AudioTechnology App Issue 9

AT 1

Introducing the new M5 Matched pair of 1/2” Cardioid Condenser Microphones Watch and hear the M5 matched pair!

ORTF

“

SPACED

X-Y

Given their attractive price, the level of performance and that enticingly long warranty, there’s little not to like about the M5s.

Paul White, Sound on Sound

AT 2 bar not included. Available from early 2014. *Stereo

”

www.rodemic.com

INTRODUCING 10 NEW

NEXT-GENERATION MG MIXERS WITH

MG12XU shown

MG06 MG06X

MG10 MG12 MG16 MG20 MG10XU MG12XU MG16XU MG20XU

DIGITAL MULTI EFFECT PROCSSOR

Studio-grade Class-A discrete microphone preamps

Great-sounding, simple to use onboard compression*

Built-in industrystandard SPX digital effects processing*

MG mixers are built to last in any application

24-bit/192kHz USB audio interface*

Includes Cubase AI DAW software*

*1-knob Compressors not included on MG06 and MG06X. SPX digital effects included on “X” models only. USB and Cubase AI included on “U” models only.

EVENTS AND PROMOTIONS yamahabackstage.com.au

LIKE US ON FACEBOOK facebook.com/yamahabackstage

FIND A DEALER au.yamaha.com AT 3

REGULARS

ED SPACE

Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au

Digitally altered game

Publisher Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au

Text: Mark Davie

Editorial Director Christopher Holder chris@audiotechnology.com.au Graphic Designer Daniel Howard daniel@alchemedia.com.au

Remember when you used to sync ADATs with a prayer? When your DAW would have to render?

When music was distributed on tangible (read scratchable) pieces of plastic?

studios are concerned, it’s a non-issue. Insofar as 24-bit digital workflows have almost completely usurped tapebased ones. With the super-high sample rates of DSD and DXD still knocking on the door.

Art Director Dominic Carey dominic@alchemedia.com.au

We can rhapsodise all day long about how audio was purer ‘back then’, when really, 16 years ago, it could be bloody frustrating.

Digital audio compression has blossomed beyond the 128k MP3, but streaming services have put us back a step, and we’re only marginally closer to high-resolution files being the distribution norm. Though Bob Katz has declared the end of the loudness wars… if you listen to iTunes Radio.

Accounts Jaedd Asthana jaedd@alchemedia.com.au

It’s taken us 16 years, but we’ve managed to hit the ton of AudioTechnology print issues and have seen the game change dramatically.

JANUARY – AUDIOTECHNOLOGY ISSUE 1 HITS THE SHELVES.

The biggest Game Changer in that time has been digital.

No question. And in the last decade and a half, we’ve seen digital recording grow from being barely functional —wheezing when trying to perform tasks that would barely tickle an analogue four-track — to downloading free multi-track apps to our phones.

We’ve seen DAWs evolve beyond mere tracking or MIDI interfaces into immersive creative environments with more features than most users will ever clue into. The digital vs analogue debate still rages on, but as far as the majority of professional

Live sound was dominated by the maturation of the line array, next level control, perennially lighter truck loads, diminishing copper, and digital mixing consoles.

And game audio has risen from the bottom of the pile to the top of the heap in the entertainment industry.

Nothing sells faster or brings in more dosh than games, and now the industry is flexing its muscles.

In this issue, we’ve surveyed the best of the best in the studio, live sound, acoustics, game sound, and plug-in modelling worlds. We’ve chronicled the developments of DAW technologies, we’ve looked back to see just how far our computers have come, we’ve talked to the producer who defines the dream of a bedroom generation, and it all starts right here. Work your way through the time line and indulge in a bit of nostalgia. It gets better from here.

MAC NOTES IMAC RELEASED AND SAVES APPLE. AT 4

Subscriptions Miriam Mulcahy mim@alchemedia.com.au Proofreading Andrew Bencina Regular Contributors Martin Walker Michael Stavrou Paul Tingen Graeme Hague Guy Harrison Greg Walker James Roche Greg Simmons Tom Flint Robin Gist Blair Joscelyne Mark Woods Andrew Bencina Jason Fernandez Brent Heber Gareth Stuckey

Distribution by: Network Distribution Company.

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

Contact (Advertising, Subscriptions) T: +61 2 9986 1188 PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest NSW 2086, Australia.

SHUTTLING THROUGH THE DAWS MACKIE HUI ARRIVES. AS DO FRUITYLOOPS , ENSONIQ PARIS, PROTOOLS 24 MIX & NEMESYS GIGASAMPLER V1.5.

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

DANGER MOUSE MARTIN’S PC POWER 133MHZ, 16MB RAM.

ACOUSTICS TOM HIDLEY DEVELOPS FULL-BANDWIDTH (24HZ) ‘BUILT-IN’ SURROUND MONITORING, DESPITE RELATING TO AT IN ISSUE 37, HE DOESN’T THINK THE FORMAT IS RIGHT FOR MUSIC. RPG’S BINARY AMPLITUDE DIFFSORBER (BAD) PANEL PROVIDES DIFFUSION AND ABSORPTION THROUGH A VARIABLE IMPEDANCE SURFACE OF HOLES ACCORDING TO AN OPTIMAL BINARY SEQUENCE.

Advertising Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au

LIVE SMAART: CLAIR BROS USE SMAART TO TUNE U2 POPMART TOUR.

E: info@alchemedia.com.au W: www.audiotechnology.com.au

All material in this magazine is copyright © 2014 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. 20/02/2014.

COVER STORY

Danger Mouse From Bedroom Mashups To U2

17

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIVE SOUND TRENDS

Shuttling Through The DAWs

19

Killer Sounding Microphones: What’s behind the Shure KSM name

Tchad Blake

Tom Elmhirst

Mac Notes

25

13

Flood

Michael Brauer

21

27

PC Audio

Nick Launay

23

31

15

33

29

AT 5

1ST PRIZE (WORTH $13,817)

Avid Pro Tools|HD Native Omni system - Avid Pro Tools|HD Native Card (PCIe or Thunderbolt) - Avid HD OMNIIinterface - Avid ProTools 11 HD Software 1× Avid Artist control surface Pair of Event Opal Studio Monitors 1× Rode K2 Valve Condenser Microphone 1× Rode NT5-MP Matched Pair Pencil Condenser Microphones 1×

2ND PRIZE (WORTH $3,465)

Avid Artist Mix Surface Avid ProTools 11 Pair of Event 20/20BAS Studio Monitors 1× Rode NT1 Condenser Microphone 1× 1×

3RD PRIZE (WORTH $1,168) 1× 1×

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Avid ProTools 11 Rode NT1 Condenser Microphone

… LET THE GAMES BEGIN It is with considerable pride and a little bit of queasy excitement that AudioTechnology in partnership with Avid, Rode Microphones and Event Electronics brings you The Biggest Remix Comp in the World Ever.

Here’s the deal: Alt Rockers, The Occupants, have been hunkered down in Sing Sing studios with Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Dead Letter Circus, The Butterfly Effect) recording their new album, and have very generously made the stems of one of these new songs (Wonderland) available for AudioTechnology readers to remix.

The rules? Well, there aren’t too many really. Head to the AT site to download the stems. Import them into your DAW and make the song your own. Once you’ve finished your remix and sent us the Soundcloud link, then our illustrious judging panel will pick its Top 3 favourites – based on all the good stuff: production values, originality… just generally how good it is.

Head along to the AT website for more details and the stems.

Good luck!

www.audiotechnology.com.au/remix MEET THE JUDGING PANEL

Forrester Savell is one of Australia’s most in-demand producers and mix engineers. He’s based out of Melbourne’s Sing Sing Studios where some of his best work has garnered two ARIA award nominations for Karnivool’s Sound Awake and Dead Letter Circus’s debut This is The Warning.

Tom Larkin, originally from New Zealand, is a producer, drummer and songwriter.

He is the founding member of NZ band Shihad. He also currently owns and runs Melbourne recording studio The Studios in The City, and runs music management and artist development company Homesurgery. Tom has produced and recorded bands such as Shihad, Bodyjar, The Butterfly Effect, and Calling All Cars.

Francois Tetaz has many studio and performance strings to his bow. His movie scores include the soundtrack for Wolf Creek and the Julian Assange biopic, Underground; with his Moose Mastering head on, Francois has polished dozens of Australian and international albums; while more recently his production skills gained worldwide attention with his work on Gotye’s blockbusting Making Mirrors album.

AT 7

NEWS

more news at www.audiotechnology.com.au

ONE MICROPHONE TO RULE THEM ALL… www.slatedigital.com

Steven Slate and Slate Digital are looking to rattle the recording industry’s cage again — his innovative Raven MTX system still starts arguments around the water cooler. This time it’s the Virtual Microphone System (VMS). Yes, microphone modelling has returned to try and render your cherished, expensive microphone collection obsolete. The VMS is a hardware/plugin combination that includes two microphones, a dual preamp converter and the VMS plug-in software. It may be the modelling algorithms in the plug-in that recreate a wide range of classic microphones — labelled in such a way that leaves little doubt as to the original mic’s identity — but critical to the VMS’s accurate reproductions is the ‘ultra clean’ neutral hardware.

The supplied microphones and preamp provide an uncoloured signal, so

the plug-in module’s input signal isn’t tainted prior to processing. Aside from the raw computing power of the modern-day plug-in (compared to modelling software of a decade ago), it’s this blank canvas concept that promises the difference between VMS and previous attempts at microphone mimicry. Now, we know that normally microphone modelling is dismissed by experienced audio engineers as a gimmick — simply, impossibly never the real thing (off-axis response anyone?) — but on Slate Digital’s website Steven Slate puts up one of his now infamous video arguments, complete with cameo performances by the man himself. So prepare to heed the message.

Audio Chocolate: (03) 9813 5877 or www.audiochocolate.com.au

MANLEY LAB’S GREATEST HITS www.manley.com

Manley Laboratories has developed what it says is a combination of “greatest hits” from Manley’s existing signal processing devices, with an added dash of fresh technology, all into the one device. The end result is an analogue channel strip called Core; including a microphone preamplifier, compressor, equaliser, and limiter. Core is put together with an intuitive design — “intuitive” being a word that always makes us a little wary. It gets worse in that regard — Core also incorporates musical and “forgiving” circuitry, whatever that is, although it apparently allows the user to concentrate on performance rather than be lost in a sea of knobs (actually, most of us are at

our happiest surrounded by a million knobs, faders and buttons, and we’ll never, ever admit to being lost, even if we are). Anyway, regardless of any illconceived marketing hype, we’re talking about Manley here and we have no doubt the Core will be an impressive bit of kit indeed. Don’t forget, Manley equipment is handcrafted in the US by people who live and breathe high tech audio gear. It’ll be interesting to see how many Manley fans agree with that “greatest hits” thing.

Audio Chocolate: (03) 9813 5877 or www.audiochocolate.com.au

MODEL BEHAVIOUR: THE GOOD TWIN $1399 | www.uaudio.com

Universal Audio has a knack for designing gear that looks so cool you worry about the specs and features after you’ve bought the thing, put the box under your arm and walked out of the store. The new Apollo Twin desktop interface is no exception. The desktop design has a sleek, neat appearance that alone should convince people you know what you’re doing, and the front panel headphone and instrument connections allow for quick plug-in-and-play whenever inspiration hits you. Everything else is on the rear; including two combo mic/line inputs, ADAT in, four outs, and a Thunderbolt port (the only computer interface). Plug it all in and things are back to normal — you’ve got a desk covered in messy cables. Apollo Twin ships with the Realtime Analog Classics UAD plug-in bundle — not to be

AT 8

sneezed at — and also introduces UA’s new Unison technology. Built into the Apollo’s onboard UAD plug-in processing, Unison boldly promises the authentic tone of the most sought-after tube and solid state mic preamps including genuine impedance, gain stage “sweet spots,” and componentlevel circuit behaviours… in other words, microphone preamp modelling.

Interesting — that strange noise you can hear is Steven Slate grinding his teeth. Extra preamp models will be released over time and Unison will be available for Apollo Duo and Quad interfaces later, too.

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

FRESH AIRA AT ROLAND www.rolandconnect.com

Roland certainly got everyone’s attention with its intention to release a TR-808/909 successor called the TR-8. Even musicians and engineers who couldn’t give a hoot about EDM recognise the drum machines as legendary bits of gear — if for no other reason than they’ve been modelled, sampled, mimicked and key-mapped in every drum sampler and synthesizer since Brian Eno was a… well, about 30 years old, actually. Whether the TR-8 will live up to the hype remains to be seen. At its core are digitally recreations of the original sounds, which will have some baulking already. But apparently Roland has modelled the circuitry, not merely stuck some samples in a box. In that regard, parameter editing is a base level affair. The new interface lights up in all the right ways without throwing away the originals’ sequencing style.

And a new Scatter control lets you reverse, glitch, gate, truncate, stutter and generally mangle your beats to no end.

Also in this new AIRA family are the TB-3 (TB303 recreation) bassline module with a pressuresensitive touch pad instead of button keys; the VT3 Voice Transformer, which combines vocoder and lo-fi vocal effects; and a recreation of the System 100 synth called the System-1. From early accounts, the pricing will be affordable, giving a new generation tactile versions of legacy Roland hardware (albeit digital). We can’t get enough of this synth manufacturer dumpster diving.

Roland: (02) 9982 8266 or www.rolandcorp.com.au

FINALLY A NEW DAW ON THE BLOCK?

True To Your Sound Wi-Fidelity

US$399 | www.bigwig.com

Can you believe we first started talking about the imminent arrival of Bitwig Studio in June 2012?

Bitwig was (and perhaps still is) going to be a game-changing new DAW with a strong focus on live performance applications — and thus has been touted as software that might give Ableton’s Live something to worry about. Here we are in 2014 and Bitwig has demoed its software at NAMM, released a long video in which a rather nervous chap called Dom gives us a Bitwig Studio run-down, and finally the company announced a definite launch date of March 26th.

If you haven’t been keeping tags on the Bitwig saga, from what can be seen, Bitwig Studio is an electronic/EDM music creation DAW much like Live, but with promised future enhancements like multi-user production and a native modular environment for creating your instruments and effects from Bitwig building blocks. Included in the first version of Bitwig Studio will be 50 ‘devices’, a term which covers virtual instruments, plug-ins and effects, so that’s suddenly not such an impressive number. Still, you’ve got to start somewhere. Bitwig Studio has a staff of 10 attempting to usurp Live 9’s throne. That’s a small company attempting a very big task, but revolution is in the air — a bit. We’ll be putting it through its paces soon.

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

Epic digital wireless technology, now amazingly affordable.

Introducing the DWZ Series with affordable 2.4 GHz technology. You get solid-gold, 24-bit linear PCM digital audio to keep you sounding your best.

You get robust transmission and easy channel selection. Even automatic feedback reduction, encryption and battery charging are available.

And Sony has pre-assembled DWZ packages for presentation, speech and vocals, guitar/bass and wind instruments.

Sony’s DWZ Series. Sound like a million bucks without spending it. pro.sony.com.au/audio

AT 9

NEWS

more news at www.audiotechnology.com.au

RADIAL COMES OUT SWINGING www.radialeng.com

Radial Engineering’s been making quite a name for itself designing specific-application DI boxes, guitar effects and signal processors using the highest-quality components — which isn’t suggesting the competition doesn’t, only that Radial takes careful aim at providing the best solutions. The company’s most notable NAMM releases are the Space Heater and the Headload Guitar Amp Load Box. The Space Heater is an eight-channel summing mixer with the addition of a 12AX7 tube in the signal path of each channel. Voltage to the tubes is variable to provide differing levels of fidelity and character — okay, if you like, you can start arguing now

over the perceived benefits of summing, but perhaps of more interest is decyphering the manner in which the tube is integrated into the design.

The Headload Load Box is designed to be placed between your guitar amplifier head and the speaker cabinet, allowing guitarists to drive their amp head at band-annoying levels and still maintain quiet, on-stage volumes. Much more than just some shredding, guitar-god noise sponge, the Headload also has Radial’s JDX DI box built in — a popular alternative to miking up the cabinet — plus a Radial Phazer that deals with alignment issues, should you want both.

Also new from Radial, the Bassbone OD is an improved, overdrive version of the existing Bassbone bass pre-amp, and the Twinline Effects Loop Router lets guitar players share stompbox peripherals between two amp heads.

Last, and definitely least among this company, the SB5W-Wall DI is a two channel passive DI box designed to fit inside a standard electrical wall plate — think AV install applications here, or a studio dunny DI, wherever inspiration strikes.

