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Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au
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I don’t know what I was more excited about: Dropping an SM58 onto the hallowed piece of hardwood at Shure headquarters, or discovering the guy who’s job it is to drop test SM58s is a Belarusian named Boris. Not to stereotype too hard, but this was like catching a vision of Aretha Franklin after years of listening to her records and, much to your delight, discovering the woman matches the size of the voice. The durability of the SM58 is legendary. There are YouTube videos of people trying to drown them, and running them over with Mack trucks, all proving the SM58 is the cockroach of the audio world. Making something Apocalypse proof isn’t easy. And if you’ve ever handled an SM58 Mylar diaphragm, you’ll wonder how it can resist any punishment, let alone the torture it goes through at the hands of Boris. But what made the heaviest impression was Boris’ enthusiasm for the job. Some people like to create things, but every now and again I think we all get a kick out of destroying things. Each and every day, it’s Boris’ job to drop, twist, bend, heat, freeze, and coat microphones in synthesised sweat. And he loves it. If a Shure design can get past Boris and still hold to spec, then it passes on to you. And he’s not pulling any punches.
I don’t want to give too much away, because I’ll be writing more about my Shure experiences in the coming issues. But it was a lesson on the fastidious attention paid to the production of these microphones that we probably take for granted. There’s the market analysis, the math behind the acoustic design (288 equations to arrive at a single important piece), the industrial design, the suppliers (vetted and continually monitored), quality control of materials before production, quality control during production, quality control after production, and, of course, Boris. Just so you can drop a $150 microphone on the ground and not have to buy another one. In our world, the $150 price point can buy a lot of technology, but for the most part, low cost technology pieces are also considered throw away items. When a lack of durability or reliability is combined with an inability to replace parts, there is no other option. And this mentality has well and truly crept into high-ticket items too: Phones, computers, even automobiles are going this way. It’s comforting to know that there are people and companies out there dedicated to making our dollar go further by lasting longer. Because a 50-year old design could have easily been adapted to our slipping standards, and probably saved Shure a few bucks in the process. But it hasn’t. It still has to get through Boris.
Subscriptions Miriam Mulcahy mim@alchemedia.com.au Proofreading Andrew Bencina Regular Contributors Martin Walker Michael Stavrou Harry Irvine 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. Contact (Editorial) T: +61 3 5331 4949 PO Box 295, Ballarat VIC 3353, Australia. E: info@alchemedia.com.au W: www.audiotechnology.com.au All material in this magazine is copyright © 2013 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. 18/09/2013.
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FEATURE
Sigur Rós’s seventh studio album, Kveikur, is unconventional… even for Iceland. Story: Paul Tingen
Although Iceland is Europe’s second largest island (about half the size of Great Britain), just 321,000 people live there. Marginally more than in, say, Wollongong. Given the tiny size of its population, the impact Iceland has on the international music scene is stupendous, with acts like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters & Men and Emilíana Torrini, all enjoying overseas success and recognition. Compare this to the amount of internationally famous artists coming out of Wollongong and, err, you get the picture. There’s been ample speculation about the reasons for Iceland’s musical riches, but few rise above the pub-talk notion of it having something to do with the climate. Whereas people from Wollongong might, perhaps, find hanging out at the beach the most attractive option once essential work has been done, the Icelandic climate forces people to stay indoors where a guitar and a laptop start looking like a portal to the outside world. On the phone from Sundlaugin studio, just outside Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, engineer Birgir Jón Birgisson chirpily announces that the local weather is in fact “very good” with blue skies and bright sunshine. The catch is the temperature: 14ºC, mid-afternoon, mid Summer. A dozen kilometres away, in downtown Reykjavik, American engineer, mixer, producer, musician and visual artist Alex Somers muses from his private studio that the entire environment in Iceland prompts him to “be creative”. The weather certainly plays a part, he agrees, but it’s also the attitude of the people in general and of Sigur Rós specifically: “They like to experiment, and taught me a lot about not playing it safe, not being precious and just going for it.” Birgisson and Somers both have long-standing working relationships with Sigur Rós. The band broke through in 1999 with its second album, Ágætis Byrjun, to become one of the world’s leading post-rock acts, playing ethereal, ambient, impressionistic non-rock, with a lot of its identity coming from Jón ‘Jónsi’ Þór Birgisson’s reverb-drenched falsetto vocals and bowed electric guitar. The music is characterised by a bone-chilling, melancholic, glacial grandeur that could only have been conceived by people living in the far north. 14 years later the band released its seventh studio album, Kveikur, which saw two major changes, one being the departure of keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, reducing the band to a power trio; the other, the much more aggressive, in-yourface sound of the album. Atmospherics and cinematic soundscapes still abound, but the rhythm section is more hard-hitting than ever before, and distortion has joined reverb as the music’s overriding, signature effect. KVEIKUR IN STEPS
Kveikur was recorded during 2011 and 2012 in several studios, for the most part in the band’s rehearsal space and Sundlaugin, plus some work in two studios in Los Angeles. Eminent mixer
and producer Rich Costey mixed the album at his Los Angeles studio, after which Alex Somers was asked to revisit the recordings and stamp more of Sigur Rós’ss trademark Icelandic identity on the project. Although Somers is originally from Boston, he and Sigur Rós’s frontman Jónsi are both musical collaborators and a couple. The American moved to Iceland in 2005, and the two have since worked together on, amongst other things, a duo project called Riceboy Sleeps (2009) and Jonsi’s first solo album Go (2010), and Somers also engineered and co-produced Sigur Rós’s sixth studio album, Valtari (2012). With Somers running his own studio in Reykjavik, he’s assumedly by now able to out-Iceland the Icelanders, at least on the musical front. Birgir Jón Birgisson (nicknamed Biggi, and despite the identical surname, has no family ties to Jonsi) is an Icelandic native, who presumably hasn’t had to acclimatise to the weather or the music. He began his studio career attending a sound engineering course at the SAE Institute in London, then worked for Icelandic National Radio for five years, and started working at
Sundlaugin in 2003, three years after it was constructed. Located in idyllic surroundings next to a waterfall, and built inside an old derelict swimming pool (indoors, this is Iceland!), Sundlaugin became widely known as Sigur Rós’s studio, but Birgisson explains that the band in fact sold the complex to he and Sveinsson in 2008. The latter regularly comes in to record his own material, but Birgisson is the only one involved full-time with the studio, as manager and chief engineer. PADDLING IN SUNDLAUGIN
The gear and acoustics at Sundlaugin — Icelandic for ‘The Pool’ — are a significant part of the Sigur Rós sound, and the band has continued to work there after the sale. According to Birgisson, the swimming pool acoustics are one important aspect, but mostly the band’s and studio’s identities are tied up with the studio’s analogue gear and consequent working methods. “We have a fairly big live room of 60-70sqm with a 5.5m-high ceiling,” described Birgisson. “But the place is pretty square and we have treated it quite a lot, because we had to be able to control
BASS & GUITARS Birgisson: The bass was recorded using a Neumann U47 on the cabinet and then going into a Universal Audio 610 or a 710 preamp. I also recorded a DI, but used that signal only if I wanted to re-amp the bass later. I recorded guitars with an SM57 and a Pacific Pro Audio R-One ribbon mic. Both can handle a lot of SPL — Jonsi likes to play loud! I also had some room mics on his guitar, like the U47 and the Neumann CMV563, and Jonsi brought his Thermionic Culture Rooster preamp. We only recorded some basic ideas for Jonsi’s vocals here, for which I used our old U47. He likes that one so much that he bought a remake of the U47 from Vox-o-Rama to record his vocals after the band sold us the studio. And the band monitored each other when playing live via a 16-channel Aviom system.
the acoustics. We recently had floods here and have since put wood on the ceiling and added curtains that are on rails, so you can adjust the acoustics any way you like. But the acoustics are fairly distinctive, and you can hear them mostly in the band’s drums. The reverb on the other instruments and the vocals come mainly from synthetic sources.”
