

In a bid to make top-notch audio more financially accessible, Apogee recently introduced the Element Series; a family of three that claims to deliver no-compromise pro audio standards, yet is disrobed of hardware control and exterior bells and whistles. LCD screens, colourful meters, gain knobs, and phase switch buttons are nowhere to be found. On a per-channel basis, Element is

CONTACT Sound Distribution: (02) 8007 3327 or info@ sounddistribution.com.au

PROS Outstanding sound quality Road-friendly build Excellent control software CONS Single Thunderbolt port

among Apogee’s cheapest offerings — so the loss in aesthetics and control converts to savings in your account. After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

SOFT OPENING

I’d say the Element’s packaging is extremely underwhelming, but having reviewed Apogee’s flagship Symphony I/O Mk II converter last year I think a no-frills unboxing experience is just the company’s style. You won’t get a Thunderbolt cable either, so make sure you budget an extra $45 if you take the Element route.

SUMMARY Forfeiting hardware control doesn’t seem so bad when you get excellent preamps, plenty of I/O, and industry-leading conversion for less cash. Apogee Element Series is a cost-effective stepping stone from prosumer to pro; and if you’re irrevocably the hands-on type, Apogee Control is definitely worth the extra.

Like the brown cardboard box, the unit is unassuming — a metal block with a bunch of I/O holes on either side. We received the middle child of the Element family, Element 46, with four XLR/ line/DI inputs and two sets of headphone outputs on the front. The rear sports a pair of XLR monitor outputs, optical I/O which covers ADAT, SMUX and S/PDIF, word clock I/O, a Thunderbolt port (yep, just one) and socket for the external power supply. I didn’t expect to like Element’s boring form factor but it’s actually a very nice piece of kit.

Rubber strips under the silver bookends help keep the unit secure on a desktop. It’s fairly heavy and sturdy, and you feel comfortable shoving it in a backpack because there are no protruding knobs or scratch-able screens to damage.

NUMBERING THE ELEMENTS

While the units appear pedestrian, the specs are the precise opposite. D-to-A conversion has a very respectable dynamic range of 123dB and a ruler-flat response of ±0.05dB from 10Hz to 20kHz. On the way in, the converters give 119dB of dynamic range and a frequency response of ±0.2dB from 10Hz to 20kHz. Onboard mic preamps offer a massive 75dB of gain and all three interfaces can operate at audio resolutions up to 192k. Round-trip latency via the Thunderbolt connection is stated as 1.41ms at 96k with a 32 sample buffer size. Don’t let the boring black exterior deceive you — when it comes to audio quality, Element means business.

SOFTWARE CONTROL

Sacrificing all onboard hardware control naturally means you rely heavily on software to take command of an Element interface. Thankfully, Apogee delivers the goods with an excellent application, though Mac-only, called Element Control. It’s a small download from the Apogee website that takes half a minute to install.

Opening Element Control for the first time revealed a pop up window requesting permission to make Element 46 my Mac’s playback device. It went on to present a number of Element Control templates I could load: ‘Getting Started’, ‘Vocal Overdub’, ‘Direct Monitoring’, and ‘Essentials’ (for control of the onboard analogue I/O only).

Naturally I went for the full banana and selected ‘Full Functionality’.

The mixer is extremely thorough and intricately configurable. The Hover Help window displays a little blurb about whatever control your mouse is on — super useful when initially nutting it out. For the Element 46, channels strips are laid out with the four analogue inputs first, then the eight optical inputs (which are displayed as four stereo-linked pairs by default), then five stereo playback pairs for internal routing. You can create up to four independent mixes, one of which is labeled FX Send.

Element 46’s three stereo analogue outputs (Main L/R, HP1 and HP2) can be fed with any of the four mixes, or any of the five stereo playback channels, selected via a dropdown box above each output’s volume control. The Element Control window lets you stack the four mixes so the faders pile on top of each other, and you can tailor the

amount of detail in the Element Control window to suit your session.

It all looks and sounds quite overwhelming at first, but spend some time with it and you’ll be building and tweaking low latency mixes with blazing speed. You can also cut the window down to just the ‘Essentials’ if you want to keep an eye on preamp gain and output levels without the app hogging your screen. If you want to do all that while moving around the studio, Apogee’s Element Control Mobile App lets you take the reins using your iOS device.

HARDWARE CONTROL

Apogee knows not everyone would be pleased having Elements’ hardware control stripped in the name of affordability, so the company wisely created an optional control device for Element called, wait for it… Control. It looks like a Big Knob-style monitor controller, but it’s only I/O is a mini-USB port. Eight user-definable buttons on the top panel give you custom access to a range of parameters on your Element interface, while the Mic, Headphone and Speaker buttons dictate the function of the detented central knob. To configure the unit to your liking, you simply hit the Remote Control Assignments button in the Element Control software.

The Control unit certainly heightened the Element experience. Without it, even the most common tweak, like adjusting monitor or headphone level, required either minimising the software to the Essentials pane, or constantly switching between windows. A physical device to control these basic functions really does make a difference, especially when you’ve got a long session.

ALL IN THE DETAIL

There’s something about Apogee conversion that just hits the spot, and all the outputs are high quality. Listening on AKG K702 headphones through the onboard amp, the high end was far smoother than my Focusrite Forte which sounded slightly more brittle. Lows felt firmer and more rich. The soundstage is as wide as it should be, and oh, so detailed. Stereo spread is presented with pin sharp precision and instruments mixed front and centre seem very coherent, tending to poke out of the mix that tiny bit extra than the Forte. It definitely sits atop the prosumer class.

IN USE

Gaining up a mic for the first time, I was instantly impressed with how quiet Element’s preamps are, even when cranked up to +75dB. The signature Apogee sterility is evident but it’s not a bad thing.

It’s a clean sound that’ll match well with pretty much anything. Buy any prosumer interface on the market today and its built-in preamps aren’t going to disappoint, but I’m confident in saying the Element’s pres are among the best you’ll get in a doit-all box. The Soft Limit option is a nice touch but don’t treat it as insurance for insensible gain setting — it gets ugly if pushed.

The ADAT I/O is an easy way to add eight extra pres. Connecting my trusty UAD 4-710D

and Focusrite ISA428 Mk II combo gave a nice palette of transistor, transformer, and tube preamp flavours counting up to 12 inputs — sufficient for most multi-tracking purposes. Don’t forget, if you need higher input counts, Element 88 has eight built-in pres. For even more I/O, hook up two Elements to your computer’s Thunderbolt ports and they’ll work in tandem. Keep in mind you’ll need two ports and two Thunderbolt cables to control the units from the computer, because the units don’t daisy chain. Somewhat frustratingly, you’ll also require optical cables to bridge the audio between the devices, which is not handled by the Thunderbolt stream.