Amber Technology: 1800 251 367 or www.ambertech.com.au

BEHRINGER STAYS IN TOUCH WITH REALITY www.behringer.com

At last year’s winter NAMM, Behringer pretty much backed up a truck of new goodies headlined by the X-32 mixer — which wasn’t so new, but the various X-32 versions were — and it was always going to be a hard act to follow in 2014. Three new universal control surfaces isn’t a bad start. The largest model is simply called the X-Touch, or there’s the X-Touch Compact and the X-Touch Mini.

All three models have a Dual-Layer mode and the ability to remotely control Behringer’s X-32 digital consoles is on the drawing board.

Behringer could be onto something here — the flood of iPad apps may have provided remote control for

QSC TOUCHMIX MAGIC QSC’s TouchMix Series came as a NAMM surprise. QSC is a big audio company going places, but this is its first foray into this area.

TouchMix is a portable, laptop-sized compact digital console that’s designed to be operated by newbs, but with enough DSP grunt to be a great little, tuck-under-the-arm, problem-solver for pros. TouchMix-8 (12 input channels) and TouchMix-16 (20 input channels) both come with EQ and processing on each channel along with access to four digital effects processors.

A comprehensive library of Channel Presets is included, designed by veteran live sound AT 10

engineers utilising all types of instruments, microphones and pickups, plus there’s a library of complete mixer scenes. If you need more help, you’ve got more wizards than a Harry Potter convention — including an onboard Effects Wizard and a Gain Wizard which continuously monitors and displays input clipping. A colour touch-screen provides access to all mix parameters or, of course, you can use a Remote Control App for iOS. Technical Audio Group: (02) 9519 0900 or www.tag.com.au

just about every DAW and digital console around and put a dent in the appeal of hardware controllers, but that tactile experience of real rotary controllers and sliders is still missing and by now the novelty of apps-driven control is kind of waning. No one’s impressed anymore when you whip out a touchscreen tablet and make faders on the DAW screen move. However the appeal of being surrounded by hardware knobs and faders is timeless, especially when they’re full-throw 100mm motorised faders.

Galactic Music: (08) 9204 7555 or sales@galacticmusic.com.au

VINTAGE ABBEY ROAD IN A LUNCHBOX www.chandlerlimited.com

Abbey Road Studios is as iconic as you can get in this business. Even so, it’s interesting just how often we go rummaging through its history for gear to inspire new hardware and plug-ins that emulate the studio’s legendary 1960-70s “sound”. Plug-ins in particular — the tape machines, the consoles… about the only thing left that hasn’t been sampled and modelled must be the teaspoon John Lennon used to stir his Earl Grey.

In pursuit of those famous tones Chandler Limited prefers real knobs and wires and stuff. The TG2 has been around a while and is a recreation of the rare EMI TG12428 preamp used in EMI/Abbey Road recording and mastering consoles in the late

’60s and early ’70s. Now Chandler has announced the TG2-500, which is — no surprise for guessing — a 500 Series version of the TG2 and Chandler readily admits it’s taken a while to figure out how to design the module without compromising the circuitry and sonic signature.

The end result has the identical TG2 circuit, transistors, and transformers, including the coarse gain control and a fine gain control as found on EMI consoles. That should satisfy any appetite for Beatlesque vintage sound for a while — until someone opens the next dusty cupboard at Abbey Road.

Mixmasters: (08) 8278 8506 or www.mixmasters.com.au

THE GROUNDBREAKING

ZOOM H6 NEW VINTAGE MICROPHONES

It will change the way you think about recording forever.

www.bockaudio.com

David Bock, the founding owner and chief engineer of Bock Audio, truly epitomises the terms “hand crafted” and “custom designed” when it comes to vintage-style studio microphones. David works from his own small production workshop in California and has a hand in every step of his microphones’ manufacture. In mid-January the company announced the forthcoming Bock Audio 241 cardioid-only, tube condenser microphone to be showcased at NAMM, then at the show also revealed the iFet microphone. The Bock 241 was designed in response to user feedback (the good kind of feedback, obviously) asking for a vocals-only — and more affordable — version of Bock’s flagship 251 model. The iFet is a phantom powered FET condenser mic designed to capture the high SPL handling and sound of the classic Neumann FET47, which David tells us has unique sonic signature that’s not easily replaced by modern microphone alternatives. To increase the value and versatility of the iFet, Bock added a second set of FET electronics for a second ‘sound’, accessed via a switch. Go to Bock Audio’s website and you’ll find not only technical information on David’s creations, but comprehensive notes on how and why each microphone was made. Lots of geeky, interesting microphone-making stuff.

Audio Chocolate: (03) 9813 5877 or www.audiochocolate.com.au

Here at Zoom we’ve been building innovative products for the past thirty years.

But with the revolutionary H6 six-track recorder, the bar is raised further still. Four interchangeable input capsules – X/Y, MS, Shotgun, and Dual XLR/TRS Combo – make the H6 the ultimate chameleon of the audio world, and its advanced preamps make it the best-sounding one too.

Whatever your application – live recording, professional film/video work, live broadcast or electronic news gathering – the H6 can handle it with ease.

The most versatile portable recorder ever.

ZoomAustralia

dynamicmusic.com.au

AT 11

NEWS

more news at www.audiotechnology.com.au

BIG BOTTOMS, YOU GOT ’EM

PMC is another studio monitor manufacturer to add an active subwoofer to its line. The grammatically-challenged twotwo sub1 is a lowdistortion, active subwoofer featuring PMC’s AT bass-loading technology, Class D amplification

Presonus’ 250W Temblor T10 subwoofer has some clever tricks, too. The T10 has a momentary footswitch that bypasses the subwoofer, high pass filter, and sub out allowing the audio source signal to pass directly through the Temblor T10 to the full-range studio monitors with the obvious benefit of letting you compare your mix with and without subharmonic frequencies.

The subwoofer also features “gravity-calibrated” rubber feet for stable placement. Presonus makes no effort to explain this further or perhaps the lads at Baton Rouge are just having a laugh?

Presonus Temblor T10 National Audio Systems: 1800 441 440 or sales@nationalaudio.com.au

Most studio engineers have had to explain many, many times to a client that the lack of bass in the hyper-accurate monitors doesn’t necessarily mean the final mix will lack bottom end. It’s all about making the mix sound… yes, okay — bugger it. Take the easy way out and get a sub.

PMC twotwo Sub 1 TotalQ: (03) 8360 3530 or www.ozhifi.com

JBL LSR310S

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

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MA T,

2000 YAM A REL HA P IAB M1D LE D : LA IGI RGE TAL -FO R

PO W SAM ER MA C 5 A E TIME G4 IS N A R PR D LOG S THE ELEA OC I ESS C 4. S DIGI SED A ING UD 001 T TH BEC DEN , PRO E OM LY N TO ES ATI OLS FEA VE SIB LE.

1999

ON

You probably already know the need for a sub depends entirely on the material you’re mixing.

JBL Professional is keen to point that out, announcing the new LSR310S powered studio subwoofer — optimised for use with the JBL 3 Series studio monitors — has some specific applications. Looking like something Ned Kelly might knock up in the barn, the LSR310S subwoofer extends the low-frequency response of a Series 3 system into the 20Hz range and includes a selectable Extended Low Frequency (XLF) setting that emulates the augmented low frequency response heard in the dance club environment. Using this setting, the bass output more than doubles, which could be alarming except JBL assures us that the newly developed woofer/amp combination with protective limiting allows the 310S to produce extended bass output continuously without failure. Good to hear, although your neighbours may not be so appreciative.

and DSP-based filtering and bass management, which extends bass output with negligible harmonic distortion. The Sub1 features an AES3 XLR input with a built-in sample rate converter that accepts digital signals at any sample rate up to 192k. The digital input is also passed through to the sub’s analogue and digital outputs for connection with other devices, allowing the twotwo Sub1 to be used as a DA device to drive other analogue monitors from a digital stream — that’s a handy thing.

DEC E PR MBER OP ELL – DEB ERH UT EAD OF REA .

S

But wait — you need more! At least, that’s the story you might feel you’re getting from many studio monitor manufacturers, when you’re told a sub monitor is required to complete your system.

Isn’t the expensive pair of monitors you’ve already bought the perfect solution on their own?

Is Your Wireless Microphone Ready for the Digital Dividend Restack?

STUDER, TO INFINITY AND BEYOND www.studer.ch

Studer’s Vista consoles have been the choice of the production mixing elite for some time now. Studer figured out how to use touchscreens in a particularly intuitive manner — dubbed Vistonics and borrowed by some of the high-end Soundcraft designs — and the use of coloured LEDs to help identify assigned knobs/faders (again, borrowed by Soundcraft). The latest Vista console has now introduced a new processing engine — using CPU-based processors. Warning, things get a little Star Trek from this point on — the idea here is that SHARC chips are getting long in the tooth (arf!), and FPGA, although plenty powerful enough, are very difficult to program for. Meanwhile, the ‘Infinity’ DSP core, which uses CPU-based processors, combines the best of both words, providing huge numbers of DSP channels for large-scale, high-resolution audio processing and mixing. How ‘large scale’? Studer reckons it squeezed 800 audio channels from a single CPU-based board. This offers significant advantages, as — hang on, take a breath — CPU processing provides a scalable system, faster development of new signal processing designs, huge channel counts, full system redundancy without a single point of failure and the possibility of running third-party algorithms. The new Infinity DSP engine provides 12 A-Link high-capacity fibre digital audio interfaces, providing more than 5000 inputs and outputs. A newly designed high-density I/O system — D23m, is used to break out these A-Link connections to standard analogue, digital and video interfaces. The A-Link interface also provides direct connection to the Riedel MediorNet distributed router, allowing many Infinity systems to be connected together with router capacities of 10,000 square or more. Phew, all that’s left to be said can only be — make it so.

With the Digital Dividend Restack now only 15 months away people are obviously starting to wonder what they should do with their existing wireless microphone systems. Especially after some media outlets reported recently that if you operate a wireless microphone system in the 694MHz-820MHz frequency range after 1 January 2015, you may face large nes and/or jail. So for a limited time, Shure will take your existing wireless system off your hands and offer you a great price on a new replacement Shure wireless system that you know will last you into the future.

TAKING YOUR WIRELESS SYSTEM BACK TO AN AUTHORISED SHURE RESELLER Trade in your existing wireless microphone systems and save BIG $$$$ on brand new Shure wireless systems that are ready for the Digital Dividend Restack: 1. Bring in any brand of wireless microphone to your participating Authorised Australian Shure Reseller and as long as it is a complete, working wireless system you can qualify for an extra discount on a new replacement Shure wireless microphone system.

2. The discount applies to a replacement channel of Shure wireless for every working channel of wireless you hand in.

That is, a channel for channel trade in deal.

3. All traded in wireless systems will be returned to the Shure Distribution Centre for correct disposal and recycling.

By acting now you can be confident for the future and you will save money.

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

E LIN A— ALI V-D O AR SC LA RAY ND REI S IN GN AU S. STR

OS X FOR 10.0 ( C SYS A DEC HEETA TEM ADE H) S OF S. OP ETS TH ERA E T TIN ON E G

Conditions: 1. This offer is valid for all trade in’s occurring between 1st October 2013 – 31st March 2014. 2. Access to the extra discounts applies for channel-for-channel trades of complete systems. 3. All trade in systems must be in complete working order. Non-complete or non-working units will not be accepted.

AT 13 AT Vert End Users Extended Shure Wireless Promo HP PrintAd.indd 1

19/02/14 10:18 AM

NEWS

more news at www.audiotechnology.com.au

MINI MONITORS SPEAK UP NAMM 2014 should be remembered as a year for new studio monitors, in particular compact types that — let’s be honest — due to the diminutive size are a little hard to take seriously. On the other hand, providing miniature, mobile and accurate monitoring is a noble concept, even if there is a risk of losing one of these things down the back of a bus seat. Actually, all the monitors below are active and require a 240V power source, so you won’t be balancing them on your knees and mixing a Grammy winner while commuting on the train anyway.

Tannoy released its new Reveal range of active studio monitors that are designed and engineered in Scotland — you don’t hear that too often in this business. The three models are the Reveal 402, Reveal 502 and Reveal 802 and we’re not giving away any prizes for guessing the bass driver configurations in each. An added extra is an Auxiliary 3.5mm input on the rear that allows you to directly plug in your portable device.

Genelec already has the 6010B “extremely compact” monitor aimed at mobile PC monitoring powered by 12W — and only an RCA input. Perhaps to be better associated with the professional 8000 series studio monitors, Genelec has now created the Genelec 8010 monitors that are very similar, loaded with a 3-inch driver and ¾-inch dome tweeter. The amplifiers have been doubled to 25W and the input is an XLR. Still, Genelec itself constantly refers to the 8010 as a “compact” and “mobile” solution, which is techno-speak for “don’t expect too much”, and it’ll be interesting to hear just how well the 8010 performs.

Tannoy Reveal

Amber Technology: 1800 251 367 or www.ambertech.com.au

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Genelec 8010

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

M-Audio launched into 2014 with no less than five new monitor models ranging from a 3-inch driver model to an 8-inch type. With the AV30 and AV40 models — respectively 3-inch and 4-inch drivers with 10 and 20 watts of power — labeled as “audio monitors for media creation”, incorporating connections specifically for PCs or tablets. M-Audio too admits these monitors are more high-end computer speakers than studio devices, but the new larger BX Carbon designs (BX5, BX6 and BX8) are true studio monitors.

PreSonus brought an ultra-compact version of the new Eris monitors to NAMM. The Eris E4.5 studio reference monitor features (no surprise) a 4.5-inch, Kevlar low-frequency transducer, a 1-inch silk-dome, high-frequency tweeter, and a rear bass-reflect port. Like the Tannoy Reveal, Presonus supplies an additional unbalanced 3.5mm input as an option to drive the E4.5 direct from a motherboard, plus MP3 players, iPads and so on.

PreSonus Eris 4.5

Price: $279 pair National Audio Systems: 1800 441 440 or sales@nationalaudio.com.au

All these compact monitors include their own variations of built-in critical controls such as EQ, filter switches, volume and the like that allow you to tailor reproduction to each environment.

They’re definitely a level above computer speaker products — even the high-end ones (which often rely on gaming DSP for performance anyway).

However the sheer size of these monitors, or the lack of it really, probably means they won’t be the first choice for many — portable or not.

Then again, speaker efficiency and technology has come a long way and we’re hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

M-Audio AV40

Pro Audio Group: (02) 9521 4844 or www.proaudiogroup.com.au

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NEWS

more news at www.audiotechnology.com.au

STICKY BUSINESS

Alcons RR12

Loud & Clear Sales: (02) 9439 9723 or www.loudandclearsales.com.au

If you’re in the hunt for a powered, portable PA rig — good luck. The number of speaker-on-astick systems out there has become legion, many of them little better than cheap, Chinese knockoffs that promise a hell of a lot and fall far short of delivering. The good news is that established names like EV and JBL are fighting back by offering a wider range of products with the more cost-effective series still having the benefit of being sold by a respected and reputable company.

Your warranty, should you ever need it, won’t mysteriously vanish overnight.

Maybe the VTX moniker is meant to suggest the F Series are in the same league as the line array, albeit a… completely different concept, design and application? Never mind, it works for us. Actually, voicing similarities mean you can use the F series as fill in a VTX-based setup.

And what does the ‘F’ stand for? JBL teamed with Firehouse Productions, which is a nice collaboration to crow about given Firehouse’s wedges, for example, were for a good number of years just about the floor monitor of choice when money was no object.

Electro-Voice has long planned a trio of portable loudspeaker series, each designed to cater for a specific, market price point, and the final instalment is the ETX range. Positioned above the ZLX and Live X families, the ETX family comes as a rent-a-crowd. There are three two-way models, a 15-inch three-way model, and finally two subs with either a 15-inch or 18-inch driver.

All models have simple DSP control via a singleknob control. ETX should ship in the next few months.

And talking of line array systems, Alcons’ new RR12 cabinet is designed to implement the features of Alcons’ own pro-ribbon technology into a modular concept, meaning the RR12 has been developed as a “building block” to create what we’d now call a traditional array for controlled sound coverage. The RR12 has a very high performance-to-weight ratio and due to the pro-ribbon’s cylindrical wave-front, no adapters or converters are needed to obtain coupling for precise directivity up to and beyond 20kHz.