Sigur Rós Kveikur
According to Birgisson, the Kveikur recordings at Sundlaugin took place over two week-long sessions in late 2011 and early 2012. “The band worked pretty quickly,” he said. “They came a bit more prepared than previous albums, having already written a lot of material at their rehearsal space. Though they still did a lot of writing at Sundlaugin. The main thing was that we recorded everything to 24-track tape on an Otari MTR90 Mk2. Everything they’ve recorded in this studio, apart from Valtari, has been to tape. Tape is fun to work with, and still sounds a bit better. The band really wants it, they like to work outside of the box and manipulate sounds in the real world. For me, tape is just a different way of working, and there’s still a
sonic difference. The new album was recorded quite hot, because we wanted that saturated tape sound. It’s something you can’t accomplish in digital. There are loads of tape emulation plugins, and some of them sound really good, but it’s not quite the same thing. “We used Quantegy GP9 and everything went to tape, even the try-outs, and we then filled up all 24 tracks with drums, bass, guitars, and some synths and loops, before transferring the material to ProTools. The only problem is, tape is really expensive, and we only had a couple of reels of GP9. So after transferring things to ProTools, I’d delete what was on the tape and we’d re-use it. The expense of tape, and the fact it wears out, means you don’t record 15 takes and then spend days going through them trying to figure out which one is the best. That’s a really boring process.
Working with tape is a destructive process, and if you f**k something up, it’s f**ked up forever, so you have to hold a certain amount of confidence to be able to work with it. That makes it exciting. People are too comfortable with all the undos and redos, and all that shit you can do in digital.”
NEVE V0 Birgisson: I used the Neve V0 desk for its mic preamps in some cases. The desk is actually a 5132, and it’s one of the last 51-series that was made. It’s the broadcast version, and it probably dates from 1980. I use it every day to listen to what I record, but some of the preamp circuits are getting corroded and the sound begins to break up. I can only use some of the channels as mic pres, and therefore use several external mic pres. For example, I used my Millennia Media mic pres for other drum mics and Jonsi’s AEA RPQ preamp for the ribbon mics.
Birgisson is now the proud owner of a pool… with a studio extension.
FLAT CHAT TRIO
WINTER AT SOMERS STUDIO
Going into more detail on how Sigor Rós and he operate in the ‘real world’, Birgisson explains that the band tracked most of the songs playing live as a trio. “The band members were in the same room, but we had the amplifiers in different iso-booths. We’d usually go for a good drum and bass take, and then, if they need to fix something we’d do that. Jonsi’s guitars and vocals tend to be overdubbed. He’s very particular about his vocal overdubs, because he likes to try out different melodies and harmonies, so he takes a lot of time for this and needs to be in the right frame of mind. They also overdubbed some synths, often using the Teenage Engineering OP-1, plus they brought some loops they made in Logic. Most overdubs were to tape. They also added some more material once we’d loaded everything in ProTools, but not much.”
Having laid down the basic tracks for Kveikur at Sundlaugin, Sigur Rós returned to their rehearsal space to overdub more material. They later returned for a string recording session at the studio, which was conducted by studio assistant Elisabeth Carlsson. During this overdubbing period, mostly the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, Alex Somers worked intensely with Jonsi, recording vocals and some guitars at his downtown Reykjavik studio. Somers’ studio is located in a former private theatre, built by an artistic couple in the 1970s. “It’s not huge by any means,” commented Somers. “But for me it’s a perfect size, and the room is acoustically treated, so it sounds really good. With my Barefoot MM27 monitors, which are amazing and a dream to work on, it translates really well. No, my studio has neither a name nor a website. People find out about it by word of mouth, which is a very bad business move!”
For the signal chains Birgisson made good use of the eclectic collection of microphones and outboard at Sundlaugin, which includes goodies like the RCA Type 44, 77DX and 77D ribbon microphones, mics by Lomo, Neumann, Schoeps, Melodium, AEA, Altec, and so on. Birgisson: “The signal chains I used were an old AKG D25 and a Sennheiser e602 on the kick, a Sennheiser 441 and a Shure SM57 on the snare, AEA R84 or Coles 4038 as overheads, AKG D112 for the floor tom and Sennheiser MD421 on the other two toms, plus AKG C12A and Sennheiser MKH80 as ambient mics. “Once they had filled the 24-track tape, I transferred the material to ProTools at 96k, though sometimes at a lower sample rate, because Jonsi wanted to be able to work with it in his system. The band uses Logic, and it’s what they used when they added more material at their rehearsal space. I like Logic as well, but most people use ProTools, so that’s what I tend to use in the studio. I mixed the band’s Hvarf/Heim (2007) double album and the Inni (2011) live album in Logic. Actually, I recorded Heim in Soundscape, which was an old recording system we had here in the studio, and I recorded Inni (2011) to ProTools, because I ran 60+ tracks, which is quite big, and I wanted to make sure everything worked live. ProTools was still relatively new to me at the time, and I was more comfortable in Logic, so I chose to transfer everything to Logic and mix in that.”
While Somers does not have a desk at his studio, and does a lot of work in the box, the ‘real world’ working methods of Sigur Rós also inform his way of working. This is reflected in the extensive collections of often eccentric outboard and musical instruments that he has at his studio. “Our focus is on having loads of unusual acoustic instruments,” he explains, “like a dulcitone, a celeste, a harmonium, metallophones, and other quirky things, plus the typical stuff like guitars, amps and pedals. “I guess you’d call my approach hybrid, because I use a lot of outboard gear while mixing,
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Alex Somers was more than happy to colour the sound of Kveikur with some Thermionic Culture, Chandler and Retro gear.
OUTBOARD VOCAL CHAIN Somers: When recording Jonsi, I used a Neumann U47, and the signal chain changed a bit dependi ng on the song. We mostly used a really cool preamp made by Preservation Sound in New York, which is an RCA clone. It literally has just one knob, so it really is old school. After that I went into the Thermionic Culture Rooster, for some distortion and then the Phoenix or Sta-Level compressor — we’d switch that around depending on what sound we were after. Finally, the signal went through a Curve Bender EQ just for some hi-pass filtering and maybe a bit of mid-range boost, if we wanted his vocals to sound a bit more nasal. The analogue signal went into Logic via an Apogee Symphony AD converter.