More and more interfaces are appearing with built-in talkback mics. Element cleverly saves this extra cost by hijacking your Mac’s built-in microphone and using it as a Talkback input. I think it’s a splendid idea — if you want to speak to the artist, you’re going to be at your computer 95% of the time anyway. For all other instances, the Talkback source can originate from one of Element’s physical inputs, or from another playback device. The Talkback destination has to be one of the five stereo Playback channels. I routed it to Playback 3-4 and had this channel turned up only in the headphone mixes sent to the talent.

Engage the Talkback input using the latch button in Element Control, or its assigned button on the hardware Control unit.

ELEMENTARY

Apogee’s Element Series is about delivering the fundamental requirements — or elements — of high-quality audio without compromise. It does the job fabulously. Conversion? ‘Industry leading.’

Preamps? Well above average. Inputs and outputs?

Enough for most small- to mid-sized applications.

Latency? Thunderbolt is as quick as it gets. If you’re willing to take an elementary approach to audio, Apogee’s latest offering has you covered.

AT 59

REVIEW

BAE vs AML

Neve Clone Shootout It’s a Class A battle of the transformers as two Neve recreation specialists go head-to-head.

Review: Greg Walker

BAE 1023L FREQUENCIES BAE takes more out of Neve’s 1084s book than its 1073, with selectable frequencies for the high shelf, and the same frequency selection as the 1084 in the high pass filter. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Neve with this many options in the mid-range band though.

• HF Shelf (±16dB gain): 10, 12, 16, 20 or 24kHz • Mid-range Bell EQ (±18dB): 160Hz, 270Hz, 360Hz, 510Hz, 700Hz, 1.6kHz, 3.2kHz, 4.8kHz, 7.2kHz, 8.2kHz or 10kHz

AML ez1073-500 FREQUENCIES AML sticks strictly to the 1073 script with its frequency selection; it’s an exact replica.

• HF Shelf (±16dB gain): 12kHz • Mid-range Bell EQ (±18dB): 360Hz, 700Hz, 1.6kHz, 3.2kHz, 4.8kHz or 7.2kHz • LF Shelf (±16dB): 35, 60, 110 or 220Hz • High-pass Filter (18dB/oct slope): 50, 80, 160 and 300Hz.

• LF Shelf (±16dB): 35, 60, 110 or 220Hz

NEED TO KNOW

• High-pass Filter (18dB/oct slope): 45, 70, 160 or 360Hz

PRICE Expect to pay BAE 1073MPL: $1499 BAE 1023L: $3799 AML EZ1073-500: $1615 AML 54F50: $2380

AT 60

CONTACT Muso’s Corner: 1300 687 672 or salesteam@musoscorner.com.au

SUMMARY Both the BAE and AML Neve recreations are quality builds, with all the right components. While the BAE’s expanded EQ control and output attenuation take the biscuits in the 1073 stakes, AML’s 54F50 Comp/ Limiter literally smashes everything in its path.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m getting a little tired of the extremely tall pedestal that Neve’s vintage recording equipment sits upon these days. I’m not sure whether it’s the online frothing of nerdy engineers and producers, the dewy-eyed look the Neve name elicits from young up-and-comers, or the increasingly obscene asking prices of genuine vintage items offered up on Ebay and Reverb.com. In any case I can’t help feeling like the whole Neve thing is way overblown… and yet every time I track through Neve preamps, mix on a Neve console or run something through a Neve compressor there’s that sound again: the sound of countless great records and doubtless many more great records to come.

It’s gluey, thick, musical, undeniably satisfying, even culturally significant, and nothing else out there quite does the same trick. There’s no fighting it! Indeed BAE and AML are two companies (American and British respectively) that wouldn’t dream of putting up any resistance and are delighted to go with the flow and give the people what they want: accurate yet modernised Neve recreations at more attainable prices in everybody’s snack pack favourite, the 500 series format.

DINING OUT

Just to be clear, I’ve got a couple of preamps in my studio built around vintage 1272 Neve cards and I would be very unhappy to lose them, especially given how good they sound on loud electric guitar cabinets. These are, however, merely a pair of bitesized snacks compared to the five-course banquet of 500 series Neve recreations that arrived from Musos Corner one afternoon in a lovely 10-slot lunchbox. As well as a pair of BAE’s tidy single rack-space 73MPL preamps, BAE’s mighty threespace 1023L preamp/EQ shared centre stage with two large offerings from AML — the ez1073-500 preamp/EQ and the 54F50 compressor/limiter. All these modules share a similar grey palette that gave the whole rack a very military-grade look. There were a lot of knobs begging to be fiddled with and plenty of things that needed recording and mixing in the studio so it was a pleasure to roll up my sleeves and get stuck into a steady diet of Neve for the month or so I had possession of the rack.

LITTLE BIG

BAE (Once Brent Averill Enterprises, now British Audio Engineering) has been racking and recreating vintage Neve circuits longer than just about anyone else in the game. Their reputation as ‘the next best thing’ to the originals has been earned on the back of consistently excellent build quality, parts sourcing and circuit design. The 73MPL is essentially the preamplifier stage of the Neve 1073 circuit, optimised as a compact 500 series module with a few mod-cons such as DI and impedance switching thrown in. The module utilises original Marconi knobs for the look, and a fully Class A signal path with sought-after Carnhill transformers and point-to-point wiring for the sound. Up to 71dB of gain is available making the preamp capable of driving even very soft ribbon and dynamic microphone sources. The 73MPL can

function as a line-level driver and also features a switchable impedance of 1200 or 300Ω to optimise for various microphone sources. The front panel is simplicity itself, with one large stepped rotary control for preamp input and another smaller knob for output control. Between these are the large push-buttons for Hi-Z input, phase reverse and phantom power selection. There’s also a DI input on the front for ease of access. For mine, the output control is the key feature here as you can choose how hard to drive the input (clean at lower levels and thick and dirty at higher levels) while making up or attenuating gain at the output stage. This allows for fine-tuning of the harmonic distortion and larger-than-life bottom end that is a big part of the Neve sound.

Sacrificing compactness in order to deliver comprehensive tonal control is the 1023L – a three module-sized behemoth that again uses the 1073’s preamp section but adds an expanded three-band

Hitting the limiter harder on the Fast (5ms) setting delivers more extreme results including classic Beatles-style cymbal explosions, thick-as-gravy guitars and monolithic walls of bass

EQ section plus low cut filter. Compared to the original Neve 1073, the 1023L offers considerably more frequency options in the mid and high bands and also allows for playing with some overlapping frequencies to create new EQ curves.