JBL’s new VTX F Series may share the same name as JBL’s VTX line array brethren, but they’re a more conventional point and shoot range of passive, bi-amped, 1000W two-ways and sub.

Active EV, passive JBL or line array Alcons?

You’re spoiled for choice — no, that doesn’t include the cheap knock-offs.

Electro-Voice ETX

Bosch Communication Systems: (02) 9683 4572 or www.boschcommunications.com.au

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JBL VTX F

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

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Meyer Lyon

Last year our Editorial Director, Chris Holder, went on a junket to Anaheim and discovered NAMM is really about guitars, guitars, and more guitars. The professional audio section is located in a dusty corner, hidden behind an enormous pile of empty guitar cases. Meantime the PA exhibit area is out the back — a bit like the gardening section at Woolies.

All right, it’s not that bad, but it kind of explains why Meyer chose the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) trade show in Amsterdam during Feb to reveal its new Lyon linear sound reinforcement system, plus announced this to the world in the relative news vacuum a week out from NAMM, before the deluge of ground-breaking, innovative, industry-leading, best-in-class, top-of-the-wozzer products being released there cluttered the news feeds. Lyon linear line array loudspeakers are available in two versions: the Lyon-M main line array loudspeaker and the Lyon-W widecoverage line array loudspeaker. The Lyon-M can be deployed as a main system for installations in arenas and large auditoriums, as well as tours and festivals. The Lyon-W can serve as down fills to augment any Lyon-based system. If you’re thinking bigger, both Lyon versions can be used to provide supplemental coverage for one of Meyer’s flagship Leo systems. We love all manner of new audio gear at AudioTechnology, but shiny new main PA systems in particular can lure us out into the sunshine for a listen. You’ll be the first to know what Lyon sounds like.

Meyer Sound Australia: 1800 463 937 or australia@meyersound.com

Midas M32 & XL48 D&B Audiotechnik D80 amp Price: $22,999

German company d&b Audiotechnik has released a new flagship amplifier called the D80. It’s quite a big deal, because until now d&b Audiotechnik has given you a choice of just two amplifiers to power its entire range of PA cabinets, either the D6 or D12. The D6 isn’t suitable for some of d&b’s systems, while the D12 caters for them all. The D80 represents a significant upgrade all around, not the least being the amount of power it delivers. For example, the older 3U D12 offers two channels of 1200W into 4Ω — the 2U D80 gives you four channels of 4000W into 4Ω. As you’d expect the D80 has a swag of DSP functions for system design and preset configurations for all of d&b’s potential cabinet configurations. The boffins at d&b tell us that one consideration behind the 2U design was to provide enough front panel real estate for a decent-sized TFT touchscreen that lets operators with stumpy fingers access all that processing. They also put extra effort towards the D80’s power supply. The Class D amplifier utilises a switch mode power supply with what d&b calls Power Factor Correction (PFC). The PFC technology promises that the output of the D80 remains largely independent from voltage variations caused by heavily loaded mains supplies or dodgy on-site generators. If you’re up for a laugh (or a cringe, really) other design criteria are explained at d&b’s website in a D80 video presentation that won’t be winning any Oscars anytime soon. In a nice change from much of the new NAMM stuff — which is often announced, but not actually available — stock of the D80 exists in Oz right now.

National Audio Systems: 1800 441 440 or sales@nationalaudio.com.au

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Midas reckons it brought the Roll Royce of consoles to NAMM by releasing the M32 Digital Mixing Console — or a Bentley, to be correct.

Sporting a design created by no less than Bentley Motors Industrial the console makes use of high-performance material such as carbon fibre and… hmm, “aluminum” (let’s not get too excited about that). The M32 is a 40-input digital mixer with a lot of bells and whistles, and — okay, the Midas pedigree is definitely there. Even so, while The Music Group has done a good job so far of keeping some distance between Behringer products and its subsidiaries like Midas, Klark Teknik and others, on this occasion it’s hard not to connect the dots between Midas’ M32 and Behringer’s X32 console. Some forum pundits are even suggesting the M32 is a “rebadged” X32, which is taking things much too far, but Midas shouldn’t be surprised to hear it and will surely prove the detractors wrong over time.

Something that is undoubtedly pure Midas in every respect is the new Midas XL48. New in a vintage kind of way, that is. Years after the Midas XL42 has come and gone — but remains a treasured bit of classic gear — Midas has returned to carving up the beloved XL4 console to provide slices of its legendary tone. The Midas XL48 squeezes eight Midas XL4 mic preamps into a 1U box. Aside from its primary purpose, all five outputs types (analogue and digital) of the XL48 can be used simultaneously, making it potentially an analogue/digital mic splitter as well as adding that Midas touch to eight channels of your mix. Midas reckons applications include portable recording rigs, analogue and/or digital splits between consoles, or improving the input stage of an “ordinary” digital console — cheeky buggers. Unless, of course, Midas is referring to its very own X-32 – sorry, the M32. Hell, you know the one we mean.

National Audio Systems: 1800 441 440 or sales@nationalaudio.com.au

A UNIVERSE FROM A DECADE OF MOTIFS The popular MOX Series has been updated with the latest MOTIF XF technology by adding more sounds, more effects and a flash memory option slot. Because it is compatible with MOTIF XF and MOX data, the MOXF has a huge collection of sound and sample libraries available right out of the box. Expandable, portable and affordable, MOXF brings MOTIF music production power to a whole new generation of musicians and producers.

MOXF6 61-key semi-weighted keyboard

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MOTIF XF sound engine

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USB audio/MIDI interface

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VCM effects

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DAW control functions

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Flash memory expandability

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Includes

MOXF8 88-key graded hammer action keyboard

EVENTS AND PROMOTIONS yamahabackstage.com.au

LIKE US ON FACEBOOK facebook.com/yamahabackstage

FIND A DEALER au.yamaha.com AT 19

VOX POP

THE PROFESSIONAL VOICE The victory of the DAW, and corresponding decimation of the cost of pro audio equipment was one of the main factors behind the collapse of the commercial studio industry. This whirlwind of closing studios, lowering recording budgets, improving digital audio sound quality and endless options and effects at the press of a button, turned the worlds of all engineers, mixers and producers upside down. Throughout this issue, Paul Tingen asks nine of the world’s leading studio practitioners to elaborate on what has changed for them since 1998, homing in on the pieces of gear they consider to have been game changers, and the working methods they use today, which they didn’t in 1998.

Interviews: Paul Tingen

TOM ELMHIRST Adele, Amy Winehouse, The Black Keys, Cee Lo Green, Ellie Goulding, Florence & The Machine, Arcade Fire, Mark Ronson, Jonsi, U2, Peter Gabriel, Rufus Wainwright, and Goldfrapp.

Four-time Grammy award winner, Elmhirst, is a British mix engineer who works in Electric Lady Studio C, using his own Neve VR72 console, an extensive collection of outboard, ATC SCM50 and Auratone monitors, and, of course, ProTools.

Elmhirst: “15 years ago I was still working as a tracking engineer for producers like Trevor Horn and Steven Fitzmaurice. I gradually moved into mixing, working in Metropolis Studio C and The Pierce Rooms (both in London, and both Neve rooms) before moving to Electric Lady in 2012. For me the process of making and mixing records hasn’t changed that much: people still write and record songs the same way, though mixing techniques have changed. When I started out I was still working on analogue tape, but now with ProTools you have so much more control.

The 24-track tape machine which is the main photo on my web site (tomelmhirst.com) is just there for the romance of it. It rarely gets used these days. Everything comes in as ProTools sessions now, though I have to say that the sessions that had analogue tape involved during tracking generally sound better. This is mainly because of the aesthetics of the people involved in making it, rather than the gear that’s used. It’s true that there’s something that tape does that makes what comes back from it sound sympathetic and that you have to try harder to get emotions out of ProTools. But I get many straight-to-ProTools sessions in that sound amazing.”

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GAME CHANGERS

PROTOOLS “Without a doubt the biggest changes in the last 15 years have been the developments in computer technology and the abilities of ProTools. ProTools is so powerful now. I already worked on it when I started, and have a very good knowledge of it. Also growing up in the era of large format console mixing, I found that I could get that combination to work. For me it is about marrying the best of the old and the best of the new. I just could not mix in-the-box, I would not enjoy that in the same way. I could not live without faders and outboard gear. But I could also not live without ProTools. In the end, you find a way to get the tools you have at your disposal to work and to be productive. It’s not about the gear.

People ask me things like: ‘What’s your go-to compressor?’ I don’t really think like that. With mixing, experience is everything. If you look at the top mixers in the world at the moment, they are not young cats, they are mostly in their 40s and older [Elmhirst is 42]. The main change in my mixing approach over the last

10 years is that I have become much quicker.

Things that would have taken me six or seven hours at the time, now take me 20 minutes.

The more experienced you are as a mixer, the less you waste time. After 20 minutes I’m still fresh, but if it had taken me six hours to get to the same point, my ears would be tired and I’d need to take a break. So the ability to get a mix balance going very quickly is the biggest change for me.”

“

The main change in my mixing approach over the last 10 years is that I have become much quicker

”

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MICHAEL BRAUER The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Coldplay, John Mayer, Ash, My Morning Jacket, Ben Folds, Eric Clapton, Prefab Sprout, Leonard Cohen, Pet Shop Boys, Dream Theater, Aretha Franklin.

Brauer, four-time Grammy winner, is based in Electric Lady studio B in New York, which sports an SSL 9000 J-series desk, as well as a mind-boggling amount of outboard gear (see www.mbrauer.com/soundtowers2. asp). The outboard is at the heart of an approach to using compression and EQ that is so elaborate he’s given it a trademarked name. ‘Brauerizing’ is parallel, multi-channel, multi-bus post-fader send/return sonic treatments that are about “mixing into compression”, allowing Brauer to ride instruments, vocals, and also his entire mix “into the sweet spot.”

Photo: Mix With The Masters

GAME CHANGERS

PROTOOLS, THE DISTRESSOR, & THE ANTELOPE CLOCK “ProTools has changed everything over the last 15 years. There are young engineers now who grew up on it and don’t know any other approach! The tools that ProTools offered were revolutionary. Suddenly you didn’t need a desk, you didn’t need any outboard, you could do everything inside. But going from analogue tape to ProTools initially was a serious shock from a sonic point of view. We were all used to hearing endless top end that just went up and up, and it was the same with the bottom end going down. Then with ProTools there suddenly was a ceiling that you couldn’t get beyond, and when you got close to that ceiling, things started to sound weird. I didn’t know what was going on from a technical point of view, but while working in analogue felt like being in a cathedral, at the time working with digital felt like being in a room with a 7-foot ceiling. As ProTools became more and more high definition that ceiling got higher and higher. Digital improved to the point that those old analogue versus digital arguments discussed in panels 15 years ago have become irrelevant. Whether I use analogue or digital doesn’t matter to me anymore. I don’t

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distinguish between them anymore. I simply use what’s best for the job. Another piece of gear that came out at the time, or perhaps just before, that has been absolutely huge is the Distressor. It was the next generation of compressor that offers so many versatile sounds and options. It was really instrumental in how the sounds of records were changing.

And finally the Antelope 10M digital clock really upped the game. I did not really know the importance of digital clocking until I first heard it. It was so detailed, I could hear how the sound came together.”

“

Digital improved to the point that those old analogue versus digital arguments discussed in panels 15 years ago have become irrelevant

”

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Brauer: “1998 marked the last throes of multitrack analogue tape. I was also using Radar at the time, and was starting to get more and more mixes in as ProTools sessions. Radar was a great sound recording and playback machine, and at the time I was using ProTools in the same way. I didn’t consider using plug-ins, because they sounded awful to me. They did not even come close to sounding as good as the hardware that they were trying to mimic. This has changed dramatically over the last 15 years.

My mixing methods have remained the same — I still go through a desk and use the Brauerize process with my four towers with different compressors, EQs and summing amps — but the big difference is that I now use plug-ins all the time, and maybe even more than hardware. I love the UAD plug-ins, and the Softube ones, and I use the Waves Chris Lord-Alge, Manny Marroquin and Tony Maserati plug-ins on a daily basis. Plug-ins also offer you many things you can never get from hardware, like great de-essers and other great tools for fixing things. The advances in digital technology has led to me building two additional rooms in which my assistants will be mixing lower budget projects, supervised by me. One room is almost finished and is a hybrid studio, with two Euphonix 8-channel desks and a stripped down version of what I have in terms of hardware. The other studio will be for entirely in-the-box mixing.”

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FEATURE

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Bedrooms, garages and basements are the traditional breeding grounds of genius.

Unlike high-rise corner offices, there are no approval committees, no business development plans to adhere to, no one to say, ‘No’ — just you and your ideas. If you’ve got the talent, the time, the idea and the will, you’ve got everything you need. And a computer, of course.

Before Facebook had a billion users and contracted superstar architect Frank Gehry to design its audacious new Palo Alto headquarters, it was the product of a university student in a dorm room. And the Silicon Valley trope of up-all-night, 72-hour lock-in programming marathons isn’t too far from how some of the world’s best records are made.

Long hours, late nights, living in the studio. It’s a coming of age, incubation process for musical ideas. Shutting out any outside influence, and pouring everything you’ve got into a concept.

It’s how Danger Mouse, née Brian Burton, became infamous.

In 2004, the producer locked himself in his second-storey bedroom. Just him, his bed, Sony’s Acid on a PC and two albums’ worth of gold source material. Seven days later, he emerged with a mash-up collage comprising a cappella vocals from Jay Z’s The Black Album and music from The Beatles’ The White Album. The Grey Album, as it was named, not only staked his place in popular music culture, but helped shape the worldwide copyright debate.

EMI took umbrage with the unlicensed use, and ordered the album to be taken down.

But the mash-up — originally intended for friends Burton knew wouldn’t be offended by the ‘sacrilegious’ slicing and dicing of Beatles material — was downloaded over 100,000 times in 24 hours when, on a day dubbed Grey Tuesday, an independent group coordinated a mass spread of the album across 170 websites.

“

I never wanted to use computers. I thought it was cheating, I didn’t think it was pure…

I didn’t know what I was talking about

”

Even Sir Paul was into it: “I didn’t mind when something like that happened with The Grey Album,” he commented in the BBC documentary The Beatles and Black Music. “But the record company minded. They put up a fuss. But it was like, ‘Take it easy guys, it’s a tribute.’”

The Grey Album brought Burton notoriety, but his trajectory since then has been continually rising, both as a producer and a musician. He has been one half of two high-profile duos: Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo Green, who had the mega-hit Crazy; and Broken Bells with The Shins’ James Mercer. Over five years, he and composer Daniel Luppi patiently reconvened the original Cantori Moderni choir that sung the score to The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, and a cast of Italian musicians from the Ennio Morricone era, to record an album inspired by spaghetti western soundtracks with Jack White and Norah Jones.

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A MIX OF DISTORTION

The decidedly ‘futuristic’ Yamaha Electone EX-2 organ is one of the many inspiring pieces Burton uses.

Burton has also produced albums for Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz [Demon Days] and The Good, The Bad & The Queen projects; Beck’s Modern Guilt; The Black Keys’ breakthrough album Attack & Release as well as El Camino; Norah Jones’Little Broken Hearts; Portugal, The Man’s Evil Friends; Dark Night of the Soul, and a collection of songs by the late Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse recorded with a rotating cast of vocalists from Iggy Pop to Suzanne Vega. Now, in between touring the second Broken Bells record, he’s tying up the production of U2’s next album, arguably still the biggest band in the world.

He’s a long way from the bedroom.

GREY AREA

Probably the biggest misconception about Burton — perhaps because he’s American, has an afro, and The Grey Album was necessarily stylistically skewed towards Jay Z’s raps — is that he was always purely a hip hop producer and DJ, and somehow stumbled into rock music. Really it was the other way around.

The DJ ‘thing’ “is kind of a misconception,” said Burton. “What really happened was when I was 19 in college, I decided to try music out. I never really thought music was art, I just thought it AT 26

was entertainment. But I never wanted to be an entertainer, I just wanted to be an artist and thought more about making films or being a comic book artist. Then I realised you could make music in an ‘art’ way.

“So I started getting equipment. I bought a cheap keyboard, a cheap four-track off a friend, a guitar and a sampler. And I hooked all those up in my dorm room and started playing stuff in and making loops. I didn’t play any live drums, it was all samples, keyboards and guitars.

“I had no training. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just fumbled around with it. I made my own soundtrack-sounding instrumental albums — basically, things I could make on my own because I was afraid to work with other people and embarrass myself. Every once in a while I would get someone who could play guitar better than me to help out.”