like the Thermionic Culture Rooster and Curve Bender, the Retro StaLevel compressor, Roland RE201 Space Echo, Echoplex, the Kush Audio Clariphonic EQ and so on, plus a valve summing mixer, the 14-channel Thermionic Culture Fat Bustard. I really love outboard gear, and I love the way you can push it and transform sounds with it. You can achieve so much with outboard: distortion, brutal compression, tape delay, and so on. At the same time, I also love digital and plug-ins. I really am 50-50. The SoundToys Decapitator is an amazing plug-in I use on most of the songs I mix. I also love reverbs from the native Lexicon bundle, and Audio Damage’s Ratshack reverb. I like working on a computer, because it’s what I grew up with — I’m a bit too young for all the stuff with consoles. Again, people put all this weight on what gear they’re using, and I’m guilty of that myself because I love studio equipment, but it’s much more about taste and your feeling for the music. “Jonsi is a really good singer, so we didn’t need to do a million takes to get a good one. For the lead vocal he usually sang the song through two or three times, and after that we’d make a comp. Doing backing vocals was way more in-depth and lengthy, because Jonsi is really into that and does loads of vocals all over the place.” The Sigor Rós singer would go to and fro between Somers’ studio and the band’s rehearsal space, sometimes recording his vocals himself. Although Somers wasn’t present at the recording sessions at the rehearsal space, he was privy to some of the things that were done there, and recounts: “They did a bunch of weird stuff on their own for this album, engineering
themselves. They made their own instruments, they bowed a ukulele, and they bowed Jonsi’s guitar without any reverb, which is something he had never done before. They whistled and bowed cymbals, and would map these sounds out on a MIDI controller, so they could play all these homemade instruments as samples. I know the song Isjaki started from the bowed ukulele sound, but you’d never recognise it. I think it’s always been Sigur Rós’s modus operandi not to use synthesisers very often, creating their own instruments to use as samples instead, which is pretty cool. They are tweakers and experimenters, even though the main sound of their core instruments comes from the way they play.” REMIXING THE PERFECT MIX
With sonic experimentation being a large part of Sigur Rós’s modus operandi and raison d’etre, it is to be expected that this also informed the mixing stage. Once they had completed tracking in Iceland they went to Los Angeles, for some additional overdubs and an extensive mix process with Rick Costey, who has worked with Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, Audioslave, Fiona Apple and many others. Costey is known for his hard-hitting, volume-to-11 sound, and Sigur Rós most likely approached him because he would be capable of bringing the best out of the more aggressive sound of Kveikur. On returning from Los Angeles, the band gave Somers the unusual job of mixing the album again, building on what Costey had done. Somers says he doesn’t know why he was asked to do this, nor was he given any instructions. What is certain is that the band loved the elaborate sonic experimentation he added to the already-mixed material. Somers: “I guess because I know them so well, and have worked with them many times in the past, they wanted me to try something that’s more familiar. But I don’t really know why they asked me to rework the mixes. Rich mixed this album in Logic, and I was given his stems. I also had the original drive, so I could dig out the raw tracks if I wanted, though I didn’t do that very often. Rick’s stems amounted to 12 to 13 per song, and they
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Jonsi was really outspoken about wanting his voice to sound messed up on the album, like really treated and lo-fi and overdriven
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SPRING HAS SPRUNG Somers: On Kveikur we did a lot of new stuff, like sending his vocals through a Swart guitar amp. One cool trick was to set the volume of the amp to zero and turn the spring reverb all the way up, and this gave a really ghostly and very cool sound that we blended in with the main vocal. This became a pretty big part of the album sound.
sounded incredible. I then carried on from there. It’s the first time I did something like this, and it was really fun. I just put Rick’s stems up, and started doing things purely going by instinct. The band would come to my studio once a day, and Jonsi would hang out for more of the time. I’d do a first mix, and then the band would maybe have a few ideas, and I’d carry on. THE MIXES WERE SO CLOSE TO PERFECTION WHEN I GOT THEM THAT IT WAS JUST A MATTER OF ME NOODLING AROUND UNTIL THE BAND WAS TOTALLY SATISFIED.
“The first thing I did was make the drums sound more aggressive. On many songs I really wanted them to sound as dirty and distorted and compressed as possible, while still keeping the impact. At the same time I spent a lot of time getting the vocals to sound as spacey as possible. Jonsi was really outspoken about wanting his voice to sound messed up on the album, like really treated and lo-fi and overdriven, but because the music was really aggressive and raw and distorted, I thought it was cool to balance that with a more dreamy and experimental vocal soundscape, and really go far with the delays, echo and reverse reverb that he always likes to have on his voice. That contrast is the new thing about the album. The voice being floaty and echo-y means the distorted things don’t sound flat.” DISTORTED VIEW
Talking specific instruments, tracks and effects, Somers explains, “I used several plug-ins, like the UAD Echoplex, which is really cool, and the Decapitator, which I had on the overall drum stem, because it just sounds really good. Parts of some songs I re-tracked through the Thermionic Culture Rooster. When I mix songs from scratch, the first thing I tend to do is put the Rooster on the drum bus, to add distortion, because it sounds so cool. Everybody added distortion on this album, the band, Rich, and I. The instruments were tracked well, but the distorted bass sound in many tracks was what was laid down during tracking. Rich probably pumped that up, and I did the same. I spent a couple of days at Rich’s place in LA, and he has an insane amount of equipment. I know he had a Fairchild across some of these groups and buses, and he also used the Shadow Hills compressor. All this meant that I HAD TO BE CAREFUL NOT TO OVER-PROCESS, BECAUSE THE ALBUM WAS IN EFFECT MIXED TWICE, AND AT TIMES THINGS STARTED TO SOUND OVERCOOKED, AND I HAD TO PULL BACK. BUT WE LOVE DISTORTION. I think it’s beautiful and I don’t really
like listening to music that’s clean. I find that really boring. Distortion is my favourite thing!
“Many of the distorted vocal effects on the album came from [Symbolic Sound’s] Kyma, which Rich has at his studio. As I understand it, it’s designed for people making movies, not for musicians. I believe it was used for the making of the animated movie Wall-E. Jonsi found it, and started experimenting without really knowing what he was doing. He got this weird vocal stuff happening, like stuttering and the vocals breaking down and detuning. It just destroys sounds. Regarding the more floaty aspects of
RICH COSTEY ON THE MIX Rich Costey: Sigur Ros came to me with their direction intact. I guess they felt a bit boxed in with the sound they developed on their previous albums, and in many ways this is the sound of them cutting loose. I also think this is the first time I’ve heard a recording from Sigur Ros that approximates the sound and power their concerts have. They are an incredibly dynamic group, and have no fear of distortion. Mixing for Sigur Ros is very different to mixing for anyone else. They tend to have a lot of things happening in a similar register, and although they desire clarity, they also aren’t interested in too much clarity. Jonsi is completely hands-on and is one of the only artists whom I’ve worked with who has no problem sitting down next to me and grabbing faders. He works from a place of absolute confidence, even though quite often we spent a good deal of time searching for sounds, presentation, balances, etc. In regards to the dynamics of what they are doing, it’s true the gear in the room was often pushed to extremes, and typically we were just riding on the edge of it by the time it sounded decent. AT: How do you deal with the complex rhythm patterns, and what does that mean for compression on drums? RC: This is a good question. I didn’t use a lot of compression on the drums, except for occasionally on a treated snare sample or on a parallel snare track to bring out some snap. Compression tends to drag out the tone and ring of a kit, and often that doesn’t help anything. I did use a bit of limiting, and for that I used an antique Decca compressor I have. AT: How dynamic is the final mix with all that distortion? RC: I tried to keep things pretty dynamic when possible, that’s a critical element to the emotional quality of their music. I used a bit of Shadow Hills limiting, but on a number of the tracks they went back to Iceland and treated all of my stereo submixed stems, so I couldn’t tell you what they used in those cases. AT: Two of the key elements of Sigur Ros’s sound are the bowed guitar and soaring vocals. How did you treat those? RC: The bowed guitar sounds on the album are exactly how they sound coming out of the amp. I used no treatment whatsoever and I don’t think I even used any EQ. The vocal treatment was watched over very carefully by Jonsi and the band. A lot of it is reverse-printed reverbs and things they did on their own guitar amp spring reverb plug-ins, etc. Also we used my Kyma system quite a lot. AT: How is a Sigur Ros mix built up? RC: Very slowly!