The large faceplate means a spacious layout with large Marconi knobs for all major controls and the classic concentric knob approach to the EQ (the outer ring selects stepped frequencies and band bypass while the inner knob control adds gain clockwise and subtracts it anti-clockwise). The entire EQ circuitry can also be hard-bypassed using one of the sturdy white push-button switches. As with the 73MPL, gain structures are very versatile thanks to the output attenuator. The front panel DI is selectable along with line input, phase reverse, microphone impedance and phantom power. All in all the 1023L is a very imposing unit. Its wide faceplate and large controls certainly proclaim it as a heavyweight in the world of 500 series modules.

EYES ON THE ENTERPRISE

I started my ‘rack of Neves’ banquet with the entrée-sized BAE 73MPL. On a variety of different sources including drums, electric and acoustic

guitars, electric bass and vocals the single module unit performed beautifully. The sounds had a strong sense of solidity to them, with great tonal balance and a slight thickening and smoothing to them that helped the tracks sit easily in the mix. I found I needed to take care with this module not to overdo the input gain on loud sources as the sound could blow out quite easily, but it was no problem to adjust input and output levels to get just the required amount of thickening and juiciness out of this box. The 73MPL delivers very pleasing Neveish tonalities from clean to dirty and everything in between. The DI also sounds great on bass and synthesizers and I found myself using this feature quite a bit with great results.

Moving over to its big brother the 1023L, it was a joy to augment the BAE mic preamp sound with some sweet analogue EQ. I was able to capture larger than life kick drums, electric guitars and vocals using various combinations of the EQ bands and the high-pass filter to really shape the sounds.

The bottom end of this module packs some real power while the mids give great ‘voicing’ options and the top end is super sweet and musical. If there’s one thing the 1023L excels at it is delivering a sense of real power. In addition to the muscular quality of the preamp sound itself, the EQ can be used to great effect, boosting the low mids and cutting frequencies below to really pump up the perceived weight of instruments like electric guitars, drums and keyboards. The BAE 1023L really impressed me as a Neve reproduction that ticked all the boxes in terms of sound and flexibility.

HIGH MAINTENANCE

AML (Audio Maintenance Limited) is a more recently established company with a history of supplying parts and high-grade kits for the DIY community. Its kits, as well as more recent forays into fully assembled modules, have met with great success and the word on the street is its Neve recreations are exceptionally good value for money.

The AML ez1073-500, its take on the Neve 1073, is a two rack-space module with full preamp and EQ functionality built and tested in England. The ez1073 shares many of the same features as BAE’s 1023L; Carnhill transformers, impedance switching and a fully Class A hand-wired build. The three EQ bands and high-pass filter can be independently bypassed and there’s a global EQ bypass as well. AML has approached the faceplate layout differently by using smaller, separate rotary pots to select EQ frequencies and to boost/cut them.

There are also separate input gain controls for mic and line sources and small silver toggle switches for all selectable features including phase reverse, phantom power and impedance selection.

There are a few differences from the BAE 1023L worth noting. Maximum microphone amplification is slightly lower at +65dB and there is no output attenuation, meaning if you want to drive the ez1073’s input hard you will need to patch it into another device in order to damp down the output level (the CAPI Missing Link is a popular choice for this). The six midrange frequencies and fixed high-band EQ are faithful to the original 1073 in AT 61

a way the expanded tonal options of the 1023L are not. The AML’s build quality and ergonomics are similarly excellent. The unit is easy and intuitive to use and, of course, it isn’t quite as hungry on your 500 series rack space.

In use the ez1073-500 doesn’t disappoint. The top end EQ is sweet while the mids are full and characterful. The unit delivers lovely analogue flavours that definitely have the Neve thing going on. Like the BAE 1023L, the AML’s combination of low boosting and cutting options effortlessly adds weight and ‘stature’ to guitars, drums and other sources and the high EQ band, while fixed, is a thing of beauty for sweetening vocals, snares and programme material. To my ears the low end EQ band doesn’t quite have the extension of the BAE though this is a relatively minor criticism.

The main drawback of the module is the lack of output attenuation but again this is easily fixed by using an inline pad or second preamp/compressor downstream. Prospective buyers need to consider this, as driving this unit for more harmonic saturation delivers some exciting and musical results. The trade-off for this missing feature is a very significant difference in price with the AML unit being exceptionally good value for money and the BAE being more of a ‘you get what you pay for’ type of deal.

SKIES THE LIMIT

The last course of my ‘Neve-orama’ banquet was another 500 series goliath, the three-module sized AML 54F50 compressor/limiter. This unit is inspired by the much-loved Neve 2254 while adding a few variations of its own. Adhering to the original’s faceplate layout, the 54F50 features the distinctive vertical VU meter on the left hand side flanked by a series of small toggle switches controlling global bypass (SYS), limit and compress Off/Slow/Fast recovery times and Input/Output/Gain Reduction metering. There AT 62

are individually selectable stepped recovery times for the compressor (400ms, 800ms, 1.5s, Auto), and limiter (100ms, 200ms, 800ms, Auto). ‘Level’ and ‘Threshold’ controls determine overall gain reduction levels to the limiter and compressor respectively. A stepped compression ratio selector (1.5:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4.1, 6:1) and continuously variable overall gain make-up control round out an actionpacked front panel. There are four Class A amplifier stages and four Carnhill transformers in this circuit making it one of the more comprehensive vintage style solid-state dynamic control units in the 500 series universe.

FRESHLY SQUEEZED

Within a few minutes of running my first guitar and drum sounds through the AML 54F50 it was apparent this unit was going to dish out sumptuous amounts of tasty Neve-style gain reduction without raising a sweat. At lower thresholds and ratios with a slow attack speed (25ms) the compressor is sweet and subtle while dialling more aggressive amounts lends sounds the familiar thickness and harmonic enhancement that the vintage Neve modules are so famous for. Once the limiter is engaged the scope for signal processing is further enhanced with tighter overall control of dynamics meeting additional harmonic richness. On the Slow setting the limiter lets percussive elements breathe a little while extending tails and ambiences. Hitting the limiter harder on the Fast (5ms) setting delivers more extreme results including classic Beatles-style cymbal explosions, thick-as-gravy guitars and monolithic walls of bass. Sounds can be magnified and made more aggressive without becoming harsh or tonally compromised, drums can go smash or splat in the best possible way and vocals are leant an extra dose of weight and smoothness with harsher digital transients massaged into warmer analogue contours. The compressor and limiter circuits work well together, and while finding the

right interaction of the two involves some careful tweaking, the results are vivid and extremely musical on everything from solo instruments and voices to programme material. If the available attack times aren’t quite doing what you require of them, AML has thoughtfully provided internal jumpers to tweak the compressor and limiter’s attack times; adding further flexibility to the unit.