A stint DJing for his college radio station and seeing friends making good money on the club DJ circuit led Burton to get some equipment of his own. But it was strictly party DJing — no tricks, nothing fancy. “I just played records that made people dance and that was it,” said Burton.

“I wasn’t a very skilled DJ, I can mix a record and

Whether its referencing psych albums or trying to crunch up some drums, distortion plays a big part in Danger Mouse’s overall aesthetic and attempt to get at a feeling. It’s something he learned from the late Mark Linkous [aka Sparklehorse] who always tried to disguise himself in his music.

Burton: “I learned a lot from Mark about re-amping and distorting the hell out of stuff in certain ways. He never really liked his voice, so he would beat up the finished product so it wouldn’t sound like him when he listened to it.”

Takahashi: “My idea of what sounded good and what was appropriate for songs has definitely changed since working with Brian. I’m no longer precious about having to have the best mic, the best pres. All that stuff just doesn’t matter. If you can find the sound with a dictaphone, if there’s something about it that moves you, it’s probably the right thing to use. Even if it’s noisy. I don’t think it matters. I don’t think people really care.

“SoundToys’ Decapitator is a good one for crunch, but some of the crunchy drums actually come at the outboard stage. Like we’ll crunch the preamp, Neves are good for that, sometimes blowing out an LA-2A, there’s a certain kind of squash it does.”

Blowing out drums and squashing everything can be cool, but inevitably there’s a few caveats when mixing.

Takahashi: “There are some technical things we have to watch, like bottom end, and overall trying to get the top end a little bit clearer. I generally don’t like that much top end. It always felt really artificial to me. Oddly enough, I was just listening to Fleetwood Mac on the way up and I was like, ‘Holy crap, there’s a lot of top in this and no low end!’ But I do find really high top end fatiguing.

“Mainly with mixing, if we feel like a section isn’t transitioning correctly, we’ll try things to trick the listener: ‘Listen to this cool event. Don’t worry about this key change happening here.’

Sometimes we’ll pull a Spiderman and use production to cover things up, but most problems are tackled in the tracking process. We mix on the way so we know how things should sound. By the time we’ve finished tracking it’s pretty much 80-90% there. Sometimes we have to do drastic things, but it’s becoming rarer.

“I love to use plug-ins because it streamlines the work and gives you a close-enough result a lot quicker. We use the same stuff as everyone else, Waves, Soundtoys, I like Digi plug-ins too. I know they’re not supposed to sound very good, but they do exactly what they say they can, and will open on almost every studio’s system. Most of our stuff has the Digi EQ3 on it. We do a lot of radical EQ notching.”

had good taste, but I just liked being able to pick what people would want to hear next. I DJ’d to make money so I could make my music at home.

“So that’s how I started, making rudimentary versions of the Rome album. Except that I didn’t have nearly the amount of great musicians and didn’t know how to write songs so much back then either.”

NOT VERY PC

It wasn’t until a few years later that Burton really started to make headway with his music. And it was all due to the one thing he’d always avoided — a computer.

Burton: “I never wanted to use computers. For years, I refused to use them. Even though I was

using a digital eight-track, I still didn’t use a computer. I didn’t use one until I was probably 23 or 24. I thought it was cheating, I didn’t think it was pure… I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“When I was in London, a friend of mine saw how I was working and suggested I try it. He gave me a copy of Acid and showed me how to use it for a day or two. The first things I ever did on a computer were three hip-hoppy instrumental pieces, despite never having done hip hop before. I put them on a CD and I sent them to this record label guy I’d just met, and he signed it right away. Oh man!

“The way my head works with music, the computer allows me to react very quickly to things, to mistakes. And if I’m getting on something, I can hear the end of it in my head and figure a way to get there a lot quicker when using a computer program. So I was able to do a lot more and not fatigue from listening to stuff over and over again until I got it right.”

Going digital ain’t so bad...

The label he signed to was Lex Records, an imprint of the cult label Warp Records. Before The Grey Album, Burton had already released Ghetto Pop Life with rapper Jemini the Gifted One on Lex, and had started working on Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo. But when The Grey Album landed Burton started receiving offers to produce, which he was bemused by. “I was like, ‘Why would you offer me this?’” said Burton. “The Grey Album was really just a remix record. I mean it was intricate, took me a long time to do, and I was proud of it. But why would you want me to do that, just because I did this? It didn’t even make any sense.”

BLUR OF INSPIRATION

There are some offers you just can’t refuse though. And while The Grey Album propelled him into the popular consciousness, when Damon Albarn from Blur came knocking, he provided Burton with the necessary stepping stone to become one of the defining producers of the generation.

“After The Grey Album came out, Damon got in touch and I met with him for a week in England,” said Burton. “At first, it didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t know what he saw. But I think it was much less about what I’d done and much more about the week we spent together making stuff. He tried me out.

“It was the first thing I ever produced. The idea of producing and what producing was, means different things to different people.

DIALLING IN GUITAR SOUNDS Takahashi: “We kind of have a standard setup. I definitely tend to like using lower powered amps, they sound better and don’t overload mics as much. We keep it simple with Shure SM57s. I’ve been using a Sennheiser MD421 lately, out of all things. I like the tubbiness of it. Some of the small amps don’t have the bottom, sometimes the 421 makes my little 5W amp sound freaking massive.

“We’ll play with a bunch of pedals, and Brian will jump in if he hears something in his head I can’t articulate. He’s definitely a very hands-on person.

“He does like his odd organs. So a lot of those are mic’ed with Neumann U47s out in the room, several feet away. As far as the synthesisers, a lot of that is just DI’ed straight in and we’ll treat it in the box.

“We do a lot of bass with a DI. On occasion we use that little 5W amp as our bass amp. It gets gnarly as it doesn’t handle low end very well, which sounds kinda cool. On the last Broken Bells record we’ve taken the bass, played it through the studio monitors and mic’ed it with a Dictaphone… we called that a re-amp.

“We’ll still use the DI signal to have some low end. A massively filtered DI, — low passed with our favourite plug-in of all time, the Digi EQ3 — with a Dictaphone sitting on top.”

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AT 27

TO THE BEAT Burton and Takahashi often engineer and mix crunchy, compressed drums. It’s one of the signatures of many Danger Mouse productions.

Burton: “I use a ’67 Ludwig a lot. I usually like to do a combination of live and synthetic, just to make it sound more unique. I don’t really care about whether you can play it back live or not, I’m just looking to get the end result how I want to hear it and feel unique. So I’ll program a drumbeat and go in and play on top of it and I’ll keep the parts that I like live and keep the parts that I like that are programmed and mesh them together.

“A lot of times I end up using just one mic, or just the overhead or room mic. It depends. I’ve done it all different ways.”

Takahashi: “Typically, most of the drummers we record, including Brian, don’t hit very hard. Over the years, we found that heavy hitting sounds smaller than if you’re hitting lightly. You get better tones from hitting lightly. The room mics tend to react better and we can let the compressor do that work.

“On Norah Jones’ song Happy Pills we had a condenser and a dynamic on the snare drum along with something like a Sennheiser 441 underneath the snare. We EQ’d it and bussed it down to one channel. The kick was probably an AKG D12. I don’t think we put too much thought into the toms.

AT 28

We probably had some condensers on them, but typically we have Shure SM57s on all the toms. A lot of time the bottom end might come from room mics. We use Coles 4038 ribbons as room mics a lot, placing them relatively close to the kit with the front lobe pointing out into the room away from the kit. I place it as far away as the beater is from the front of the kick drum, maybe three to four feet away on either side, with the back lobe pointing to a spot behind the drummer. Then I’ll put a baffle between the drums and those microphones. That way when you compress the Coles, there’s no real time delay, or not as much, so you get more of a bombastic sound.

“The impression is as if a drummer is sitting at their kit and can hear the room around it. That’s kind of what it captures. I try to minimise the direct kit sound as much as possible. And if the room reacts well to the bass drum, you will get a decent amount of bottom end.

“On overheads I want to say we used something like an AKG C12 or C12A in stereo. Using them as cymbal mics, so relatively close to the crash and ride. If I did a mono image I would use a Neumann U47 just behind the drummer.

“When I bus down the snare, every microphone has channel EQ. I typically get the sizzle from the bottom mic, and if there’s a lot of bottom–pop, I

like to preserve that in the bottom mic too. But more often than not it has terrible mids. I’m usually cutting that shit down.

“On the top, the condenser gives you some brightness. You get the stick attack from it and then the dynamic gives you the standard 57 sound. When I bus them all together I try to not have too much cymbal on the bottom mic because we tend to distort and compress quite a bit after the fact and all that stuff tends to come up. So I try to blend just a touch of the snare wire so you can hear it ever so slightly. Then afterwards, I like using a Pultec to lift up the tops if needed. Once I get that snare blend when we’re tracking, I’ll give it a little bit more bottom, a little more top or overall EQ the blend.

“By the time we mix we tend to heavily compress quite a bit around the kit, with the exception of toms, which are ridden when needed. Sometimes compression works overall through the kit, and sometimes we’ll just take the mono overhead and compress that, or sometimes just the room mics. But along the way, something gets really compressed.

“Typically I record that many microphones, but by the time we mix we’re ditching a lot of channels. So sometimes we’re mixing four microphones.”

For me I thought producing was making all the music, and that’s what I was doing. In hip hop music, the guy who makes all the music, and doesn’t rap, he produces it. Whereas in rock music, the producer doesn’t even need to make any music, he can just give his opinion or tell people to play faster or slower, or a new chorus, how to record and what sounds to use. Those are different approaches and I never knew about the other side. I just made my own music in my bedroom. That’s how I pretty much did all the music up until Gorillaz. But I didn’t tell Damon how inexperienced I was. You just go do it.”

“

I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to look like, but I know it’s not supposed to look like people playing instruments and recording them

”

So, what did that dynamic look like for a producer who didn’t have the usual wealth of experience under his belt? Luckily, Albarn didn’t need a lot of hand holding.

Burton: “I did make a lot of beats and play some music, but he already had demos for a lot of it. It was more about how we interpreted a low quality demo into a whole song. He knew how to do that, I didn’t really. I’d never gone through that process before, but when we would start the song over I would just get into my thing and run with it.

“It worked out well mainly because Damon did it with me. He really empowered me, but he also had his own opinions. I learned how to work with him and get what I was looking to get out of it. It was a fun process. It could have gone a lot of different ways, but luckily for me, the first thing I produced went really well because of Damon.

“I hadn’t been in a big studio working before and even that to be honest was pretty humbling.

Up to that point, I’d only been in home and bedroom studios. It wasn’t really big, his original ’13’ studio [set up for Blur’s album of the same name — Ed], but it had a lot of stuff all over the place and was a very creative environment that was easy to work in.

“Day one, I thought I was going to meet him to see if we got along as people. But he said, ‘Hey, let’s go to the studio tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Okay.’

But I’d never worked on anything but my own equipment, so I had no idea how to use any of the stuff they had. I didn’t bring any of my equipment with me.

“I didn’t know how to use any of the drum machines or keyboards he had there, so I had to just try and figure it out. He had these great engineers, Tom Girling and James Cox, who engineered the record. They helped out, but I didn’t know how to use a mixing board or any of that stuff. I was in there fumbling around, trying to figure it out. I didn’t want him to know that. I was only 26.”

A HIT ON ACID

Burton has made a habit of developing artistic relationships on a try-it-and-see basis. Just getting together with artists to see how the relationship feels. No expectations, no contracts, just start working.

In 2007, when he showed up to Beck’s house to dry run a potential musical partnership for what ended up being Modern Guilt, Acid played a big role in helping Burton’s visions translate into production. His proficiency with Acid became his greatest asset, and he began to use it as just another instrument. In fact, it was the only instrument he took.

Burton: “I showed up to Beck’s house without a guitar or keyboard, just my laptop that had Acid on it. Anything we made, I could put into Acid and turn it into something. Or if I had beats or something else I wanted to start messing with, I had them there as well, so Acid was my instrument in a lot of ways at that time.”

And it shows. The record is an amalgamation of live recording and samples intertwining Beck’s eclecticism with an ear for retro rock. Case in point, lead single Gamma Ray kicks off with an Acid drum loop combined with a simple guitar progression. But you’d be hard pressed to put it anywhere but in the alt rock genre.

These days, he rarely uses the program, preferring to sit down at a piano or with a guitar when he’s figuring out a song. But he’s thinking of a way to go back and use Acid a little bit more, considering how useful it’s been for him. “I haven’t sampled a lot in the last four or five years,” said Burton. “Since the last Gnarls record really.

I’m thinking about getting back into it more.”

KRAFTING INFLUENCES

Much has been made of Burton’s affinity for The Beatles. But, he says, most of his early influences were ’60s and ’70s soul and R’n’B, and ’80s pop.

He got into classic rock a bit later in his musical life, and if he had to pick his biggest influence, it would actually be Kraftwerk.

Burton’s ability to fuse soulful styles with the efficiency of German minimalism is undoubtedly a big part of what attracts musicians to his services. But he still considers himself “a song person more than a sound person, for better or worse.”

Burton: “It’s more how a song makes me feel.

Does it break my heart a little bit? Does it have that melancholy quality to it? Does it do something to me in that way? I gravitate towards

Kennie Takahashi deliberating over how to get the most out of another one of those awful-sounding references.

DECIPHERING REFERENCES Takahashi: “I trust Brian 100% on bringing the taste. When he says, ‘That Acid loop is fine.’ If I don’t think so I’ll live with it for a while, and I find him to be right almost all the time.

“Brian will sometimes pull a psych record and reference it for the drum sound or a vocal effect.

Basically he gives you something to go after and I’m usually the guy that figures out how stuff was done, and how to achieve the same things with what we have today.

“Sometimes it’s not achievable with what we’ve recorded and we’ll just use an over-compressed room mic with a little kick and snare for our drum sound.

But a lot of times we could use various plug-ins or effects to get something close enough.

“If you try to dissect it too technically from the get-go, you’re going to fail. You’ve got to be sensitive to what you think the artist is moved by and it helps if you’re moved by a lot of the same things as your artist. Some of these references sound frankly god-awful. Within the mix they might have no bottom, no tops, all just mids, but the relationship between instruments is what people see. They forget that it sounds awful. Your end result might be completely different to where the record is sonically, but the placement and the relationship of the instruments that you’re cutting might be a lot more similar than you think.”

Takahashi’s last piece of advice to engineers is: “Paying attention to the artist is probably the most important thing you could possibly do and realising what we do as engineers is kind of menial. The best thing to do is help keep the artist fresh with what’s in their head, and get better at translating that.”

AT 29

the darker side of music. Unique is great, but sometimes I don’t mind if I’ve heard something similar before if I can get a new feeling from it.

That’s good too.”

It’s here where Burton differs from a lot of producers. Many producers see their role as paving the way for the artist to deliver their best performance; for them to showcase not only their talent, but their vision for the song. For Burton, he’d rather you not know who played it at all.

Burton: “El Camino was all from scratch. We’d just go in and flesh out ideas together. Ultimately though, no matter who had whatever idea, the two of them would usually go in and start playing it.

THE HIDDEN PLAYERS

“I had never done that before. Even working with other people, when I write things it’s not about the performance, it’s just about what you actually come up with. It wasn’t about going into the room and starting over or rehearsing it together.

But watching how they did it, that made it even more different from the way I’ve written with people in the past.

Burton is the first to admit the genesis of this philosophy was more to do with his lack of playing ability. “I didn’t want to depend on my musicianship to impress anybody,” he said.

“That’s what made it more of a special record, because it had melodies, and a lot of catchy things going on, yet it still sounded like the two guys for the most part. That was a new

AT 30

Burton: “I’d have my own drum pattern, bass line, chord sequence and melodies on top, and then get them transcribed. A lot of stuff was written on paper in front of them while they were playing.

But the key guys would remember the chords or the way it goes and just start figuring it out in their own way. Sometimes those songs would come to light in a way I had never heard, because they were interpreting them in a way they felt it should go, or what their style was.”

The Good, The Bad & The Queen project, which featured Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, The Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and The Verve guitarist Simon Tong alongside Albarn, tested Burton’s resolve.

“Everybody in the band was really great at what they did. Overall though, it was a dreamlike record for me. Even though there were elements of live playing, it would come in and out of that dream.

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Burton: “I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to look like, but I know it’s not supposed to look like people playing instruments and recording them.”