his voice, he loves reverse reverb on it, because it wraps his voice. It’s like a cocoon around it. For me the best thing for that is the Space Designer, the built-in Logic reverb. It’s kind of murky with a lot of mid-range, and it has its own sound, but for some reason it has the best reverse reverb I know of. I also use other plug-ins, like the SoundToys Echoboy, reverbs from the native Lexicon bundle, and the UAD EMT140. On most songs I’d also use the analogue Roland RE201 Space Echo, which is way cooler than any plug-in, it just sounds crazy. It has a really beautiful distortion, and I like to perform with it when printing the mix, twiddling the knobs, which is fun. I probably also used the Decapitator on Jonsi’s vocals, and there’s another plug-in Jonsi really likes on his voice, which is the SoundHack +Bubbler granular delay. We often put it on the bus and automated it. “Many of the weirder effects on the album were done by the band at their rehearsal space, like the effect in ‘Yferboro’ that sounds like a thunderstorm. As I said, the band loves to experiment, and one thing I picked up from them is to use the little Yamaha VSS-30 sampler to create new parts and sounds. It’s a small 8-bit sampler that’s regarded as a toy, but it’s way cooler than any other sampler I’ve tried. What we do is play a part back via the monitors, say a string part, and record it in the VSS-30 and then DI that sample back into a preamp, and write new parts. We used it on the strings, the brass, and the harmony vocals. I am also obsessed with
Logic’s varispeed. It’s good because it doesn’t time stretch anything. Instead it works like varispeed on a tape machine, playing things back at higher or lower pitches. I used it in the outro of the title track, where there’s this really f**ked up piece of noise for several seconds. It’s actually an upright bass I slowed down with varispeed. I also used it on the outro of Hrafntinna, which has a really beautiful brass section that wasn’t originally in the song. The band took a snippet of brass to use as an outro, and we used varispeed to create a really nice effect.” MIX RESTRUCTURE
“Restructuring songs is something I always do when I mix. In fact, every time I mix a song from scratch I play around with the structure, creating new intros, outros or bridges by soloing one instrument group and reversing it or slowing it down and so on. I did this with many songs on Kveikur, and very much so on the instrumental that closes the album, Var. I mixed that from the beginning, Rich never touched it, and the song was a bit short. I think it was only one-minute long or something, so I restructured the parts and made it longer and turned the strings into a final coda — the song is now 3:45. The Sigur Rós guys are very open to things like that. They are really creative and also a lot of fun to be around, and they don’t take things too seriously.” Clearly, no winter blues for the likes of Sigor Rós and Somers. But then, with the success they enjoy around the planet they have a lot to smile about…
FEATURE
SCI-FI REALITY
Elysium director, Neil Blomkamp, uses audio to help audiences suspend their disbelief. While two new surround formats have given movie theatres another dimension. Story: Christopher Holder
Reality and sci-fi don’t normally mix. As soon as Star Wars audiences, back in the day, experienced the sub-rattling rumble of a giant spacecraft cruising overhead they were hooked. The pedants who pointed out that there is no sound in the airless expanse of space were shouted down. George Lucas and his right-hand audio henchman, Ben Burtt, had created a totally fresh world, one ‘far, far away’ from the banalities of Earth, humanoids, and, often, the natural laws of physics. ‘Reality’ didn’t come into it. Neil Blomkamp isn’t George Lucas. When District 9 was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, people simply couldn’t believe how believable the movie felt. I’m sure many curtains twitched in Johannesburg at the time — half expecting a huge spaceship to be parked over its outskirts. Believability is tough to attain. Most commentators will focus on the fact that Neil Blomkamp started life as a special FX creator and has a talent for composing richly detailed digital worlds. True. But it’s also been recognised that Elysium (not to mention District 9) was built with nowhere near the budget of an effects-heavy Michael Bay movie. In other words, believability is far more than simply having an army of FX techs and acres of feverishlyrendering server farms. It’s a philosophy. REALITY IS AN ATTITUDE
So when Neil Blomkamp talks to his sound guys, he’s reinforcing an attitude: it’s all about locking the audience into a world of his creation, and not doing anything to shake them awake from their reverie. Only, Elysium is about two worlds, and they could hardly be more different.
GOOD VIBES: FLYING WITH THE RAVEN If there’s a cooler ‘bad guy’ spaceship than the Bounty Hunter’s ‘Slave 1’ in Star Wars, then it’d have to be the Raven. Dave Whitehead: I liked the idea that the Elysium spacecraft and the underlying technology worked on ‘vibration’ for its means of propulsion. I took that concept quite literally and bought some vibrators, shoved them into a Dobro guitar and miked up the results, moving it around, using it with a slide, etc. I also attached a vibrator to a colander — stuck it to the bottom and swung it around with a rope. The Raven is a military spacecraft and I love the sound of a Huey helicopter. So I thought if I could evoke the feeling of an approaching Huey with rippling sounds coming over the hills. We were given permission to record on the tarmac of Wellington airport, including standing near the engines as they started them up, which was awesome. And it was the real-world sound of the jets that you’re accustomed to hearing that helps you accept that there’s this menacing spacecraft approaching in the distance. While it’s the vibrators providing the X Factor.
Dave Whitehead: Earth is a mess: polluted, overpopulated, depleted, and a police state. The technology is old-school. Conversely, Elysium [the orbiting world created by and for the rich] is a paradise: a huge country club where sickness has been eliminated and technology is seamless and largely unseen. Knowing this was a solid foundation for me to begin to build two very different audio worlds. Dave Whitehead is Elysium’s sound designer. He’s based at Park Road Post in Wellington and most recently been working on the latest Hobbit. Dave spent 10 weeks recording, collecting and preparing sounds, and another 10 weeks with the movie preparing his sound design for the final mix. I started out by asking Dave how he made the Earth feel so grittily authentic. Dave Whitehead: It all starts with Neil as the director. I recall having an interesting conversation with Neil and how he likes the idea that even though this film is a sci-fi, the source sounds come from the real world. By which I mean, what you hear as effects and ambiences are composed of source sounds we as humans hear daily. So in that sense it’s far easier for our brains to accept the sound. Neil really shies away from synthesised sounds — I couldn’t really bust out the Moog for this movie, because he doesn’t like over-processed sounds. It’s definitely not Transformers-ish. Not to say I don’t like the Transformers movies, I love them, but Neil would really shy away from that… it would be too processed.
So if you take the Matt Damon character’s exo-suit, we recorded every servo we could, every printer we could; we went to Weta [the creative/modelling force behind Lord of the Rings etc] and recorded all their robots. We recorded every gadget in our house and friends’ houses. MIXING AS YOU GO
Craig Berkey and Chris Scarabosio mixed the movie. Chris was in charge of the music and dialogue, while Craig mixed all the effects, Foley, ambiences etc. Craig is based in Vancouver along with Neil Blomkamp and worked closely with the director throughout. I asked Craig about his approach to mixing a movie. Craig Berkey: I work with a filmmaker from day one. We work in a linear fashion from beginning to end. Whatever tool we use doesn’t matter to me — I build a soundtrack and they’re involved the whole way. Every time I add a new sound, I can pan it, EQ it, and mix it. That’s the beauty of this approach. By ‘building as you go’, when you get to the final mix you have more creative freedom – you’re thinking about the big picture rather than scrambling to ensure you’ve got everything in place. When I get to the final mix stage I can hit Play on my ProTools session and every track plays with its automation… but every element also remains separate. I’ve not committed to stems that can’t be pulled apart. AT: So you’re not under quite so much crushing pressure in the couple of weeks you have to produce the final mix. CB: Right. On the first day of the final mix on this film, Neil Blomkamp had already heard the mix. Which means that rather than focussing on ‘why is that footstep so loud?’, we have the luxury of stepping back a bit and thinking: ‘do we really need that music cue?’ etc. We can look at the big picture rather than trouble shooting. AT: And I guess it means you’re less likely to be thrown any curve balls from the director at the 11th hour if he’s already comfortable with the mix? CB: Exactly. He likes what we have. It’s not like he’s not heard anything for the first time. If you hear a director say ‘What’s that?!’ in a final mix; if I have to explain to a director what something is, we’re in trouble! AT: Given all your pan automation is within your ProTools session you must had a few misgivings about having to do it all again for an Atmos and Auro mix? CB: The kind man from Dolby copied my pan information from the ProTools panner to their plug-in. Even though the two panners don’t match, you can Copy and ‘Force’ Paste in ProTools. The upshot is that all my panning automation showed up on their Dolby panner. And what it meant was that I could make a track an Atmos Object and my original panning would dynamically pan in the Atmos space, rather than just simply showing up in the surrounds. Ah, yes, mixing for Auro and Atmos. That’s almost a story in itself…
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even though this film is a sci-fi, the source sounds come from the real world … I couldn’t really bust out the Moog for this movie, because he doesn’t like over-processed sounds
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WORKING IN NEW FORMATS
ATMOS & AURO: MIXING ON A LARGER CANVAS Yes, new cinema formats! Auro has been developed by Barco, the world’s biggest supplier of highperformance cinema projectors, and Dolby. Both promise a more immersive listening experience for theatre goers thanks to more channels. Both promise a superior listening experience thanks to full frequency speakers throughout the theatre, rather than narrow-band speakers that are 3dB down on those at the front. Both promise the ability to mix in the vertical plane, not just horizontal. But that’s about where the similarities end. Auro is an 11.1 format with the extra channels occupied by a second tier of speakers above the conventional, as well as yet another layer overhead (three tiers in all). Dolby Atmos is a 9.1 format, with the extra two channel being overhead (left/right). The kicker with Atmos is you can assign tracks to be ‘Objects’ in the mix, which allows you to individually place that sound discretely in any speaker (not just the surround channel) and pan it accordingly.