There is clean dynamic control available here, but for me the 54F50 does its best work when pushed into subtle (or not so subtle) distortion. In this role it’s a colour box of the highest order. After just the first couple of hours playing with the AML 54F50 I found myself scanning my racks wondering what else I might have to sell in order to buy one, or maybe two.

POST BANQUET WASH UP

I have to say I was very impressed by all of the units reviewed here. Both these companies do a great job of recreating the Neve sound at relatively accessible price points in a format that is quickly becoming ubiquitous. Vintage audio snobs will doubtless point to the fact that all 500 series modules run on 16V rails while the original Neve modules operate on a higher 24V system, however the quality of these sounds speak for themselves.

For those without the advantage of either having bought into the vintage Neve market ‘back in the day’ or being filthy rich these recreations are an excellent way to access what are undeniably great and extremely Neve-ish sounds. My pick of the bunch are the BAE 1023L preamp/EQ for power of sound and flexibility of use, and the AML 54F50 Comp/Limiter for smashingly classic compression effects. Having said that I’d happily have any of these modules in my rack. They are the kind of audio tools that would see daily use in most studios and repay the investment with sonic quality downstream come mix time. The only question now is what’s for dessert?

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AT 63

REVIEW

SENNHEISER XSW1

Wireless Microphone System Sennheiser ramps up the numbers in its entry-level wireless offering without bumping up the price.

Review: Preshan John

NEED TO KNOW

Sennheiser’s original XS entry-level wireless microphone system was a hit on par with Shure’s PGX line. Notwithstanding, user demands change quickly at the bottom end: more channels, better builds, cooler looks — all areas Sennheiser has addressed with its latest update to the range.

There are two broad flavours of XS wireless systems; XSW1 and XSW2. The main differences between the two are; preset vs manually selectable frequencies, 10 vs 12 channels per band, integrated vs external antennas, pushbuttons instead of dials, and plastic vs metal receiver housings. Other than that, the audio specs are the same, and they both operate within a bandwidth of 24MHz. The XSW2 range wasn’t available [in stores now - Ed], so Sennheiser loaned us a couple of XSW1 systems for review; the XSW1-825 with handheld

PRICE XSW1-825: $449 XSW1-ME2: $499 CONTACT Sennheiser Australia: (02) 9910 6700 or info@sennheiser.com.au

AT 64

PROS Super easy setup Mics sound good Affordable

transmitter, and the XSW1-ME2 with the beltpack transmitter and ME2 lapel mic. Other options include a handheld with an 835 capsule, and beltpacks with a headset mic, instrument cable or e908 condenser mic for brass instruments. The system we reviewed operated in the 24MHz of spectrum between 614-638MHz. Both transmitters have individual Power buttons and Mute switches, and a couple of AA batteries will power a transmitter for up to 10 hours. The handheld mic is a handful compared to a standard wired mic, like an SM58, and a bit chunkier than Shure’s wireless version of the ’58.

The beltpack transmitter is smaller than Shure's BLX, but isn’t petite either. It sits happily on your waistline if you’re wearing a tucked-in shirt, but if you try hiding it behind an untucked shirt or in a pocket, the bulge will be a dead giveaway.

CONS Handheld mic prone to handling noise

CHANGE THE CHANNEL

Keeping to the entry-level pitch, the user manual is entirely pictorial. Skipping the tiny print and tech jargon meant I had the beltpack system up and running in about three minutes. It’s a pretty standard process. Plug in the receiver and run a scan by pressing and holding the centre Scan button. Once it’s happily settled on a channel, power up the transmitter, hold it near the receiver, and hold the Sync button. You’ll see a sync light flash red and green on the receiver to confirm the pair are communicating, then press the receiver’s Sync button to lock in the channel.

Sennheiser promises you can use up to 10 XSW1 systems simultaneously without them banging heads in the RF realm. It’s a numbering system, with group followed by channel numbers.

SUMMARY Sennheiser’s XSW1 offers an affordable entry into the wireless mic world that promises faithful performance, quality sound, and lots of channels for the price

If you’ve got multiple systems, avoid intermodulation by keeping them all within the same group. So 31, 32, 33, and 37 will get along fine, but you’re asking for trouble if you throw in a 45. Manual channel assignment via the Ch+ and Ch– buttons is simple to dial on the front of the receiver. If you’re mixing systems, there’s a card chart in the box showing the frequencies each channel corresponds to.

BOLT OUT OF THE BLUE

THE RECEIVING END

While attractively finished, the light weight of the XSW1 plastic receiver feels cheap. The dual internal antennas are configured in antenna switching diversity — which means both feed into a single receiver circuit and act as redundancies for each other — as opposed to the true diversity of the XSW2 range.

While internal antennas won’t elicit as much range, the benefit is you can chuck the receiver in a bag or case without any dismantling. Having said that, the signal transmission was very stable in my experience when the receivers were mounted at stage end within line of sight of the transmitters.

Besides the usual Sync and channel select buttons, you get volume buttons. Nine 5dB steps provide 45dB of useful level control going into your console. The next model up, XS Wireless 2, sports a continuous rotary control for managing receiver output level.

GAIN IT UP

I put both systems to work at my local church. The frequency scan took a fair while longer than the first run in my lounge room, likely because of another Shure BLX system nearby, and the urban location adding more RF commotion to the airwaves. The first receiver eventually settled down and I parked the second in clear air within the same group.

When I first ran the lapel through the PA, the ME2 capsule was more eager to take off than an apprentice fighter pilot. It’s quite a toppy mic by nature, which when paired with an omni pickup pattern doesn’t result in loads of gain before feedback — especially if the presenter is the type who’ll unexpectedly dash in front of FOH to interact with the audience. By the time I managed to get more than a handful of gain from the mic the channel EQ curve resembled the Swiss Alps. The ME2 lapel is definitely better suited to very controlled environments and applications, like corporate presentations in a boardroom or audio for video. Alternatively — as is the norm for presentation systems these days — plug a headset into the 3.5mm jack and you’ll instantly have a much tighter sound that’s easier to gain up.

Gain wasn’t a problem with the handheld mic, and the 825 capsule has lots of vocal presence and clarity. High mids are pushed forward but it doesn’t sound thin. It worked beautifully for male voices and thicker female vocals. The green status LED was pretty bright and fairly noticeable when a singer is using it on a dimmed stage. My only gripe is the handling noise — rubbing the mic’s plastic exterior translates quite audibly through the PA. It pays to not shift your grip too often.