The sessions for Rome took a similar turn. While Daniel Luppi and Burton provided transcribed scores to follow, arguing against the intuition of the Italian musicians who’d played on the original Spaghetti western scores seemed unwise.

YE

It’s this idea of the gradual accumulation of parts influencing the outcome that Burton is most interested in. In the same way an engineer crafts space in the spectrum or paints elements with width and depth in the soundstage, Burton as a producer is working with the sum of parts.

Having now worked with a lot of talented musicians, he’s not blind to their strengths either.

The biggest exception to Burton’s ‘rule’ occurred the second time he worked with Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney from The Black Keys. His philosophies became jumbled up with the duo’s acuity for great performances.

experience for me, writing something that way and watching them flesh out what was written in their own Black Keys way.”

DB

“Sometimes if you blow out some drums and you overly push, distress and distort them, then you hear chaos and a certain kind of pace or urgency. You’re not hearing the way it was put together. You start to think of something else.

You don’t think of a drummer, you hear some kind of anger or madness and you mix that with something really lush and really beautiful like a xylophone and then you’re thinking of something else, but you’re not thinking of somebody playing the drums.”

“That’s probably why I started out doing it that way. I just wanted to make people feel something and if you’re not a really amazing player, you have to find an interesting way of doing it.”

OP TO MU COR LTIC E — OR SAY E. GO O

“It’s hard for me to put my finger on, but I know when I hear it, and I know when it’s not there.

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“The main thing for me is what you visualise,” he explained. “It’s always been important for the project I’m working on to not sound like musicians playing instruments, because I don’t want people to visualise someone playing guitar and drums and bass. Even if it’s obviously guitar, drums or bass. Whatever the part is, and how it sounds, should make somebody think of something else — a place, a dream — not the people who made the music.

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SOUND FACTORY REBORN

“It was weird because you have all these great individual musicians and I didn’t know if I was doing it wrong or not, to make it so dream-like.

Will people just want to hear a band play? But I didn’t want to hear that for a whole record. I wanted to hear the fantasy of the whole thing.”

ENGINEERING A DREAM

When Burton thinks back to those sessions though, he couldn’t imagine them without the creative engineering of Jason Cox helping drive that dream.

Burton: “He’s an amazing engineer. At the time, I hadn’t really had much experience with engineers to know how really good he was. But looking back, I can see that now.

“I can’t think about The Good, the Bad & the Queen without him. A big part of the sound of that record comes from what Jason was doing as an engineer. He’s amazing with spring reverbs and bouncing around delays. It developed the sound of the record.

Ernest Penfold — the bespectacled hamster sidekick who always finds himself in need of rescue. But in this saga, Takahashi is the one solving all the tricky problems.

The pair met when Burton was working with Martina Topley-Bird in 2007: “I was getting ready to do her record in Los Angeles and we used a service to find a studio that would give us a good deal, because it was an independent record. We wound up at Glenwood Place, which is a really nice studio off Burbank, and they matched me up with Kennie. He was the house engineer and we got along amazingly. We worked together on that album and after that he’s come with me on everything.

“We have very similar qualities, but I can’t do anything like he can do on ProTools. He’s so, so fast.

“I think about what would have happened if he wasn’t around back then. I know what I do wouldn’t be where it is. I shudder to think about that. He’s one of the people that’s been a huge part of what I do.”

“Work with a really good engineer, that’s the main thing. I engineered my own records up until a point, but I don’t think I did really well at it, and I didn’t do anything in a professional way or in a professional studio. The whole trick is to make people think it’s not in the bedroom.

Looking back now, I can tell it was in the bedroom, but I thought I was fooling people.”

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED

These days, Burton’s partner in crime is Kennie Takahashi, who Burton describes as his “ultimate engineer”. If you were sticking to the Danger Mouse characterisation, Takahashi would be

Burton’s preferred mode of working is somewhat bullish. But it’s a big part of what makes him a sought-after producer. He has vision. And he had it even way back in his bedroom. It’s what Albarn

AT 32

And for Takahashi, it’s been a boon. He’s not only engineered pretty much everything Burton has worked on since Topley-Bird, he’s also mixed Modern Guilt and assisted with the mixing on a lot of the records too.

Burton recently took over Sound Factory Studios, long the sister studio of Paul Camarata’s Sunset Sound, in September 2013. Sound Factory is a famous LA institution that’s had clients as diverse as Jerry Lee Lewis and Motorhead. It’s the second studio he’s had. Before that it was Mondo Studio, his private room for seven years.

Reflecting on Mondo, Burton said: “I think it was a lawyer’s office before it was a studio. It was really small with low ceilings — one live room, one control room — and wasn’t really set up to be a ‘studio’ studio. But I liked it because I don’t really like industrial areas, and it felt like a basement somebody made into a studio. That’s where I made both Broken Bells records, the Norah Jones record, and Electric Guest. I made a bunch of records there.”

Takahashi loves the new digs: “I’ve done a session there, I like it a lot. I think it’s a heck of a good studio, and it’s definitely better than the places we’ve done the majority of our work so far. But honestly, I think we’d work out of a warehouse if we had to.”

They’ve moved a bunch of gear into Sound Factory, combined with the existing custom API console and a lot of outboard. Takahashi mostly listens to Dynaudio BM15A monitors. “They’re a little scooped, but I’m used to them now,” he said.

He also recently picked up a pair of Ampex 414 monitors: “They have enough mid information to actually do a decent job. And I don’t have to go as loud as often.”

As far as the gear Burton brought with him: “I have all the basics: drum kits and piano, many, many synthesisers and keyboards. I also had an inexpensive Soundtracs mixing desk from the ’80s.

“I’m not a really big gear person. I had a lot of gear, but wound up using the same things all the time. I don’t really have a lot of tricks. I know that sounds kind of weird, but I don’t really. A lot of times I’m always asking other people, ‘What’s your tricks?’ I used a BBE Sonic Maximizer on a lot of stuff years ago, and still do. I use Distressors, but a lot of it is just finding weird sounds in instruments like a keyboard and throwing a really big reverb on it or trying to find happy accidents and basing the songs around those.”

saw, and it’s what continues to come through in each production.

The way he eases into musical partnerships is as much about the artist feeling him out as he them.

He’s only interested in working with someone if they’re willing to budge, or at least meet him some of the way.

Burton: “Sometimes I hear an artist and go, ‘Okay, this how I’d do it, this is the record I’d like to hear from them.’ And if they want to know what that record would be then they should hire me. But the record I want to hear from them isn’t necessarily going to be the biggest selling record.

It might be their best record or their worst one, I don’t know. But when I hear someone’s voice and what they can do, it makes me think this is what I’d love to do, these are the things I’d like to feel from them.”

These days, you won’t find him in his bedroom nearly as much.

Distributed exclusively in Australia by Studio Connections Pty Ltd.

71 Newman Street Thornbury, Victoria, 3071 Ph: +61 3 9416 8097 E: enquiries@studioconnections.com.au W: studioconnections.com.au AT 33

FEATURE

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shuttling THROUGH THE DAWS

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The game has changed since 1998, and DAWs have completely re-written the rules of what’s possible with audio. Brad Watts takes a walk along the perennially greener grass of this level playing field.

Story: Brad Watts

AT 34

AudioTechnology readers would be aware of my long-term dalliances with the genteel pursuit of hard disk recording. I jumped into the then murky waters of desktop digital recording back when Macs had Nubus slots and 33MHz PCI was the new hope on the horizon — circa 1994. Thankfully technology has leapt a long way ahead in the 20 years since, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the development of the digital audio workstation, or as it’s become known, the DAW. Back then you were lucky to get eight tracks recording without glitches at 16-bit, and that was with additional bespoke hardware. And, if you wanted any real-time processing you used outboard hardware — digital processing by a host computer was strictly an off-line affair. In other words, set up your software processing, set it rendering while you went out for a sandwich and a coffee, then head back to the studio to hear whether the processing you’d performed made the cut. That’s if your computer hadn’t crashed two minutes after you left the room. A 1GB hard drive set me back $1400, CD burners were about $2600, and CD blanks were $12 a pop! DAT was de rigeuer. It was all alarmingly touch-and-go.

Fast forward a trifling four years to 1998, AudioTechnology Magazine had hit the streets and hard disk recording had advanced exponentially — literally. Issue One of ‘AT’ included reviews of various digital products: a digital console from Yamaha, a digital processor from TC Electronic, a digital multitracker from Sony using the short lived and now utterly extinct MiniDisc platform, along with a bunch of more traditional analogue devices. Remarkably, Issue One featured reviews of no less than four DAW systems, with the big news being for each that they could tackle 24-bit recording. At the time, 16-bit recording was dying a quick death, it simply wasn’t precise enough for capturing audio in a professional sense any longer. In fact, at the time

GAME CHANGER 24-bit, digital done right.

it was common practice to record to high maintenance two-inch tape, then transfer the tracks to a DAW for robust editing and mixing. 24-bit digital recording changed that paradigm completely, and is still the standard today. Without question, 24-bit recording was one of the biggest ‘game-changers’ for the digital recording field.

So what were those four DAWs? Four of the big names in DAW history; Digidesign’s ProTools 24, Emagic’s Logic Audio (now part of the Apple behemoth), Steinberg’s Cubase VST, and the progressive/unique, and now extinct, Paris system — a cooperative effort

by Ensoniq and the late Stephen St. Croix (not to be confused with the vigorous Steven St. Croix).

With the exception of the Ensoniq Paris, these three DAWs are still the big names of the field to this day, however in the ensuing 16 years there’s been dozens of newcomers to the landscape. We’ll look at some of the more prominent manufacturers and their contributions to DAW development soon, but firstly

I should point out the two primary paradigms behind DAW design.

TWO OF EVERY KIND

Perhaps obviously, the reasoning behind a DAW is to record multiple instruments, and to facilitate overdubbing. As the DAW has evolved, there has been two paths of development, one being from a tape machine and mixer model, the other from the

— I’ll explain the difference. With the emergence of the multitrack tape recorder, tape machines gradually evolved to record up to 24 monaural tracks across a two-inch tape width. For decades the general studio hardware regime included a mixing console and a multitrack tape recorder. As magnetic tape technology evolved, more tracks were able to be crammed into the available tape width. First two tracks, then four, eight, 16, and then 24 tracks. Then, of course, the recording can be edited by physically cutting and splicing back together pieces of tape to rearrange and possibly repair sections of a performance. Some DAWs follow this model. The major distinction of DAWs following this model is that musical sections are measured in time — typically a SMPTE-based timeline — just like linear tape, and edits are conducted according to hours, minutes, and seconds.

ProTools is no doubt the most notable DAW to follow this design, and for many years, ProTools was an audio recorder, with mixing and editing facilities only. This approach has stood ProTools in great favour with professional recording studios over the years as it more closely replicated this traditional recording methodology.

electronic instrument and sequencer model

There’s of course another angle of approach to DAW design. During the 1980s, electronic music production gained traction due to the groundbreaking rise of MIDI — the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. With MIDI, musicians could sync multitudes of electronic keyboards and rhythm machines together. Instead of recording each and every sound source to multitrack tape, hardware sequencers were used to record the note events of each instrument. Alongside relatively inexpensive cassette and reel-based multitrack recorders, sequencers could provide additional tracks of audio performance. This was a boon for home recordists and composers as they could piece together multitudes of audio tracks using electronic sound sources such as synthesisers and samplers, and their ‘live’ sources such as guitar and vocals could be recorded to an affordable multitrack recorder.

The inevitable next step was software-based sequencers.

Two of the bigger names at the time were Cubase from Steinberg, and Notator from C-Lab. Both applications (or ‘programs’ as was the parlance of the day) ‘recorded’ MIDI events to be re-triggered in sequence. As time rolled on Notator evolved into Logic (as C-Lab became Emagic), and by the mid 1990s, when hard drive speeds had suitably fast read and write speeds, both manufacturers began to integrate audio recording into their flagship sequencing packages. What makes this an alternate design approach to that of the linear tape AT 35

concept is that ‘recorded’ musical sections adhere to ‘bars and beats’, with editing adhering to the bars and beats of a musical piece.

These days, the lines between these two paradigms have blurred immeasurably, with almost all DAWs able to operate in both bars and beats or divisions of hours/minutes/seconds. There’s no right or wrong between either — it’s simply a matter of where your background and training lies and what one prefers — musically trained people tend to favour bars and beats, whereas studio-trained ‘engineering’ folk will tend toward time-based editing. Though the distinction is pretty blurry at this point in time.

One particularly dark horse to completely smear this delineation was Ableton’s Live. Birthed in 2001, Live was a return to bars and beats sequencing and the clip-based style of music creation originally seen in C-Lab’s Notator and Creator software on the Atari ST platform, only with the amenity to pull off similar compositional stunts with recorded audio, virtual instruments and plug-ins. Live has a huge following these days and justly so — it filled a gaping hole in the market at the time; a DAW aimed at performance and composition rather than recording and

GAME CHANGER Ableton Live & Fruity Loops brought in the new crowd

Another roughy to make its way to the head of the pack was ImageLine’s FL Studio, which began life as Fruity Loops before metamorphosing into a fully-fledged performance-based compositional tool and DAW. Both DAWs were and are game changers, simply because they brought a raft of flexibility and a completely new crowd of composers into the DAW fold.

surgical editing and mixing.

HANDS ON

GAME CHANGER DSP-powered plug-ins bring in-the-box to life

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By Issue Two of AudioTechnology, the first incarnation of an undeniable DAW game changer had reared its head, and with it came a number of changes to the audio industry that shifted the way composers and engineers work. In the preceding five years or so, a great number of studio outfits and composers began to latch onto the power of computer-based mixing and editing. By this stage it was possible to run a fist-full of natively driven (i.e. powered by host CPU processing) audio plug-ins, with the more affluent and professional waveform-tamers opting for DSP-powered plug-ins such as those offered by Digidesign, Creamware, UAD, and TC Electronic/ Works. You see, with all this newfound DSP power, a game changing aspect in itself, people began ditching their mixing consoles completely. Mixing and processing ‘inthe-box’ became an extremely effective option as it offered complete control over a mix, and often, more importantly, complete recall of a mix.

It was as easy as loading a session file. No need for photographing the console or shelling out for

a console that offered automation and recall. It also gave studio operators and composers more time for audio work rather than the time-soak of maintaining outboard mixers and the kilometres of cabling that went with them. It also provided the luxury of keeping multiple projects on-the-go at once, which again lent itself to more output and further profitability. The in-the-box revolution was a game changer in itself, yet there was an intrinsic snag with in-the-box mixing; unlike mixing with a console where you could access multiple volume levels and EQ settings spontaneously, DAWs offered control over merely one parameter at a time — the limitation of a single computer mouse pointer. For the many who’d developed mixing skills on consoles with immediate access to hundreds of options at a moment’s notice, this was a colossal hinderance. Enter the Mackie HUI. HUI was the first ‘Human User Interface’, and was a joint effort between budget console manufacturer, Mackie, and Digidesign, the creator of the now well established DAW, ProTools. HUI was, in itself, an engineering triumph, utilising complex MIDI data to allow a traditional set of knobs and motorised faders to control the virtual knobs and faders within a DAW. For the first time a ProTools operator could quickly and simultaneously alter the level and pan of eight channels within a DAW,

instigate and edit plug-ins, record channel automation and have access to palpable, physical transport controls, all without resorting to the ever-so-restrictive mouse and pointer.

The HUI made all the difference. Suddenly mixing without a console made a lot of sense, and the bottom fell out of the small footprint mixer market for a good while afterwards. In its wake came countless monitoring systems like Mackie’s own Big Knob — devices to provide attenuation over a DAW’s monitoring output, along with headphone outputs, talkback, and monitor switching — all the things people held onto their analogue consoles for. A procession of summing mixers also proliferated at the time — for those who missed the sound of a console feeding summed audio from various audio interfaces into a two-track recorder — but this fad lasted only until DAW manufacturers got a solid handle on digital summing. These days nobody seems too worried about digital summing.

Not too long after the physical HUI debuted, Mackie’s HUI protocol became a de facto standard for control surfaces, as they became known.

Shortly thereafter, Mackie released its own control surface protocol, ‘Mackie Control’, designed for use outside of the Digidesign/ProTools ecosystem.

Consequently a stream of control surfaces hit the market — from Mackie, Tascam, Novation, Alesis, SSL, and of course, Behringer. The upshot was a massive move toward in-the-box mixing. It’s around this time a lot of vintage consoles were

GAME CHANGER The Human User Interface, like something straight out of 1998

sold off at crazy you-can-have-it-if-you-move-it prices.