Elysium wasn’t originally mixed in the new surround formats: Dolby Atmos and Barco Auro. Rather, about a month after the ‘final’ mix, Craig Berkey and Chris Scarabosio got the call-up to head to Skywalker Ranch where they would ‘remix’ the movie on a Neve DFC console. Saying that, Chris was quick to point out that their intention wasn’t to ‘remix’ the movie but simply to take advantage of the extra surround dimensions afforded by the new formats. As outlined in the ‘Larger Canvas’ box item, both new formats provide extra surround channels for a great degree of immersion. Auro tackles this more conventionally, with an 11.1 panner that provides a ‘height’ dimension to push sounds vertically. It takes a little more time to understand Atmos. To come to grips with Atmos you have to understand that there are two ways of addressing the speakers within the new format: Bed tracks or Objects. Bed tracks are panned in the room like a regular 7.1 setup, only you also have two extra channels overhead, so they call it 9.1. Objects on the other hand can address individual speakers.
Craig Berkey: “For example with a shuttle sound. In a 7.1 mix when I panned it from the front to the left side and then to the left rear it would go to the whole wall of the left side and the whole left hand side of the back wall. When we did the Atmos mix, I could take the same sound and put it in the object track and the same panning made it travel down the wall and along the back. There was a greater sense of motion.” AT: Placing sounds discretely in an individual speaker sounds wonderful, but movie theatres come in different shapes and sizes. How can you be sure the precise speaker to which you’re panning actually exists in every movie theatre? CB: Good point. If someone on screen is responding to a sound in the left surrounds in my mix room, we can lock the sound to the fourth speaker in the left surround wall. But if I go to a theatre with a different number of speakers — if the source is locked to the fourth surround — it’s not going to be lined up to where this actor is looking. Depending on the size of the room, Dolby can allow you to lock the sound to that location in the room, rather than that speaker channel. There’s a mode on the panner that allows you to do that.
(Above) The final mix in full swing. Dave Whitehead (below) braves the wilds of Canada to record atmos for Elysium.
MIXING TO NEW HEIGHTS
Both new formats explore the vertical domain. Auro has three levels of speakers: an entire additional layer higher up the wall and a smaller complement (one channel) on the ceiling, while Atmos adds two ceiling channels to its 7.1 setup. AT: What did you think about the extra height offered by both formats? Craig Berkey: The overhead channels are tricky to deal with. The danger with Atmos, especially, is it can take away some of the width of your mix when you pan things up there — it feels like you’re mono’ing things up. I used them for specific FX. Like when Max [Matt Damon’s character] gets locked in the radiation cell. I have those FX sounds up the top and those extra channels are really effective for things like that. But when we placed other, less specific, components up there, we found it could sound cloudy or muddy. We just had to be careful. Auro doesn’t have the Object mode; it has channels. It’s got an upper and lower surround mode and a couple on the ceiling. Auro was good for creative ambiences because the upper level wasn’t too far overhead — it didn’t pull the
sound up to mono. Auro also has three additional channels behind the screen above the normal LCR channels. I used those for spaceships and other elements that were placed up-screen high. I could pan up there and that would help provide some separation for the dialogue — it would provide extra clarity. Atmos has height channels on the ceiling, they’re not on screen, so it doesn’t work as well in that regard. MIXING MUSIC IN AURO/ATMOS
AT: Chris, How did you attack your music mixing in the new formats? Chris Scarabosio: I had my music on 12 stems. I started with the bed tracks — such as strings and horns — by putting them in the middle height position (there are height panners in Auro). In Atmos, the speakers just off the screen, not behind the screen — what we liked to call the ‘band shell’ channels — served as a really good place to put the orchestration (I created Objects out of those orchestration stems), and opened up the front three speakers quite a bit for dialogue. Most of the time I would keep the big drums and percussion across the front, occasionally move it into the room but then bring it straight back.
ADR: PARDON MY FRENCH AT: Word has it that Jodie Foster’s dialogue was all re-recorded? Chris Scarabosio: The studio wanted Jodie Foster’s accent changed. She had done her original performance with a French accent, and a lot of test audience people weren’t responding well to that, so all her lines were re-recorded in a more American accent. AT: A huge task. CS: Yes, a huge undertaking. Vince Renaud, the ADR supervisor/dialogue supervisor, did a great job working with Jodie Foster, who’s a phenomenal looper — her ADR skills are really good. So it was a combination of being vigilant about getting the performances as tight with her mouth as possible, but recognising that some of the different inflections meant that getting a perfect lock every time was impossible. AT: How do you smooth the edges? CS: EQ and reverb are always the first stops — matching the tonal balance and space that’s captured on set in production. But I also use a plugin called The Decapitator. It’s a plug-in designed to provide extreme distortion, but I use it like a preamp to colour the voice in such a way that it doesn’t sound like it just got recorded in the studio. Ultimately, it has to sound part of it all happening that day on the set. Even with sound effects. I don’t want anyone to know that whatever we did happened in a studio. I just want it to feel like it happened right then when the cameras were rolling.
Mixing the final on an Avid D-Control console at Sharpe Sound studios, Vancouver. Photo: Lee Smith
AT: No doubt it will be interesting to mix in Auro and Atmos from scratch.
like one big living entity. But it’s more involved than just panning some stuff around.
CS: That’s right. I think I would take an approach that was more dimensional. Elysium’s music track is quite dense and you could see how the additional channels would allow you to spread elements out in such a way that it still feels completely cohesive, but with a little more room to breathe. Saying that, I think the original 7.1 mix came out pretty good!
I never wanted to use the system as some kind of gimmick or novelty. I just want everything that’s happening on the screen to be more dramatic, so you truly experience it. It’s not like, ‘oh, I see what they’re doing there’. It’s more like: ‘I dunno what’s happening, but I’m totally involved in what’s going on’.
AT: Were you concerned that the extra channels of the new formats made it feel like the fabric of the music mix was getting stretched too far?
AT: Auro or Atmos?
CS: That was the danger. And pulling it apart really does change how the music plays. There were times when I had to check myself: ‘Okay, now this feels like a different mix; it feels like a bunch of different stems’. It was a matter of having the time to carefully place the instruments then apply some reverb in between to glue it all together. AT: So reverb was an answer? CS: Reverb on specific channels, and using reverb not to create more ambience but to localise the ambience to begin to transform the entire room into one big speaker. I think that’s ultimately the goal: to utilise the whole theatre to make it sound
IF YOU HAD TO CHOOSE
Chris Scarabosio: In some ways Auro was pretty satisfying because, especially for the music, you can spread it out quickly — it’s easy and it sounds wider and bigger. It’s immediately a case of: ‘oh that’s great’. But it doesn’t give you the range and complexity of Atmos. So I think Atmos definitely would have an edge over Auro in the long run. Craig Berkey: I liked different aspects of both. But I’d like to have something neither new format provides: more speakers horizontally across the front, so we can pan dialogue more easily — it would anchor the dialogue and sound better. I’d sacrifice the extra speakers around the theatre for that. I’ve never thought to myself, ‘I wish I had speakers on the ceiling’. I’ve never said that. Maybe others have.
OLD TECH REBORN Dave Whitehead: The Elysium earth is a wasteland, where all the technology is old. Neil said he wanted the PC noises to be more like Commodore 64 type noises — really old tech. Neil is a very good communicator in terms of what he wants and definitely what he doesn’t want. He’s good on the brief right from the start. From the beginning he said he loves CB radios going on constantly in the background. So you’ve got the constant babble of messages coming over radios, which contributes to the oppressive feel on earth. Chris Scaraposio: I’m a big fan of Speakerphone [the plug-in from Audio Ease]; some of the results you can get from that are pretty incredible.