Battery life is commendable. The three-bar readout on the transmitter lets you know when to swap them out, but thankfully those moments are infrequent. I’m still in the habit of slotting in fresh batteries before each gig but I didn’t get even close to wearing out either the handheld or beltpack transmitters in a full day’s use.

FIRE THE WIRE

Everything about the Sennheiser XS Wireless 1 system is designed for dummies. Which is great, because it doesn’t sound or behave like noob gear at all. It just presents itself with the utmost simplicity.

There’s a couple of reasons I’d recommend these for portable use. Firstly because they’re easy to set up — even if you’ve got multiple channels going.

Second is it’ll go into a bag without losing or breaking anything.

Undoubtedly the biggest thing going for it is the ability to run up to 10 channels stably in a system that goes for under $500 per channel. It’s quite an achievement. It’s perfect for small- to medium-sized churches keen to ditch wired mics once and for all, or even a small venue or restaurant that needs a couple of reliable wireless channels for the odd presentation or gig.

Bottom line — Sennheiser XSW1 gives you mega bang for your buck.

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AT 65

REVIEW

PRESONUS ULT12 & ULT18

Powered Speakers & Sub Whether onstage or in front of it, PreSonus’ ULT range of speakers with pivotable waveguides will throw long and wide.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Mark Woods

PRICE Expect to pay ULT12: $1699 ULT18: $1999 CONTACT Link Audio: (03) 8373 4817 or info@linkaudio.com.au AT 66

BIG BASS — The ULT18 sub is a beast at 43kg and nearly as big as four ULT12 speakers. It packs the required punch thanks to an 18-inch Kevlar woofer, with a four-inch voice coil that can travel 7mm before over-excursion occurs. Frequency response is quoted as 45Hz (-3dB) to 250Hz with a maximum of 135dB SPL. Power is 1000W RMS with DSP sorting out the internal details.

PROS Versatile Rotatable, wide & longthrow horn Sound good flat Covers more ground than competition

CONS Covers not included Grille a bit bendy

SUMMARY PreSonus hasn’t broken the mould with the ULT series, but it lets you adjust it. The 110 by 50-degree Pivot moulded waveguide can be rotated for wide, long-throw in either a FOH or wedge orientation. Its wide pattern can also save you putting up more boxes, in many cases, and it sounds good right out of the box

This wide, focussed dispersion is achieved by the waveguide design and the effect is enhanced by the low 1.6kHz crossover point, placing more mids under the horn’s directional control

PreSonus has a reputation for making quirky problem-solvers and delivering them at a reasonable price. The StudioLive mixers and DCP-8 multi-dynamics processor drew my attention to the brand originally and a few years later I was impressed by the good ‘bang-for-the-buck’ Eris studio monitors reviewed in Issue 112. Released in 2013 along with the co-axial Spectre studio monitor and StudioLive-AI ranges these were PreSonus’s first speaker products. The following year’s acquisition of established speaker manufacturers WorxAudio led to a commercial live-sound division and its latest release is the brand-new PreSonus ULT range.

ULT stands for Ultra Long Throw, a range of serious speakers — not cheapies — PreSonus is casting deep into the already crowded and fiercely-competitive mid-level professional speaker market. No doubt reflecting WorxAudio’s practical background, the ULT range is neither quirky nor particularly innovative.

The speakers are a traditional two-way full-range (plus sub) active design. They have some distinctive features, but in the main they compete on the execution of an established concept.

The first good sign is they’re made of wood.

Eucalyptus plywood covered in a tough, textured and slightly sparkly Chemline polyurethane; they look very nice. At 24kg, the ULT12 speakers are also quite heavy with a solid, dead feel. Thankfully the handles are excellent, big and wide and smooth on all the edges.

There’s only one side handle because the speakers are designed for use as floor monitors as well as front-ofhouse rendering one side of the cabinet too shallow for a handle. They do, however, have top handles and I reckon they’re essential for this type of portable speaker. They get thrown in cars, or the back of the ute packed with other gear, and often the only way to get them in or out is by using the top handle. The optional padded slip-on covers are convenient to use with open cut-outs to access both the side and the top handles. The perforated steel grille across the front of the cabinet will certainly protect the speakers but isn’t as strong as some. It bends in when you carry the speaker against your chest or legs and pops out again when you put the speaker down.

PIVOT POSITIONS

Under the grille of the ULT12, the speakers are arranged in the normal two-way manner with a 12-inch Ferrite LF transducer below the 1.75-inch HF compression driver.

The distinctive feature is the Pivot X110 waveguide. It’s a bi-radial design and larger than most, with a quoted horizontal dispersion (-6dB) of 110 degrees while the AT 67

vertical dispersion is considerably narrower at 50 degrees. This wide, focussed dispersion is achieved by the waveguide design and the effect is enhanced by the low 1.6kHz crossover point, placing more mids under the horn’s directional control. This dispersion pattern also gives the speaker its longthrow characteristic by concentrating the mid and high frequencies in the horizontal plane.

The horn also rotates, primarily so the speaker can be used on its side as a floor monitor but it could also work in tall, narrow spaces with the horn rotated and the speaker upright, or as a centre fill hung horizontally. You need to take the front grille off to rotate the horn but it’s only a five-minute job and it gives you a look at the amp/processing unit while you’re there. Not much to see really, none of these modern units look like much compared to the amps of old, but its two channels provide a generous maximum RMS power of 500W LF and 150W HF. On the way to the Class D amplifiers is 24-bit/96k DSP that provides a choice of three preset frequency response shapes and the usual thermal protections and limiting.

Selecting between preset frequency shapes, activating the HPF or selecting whether to have the front LED illuminated is achieved by pressing tiny little buttons along the bottom of the rear panel. Apart from needing acute eyesight to be able to read the labels they are effective visual indicators of the speaker’s current settings and help avoid unwittingly dialling up a pair of speakers to different settings.

The ULT12’s frequency response is quoted as going down to 55Hz at -3dB, but for real thick bottom end the ULT18 sub is recommended. Its range is quoted as 45Hz (-3dB) to 250Hz with a maximum of 135dB SPL. Power is 1000W RMS with DSP sorting out the internal details. Polarity inverse and mono switches can help control some of the outside world problems, like walls.

IN FULL SWING

Whether by happy coincidence or something deeper, the first time I used them was straight out of the box and onto the fairway of the local golf course for a black-tie fundraiser. If ever there was a show with long, wide throw in the sound brief, this was it. Playing across a fairway, they had guest speakers, dignitaries and a large swing band for entertainment. I used a PreSonus ULT12 with sub on either side of the band. I couldn’t bring myself to run the multicore across the fairway so I put the mixer and racks in a marquee backstage. It was an obvious gig for an iPad set-up but due to my stubborn insistence on analogue mixing for live shows, I walked around to listen to the PA then back again to make changes. It reminded me of the days when you’d pick up the PA from a hire company, and occasionally forget the multicore. I didn’t have to walk too far around the front with these speakers though, anywhere forward of the front line of the box and you could hear the horn clearly.