MEAURE TWICE, CUT ONCE

Once outboard, tactile control surfaces began to, erm, surface, DAW manufacturers began focussing on mix automation. Some would recall the pseudo-standard practice of composing in Logic Audio, Cubase VST or Digital Performer, then bouncing and exporting all the tracks as audio files over to ProTools to mix, as the automation facilities of ProTools left the other applications for dead. It was a pain in the proverbial but it provided superb results. Most of the ‘bars-andbeats’ style DAWs offered automation which was merely an extension of MIDI automation kludged to handle integrated audio tracks. With 128 steps to a fader this simply wasn’t cutting it for professional automation. You could hear the steps — ‘zippering’ was the term used. ProTools, on the other hand, offered 10-bit precision (1,024-step) faders — it sounded smoother, reacted faster, and provided the style of automation found on professional consoles by the likes of Neve and SSL,

GAME CHANGER Automation without coming unzipped

such as read/write, latch, and trim.

BRAND NEW SAMPLE BAG

Technological progress is most often about doing more with less equipment. It’s about killing off bespoke hardware and relegating the work to software within the increasingly-influential desktop computer, and nowadays, tablet.

Yet another piece of audio gear flung to the roadside in the DAW’s wake was the dedicated hardware sampler. Sampling, the process of taking a snippet-sized digital recording, storing it in RAM and replaying it with a keyboard was a significant milestone in modern music production. During the 1970s, scarily expensive sampling instruments began their march into the mainstream such as the Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI. By the 1980s, Emu, Ensoniq, Akai, and Roland had the concept in hand with affordable machines that went on to change the face of music completely, even sparking genres that relied entirely upon sampling.

There was, however, a major downfall with hardware samplers. They were restricted in the amount of audio they could record and replay because of the amount of RAM they could have installed and access — most were hemmed into 32MB (yes, that’s megabytes) although Kurzweil took its K series workstations through to 128MB. With memory prices decreasing and hard drive space increasing, it was inevitable the hardware sampler would fall prey to the desktop computer. In late 1998 we saw the NemeSys Gigasampler, a software-based sampling instrument that read samples directly from a hard drive rather than storing them in RAM. Suddenly vast libraries of previously unheard of instrument sizes were commonplace. Entire pianos could be multi-sampled — note-for-note rather than spreading 30-odd samples across an entire MIDI

GAME CHANGER Gigasampler expands sampling from RAM to the hard drive, hello gigabyte libraries!

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keyboard to save on RAM space. One caveat was the advised minimum tech specs — at least 2GB of hard disk space — a relative aircraft hangar’s worth of storage for the day. It wasn’t long before manufacturers began integrating their own ‘soft-sampler’ plug-in instruments within their respective DAWs, and then the bum fell out of the hardware sampler market completely. I literally threw six grand worth of Akai samplers on the bonfire one afternoon — I really should have sampled the sound of those chips exploding.

Alongside this soft-sampler revolution came some clever sample replacement techniques. Before soft-samplers, the regime was to place MIDI notes as precisely as possible where your recorded kick drums (for example) sat throughout a track (some DAWs offered the ability to place a MIDI note on a waveform transient, some didn’t), then load your replacement sounds into a hardware sampler and trigger those from within the DAW. This process became far easier with soft-samplers such as Drumagog and Digidesign’s (now Avid) TL Drum Rehab.

Editing digitallyrecorded material is extreme-sports hyperediting. Not only is it editable to the nth degree, it’s always reversible, un-doable, and completely ‘non-destructive

Where this becomes incredibly complex is when editing across multiple tracks of a single instrument such as a drum kit — each microphone’s recording must occupy a separate track within the DAW. One method now used by many DAWs is to fold all these tracks into a single region or folder. Logic Audio/Pro had been doing this for years with MIDI parts so the progression to this regime with audio files was a natural one. Cubase also introduced folders, a similar approach to Logic Pro whereby tracks could be consolidated into folders. Digidesign’s ProTools took a more tape-oriented approach — that of creating editing groups; assign particular tracks to an edit group, then an edit on any region within the edit group would edit other audio regions assigned to that group at the same points. For all these DAWs there has been constant improvements and baby steps along the way, and many of the later entrants to

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“

Anyone who’s dabbled even slightly with a DAW can see the propensity to get very lost in this maze of options. It can and does take years of trial and error and/or training to understand how to keep a performance intact, on track, and seemingly realistic during the editing and mixing process.

ASE

Sample replacement

Equally as game-changing was the combination of soft-samplers and the exponential and rapid growth of hard drive capacities. In true software industry fashion, soft-sampler libraries grew in size as quickly as hard drives could accommodate. It’s now commonplace to have terabytes of sample libraries at our disposal rather than shelves full of sample CDs (remember those?). DAWs now arrive with countless samplebased instruments already installed or a download away. Perhaps one of the biggest advantages for musicians was access to huge orchestral libraries — world class orchestras recorded in world renowned venues — negating the need to hire dozens of musicians and huge studios to create orchestral soundtracks. Nowadays we have thousands upon thousands of samples and software sample players at our disposal — from simple drum replacers through to note-fornote multi-sampled grand pianos, vast synthesis libraries, virtual drummers, phantom guitarists, bouzouki players. More stuff. In-the-box. Readyto-roll.

With magnetic tape and multitracking, there came an age where it became possible to edit a recording. No longer was a recording simply a facsimile of the best take on the day played by a group of musicians in concert. Tape provided not only the option to replace or add single performances to an already established recording, it was also editable — sections of a performance could be cut out and placed elsewhere within the recording’s timeline. By comparison, editing digitally-recorded material is extreme-sports hyper-editing. Not only is it editable to the nth degree, it’s always reversible, un-doable, and completely ‘non-destructive’.

FIR S REA T PUB PER LIC REL .

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GAME CHANGER

SLIP & SLIDE

the market have taken from these cues and arrived at similar methods and combinations, removing a lot of the confusion from digital audio editing.

Another more poignant use of multiple tracks is when recording various takes of an instrument — and that includes vocals. Say you have the guts of a song recorded and you’re calling in the guitarist to record a killer lead track. It’s best to get a few good (or hopefully great) recorded takes so you can pick and choose the best sections to jigsaw together when the guitarist downs tools and heads to the pub. The same for vocals; record a few great takes so you have a certain chance of constructing what sounds to be one fantastically contiguous recording — known as a composite. Errors of pitch, timing and diction are then disguised, eradicated, and replaced. It’s how modern records are made.

GAME CHANGER Track comping, only all the good bits

So how does the budding, or even seasoned recording engineer keep tabs on this shambles in the making? During recent years, many DAW manufacturers have developed comping methods with specialised ‘comping’ tracks.

‘Comping’ (or creating composite tracks) during the early days of the DAW required a bit of lateral thinking as there were usually no dedicated procedures for the process. The early years of ProTools saw users utilising the DAW’s voice stealing allowance feature. Much like playing a monovoice synthesiser, the operator can set a number of tracks to play from a single voice allocation, then cut, splice, and selectively mute sections on the separate tracks knowing only one track would play at a time.

Nowadays ProTools uses a method known as ‘playlisting’.

Cubase and its variants from Steinberg used audio ‘lanes’ for years — an additional hierarchal lane within the audio side of the DAW allowed sections of various tracks to be grouped together and output from a single channel of the DAW’s software mixer. This is similar to how newcomer to the field, Presonus’ Studio One, deals with comping, however the term ‘lane’ is exchanged for ‘layer’. Digital Performer from MOTU uses

the term ‘takes’ for comping duties, and offers a way of quickly selecting a range within a take, with that range immediately playing back from the audio output channel assigned to the original record channel. Logic Pro’s methodology is remarkably similar to Digital Performer. A quick range selection with the mouse pointer over a take allows that selection to play from the originally selected record channel. All in all, these systems are much the same — the point is these comping tools are now part and parcel of modern DAWs, making digital comping far easier than it’s ever been.

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

Throughout the DAW’s development there have been many ways to alter the length of a recorded waveform to force it to fit into a particular timespan. Originally these methods revolved around the concept first seen in digital sampling instruments — that of ‘time stretching’ — compressing or expanding the length of a recorded waveform. This combined with ‘pitch-shifting’ allowed engineers to force-fit countless perceived errors and mismatches into a musical piece without the need to re-record. In the ’90s this was very much a hit or miss affair, with the resulting audio often being riddled with harsh, telltale audio artefacts — but the concept was a promise of what was to come.

Nowadays, thanks to incredibly fast CPU processing, every DAW has the facility to warp and twist audio in both pitch and time, and shoehorn sub-acceptable audio into listenable and usable takes. ProTools offers ‘Elastic Audio’, Logic Pro has ‘Flex-Time’ and ‘Flex-Pitch’, basically, all DAWs offer this type of functionality now. The difference from the early days of the DAW and now is these warping algorithms sound extremely persuasive, with little to no audio artefacts present in the altered recording. All this can be done in real-time, non-destructively, while you listen to the resulting alterations alongside the remaining tracks for reference — a game changer of the highest order.

GAME CHANGER Built-in time warp and flexible pitch

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ALL DAWS LEAD TO ROME

GAME CHANGER Sub-$100 DAWs

EMA_AT94_HR.pdf

In the last five or so years there’s been plenty of newcomers to the DAW landscape. With the array of choices it can be difficult to know which is the best platform to spring for and from. Do you start with something based on bars and beats such as Live or even Propellerheads’ Reason, or does your production roadmap lend itself to a more traditional tape-based ideology such as ProTools. Either way, the resulting landscape means it costs peanuts to get creative with audio now. The fork in the road here was no doubt Cockos’ Reaper, an extremely capable DAW that was initially free to download.

These days it can be owned for as little as $60, and if you’re using it commercially Cockos asks you very politely to pay the full price of $225. It’s all somewhat of a democratisation of the playing field, to the point where even Apple has decimated the price of the extensively developed Logic Pro from $2600 to about 200 bucks. Sure, other DAWs cost more, and if you want the particular features and working methods of those applications you’ve no choice but to pony up. But now anybody can get their hands on an audio

“

I literally threw six grand worth of Akai samplers on the bonfire one afternoon — I really should have sampled the sound of those chips exploding

”

production platform for a relative pittance, if not for free. Game changing? Most definitely.

BEYOND

So where does all this end I wonder. In 1998 I couldn’t have predicted the majority of the innovations brought to fruition in the last 16 years. Will every piece of audio-related hardware be perfectly modelled and available at our fingertips via a projected touchscreen?

Will a completely professional DAW be available as a download on your ‘smart’ television anytime soon?

Will audio content producers eventually bring entire DSD-based sessions with countless tracks into fit-forpurpose, recording rooms on a tablet or their phone?

That said, will the need for an acceptable recording space evaporate as DSP algorithms are devised to recreate those spaces.

1 10/04/13 10:46 One AM thing is certain; the game will change, and along with it, the way we play.

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VOX POP

FLOOD U2, Foals, New Order, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, P J Harvey, Sigur Rós, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Killers.

Together with Alan Moulder, British producer/mixer Flood (aka Mark Ellis) co-owns Assault & Battery Studios in north-west London. Flood, who has won one Grammy Award, mostly works from Assault & Battery Studio B, which is one of London’s prime tracking studios, sporting a Neve VR60, ProTools HD3 Accel, Quested and ProAc Studio 100 monitors, as well as tons of outboard gear and musical instruments. Studio A is most frequently used by Moulder, and built around an SSL G+ SL4000 and stacks of outboard.

Flood: “One of the biggest changes since 1998 is that recording studios are so in decline, and with that, the opportunities for people to train as engineers. One of the most important things Alan and I have done at Assault & Battery is to make sure that we have a training program. Many people go to college and learn some techniques and off they go, and then do everything in-the-box, often working alone. This works for some things, but it’s not the same as having obtained a full grounding in all aspects of recording and mixing while working in a studio.

It takes total dedication to become a good engineer or producer, and there’s no substitute for experience and having worked in loads of different types of sessions and with different media. I also think human interaction and instant reactions to what’s happening in the studio are important. I really like to have the band in the room when I’m mixing, but because many people work on their own now and send files via the internet, this is starting to get lost.”

GAME CHANGERS

PROTOOLS HD, PROAC STUDIO 100, NEW MICROPHONES “The changes in my own approach over the last 15 years depend on whether I’m recording or mixing. 15 years ago I would have used analogue tape as a first port of call when recording, even though I also carried a small ProTools rig. HD did change a lot of things, and now pretty much everything is recorded straight to ProTools.

Having said that, we have two 24-track tape

machines at the studio [Otari MTR 90 MkII and Studer A800 Mk3], and I try to use them as much as I can, and then dump everything into ProTools. In 1998 I would also only have used hardware effects when recording, and then for a long period I was trying out plug-ins, and now I’m almost back to where I started, almost only using outboard. But when mixing, in 99 out of a 100 cases I’m using ProTools, though ideally I still like to lay everything out over the board. I also still like using hardware effects when mixing, but this is not always possible, and there are quite a few albums that I have mixed in the box.

“

Human interaction and instant reactions to what’s happening in the studio are important

”

“Another huge change for me is that I never use the NS10 monitors anymore. I always used them, because they were great workhorses. You could thrash them all day long. But unless you had a really good pair and a great amp and a good-sounding room they were bass light and

pushed the upper mids. I really like the ProAcs, and I think they’re also suited to the fact that the way people listen to music now has changed. In 1998 most people listened to hi-fi speakers and in the car, but today it’s often either headphones or laptop speakers. So you need to mix on monitors on which you can tailor your mixes to all those playback formats.

“Another development that has opened up a whole new way of recording for me are the new microphones that have been released by a whole slew of new manufacturers, like Sontronics, AEA, and Blue Microphones.

For example, I always used to use one mic on a guitar cabinet, but will now use a Shure SM58 and a ribbon, like the Sontronics Sigma or Delta or the AEA R84. Finally, mixing in stems is definitely one of the most important new mix developments. Computer savvy artists can then work with your stems and do their version of your mix, and the end result can be a very different type of mix. I also use parallel compression a lot more than in the past, though I find that compression is overused these days as a quick fix. I shy away from heavy compression and also limiting. I’ve asked mastering engineers to back it off to make sure a bit of headroom remains. A lot of stuff released today sounds impenetrable, because it’s over-limited, and also because of over-use of soft synths and stereo plug-ins during the mix. If you use one or two soft synths or plugins they can sound great, but if you put loads of them together everything starts to sound the same.”

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FEATURE

The Prestige

The Maverick

Howard Page

Dave Rat

Howard is live sound royalty. He was a partner in Jands through the ’70s and ’80s before joining rental giant, Showco. He’s mixed sound for global superstars such as Van Halen, Sade, Bee Gees and more recently Sting. Howard is currently Senior Director of Engineering at Clair Bros where he’s also chief troubleshooter, rescuing tours that have gone off the sonic rails.

Dave is best known as the FOH engineer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, The Offspring, and Blink 182. He’s boss of Rat Sound, an innovative rental and sales company based in California. Dave has a popular live sound blog, invented the MicroWedge, and is always testing the boundaries. Yes, Dave surfs.

LIVE SOUND TRENDS We convene four of the world’s live sound heavyweights to reflect on the gamechangers of the last 15 years.

Interview: Christopher Holder

The Big Game Specialist

Scott ‘Swa’ Willsallen Swa is a big event specialist. He’s been the audio director of just about every Olympic opening and closing ceremony since Athens in 2004. His consulting company, Auditoria, has plenty of expertise in designing all manner of technical production systems.

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The Showstopper

Michael Waters Michael Waters brings 20-plus years of experience as a sound designer for musical theatre. He’s JPJ Audio’s not-so-secret weapon.

AT: Let’s tackle the thorny issue first: are we mixing shows any better than we used to?

Howard Page: Last European summer I did 20-30 of the biggest festivals in the world with Sting. Each date, I was confronted with a new sound system. We’d set up early and then spend the day waiting for our turn. It was nothing short of astounding to listen to how different 10 acts could sound. Some were all-but unlistenable and others were ‘knock your socks off ’ amazing. The X factor? The guy behind the desk.

In the old days you’d unpack the PA from the Transit van, load it into the club, stack it on each side of the stage with the bass bins on the bottom, mids, then highs… maybe you’d put the bass bins a little forward of the highs to help time align the PA — if you wanted to get fancy. You’d have an analogue crossover, so there wasn’t anything you could do about timing offsets or intermod distortion. Yet those shows weren’t awful, in fact, often they were wonderful.