AT: It’s not like you’ll be given more time to mix movies now there’s Auro and Atmos? CS: You’d like to think you might, but you’re probably right! But I think Dolby is talking about ways to approximate the array systems in a smaller room so that even without all the speakers you can get close in a premix. AT: What did Neil Blomkamp think? CS: He liked the extra clarity and definition; the dialogue seemed clearer; and it felt like the room had become bigger.
FEATURE
r outh broadcaste y l a n o ti a n e th s . with Triple J a dour In The Grass n le p S n o AT is embedded lt u a ss assets for an a mobilises all its Mark Davie Story: le J Courtesy of Trip Artist Images:
Mud, mud, mud: it’s all anyone can talk about. But Splendour In The Mud? Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. It’s day three of the music festival, and Triple J Mornings presenter Alex Dyson is trudging around North Byron Parklands trying to pick out potential interviewees to pepper the live broadcast with a bit of “colour and movement”. But so far, everything’s coming up brown. It’s a tough gig. If punters aren’t genuinely lost for words when they figure out who he is, they’re often too shy, or it’s too early in the morning after too many the night before. Fifteen seconds of fame has never gone begging as many times as that morning. IN THE TRENCHES
Live music broadcasts are tough gigs, and no one does them quite like Triple J. Live At The Wireless is one of the mainstays of the national youth broadcaster’s portfolio. The station has built up
a formidable archive of live recordings ever since its formation as 2JJ in 1975. It’s a proud heritage and one Cameron McCauley, Executive Producer Operations & Live Music, is charged with continuing. Splendour In The Grass is the biggest outing of the year for Triple J’s Live team, with both the Sydney and Melbourne recording trucks on site. The Sydney crew feed live-to-air mixes of most of the Supertop mainstage to the Outside Broadcast (OB) tent, while the Melbourne team take care of the Mix-Up tent for playback in delay. Rounding out the lineup is a recording rig setup at the GW McLennan tent, capturing sets for mixing back at base. The live recording teams aren’t flying solo, a big portion of Triple J’s personnel are here.
The trucks feed the OB tent overseen by OB Technical Producer Linda Radclyffe, with the help of IT Systems Manager, Christian McGregor. Once the satellite is in position, ISDN lines dialled up, the fibre has been run out, wireless links tested, and a makeshift studio set up, then everyone else starts rolling in. There’s the names you might know: Richard Kingsmill, Zan Rowe, Tom and Alex, and Linda Marigliano, accompanied by producers, panel operators, videographers, bloggers, photographers, all overseen by station manager Chris Scaddan.
Down a central table, lined with Shure Beta 58s in wind socks, the presenters are just one part of the Triple J puzzle. When the broadcast is rolling, other than a couple of producers, barely an eye is on Breakfast stars Tom and Alex quipping through a Peking Duk interview. Backs to the talent, they’re not ignoring the radio stars, they’re blogging and Facebooking about it, and uploading footage of the Triple J-dubbed Mayor of Splendour — a wasted competition-winner in a Wookie suit crowdsurfing his way into 15 seconds. Every bit helps to paint the picture of a three-day event where music brackets and loud cheers are only the foundation on which the festival sets itself apart. There’s Beci Orpin’s craft hut, where you can fashion bedazzled rock star hangers with Patience from the Grates; the APRA tent hosting panels by ex-J’s alum Robbie Buck, Kram from Spiderbait, and Dan from Art Vs Science on the art of crafting a song; rows of multicultural food stalls; high street fashion lumped into shipping container pop stores; and a festival-long Amish performance piece complete with a barn shell, wagon, haystacks and goats — though after watching them for 20 minutes, they weren’t the most industrious lot, and you could always find a few of them knocking back a few in the VIP bar after hours.
(clockwise from top left) The renovated Sydney truck rolled in and ready for its first gig; Triple J host Linda Marigliano gives TV On The Radio producer/guitarist Dave Sitek a spruice up; the satellite dish connects the OB to the world; Greg Wales is pretty happy about his new SSL C200; Passion Pit lifts the muddy mood; Linda Radclyffe, Cameron McCauley & Christian McGregor; Triple J host Alex Dyson ensures the Mayor of Splendour is ready for business.
MOVING COLOUR
It’s these details Alex is helping fill in as he waves his HHB Flashmic DRM85 in people’s faces. If Kingsmill is the arbiter of taste, Alex is the measure of Triple J’s youthful health. In fine form, he’s the quick whip, loveable rogue who can hold down his end of big interviews, and next minute, throw himself in the mosh pit with a GoPro taped to a bottle. This is somewhere in-between. The HHB is simpler than the old two-track Marantz, mic and headphone combo, but the job isn’t. After hearing “foooking awesome!” or just plain “awesome” too many times, Alex finally lands what looks to be a winner. The night before, Luke Steele, the lead singer of Empire of the Sun, had crowned an audience member. He’d stumbled upon the lucky punter, Louise, still sporting the spoils — a costume jewellery headdress of mirror shards and blue sequins — impossible to miss in the morning sun. And hopefully, impossible to miss the scoop. But the front row screamer from the night before wasn’t half as loud as her crown and it got off to a timid start. On the way back, he catches an Islander security guard telling it like it is, and a kid in a mexican poncho and latex panda mask. It’s classic book by its cover stuff. The security guard’s classic indifference works, and while panda mask would have made great TV, it’s borderline radio. Back in the OB tent, Alex whips through the edits like a seasoned ProTools operator — auditioning, trimming, levelling, mastering and appending IDs like Triple J’s classic ‘We Love Music’ in split seconds. He does all this in a program called Netia. It’s the hub of Triple J’s programming. Anyone on the network can access anything on
Netia. So when Alex is done slicing and dicing in the Snippet tab, he labels it with the AIR suffix to show it’s ready for broadcast, and immediately, it’s available anywhere across Australia. Promising ones can often hit the cutting floor: Lost the vibe, not descriptive enough, told it better the first time. One begins vanilla, but is saved at the death by an exhaled guffaw with perfect comic timing. Others can pull it off just by sounding enthusiastic enough. Youth is the demographic, so youth makes the cut. RADIO DEMAND
The 18-24 youth market is exactly where Triple J wants to be. But the landscape has changed: with media consumption on mobile growing every day, streaming services like Spotify and Rdio seem perfectly placed to muscle in. And indeed, the lure of stream-on-demand has eaten into the market’s Time Spent Listening (TSL). But Triple J’s audience has continued to grow year on year, reaching almost 1.8m average listeners per week across five capital cities in the most recent Nielsen surveys. Breaking down exactly how Triple J is growing while radio recedes, is tricky. But one thing is for sure, while names like Rdio don’t suggest a shyness for competition, Triple J doesn’t exactly
A BIT FURTHER DOWNSTREAM We all identify with the ABC in some way. But being minority stakeholders (your share might only be about 0.000005%), the corporation can feel impenetrable at times. Triple J’s Unearthed is one of those programs purporting to lift the veil. And it works. Hundreds of tracks are submitted each day, building a library of new music unlike any other, and if Triple J radio shows are the tip of the funnel, in any other industry, it would be a glut, an oversupply. In truth, getting on radio is still bloody hard, and typically comes to those with the right backing, publicists, timing, taste, talent, and of course, song. So while there are a number of success stories, and presenters like Alex review a couple of albums a week — others, more. And Unearthed slots are up for grabs at most major festivals (there were four at Splendour). The odds of getting traditional airplay are still closer to the lottery’s. But the gesture is nice. Building a community, giving it the chance of making it to a bigger stage, and providing a lot of content to Unearthed digital radio. But best of all, it’s as close to the streamon-demand services as Triple J gets. A totally independent stream-on-demand network of almost completely under the radar artists. You could argue that Triple J has been in the game longer than anyone else.