I checked them with a dynamic vocal mic first, on the FOH setting, and I liked them straight away.

The voicing was linear, they had plenty of power and a good, solid overall sound. The ULT18 sub AT 68

DUAL INPUT — Having two Combo XLR/1/4inch inputs does away with the sudden-death mic/line switches commonly found on powered speakers. One input is line-only, the other has a PreSonus XMAX preamp and accepts mic and line-level inputs. Both have a rotary knob for volume and can be mixed together as required.

Two outputs, one for the mix of the two channels and another for the line-only channel, provide configuration flexibility.

The voicing was linear, they had plenty of power and a good, solid overall sound… they were happy to run flat in the great outdoors

level needed to be matched to the ULT12 but apart from that they were happy to run flat in the great outdoors. Lots of condenser mics through powered boxes is always a good test of how stable a system is. You’re normally searching for every dB you can get before it feeds back, but sound-checking the band was easy and I had good level for the type of event. Pushing the system up to find the limits had it becoming unstable at very high and very low frequencies but that was the condenser mics rather than the PA. The horn really does have a wide throw and it was much appreciated in this setting. Each speaker was effectively covering about 150 degrees, saving me having to mount and splay two speakers with narrower coverage. There doesn’t seem to be a trade-off in quality or evenness either. Instinctively you would think the wider dispersion would diffuse some of the level so it wouldn’t throw as far, but the narrow 50-degree vertical shape concentrates the sound energy in the horizontal plane and I found they did throw the uppermid and high frequencies a good distance — in this case it was over 50m to reach some of the audience, luckily it was a still night.

The system was next used as in-fills at the Theatre Royal Castlemaine for the first week of the recent Castlemaine State Festival and they worked well, easy to set up and again, no EQ required.

During a pumping DJ set after one show I was impressed by how they were at handling a good dose of EDM. Switched to the DJ setting, with subs of course, and these would fill a small dance club.

For the second week of the festival, the ULT12 horns were turned 90 degrees and used as floor monitors. The potential compromises in using

powered boxes as floor monitors are well known.

They sit up too high with the connections showing, the bottom end can be a mess when they couple with the floor, and the horizontal coverage is usually too narrow, especially in speakers with non-rotatable horns. As a floor monitor the ULT12 is quite compact for a 12-inch design but what you can see looks a bit industrial, with the controls and connections exposed to the audience. The sound is the main priority though and I found these made very good wedges. Selecting the Monitor preset button cuts low frequencies in just the right place and the low end is tight and well-controlled. The throw of the horn works well on stage and it’s evenly spread across the width of the cabinet and beyond.

Up loud the voicing stays commendably flat and they’re stable and clear enough for rock levels.

THE FULL WORX

The ULT range will enhance PreSonus’s mainstream credibility by providing strong competition in a traditional market. The range also includes the ULT10 and ULT15, with 10-inch and 15-inch woofers respectively. All three full-range boxes use the same X110 horn and all three can be used as FOH, floor monitors or flown using the on-board M10 rigging points. The sound quality is right up there with its direct competition and these are handy speakers with the wide, rotatable horn making them suitable for a broad range of applications and placements. They are simple enough to operate for hire use and the build quality combined with a six-year warranty inspires confidence that they will last. The wide coverage rivals that of the small array systems but the sound is more direct with more bite if things get loud.

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REVIEW

ROLI BLOCKS MPE Controllers

ROLI might have finally cracked open the market for the longstanding ‘next big thing’ in MIDI — MIDI Polyphonic Expression. If only Ableton would get onboard.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Mark Davie

PRICE Expect to pay Lightpad: $279 Loop & Live: $119 CONTACT CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or info@cmi.com.au

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PROS Potent ability for expression Noise app has great sounds Wireless mobile operation Dashboard app connects Lightpad to DAW

CONS Noise app is frustratingly ‘almost pro’

SUMMARY ROLI initially rolled out Blocks as an entry point for beginner beat makers, but the expression you can achieve playing with Lightpad is far too powerful to keep contained. Now Blocks can interface with your DAW for simple, cheap and incredibly fun MPE control.

I’m always on the lookout for the studio of the future. What image that conjures up in my mind is forever changing, but it always centres around one goal; achieving more complex tasks, easier, and with more musicality. MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) fits squarely into that mould. Or should that be ‘fits cubely’?

What is MPE? Think of it like breaking down the barriers between notes. You can slide between any pitch, or modulate a sound by pressure or movement, all without lifting a finger to grab a mod or pitch wheel, knob or joystick.

We’ve already covered ROLI’s Seaboards, which look like keyboards but feel like a gel shoe insole.

Awkward to play on at first — like learning how to walk again — but with four extra dimensions of touch to spur you on through the learning curve, you’ll be gliding around the keys in no time.

The core of ROLI’s Blocks is the Lightpad. It’s square, with a tough plastic body and a silicone top.

The top has a bit of give, but it’s hardly the level of squish of a Seaboard, it feels more like a drum pad you might find on a Push, or similar. This is where all your finger-drumming and notes are played in.

It’s got ‘DNA’ connectors on all sides. These magnetically lock other Blocks into place as well as passing power and control signals. At the moment there are two other Blocks in the series; the Loop and Live blocks. Both essentially bring software-based controls from the Blocks-specific Noise app into the hardware domain. Loop is recording specific, and the Live block is catered to performance. Both of these are rectangular, with two joining together to form the same size square as the Lightpad. All of them have onboard batteries that are rechargeable via a USB-C connection on the Lightpad.

MAKING NOISE

There are two main ways you can use Blocks.

The standard mode is pairing it via Bluetooth with ROLI’s Noise iOS app. The second way is to connect it to your computer via a USB-C cable (Blocks ships wth a USB-C to USB-A cable) and using it to your control your DAW through the Blocks Dashboard application, which is currently still in beta. We’ll get to that, but first, Noise.

Noise is free of charge. It’s a fun app with great quality sounds, making it worth grabbing even if you don’t have Blocks. You can still operate the app with your fingertips, you’ll just be missing the two touch dimensions on the Z axis — Press and Lift.

It interfaces perfectly with Blocks. It’s essentially a four-instrument sequencer, allowing you to create four-bar 4/4 loops in slots along a grid. There’s also snap, which automatically quantises your playing.