Now we’ve taken those technical issues out of the equation. We now have the ability to make the PA as perfect as it can be. The downside? The PA doesn’t mush up your mix and turn it into a rock ’n’ roll show like it used to. Now the focus is fairly and squarely on the guy behind the desk. More and more, the end result of the show is down to the engineer. Not the PA, or the lousy room.

With a perfectly optimised modern PA, your sound system is a lot like a Ferrari or Lamborghini — a highperformance thoroughbred. But unfortunately 90 percent of the operators of those systems are not

I know this because of the number of bad-sounding international touring shows there are out there!

Ferrari or Lamborghini drivers.

“

T hese days the rigs are so clean and clear, every fault, every out of balance mix, every bad gain structure, every overuse of plug-ins… it all shows up as a mess

”

So do concerts sound better now? It’s better with the best guys, but the guys without their chops down? They would have had bad shows on old-school PAs, and they’re having worse shows on a modern-day PA system. These days the rigs are so clean and clear, every fault, every out of balance mix, every bad gain structure, every overuse of a plug-ins… it all shows up as a mess.

Michael Waters: I remember sitting in production meetings in the ‘90s, it was like going to the headmaster’s office. You knew you were going to get the cane: “You missed that line and that line, and I couldn’t hear this and that, and it sounds dodgy over there, and what about the people upstairs?” And on it went. Provided you’re diligent and competent, then those days are over.

V-DOSC GAMECHANGER

AT: There’s many game-changing tech advances in live sound since 1998, but can we safely say that the widespread adoption of L-Acoustics’ V-DOSC (and line source, now more generally) is the biggest of them all?

Dave Rat: V-DOSC changed everything. For the first time there were these long, slender PAs that could cover an entire room and it was jaw-dropping. It was a complete, revolutionary change in the way people thought about PAs. There was resistance at first from all the manufacturers and then everybody jumped on the bandwagon.

Michael Waters: With line source array’s co-planar symmetry and the waveguides, it just made the sound so coherent and seamless across the board, from the front of the venue to the back. Not only that, but in some theatres it cut down the number of delay and fill speakers we required. Prior to line array, we had a vast combination of Meyer MSLs and UPAs. Scott Willsallen: With V-DOSC, rather than dealing with two dimensions of interference we only had one to deal with. That was the same dimension Christian Heil had tidied up for us by inventing the DOSC waveguide that takes care of the HF. The benefit of taking away those other interferences was they were so bloody complex — you could never predict or calculate the full story. By having something that behaves itself in the vertical plane you could adopt modelling software that was pretty easy to use on site. What used to be a result based on someone’s experience of what ‘worked last time’ became something far more predictable.

GAME CHANGER L-Acoustics changed everything with V-DOSC.

Michael Waters: Exactly. And without taking Christian Heil’s breakthrough too much for granted, in my view L-Acoustics’ predictive software was almost as game changing. What it now calls Sound Vision was a total revelation — it worked extremely well from the get-go — it really was very accurate.

Dave Rat: Just to expand on Swa’s point. Prior to L-Acoustics’ modelling software I would stand in a spot, put a chalk mark ‘X’, and say to my crew, “let’s put it here”. They flew it up, a guy would climb up into the rafters or stand on stage and look at the seats to make sure we didn’t block sight lines. It was just ‘seat of the pants’ stuff.

Back in those days, great system techs had many years of experience and wisdom. There was no way of fasttracking someone through with good ears. It really was an old-school apprenticeship system where you’d learn the skill of looking at a room and instinctively knowing where the speakers should be and how they should be tuned.

It was a huge paradigm shift to use 2D (then 3D) models and develop some consistency between what you predicted and what actually occurred in the room — the confidence that brought was and is enormous.

Michael Waters: The same applied in theatre production. Prior to V-DOSC, you’d be getting your rigging pins; your shackles, putting it to the right height and then you’d have to fudge it, depending on which way you were twisting it to get it in the right position. Then you’d fly up maybe four, five or six times to get the correct angle.

Nice, seamless, phase conherent coverage without comb filtering was literally impossible.

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DAVE RAT: WHY I LOVE NAPSTER

AT: So the success of V-DOSC was as much about the ease of system design and predictability of results as it was about the sound?

MP3 file sharing was one of the most game-changing things that happened to the live sound industry.

Napster? It was the best thing that ever happened to us. We love Napster. I’ll explain: When I was growing up, every person was defined by their record collection. I’d have my records, you’d have your records. And everybody’s record collection was different – it was as an extension of your personality. Now you have a bunch of MP3’s.

Gimme your hard drive and, boom, we’ve got exactly the same music collection in 15 minutes.

So when music became downloadable it devalued recorded music. But people still strive to be unique. This is where live shows come into their own, and live experiences become more valuable, because nobody has had the same set of concert experiences – even if we went to the same live show, we’d have different experiences. So we now have a collection of memories rather than a record collection.

I see a direct relationship between the demise of the corrupt, monopolistic record companies, and the spread of mp3s that took them down.

No longer is a band given a huge signing bonus, a budget to record, then does a tour to spend as little as possible to support it.

The tours are now where they make their money.

And historically, that’s the way it’s always been — I’m talking over hundreds of years; it’s always been about the live experience, and the recorded industry distracted us for a while, and now we’re going to back to where it should be.

Michael Waters: Getting a PA to sound right in the mid/late ’90s was arduous. We’d have Peter Ratcliffe [former JPS boss] walking around with his portable test/measurement device and listening to the same Boz Scaggs song for hours. Not only that, but he’d have Wyn Milsom with him as another pair of ears. There’d be somebody at the console, someone else at the drive rack to take instructions over the two-way radio, and yet another person at the amp racks to do any gain shading.

GAME CHANGER PM1-D: all-digital finally hit the road

It was so much more labour intensive and the hours were mental! We were always locked in for the overnight sessions because you couldn’t tune an entire PA while the mechs were banging away and the lights were focusing, so you had the midnight-to-dawn shift, and it was horrible!

These days — and I don’t know if I should admit this — but there’s been a couple of shows where I’ve been able to tune within a couple of lunch breaks — time align it, and it’s come up perfectly!

You can access your amplifiers and processors — everything is digitally accessible.

DIGITAL MIXING

AT: Back in the days of the Yamaha PM1D and other pioneering digital mixing consoles, FOH engineers could have a wild, hunted look in their eyes.

Howard Page: There was a lot of mistrust in the early days. And rightly so. They were incredibly unreliable and didn’t sound that good. Let’s not forget, the software was being written for the first time. Those were also the days when your PC would crash all the time. But digital is now in its fourth or fifth generation and things have really improved. And, in the case of a couple of today’s consoles, you can achieve virtually the same result as the best analogue.

Little wonder then that some of the old guard — who didn’t even use a computer at home, let alone on the road — were deeply sceptical. Underlying that, they were intimidated, and could see the writing on the wall for analogue.

There aren’t too many analogue hold-out guys now. The people who manage these tours — the accountants and production people — are realising that if you have a digital console, you can transfer files between countries without shipping the gear along with it. So as long as you have the same mics and the same model console in another country, you can load up the files and away you go. And in most cases you take up a lot less room at FOH, which translates into more tickets sold.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone to shows where there’s a giant hum on the guitar amp, and no one’s ever bothered to hunt it down and fix that, and then behind the mixer is the analogue ‘purist’ who’s gotta have ‘this’ special preamp, and ‘that’ special valve compressor. When in actual fact, his show is being ruined by as something as banal as a ground loop in his guitar channel! Doesn’t make sense.

Dave Rat: I have no problem admitting I’m one AT 44

of those analogue holdout guys. I still love my analogue mixer. I enjoy mixing in the way I enjoy driving a really fast car that handles well. In fact, I enjoy mixing even more than the car, but I enjoy both of those experiences.

Meanwhile, I enjoy mixing on a digital mixer like I enjoy playing a video game of driving.

Of course, I understand the advantages of digital and the case Howard makes for digital. But I think those advantages are overrated. Mostly, I’ll mix on an analogue board because of the connection I have with the artist and the audience. And let’s face it, that’s our job as audio engineers, to make that connection, and anything that stands between you and that connection is just a distraction. You can’t be watching your mixing console, you’ve got to only have eyes for the artist and the audience.

An analogue console allows me to focus on what’s important. It responds instantaneously and provides me access to everything that’s going on at all times.

Now, in my opinion, a digital console that buries things under layers doesn’t do that. First of all, you can’t see what’s going on. Second of all, when you want to access something you have to do that in multiple steps. So now you’re distanced further, and to compensate, you need to add illumination, computer displays and a significant focus on that. Visually, your focus is pulled from your primary purpose which is connecting the artist to the audience.

A guitar is a tactile device where the musician doesn’t need to look at the guitar while he or she is playing it. They look at the audience; they stay connected with the audience. Why do we hold ourselves to a lower standard than the musicians we work with? Why can’t we operate our ‘guitar’, our tool of the trade as efficiently and effectively

without illumination, without any labelling, and be able to fluidly alter levels and pans, and more while maintaining a focus on the artist and the audience throughout? Wouldn’t that be the optimum?

Scott Willsallen: On a more grass roots level: digital has provided us with massive amounts of flexibility but it’s also allowed people to tie themselves in knots and lose the fundamentals of gain structure. Remember: it is possible to sound good without spending 30 minutes applying compression on every input. With the increased availability of the toys some of the focus has been taken away from the audience experience. A lot of the better shows I’ve ever heard were mixed on an analogue Midas Heritage 3000, with not a lot of outboard kit, half of which was replay for the pre-show music!

Howard Page: I love analogue, what sound engineer doesn’t? But there can be far more consistency with digital mixing consoles.

Hypothetically, let’s say you’re preparing for a large tour with a lot of money behind it — as I am at the moment [Sting and Paul Simon] — by going into a production facility and you’re rehearsing for a couple of weeks. As an engineer, if you’re smart, you closet yourself away in a separate

room, with high quality studio monitors so you have isolation from the band and you get the mix sounding as perfect as it possibly can. Only, let’s just say, you’re using an analogue console. Then you leave that production facility, and go on tour.

The first few shows — provided your PA is tuned properly — may well sound pretty amazing. But unfortunately, the next show takes you into a bad room, and you make changes to the EQ. Every moment of time spent in that production facility is lost the moment you touch those 10 knobs on that analogue console. You never get back to that perfect mix under controlled conditions.

The biggest advantage now, with digital mixing, is you can return to that benchmark point — regardless of what you’re doing within that show — the room, the band — you can go back to the reference mix. You know what’s coming out of that console is correct.

AUTOMATION & VIRTUAL SOUNDCHECK

AT: Michael, musical theatre has doubtlessly benefitted from mix automation?

Michael Waters: Prior to digital we did have moving faders on our Midas XL4s but those faders weren’t particularly good or reliable.

Mostly you were performing a true orchestral mix every night. The cast mixing console would take subgroups of the orchestra, then we’d use those flying faders to plot scenes depending on who was strong and who was weak in the ensemble; to get the balance right.

There was certainly no scene automation. Unless of course you were willing to go well and truly above and beyond with some lateral thinking.

On Boy from Oz [1998] I needed different tonal balance for each ensemble number. It could be a loud show at times, you could run out of headroom and you just wish you had a filter to grab, say, 1kHz, because that happened to be the frequency that was screaming along in that particular song. So I got a BSS Varicurve and strapped that across the ensemble group and had that MIDI-cued so I could change the EQ sceneto-scene. That was globally off a subgroup and was the only EQ automation I had at my fingertips at that stage.

Nowadays, in a busy show like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, I might have up to 20 or 30 different EQ shapes, depending on the song. Automation doesn’t mix the show for you, but having that starting point at each scene is invaluable.

AT: Just to sign off on ‘digital’: virtual soundchecks.

When Avid first released its live board it became a nice ‘value add’, but recording gigs has become much more than that now hasn’t it?

weeks after opening night, because you could only learn it in real time.

And just before we do sign off on digital: of course, in musical theatre world, it’s the producer who wins most from the move to digital. The space saving is amazing. We’re giving back tens of thousands-worth of seat real estate back. Does the sound company financially benefit from that? No. In fact, they’re probably paying us the same or less than they were in the ’90s! Hm, thinking about that, I’m not even exaggerating.

LIGHT ’N’ EASY

AT: Dave, as someone who’s run his own rental company for years, you must have noticed that your loads are considerably lighter?

Dave Rat: Amplifiers have changed out of sight.

A Crown PSA-3s would weigh in at 80 pounds apiece – that’s 250 pounds-plus (115kg+) per rack, and give you 5000-6000W for the whole rack. Now you’ll have a 8000W amp that weighs less than 20 pounds (9kg), with up to 24,000W in a rack that that weighs less than a 100 pounds (45kg).

So we have five times the power in less than half the weight. That’s some massive trucking advantages.

Back in the day, I was always surprised at how unimportant weight issues were to production managers. It was assumed that things were big and heavy, and there was an arrogance among production managers. I think they gauged how important they were by how many trucks they had on the tour. “I did a 20-truck tour!” “Yeah? I did a 30-truck tour!”

GAME CHANGER Powersoft: at the forefront of lightweight power amps.

WHAT NEXT?

AT: Swa, as the world’s big event audio director of choice, you see the ‘no expense’ spared end of the business more than most. What’s next for live sound?

Scott Willsallen: The next big thing has to be about the audience experience and I think it’ll be making the experience more spatial. I’m about to work on a job in Dubai. It’s a highly spatial, theatrical design for a couple of thousand people.

Technically, it’s not that difficult to do, but the opportunity is rare. We’ll have 180 loudspeakers going into a 1200-seat venue. Some sources are being installed solely for an eight-second effect.

It’s about localising sound such that what you’re seeing and hearing one cohesive package.

Admittedly, for the moment, what I’m talking about is for the lucky few — it’s a hard trick to pull off for more than 1500 people — but I can see this as an area for further development.

AT: Any areas in which we’ve gone backwards?

Michael Waters: Where we’ve actually regressed is

Michael Waters: Yes, and not just in concert touring. We use virtual soundchecks extensively in training understudy operators, for example.

That’s what we’re doing with The Lion King, we’re training our operators on a multi-track we recorded in one of the previews.

impacts on the sound of the show. It completely diminishes the dynamic range of a show.

And everyone uses virtual soundchecks to fine tune their mix in their own time. Fifteen years ago you couldn’t learn your mix properly until you were well and truly into previews, or worse, two

AT: A Facebook hate page might be a good place to start!

with bloody moving lights and the fan noise those things emit. I think it’s outrageous and seriously

I’m thinking of starting up some lobby group to make lighting manufacturers do something about it.

AT 45

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AT 46

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VOX POP

TCHAD BLAKE Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Pearl Jam, Tom Waits, Sheryl Crow, T-Bone Burnett, Travis, Crowded House, The Pretenders, Los Lobos, Suzanne Vega, Bonnie Raitt, Al Green, Tracy Chapman, The Black Keys.

Blake, a five-time Grammy winner, likes to use and abuse all manner of analogue gear and real-life objects in unorthodox ways. Given Blake was the archetypal analogue mixer, his decision a few years ago to operate almost entirely in-the-box was most surprising. Blake is an American, but currently resides in Wales in the UK, where he works in his home studio, called Full Mongrel. Full Mongrel’s gear list gives a good indication of where he’s at, and the analogue gear he still finds irreplaceable: ProTools HD 3 V8.0, Linn 328A powered monitors, Daniel Audio Labs NF12 powered monitors, ICON D Control, Eventide H3000SE, Tech21 Classic SansAmp, Empirical Labs Distressor EL6, SpectroSonics 610 compressors, Shure Level Loc compressors, Hughes SRS AK100, Little Labs HQS REV2 mic preamp, Aguilar DB 900 DI, Studio Projects B1, Shure SM57, AKG C414, Apogee MIC, lots of guitar pedals, and too many plug-ins to list.

Blake: “Many of my clients could no longer afford proper studio rates and I was losing work because of that. I now have an affordable mix room at home. It’s amazing. I’m 99.8% in-the-box, as opposed to mixing off tape through a vintage API console at The Sound Factory or the very large SSL at Real World Studios [in 1998]. The 0.2% represents instruments I add or pedal-style effects I use. Not that plug-ins aren’t good enough, I just like to change things up a little, alter the body language.