Scaddan: “There are very few things culturally that can match what you feel in the live music environment. And we always aim for the absolute highest quality in recording and mixing. Greg Wales, Cam McCauley, Chris Thompson, have all got reputations as being some of the best sound engineers in the country, so we’re lucky to have those guys mixing our stuff on a daily basis.” SEEING RED TAPE
Like the man said, quality is really important. When you only have one shot at recording Nirvana live, while in their prime, it better be good. Each time the trucks roll out, they’re capturing an historic record of what’s happening in the youth demographic. A record that’s going to be around a while. There have been plenty of technology changes over the years, and the ABC has engaged with every format under the sun. Right up until the millennium, you’d find two-inch, 24-track analogue tape machines running in the trucks.
The C200 console is a 48-bus inline board. “Like a normal 4K, small-fader/large-fader arrangement,” explains McCauley. “But because 48 is not enough, we route directly from the mic pre to the recorder, and directly from the mic pre to the main faders. So any gain we adjust on the channel is going to the recorder as well as the faders. It’s a one-to-one metering situation.” That oneto-one situation means that while Greg is mixing, Josh is watching the peaks in Reaper and calling them out on the fly. While the metering is effectively the same scale, Reaper is a little shy on peaks, and tends to say it’s clipping early when the SSL isn’t bothered. It presents a couple of problems for Greg, in that, gain changes at the preamp can drastically affect his balance and dynamics structure, and engaging a pad will instantly drop the level of that channel 12dB, not the best sound mid-song. Over the weekend, the two strike a balance of paying attention to sustained peaks, and letting the others fly.
Then there were the ‘intermediate’ days of digital tape. At first, it was three daisy-chained Tascam DA-88s to get to 24 channels. “Buying tape for a set of DA-88s was about $400,” recalls McCauley. “That ran for 45 minutes. So you had boxes and boxes of tapes, and the machines took 10 seconds to sync up. And then one would just shit itself. Those days were really complicated.” After that came the 24-track Mackie 2496, which was a “great price” and syncing two machines wasn’t too much trouble, but it was “unreliable”. Then the Tascam X-48 hard-disk recorder came out, which is still used as the rig under the GW McLennan stage. “It changed everything, because you could record everything easily,” said McCauley.
see it that way, and certainly isn’t scared by technological disruption. “We think of ourselves as not just a radio brand,” said station manager Chris Scaddan. “But as a brand that goes right across platforms.” So rather than hiding, Triple J has an app on Spotify and is a personality you can follow on Rdio and Deezer. Scaddan: “We see it as another space we can help people discover new music. Our Hottest 100 list is one of the most popular ways on Spotify for people to discover music.” Indeed, Triple J has a knack for programming that becomes part of Australian music culture. The Hottest 100 is probably its best known, but Like A Version (Volume 7 passed platinum status, doubling the previous year’s sales), One Night Stand, and Live At The Wireless are all big contributors. And all involve Triple J’s Live Music team. According to Scaddan, live music has always been at the forefront of what Triple J stands for ever since it started in the ’70s. Whether it was going down to a hotel to capture a band on the verge of breaking big, or recording a festival and bringing that experience to listeners all around Australia. Splendour In The Grass is one Triple J has grown with over the years.
But after a while, even 48 tracks posed a ceiling too low for an ever-growing channel list. Going over some of the channel counts for the weekend, Passion Pit came to 47, Mumford & Sons over 50, and once you add four audience mics to that, a four-piece rock band with a few banjos can be reaching over 60 inputs. These days, the analogue split goes into DHD Audio converters under the stage that feed two RME MADI cards in the truck for a total of 128 channels. A second pair of RME cards in a separate computer act as a total redundancy. McCauley: “To be able to spend two grand on an RME card, and $600 on a PC. For that amount of money, you can easily have two of them.” Also keeping the costs down is Reaper. One of the guys doing promos at the ABC had been banging on about how good the DAW was, but McCauley couldn’t be bothered learning another bit of software. After shelling out big bucks for another software package with features he didn’t need, McCauley decided to give Reaper a go for tracking, and hasn’t looked back since. McCauley: “You put the MADI card in, it sees all the inputs. You can use any old computer, and the CPU trickles over at five percent. You can customise all the menus and take everything off except the Record button. And the price is really
good too. We bought the commercial license for just over 100 bucks. It’s crazy.” Back in the studios, they’re still using ProTools to mix. A lot of plug-ins are near essential, like Drumagog, because “if you’ve tracked a horrible kick and snare, that’s what you’ve got,” said McCauley. And they haven’t taken the time to assess their VST position — Reaper’s plug-in format. But when the truck is docked, it seems a waste to not have it running as another fully fledged post-production studio. McCauley reckons he might have to learn a new editing program after all. OUT OF THE CAGE
ABC Radio doesn’t have one central OB department. ABC TV does, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish. And likewise, there’s no central OB store. There used to be. Up until the ’80s, one gentleman looked after all the gear that Classic FM, Radio National and Triple J took out on the field. But in a cost-cutting measure, he was let go. Which turned out to be very shortsighted, because now every station duplicates and triplicates the same gear. And as the gear spread out, a dilution of the knowledge occurred with it. There’s still a bit of to- and fro-ing between the stations — everyone helps each other out with advice when it’s required — and they all share the Major Production Areas (MPA). In Sydney, Studio 227 is the contemporary recording space, on Triple J’s floor is the P63 mixdown suite, which is the same control room as 227, just without the live space. And downstairs is the Eugene Goossens Hall. It’s a similar situation in Melbourne. So while they might not be in each other’s pockets, there’s still time for a bit of jiggery-pokery. Classic FM: “We’re just down at the Opera House doing a balance.” Triple J: “What, balancing three microphones? We were doing 64 the other night.” Cue outrage. While the ABC may never return to the central cage model, over the last six years, it has made the move to standardise major pieces of gear: namely, the consoles have all been switched to SSL. The work surface of the C200 is now common from the live recording trucks, to the studio in Adelaide, to the Eugene Goossens Hall where Classic FM can usually be found. A 72-input Duality (the first console installed in the replacement program) is the odd-one out, but still has that familiar SSL manner. Funnily enough, even though Sydney is Triple J’s hub, the Sydney recording truck was the last to get its C200. Splendour In The Grass was the first test for the newly refurbished truck, and the sense of relief was palpable. The console it replaced was an ageing Euphonix System 5. A good console, but this one had seen better days. Last April, the crew took the truck up to Dalby, around 200km west of Brisbane, for Triple J’s own One Night Stand gig. It’s a big deal, the station’s own show, all live to air, and on TV. Because Sydney’s truck was the closest, they drove it up. The schedule was to set up on Friday for Saturday morning sound checks and an
evening show. Everything was going fine, and the crew were about to knock off at 6pm, when they were getting a funny line on one channel. After checking another, and another, it appeared they’d simply lost control of the mic preamps across the board — all of them entering a strange high impedance mode, layering distortion on every channel. It wasn’t the first time the console had played up, but this was cutting it fine. McCauley: “It was nine o’clock, we tried everything, but nothing worked. We needed to get another console. We were used to using Digico and an SD8 had the right amount of inputs, so I rang IJS in Brisbane, but they didn’t have one available. So we called up Drew at Group Technologies, he was out to dinner somewhere, and asked him if he knew of an SD8 in South East Queensland. There was a guy on the Gold Coast who had one — four hours there, four back — we could make it work.
“
“I rang the guy. He was out on a gig, but the
We usually go live-to-air after the second song, we never go from the top because it’s impossible to do. Anyone that says they do, it’s complete bullshit. I mean, you can with 12 inputs, but 30 or 40?