I’m unsure of exactly how much quantisation or of what sort the snap option is imbuing, but it mostly seems musical and adaptive to whatever other parts you’ve laid down. It seems especially smart for a non-adjustable function, especially considering there’s also no swing control.

There is a tempo dial, but no tap tempo, which means you can’t tap to get beats moving quickly if you’ve already got an idea in your head. There’s a sense ROLI wants you to start from nothing within

the boundaries of the Lightpad and four bar loops.

Also, despite there being a host of chord, arpeggio and scale types to choose from, there’s no way of breaking out of 4/4. You can also only select one chord type at a time, without any recourse to alter chords after you’ve recorded a pass or on the fly. I found the Blocks concept had lots of little tradeoffs like this along the way. It’s the curse of attempting to make an instrument that’s simple enough for someone with little music experience to get started on, but actual musicians want to play.

For instance, you can’t overdub parts, which means you have to be an ace at finger drumming if you want to execute anything complex. There’s also no mixer; all the patches play back at their pre-defined level. And while you can change each of the four sounds you’re working with at any time, it changes them globally across all your loops.

Much like Ableton’s session view. With three banks or four loops for each part, it becomes a test of invention. How many 4/4 parts can you play with the same instrument that fit the other loops you’ve already laid down. It’s like a Chinese whisper of musical ideas. You don’t know where you’ll end up at the last set of loops, and sometimes you’ll rue the selected palette of sounds.

Other gripes include the inability to reorder loops, you can only re-record over them. In playback mode, once you set a loop to trigger at the next four bar start point, you can’t change your mind and trigger a different loop of that instrument until it has completed a four bar cycle. On the upside, Roli just released an update allowing users to export WAV stems via iTunes to use in a DAW. With all that, it might sound like a hated the Blocks experience. On the contrary. As with all creative pursuits; limitations can be liberating.

While there are some annoyances, sure, the sounds on offer are well-selected, modern and eminently playable. You can also expand your palette with packs from RZA, Steve Aoki and more. It’s the most fun I’ve had with mobile music-making. With a fully-charged Lightpad and your phone, you can prod and play for hours. Pound for pound, there’s no other instrument that gives you the level of expression a Lightpad can for its size.

DASHBOARD OPENS DAWS

Thankfully, ROLI has quickly realised there’s a whole other market of music makers out there who would like to get serious with Blocks. To that end, they’ve released a beta of Blocks Dashboard; a control application that defines the way your Lightpad can behave within your DAW. With just one USB cable, you’ve instantly got an MPE hardware input device for the cost of a plug-in.

You can use Blocks in a variety of ways to control your DAW, as a fader block with four banks of four faders, a Mixer block with four buttons and faders, an XYZ pad, Drum or Melodic block. You can also play Space Invaders or Pong to kill time.

My main creative DAW these days is Ableton Live, but unfortunately it’s among the half that doesn’t natively support MPE, which makes integration a bit of a drag. You can force it to respond to MPE, but it’s in no way simple or neat.

When using a Drum Rack, you have to convert every Simpler instance to a Sampler. Then you have to assign the dimensions of touch to MIDI parameters… for each sample. It’s arduous, but once you’ve set up that drum rack, you can save it as a preset. Forcing instruments to work with MPE is diabolical by comparison. First, you have to figure out the patch you want to use, then duplicate that track by the polyphony you desire.

Six tracks will give you six-note polyphony. Once you’ve wrangled the Blocks dashboard to output the number of MIDI channels and assigned each voice track a different MIDI input channel, you’re ready to go. Unfortunately, the MIDI note data spreads across all the tracks seemingly randomly; forget trying to edit a performance afterwards. You also can’t feasibly change the patch or alter it in any way without making the exact same change across all the voice tracks. You’re better off treating it like a hardware synth and recording the group’s output to a separate audio track. Like I said, not exactly neat.

Thankfully, other DAWs natively support MPE. Apparently, Logic and Cubase handle it with aplomb, as does Bitwig. I have an original version of Bigwig, not the latest update, but it still works like a dream.

It’s really simple to map the Lightpad, as every built-in Bitwig instrument lets you map Velocity, Timbre and Pressure, which correspond to ROLI’s Strike, Slide and Press dimensions. Most also have Release, which you can assign Lift to. You can also set multiple parameters to the same dimension and adjust the direction they respond too. For instance, I mapped multiple organ drawbars to the Slide dimension, which allowed me to play expressively with their intensity, while they all stayed in relative lock step. It’s astoundingly simple, and would be intensely time consuming to emulate in post.

If you’re a Bitwig, Logic or Cubase user and looking for an affordable path to MPE, get a Lightpad Block. It’ll immediately reinvent things like arpeggiation. Being able to slide notes of your chord around rather than having to trigger them exactly at the next beat so you don’t mess up any note orders adds a whole new level of movement and expression to a simple form.

That’s just one of many examples of the way MPE can revolutionise your music. While there isn’t a huge selection of MPE-compatible virtual instruments available, there’s still enough to seriously consider integrating MPE into your workflow. The Loop and Live Blocks are not for everyone, they’re add-ons for players who get really serious about using the Noise app.

I often found it more convenient to not have them connected, because it meant I could have the Lightpad on my lap without having bits de-magnetising. However, I guarantee you won’t regret grabbing a Lightpad to go along with your other controllers, especially if you’re used to bashing away on a Push, MPC or Maschine.

AT 71

REVIEW

KORG KRONOS LS Music Workstation

It’s a Kronos that’s lighter on the fingers, but not on sounds.

Review: Christopher Holder

NEED TO KNOW

It’s dirty and underhand: an intro video that has four or five keyboard masters — musical directors and virtuoso players — jamming on the Kronos LS? It’s not fair.

Not as though I needed too much convincing.

I always considered the Kronos to be the ultimate musical director’s workstation; the onestop keyboard that virtually guarantees you’ll never be caught short, packing a gargantuan range of sounds from a bunch of killer engines — sampling, recording/sequencing, split/ layering, Karma… it’s effectively the full Korg toyshop in one package.

Most of us don’t/won’t need the Kronos but if you draw a wage from making/composing/ arranging/teaching music then Kronos is a nobrainer tax deduction. It’s the muso’s version of the tricked up tradies ute… why skimp?

And back to that video. The LS version of the Kronos employs a lightweight manual that not only makes it 6kg easier to lug, it’s totally suited to organ and electro-mechanical pros — making

PRICE $4999 CONTACT CMI Music & Audio (03) 9315 2244 or sales@cmi.com.au

AT 72

PROS Lightweight keybed feels great Kronos power Greater portability

staccato clav stabs and fast runs a comparative breeze. When you think about it, we’ve been chasing the ‘hammer action’ holy grail for so long we’re in danger of forgetting that there are many more players who don’t care if the manual feels like a 30-foot Bechstein. In fact, try performing a fast palm gliss on a heavy action keyboard and you’re likely to need hand therapy for a year.