“First of all there’s ProTools HD. It was the first PROTOOLS HD, ProTools I liked the sound TECH 21 SANSAMP, of. Tech 21 changed my LINN 328A life in the early ’90s with the SansAmp and did it all over again with the SansAmp PSA-1 plug-in. It’s in every mix I do. Finally, the Linn 328A speakers fit me like a glove. The Linns allow me to monitor at quiet to medium (45-75dB), almost conversational levels, without any low or sub frequency loss; and they reproduce subs without a dedicated sub woofer. They’re also the most low maintenance monitors I’ve ever encountered.

GAME CHANGERS

“As for new mixing techniques I’ve learned in the past 15 years, I usually keep levels low within the box and don’t overdrive plug-ins. One example would be my stereo bus comp/limit set up. Instead of using one ‘unit’ to smash I have four to five very different compressor/saturation-style plug-ins all doing a little bit. To my ear, when one unit is pushed hard to get the sound I’m looking for, it accentuates artifacts I find undesirable, like harsh, mid-range jagged waveforms. Using different plug-ins pushed in different amounts spreads the undesirables out frequency wise, so they’re not a problem for me. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. Plug-ins just don’t overdrive like analogue, but I can still get what I want with a bit of experimenting and mix ’n’ match. Finally, I love manual de-essing using DAW automation.”

AT 48

“

Tech 21 changed my life in the early ’90s with the SansAmp and did it all over again with the SansAmp PSA-1 plug-in

”

REGULARS

MAC NOTES What ‘i’ will we see next?

Column: Anthony Garvin

In a stroke of serendipitous timing, our milestone 100th issue has coincided with Apple celebrating 30 years since the launch of the original Macintosh. So let’s flick back through the annals and reflect on how much easier music and audio production has become since 1998.

In 1998, ProTools was up to version 4, was Mac only, and making inroads into professional recording environments. 24-bit recording had just become possible and track counts could reach 48 — though not reliably from what I remember.

In August, Apple released the ground-breaking iMac computer, which is commonly considered a turning point for Apple. Without it, there may be nothing Mac to write about today. However, back in the studio, the machine of choice was the G3, originally available in beige, before gaining colour.

1999 brought the G4 computer with it, which was so powerful at the time that the US government considered it a weapon. ’99 also saw the release of the Digi 001 interface, ProTools LE, and EMagic’s Logic 4 — suddenly native audio processing was feasible. To put the year into perspective, over at Studios 301, the first ProTools system got put into service on sessions. It was an 8-track system running on a Mac, though tape was still the primary recording medium.

At the turn of the century, Mac OS X was released to the public in the form of a preview version.

Whilst not very functional for DAW users at the time, it was a turning point. It had a slick new design, almost zero learning curve, and laid the foundation for new technologies like Core Audio, Core MIDI and Audio Units that were to come in future versions. By 2003, those developments contributed to OS X being a very stable platform.

Back to 2001 and the release of the iPod, which accelerated a major turning point for the music industry: mp3s being so mainstream your mum knew what they were. 2001 also saw the release of the PowerBook G4, which was the beginning of the (practical) DAW laptop-based mobile studio.

The big event of 2002 was Apple’s acquisition of Emagic, the original developers of Logic, much to the dismay of PC users. Oh, and Digidesign (now Avid) also released ProTools HD, which become the standard for pro studios for the next decade.

The iTunes store launched in 2003, immediately resonating with the public (one million songs sold in the first five days), and by 2010, iTunes had become the world’s largest music vendor.

AT 50

But amidst the download deluge, in June 2003, came an exciting new machine for the producer/ engineer — the G5. It boasted insanely powerful processing for the day, a 64-bit processor (though not really harnessed until years later), huge amounts of memory capability and a slick brushed aluminium chassis. The chassis design more or less stayed the same through all G5 models, and the Mac Pro, until last year. One of the few designs to survive multiple stages of Apple’s evolving aesthetic.

Around 2004, ProTools had surpassed tape machines in functionality — and more importantly — reliability. This was in large part due to the newer, stable, and functional versions of OS X. As a result, after 50+ years of using tape as the go-to medium for over 20,000 recordings, 301 made the switch — and ProTools on the Mac became the standard for almost every recording session afterward. Apple also shocked the Logic community by suddenly including all the separately available instruments and effects into the standard purchase of Logic 6.

By 2005 Apple’s computers had hit a roadblock.

Unable to squeeze any more speed increases out of the Motorola PowerPC CPUs it had been using since the early ’90s. In what was a surprising move to some, Apple announced the next generation of Macs would contain Intel chips — the very same chips used in the majority of Windows PCs. In 2006, the public saw the first of these machines, including another revolution for laptop-based DAW users — the Macbook Pro (which, in many instances, was more powerful than the available G5 desktop). But do you remember the headache of waiting for all your plug-ins, drivers and utilities to be updated? Universal Binary anyone?

Ouch!

In 2007, Logic 8 was announced as part of the new Logic Studio bundle. The most talked-about aspect of the software was the price — radically dropping to about $750 — which included a suite of tools for post production and live performance, as well as 40GB of content that was a pain to install!

The iPhone also came out in 2007 and paved the way for mobile app development. You can now multi-track, get SPL readings, listen to a library of music, all on your phone.

The iPad was released in 2010, and whilst not a threat to computers for DAW use (yet), the larger

mobile screen certainly showed promise as a musical sketch pad, DAW touch surface, effects, synths, sheet music and so on. Nowadays every console comes with a tablet app.

In 2011 Apple dropped the price of Logic Pro Studio 9 down to $200. In the hardware department, they also released an updated MacBook Pro, which were the first Thunderboltequipped computers.

In 2012, Apple announced ‘Mastered For iTunes’, which essentially meant mastering engineers could deliver high resolution files (up to 24-bit/96k) for release on iTunes. Though the product on sale on the iTunes store was (and is) still a 256kB AAC, the claim is the hi-res files were now run through a codec optimised for greater dynamic range and higher sample rates. Personally, I’m still hoping for many more improvements that will allow the public to access hi-res audio, so hopefully Apple will continue to develop MFiT. It was a relatively interesting year last year, with Avid updating ProTools to 11, Ableton to Live 9, and Apple releasing Logic X. Though the biggest news in Apple-land was Apple’s new Mac Pro. Announced earlier in the year, and finally dribbling off the production lines in December, it spelled the end of the brushed aluminium tower chassis. Along with the new design, we saw the end of PCIe, being replaced by Thunderbolt 2 ports, and SSD-only internal storage. From all accounts so far, this new machine is faaaast.

So what do we want, as users of Apple’s products, to see in 2014? I’d like to see Thunderbolt proliferate more widely now that PCIe is obsolete in all Macs (and Firewire soon will be). Specifically, more storage options and more audio interfaces, and on the latter point, I really want to see something akin to ProTools HDXThunderbolt. This will enable us to harness the full power of the incredible technologies that are the Mac Pro and ProTools (that is, without third party chassis’ and relying on out-dated PCIe technology). Secondly, the iPad could be infinitely more useful for music production and audio editing: Ableton Live for iPad as a start, and for everyone else, a next generation control/ editing surface. This surface would allow us to use gestures for audio editing, automation and multiple effects parameter tweaking in a way that doesn’t just emulate a mixing console.

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REGULARS

PC AUDIO 100 not out! Are you bowled over with how your Audio PC has progressed since issue one?

Column: Martin Walker

When I wrote my very first PC Audio column for AudioTechnology Issue 1 (way back in 1997), my personal PC had a clock speed of 133MHz, 16MB RAM, and I was recommending popular hard drive sizes such as 5GB, which could provide you with a massive two hours of continuous 8-track recording. ISA format expansion cards were on their way out in favour of new-fangled PCI versions, and Firewire had yet to put in an appearance in the average audio PC. However, the biggest revelation for the PC musician at around this time was the arrival of the software ‘plug-in’ — this way of adding new audio features to an existing application was life-changing, even though a single metallic-sounding reverb effect plug-in could easily consume 100% of your available processing power. Nevertheless, even

by Issue Six I was extolling the virtues of the fledgling ‘Studio in a PC’ running software plugins, software synths and software samplers. How time flies in music technology!

The next few years seemed to be a race between processor manufacturers and audio software developers — the former kept increasing available CPU clock speeds, while the latter released ever more refined plug-ins and softsynths that instantly consumed any extra available processing power. When writing my column just two years later in mid-1999 I’d already moved to a Pentium II 300MHz processor and 64MB RAM, and by Issue 15 in mid-2001 I’d upgraded to a Pentium III 1GHz machine with 256MB RAM. This trend for biennial upgrades was mirrored by loads of other musicians, and was repeated for me once again in Issue 29 (2003), when I moved to a Pentium 4 2.8GHz along with 1GB RAM. This time round I managed to make my computer last for three years before finally moving to a 2.4GHz dual-core processor and 2GB RAM

by Issue 52 at the end of 2006. By this stage, those of us who had ridden the PC upgrade bandwagon for nearly 10 years finally saw it slowing down — the processing power available to the average musician had started to keep abreast of software developments. For the first time, my computer proved capable enough AT 52

to last me nearly six years, before I finally bit the bullet about 18 months ago and built my current PC: a quad-core 3GHz CPU routinely overclocked to 4.5GHz along with 8GB RAM. Overall, my audio computer has jumped in processing capability by a factor of perhaps 150 since the first issue of AudioTechnology was published — a truly staggering thought!

Meanwhile, in that same time-frame we musicians have worked our way through a clutch of Windows operating systems, including favourites such as 95 and 98, and faced the impending calamity of the Millennium Bug (which many of us rightly ignored, though it didn’t stop some retiring to caves counting the strokes to midnight on 31st December 1999 on their analogue fob watches). Thankfully, the doomsayers were proved wrong, and the bug turned out to be a damp squib. Most of us also largely ignored Windows NT 4 (the ‘New Technology’ version) and its follow-up Windows 2000 (both primarily intended for business users, and had limited compatibility with music hardware and software), as well as the consumer-targeted Windows Me (Millennium Edition, which was essentially Windows 98 with the look and feel of Windows 2000).

In the arena of operating systems the next big thing proved to be a consumer version of Windows NT/2000 named Windows XP, that I first discussed in Issue 18. Despite needing a handful of tweaks to achieve optimum glitchfree audio performance, XP gained an enviable reputation for reliability, and many musicians continue to rely on it to this very day. Windows Vista wasn’t mentioned until Issue 51 at the end of 2006, but subsequently gained a very mixed reputation on the audio front. It looked good, but its new Aero graphics needed to be disabled if you needed to push audio to the limits. Audio interface manufacturers were also slow off the mark to update their drivers for Vista, and very slow indeed to introduce 64-bit as well as 32-bit versions of them. But it did allow musicians looking forward to running loads of RAMhungry softsynths and streamed softsampler

voices to finally install and benefit from more than 4GB of RAM. However, by Issue 71 at the end of 2009 Windows 7 appeared, to almost universal praise (perhaps not surprising, as it was essentially an updated and largely bugfree version of Vista), and in my opinion ‘7’ has now become the PC musician’s long-term favourite operating system. I’m still using it, while Windows 8 (declared by Microsoft as a “re-imagining of Windows from the chip to the interface”), now out for over a year, is still mired in controversy for its default touch-screen graphic environment.

So here we are in 2014, some 16 years since the first issue of AudioTechnology hit the newsstands, and in audio terms, what we can now do today with our PCs would probably have seemed almost unimaginable when AudioTechnology first appeared. From amazement at being able to run a single software plug-in in real time, through so many years of struggling to run sufficient plug-ins and softsynths to banish our creative frustration, the magic three words being bandied about so often today are music-making ‘in-the-box’.

Although some musicians still stick with hardware wherever possible, and others are once again embracing boutique hardware effects, lots of commercial hits have been created entirely within PCs. We can even realise film scores using PCs, with softsamplers and sophisticated sample libraries that already fool quite a few music industry professionals into believing that a real orchestra has been employed. Meanwhile, the power of software synthesis in our computers has expanded in so many different directions (including subtractive, additive, FM, granular, physical modelling, and analogue modelling) that I believe we have finally achieved that slogan marketing gurus tantalised us with for so long — the music we make today is truly only limited by our imaginations! No-one knows what’s around the next corner though, so I suspect we could be just as surprised by our journey through the next 16 years of the PC audio industry as we were during the previous 16. Bon voyage!

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NICK LAUNAY Public Image Ltd, Gang of Four, Killing Joke, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Birthday Party, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, David Byrne, INXS, Silverchair, Midnight Oil, Grinderman, Lou Reed, The Cribs, Supergrass, The Living End. Engineer, mixer, and producer Nick Launay was born in the UK and spent the first part of his career in London, but has since branched out to work regularly in Australia and the US. He currently resides in Los Angeles, working out of John Kuker’s Seedy Underbelly studio, which he proudly calls a “hybrid facility. I use analogue and digital absolutely 50-50, and I am very happy with that.”

Launay: “My mix setups of 15 years ago and today are pretty similar. At the time I would have deliberately rented studios that had an API or Neve desk. Luckily for me, Seedy Underbelly has a 48-channel API Legacy desk and 16 Neve 1081 modules. The difference is that back in the day I would have been doing everything on analogue tape, mixing from two 24-track analogue machines down to half-inch 2-track tape at 30ips. I didn’t like the sound of ProTools at the time, but eight years ago it improved and I began using analogue and ProTools in conjunction. I’d record the band to 24-track analogue tape, did all tape edits with a razor blade, then, when satisfied with the arrangement, striped one track with code, loaded everything into ProTools, and recorded all the overdubs there, using all the advantages like endless tracks and effortless vocal comping. I’d then do the final mix with the original 24-track tape and ProTools synced up, laying it down to half-inch 2-track.

“I changed again when I worked on the first Grinderman record (2007), in that I did not go back to the original analogue 24-track or to 2-inch tape anymore for the final mix. ProTools sounded much better by then; the A/D converters had improved, the plug-ins had become amazing, and it was also much cheaper to only use ProTools, which had become important with budgets getting smaller and smaller. I’m satisfied with the sound of ProTools now, but I still don’t mix in-the-box. I will do the intricate balancing in ProTools, using many plug-ins as well, but I will still output all channels through the API/ Neve desk and then go back into ProTools again GAME CHANGERS

PROTOOLS IMPROVEMENTS, LAVRY CLOCK, ADAM P22 MONITORS, SOUNDTOYS DECAPITATOR, EAR BUS COMPRESSORS AT 54

through a great A to D converter like a Lavry, and also through EAR compressors on my stereo bus.

“ProTools going 24-bit and 96k was a gamechanger for me. Especially when I heard what a really good clock source does for the sound of ProTools. I use the Lavry Stereo AD-122-96, and it makes ProTools sound much more like analogue. Until then digital would sound brittle and annoying. The other game changer is that many plug-ins became really good and creative.

“

Analogue distorts and compresses the sound in a nice way, and I use the Decapitator to achieve that

”

The Decapitator is one of the main ones that really impressed me. I also find Clip Gain really useful. It’s a wonderful thing that really speeds things up. Plug-in EQs are more detailed, and very useful as notch filters, something I never used to use.

“Other pieces of gear I rely on enormously are analogue tape delays, like the Echoplex, and Roland Space Echo and Chorus Echo. I would not do a mix without them. And I really love the Adam P22 monitors. I find them much easier to

mix with than Yamaha NS10s, because I always felt I didn’t know what was going on in the low end with them, and they have this sort of midrange hump that causes problems you’d need to correct during mastering. But if I get things right on the P22s, the mastering engineer hardly has to do a thing. I now own a pair of Adam P22 monitors in three different countries!

“The new techniques I use are mainly tricks to get things to sound as warm and analogue as possible. For example, when recording I’ll send the kick signal through a gate, and then through a Sansamp. I’ll keep the original kick sound, and I will pair that with the Sansampoverloaded sound, and play around with both so they complement each other and give me an incredible low end. I’ll also send the snare signal to a gate, and then to an EQ and an Empirical Labs Distressor, and will add lots of low end, finding a note in the snare sound I like, and I again pair the compressed snare sound with the original. Doing this makes for a very thick and warm sound. It’s a very deliberate squashing of certain frequencies that allows me to achieve a sound that to my ears is very much like what I got during the analogue days. Analogue distorts and compresses the sound in a nice way. I also use the Decapitator to achieve that. It’s more drastic than analogue tape, but it gives me the same feeling. I like the SoundToys Devil-Loc for similar reasons.

Overall I have to say that my mixing methods haven’t really changed that much over the decades. It’s just that what I’m doing today is all about listening and remembering how things sounded when they were 100% analogue, and applying that to working with digital. It’s all down to how I hear things, the tone and the way I EQ things to create a mood or feeling. It could be said that I’m very modern in my oldschool approach, ha!”

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