Of course, traditionally, the organ aficionado is more than happy to make do with 76 notes or less. But there are 88-note advantages, such as bashing out a full piano part or making the most of a keyboard split.

Reacquainting myself with the Kronos has been fun. What with the two-minute-plus boot up you know this is not a workstation to be trifled with. The touchscreen control is useful, indeed necessary, to negotiate the depth and breadth of editing.

There are nine synth engines to pick from, including specialist platforms such as Korg’s

CONS Some of the editing is arcane Touchscreen sounds like a microwave

CX3 Hammond emulation, the SGX-1 piano engine (the best in the synth biz as far as I’m concerned), as well as some great analogue emulation from the Korg MS20 and PolySix engines, and more. The presets are mostly dripping in reverb. You can string together as many as 16 simultaneous effects and there are dedicated knobs for constant access to a couple.

Do I have quibbles? Of course. The piezo beep of the buttons sounds uncannily like programming a microwave (I’m guessing there’s a way of turning the beeping off/down in a menu somewhere). The rhythm generations in the Combi patches sound a bit dated/cheesy to my ear. A believeable sax sound still eludes us. The UI overall could be more user friendly — it’s a task to wrangle all the complexity and depth into a manageable seven-inch window.

Nevertheless, ultimately, we’re talking about the ultimate player’s and MD’s synth.

SUMMARY 88-note Korg Kronos power with a lightweight action that’s ideal for keys players and 6kg lighter to lug than the RH3-action version. This combination will better suit a big group of gun players and musical directors sold on Kronos' ‘ultimate workstation’ package.

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LAST WORD with

KC Porter, Part I

JMC Academy is hosting an exclusive masterclass tour with Grammy-winning producer KC Porter from October 10-12, 2017 across Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. We interviewed KC to provide you with a taster of the wealth of insights he has to

KC Porter is a multi Grammy-winning producer who made a name for himself producing Ricky Martin. He has worked on Spanish language versions for hit artists like Michael Jackson, Boyz II Men, and Toni Braxton.

He also produced Carlos Santana’s Supernatural. We’ll cover Ricky and Santana next issue.

AT 74

My father was an arranger all his life, he’d played since he was a kid. He would arrange jingles and TV shows like Lassie here in Hollywood. My mother also worked for the I Love Lucy show. They were entertainment parents. My dad had his own studio at home and was always in there. I grew up in that studio. I didn’t know any different.

When I was seven, my parents took me, my brother and sister down to Guatemala. I lived my really important years between seven and 17 down there.

My dad was very taken by the Baha’i faith, whose principal belief is in the oneness of humanity and religion. They just decided to go somewhere they could help share that.

My life changed forever. I remember a hippy guy who lived next door to us would get into his old truck and play old Santana. My sister’s boyfriend used to play me Earth, Wind & Fire records, I remember a song called Brazilian Rhyme. It was really cool, but it didn’t have much Brazilian to it. My favourite song was Serpentine Fire, and I met Maurice White a bunch of years back before he passed. I asked him about that song, I said, ‘That song is insane. What were you guys thinking?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘It’s a tango, man!’ It keeps the groove going throughout the track, so you don’t feel like it has the stops, but it still has the tango syncopation throughout.

My parents are from California, I have no Spanish or Latin blood at all. I just grew up there and spent my formative years there. I feel like a Latino inside, my humour is Latino, and my American wife doesn’t get it.

When I came back to the US, I wanted to make music. I learnt more about rhythms and different musical styles when I came back to the US. Guatemala did have its own music, but it was more folkloric marimba music, kind of like my father’s job; straight ragtime. My dad found marimba music, swung it up, and made a bunch of records with all the classic marimba songs in Guatemala. His band was a big hit. He’ll be 93 in November, and though he doesn’t play with them anymore, his band is still really popular in Guatemala.

What got my foot in the door in the US was making records with Latin artists, but with an LA sound. It was groundbreaking because people from Latin America were sending out their songs to be produced in other countries like Spain or Mexico.

No one was really making any records in the US, because there weren’t any producers doing it.

Then I started doing Spanish language versions for artists like Janet Jackson, and one thing led to another and I was producing the biggest Latin artists as well as artists like Bon

offer producers, engineers and musicians of all stripes.

Head along to jmc.academy/KCPorterAT for more info and to grab tickets. Put in AT's promo code AT25 for a 25% discount at checkout.

Jovi, Brian McKnight, Boyz II Men and Michael Jackson.

Everyone wanted to do stuff in Spanish.

I would make a mockup of the song in Spanish and give it to them beforehand so they could learn the song. Then when they came to the studio they’d have a little bit of an idea. We’d still go line by line, syllable by syllable and work at it. It’s a lot of work.

Because Spanish was my second language, I understood how to convey it to an American learning Spanish. I know the techniques to get the words right.

I remember Boyz II Men showed up in the studio, and I asked them if they had learnt it, and they said, ‘No man, we didn’t even get to hear it yet.’ Sometimes we’d get artists who had some Latino blood. Toni Braxton did such a good job that it became a big hit in a lot of Latin territories, even topping charts in Spain. Boyz II Men had big hits in Latin America, and their R&B style had a big influence on Latin pop. Now you listen to Latin pop and it has an R&B sensibility.

I think people in the US didn’t realise the potential for sales of Latin music. I remember when José Feliciano and Vikki Carr were the staples of Latin music and any time the Grammys came around they were always winning. It was like, ‘wait a minute, there’s a lot more out there then just those guys.’

If you could break Mexico with a Latin hit, that was great.

South America was a little more in their world, so was Spain.

In the beginning it was connected, but it wasn’t like it is now.

Back then, you had to send physical records. Whatever the DJ wanted to play, they had to find it.

If you sounded Latin, yet made an American pop record, why couldn’t you reach multiple audiences?

The guy who plugged me into A&M records started the Latin division with A&M’s founder, Herb Alpert. Herb had vision and was always looking for the next thing. This guy came along and said, ‘Let’s start a Latin division,’ and started it off by signing a band called Maná, which became big throughout Latin America. Much later on, I ended up producing their big single on Santana’s Supernatural and it won Record of the Year at the Latin Grammys. It was interesting how it came full circle years later.

I’m surprised by Despacito, because it’s in Spanish and it’s a global phenomenon. I think having Bieber on there made a difference. It goes to show that people don’t care, a record can be fresh. Everything’s a shot in the dark, you put your soul and energy into it and hope for the best.

In a world of borders and wall-building, we’re trying to break down that mentality with music that unites.

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