”
console was free the next morning. He asked, “Where are you guys?” “Dalby,” we said. “About 100km west of Toowoomba.” He said, “No way! I’m in Toowoomba right now, I’ll bring it out to you tonight.” “So we pulled the other desk out, plonked in the SD8, plugged in the fibre and it all worked. We were so lucky. I don’t know what else we would have done. We’d had problems with it in town before, but never so isolated.” That was the last straw. But it’s all better now. SPLENDOUR BENDER
All is not silent at the Triple J Outside Broadcast (OB) tent. There’s no flashing ‘Quiet Please’ or ’On Air’ signage. It’s just another open-sided tent backstage, coated with red carpet tiles, the Triple J drum logo, and a noise floor above 70dBA. Bass is the constant companion of everyone here. Its omnidirectional boom travels the 50m from the Supertop main stage. And the mix spill is so clear, you can annunciate along with Ian Kenny from Birds Of Tokyo. This is live broadcasting on the field for the young guns of radio.
Even the lead-lined walls of ABC Radio’s newlytreated mobile recording truck can’t compete with stacks of d&b double-18 subs. Inside, distinguishing between the low end coming off stage and out of the Dynaudio studio monitors is down to timing. Sitting only 20m from the front of the stage, the bass leakage arrives 60ms late. The arrival of each late boom makes it sound like Marcus Mumford should get some drum lessons, so awkward is the timing. It might be terrible working conditions for any mixer trying to use their ears but this is live broadcasting, and it’s as good as it gets. Greg Wales sits behind the recently installed SSL C200 — a half a million dollar console that goes a long way to easing the pain. He’ll be parked here for most of the weekend, with engineers David Bates and Josh Craig. He’s one of two Triple J mixers onsite. The other, Dave Manton, is parked in a similar truck with engineer Richard Girvan behind the Mix Up tent across the other side of the North Byron Parklands. Together, they’ll mix most of the bands playing Splendour, while Josh and fellow assistant engineer Ben Northmore man a portable rig that captures some of the talent on the GW Mclennan stage so it can be mixed later back at Triple J’s base in Ultimo, NSW. GOING LIVE
Over the festival, I developed a real appreciation for what these guys have to contend with when mixing live-to-air. Firstly, there’s the source, which is completely out of their control. Bad mic positions, out-of-tune instruments or off-key vocals, wind noise, plosive performances, dropped and kicked mics, monitor feedback, back of room slapback — it’s a crapshoot that can unfold like a disaster movie on the video monitor and render an SSL console into a blunt instrument. On the other end of the chain is the audience, listening to a compressed feed coming off the back of an Optimod processor over the airwaves and through any one of a million different types of radios. At least here, a few different listening devices can help simulate the diversity — Audio-Technica noise-cancelling headphones, low-level Fostex 6301 speakers in mono, and Dynaudio AIR15 and BM15A monitors. And there’s always an off-air feed pumped back down the monitoring section, but giving the feed anything more than a cursory listen can have you chasing your tail all set. In the middle of this are two other mixes that play on the brain. There’s the studio album cut of the song, which gives a sense of what the artist is trying to achieve and takes up a more backof-the-mind position. And then the FOH mix is also run up the board to give a ballpark level of effects, vibe, and balance emphasis. Oh, and they’ll typically have a feed of the effects too. Not to mention, they could have a manager standing over their shoulder. This is all lumped on top of the pressure to whip a mix into shape within two songs that will go liveto-air to millions, so you can cut time, overdubs, or re-mixing out of the equation too. These guys are on top of their game.
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One of the most important things to remember, and often forgot, when mixing a live show is that you’re mixing a live show, not a studio recording. The balance of audience and ambience to onstage sound is crucial. There’s that classic debate over whether to recreate the sound of the record or not. But for McCauley (who was Greg’s predecessor and has mixed hundreds of bands) it’s a bar that’s pointless to try and live up to. McCauley: “You’ve got to mix in the right amount of ambience, so when someone listens to it, it doesn’t sound exactly like the original and they start to twig that it’s a live recording. Rather than thinking, ‘That didn’t sound right. Where was the bottom end? And, that vocal’s low.’” The first step is obviously a great audience mic. Over the years, they reckon they’ve tried everything under the sun, but keep coming back to Sennheiser MKH-416 shotguns for the balanced frequency response and off-axis rejection. They just work. Each stage has two stereo pairs, rigged about three metres up the truss at the edges of the stage, inside of the line array. One pair points a little outwards towards the back corners of the tent, while the other pair point at the barrier just in front of the FOH position. It’s a balance between the big roar of a capacity crowd and the more in-your-face excitement of the first few rows. And if there’s only a small crowd, they’ve still got options. McCauley: “It’s the hardest part; trying to make a mix sit together yet sound like it was at a venue. It’s easy to mix it all together and just turn the audience mics up at the end of the song. If you’re standing in the crowd you feel it in your body; there’s low end, and the structure is vibrating around you, which has a certain tone in itself. There’s certain elements of distortion you have to get back in the mix.” FINE LINE CHECK
In preparation for the first mix on Day 1, Greg starts building an EQ library from the Mumford & Sons setup day line check. It’s a loose starting point, and over the course of the weekend he’ll add and shape dynamic presets too. But the most important thing is phase. A poorly placed set of overheads can wreck the whole thing. “If they’re offset,” said McCauley. “The snare will never power the centre of the mix.” And typically there’s a judicious amount of high-pass filtering to help any phase issues.
PANEL OPERATION The connection between producer, panel operator and presenter is tight. The panel operator never sits here. They’re on point. Back in the studio, the presenters will do the panel operating, but it’s easier this way. They talk in seconds. Everything is an inevitable countdown: “We’ve got 24 seconds to the news. So we’re going to come in at 56:16, but we need to be out by 56:40, so I can play Cold War Kids.” It’s a familiar system, and one that’s been around for decades. Even the panels haven’t changed at all. Sure, they might be digital now, but there’s no EQ, no auxes, just buttons and faders, and DSP in the box. McCauley: “There are presets for different teams: Breakfast will have their own, and so will Drive. The evening show will do a lot of telephone calls, which are EQ’d and compressed a little bit. Some presenters are more dynamic, so we might use a compressor, while others have very good mic technique, and you might filter someone’s microphone specifically for their use. A standard guest preset is flat besides a roll off at 80Hz, no compression, gain set to 56dB or something. We’ve got a lot of latitude because any level mismatching gets fixed up at the end by the Optimod. “Choice of microphone is probably the main thing. We use Shure Beta 58s in the OB. We’ve tried all kinds, condensers, everything, but these just seem to work. In the studio we’re using condensers, we used to have Neumann U89s that were there before I started. They sounded absolutely fantastic, but you can’t afford to have six of them in a studio, because they eventually start breaking. The other problem with large diaphragm condensers in the studio is when you have four guest mics open plus the host mic — you can hear a lot of the room sound. In an OB, we’ve just got to make sure guests have their lips right on the mic, and it will sound nice and uniform. And the rejection is really good.” You also never know what will happen at an OB, a Beta 58 centres neatly between audio quality and robustness. Headphones, for instance, are reduced to commodities at the rate they’re consumed by wayward boots. “They’re a throwaway item,” said McCauley. “We get them for $40 a pair, and if we get six months use out of them, that’s fantastic. There’s no point spending good money on headphones. As long as they can hear themselves, it’s fine.”
McCauley: “Phase becomes far more important because it’s across every channel. And because it changes every set. If you get phase right, all the hard work’s done. You can get a mix together quickly just using phase and highpass filters. You can’t carve out a channel for five minutes, you’ve got to get a mix together in half a song. We usually go live-to-air after the second song, we never go from the top because it’s impossible to do. Anyone that says they do, it’s complete bullshit. I mean, you can with 12 inputs, but 30 or 40? You’ve got to massage it. Using those techniques, by the end of the second song, you can call the OB and tell them you’re ready to go.” Because nothing on stage is in isolation, the mixers tend not to get stuck listening to a single source for any more than a split second. Rather, Greg might try and tame a boxy drum sound by listening to the kit plus the drum vocal, and dipping the vocal at 300Hz to alleviate the mud of the drum fill. There are plenty of these situations where a lack of isolation requires a balancing act. McCauley: “If the guitar player is singing and he’s got an amp behind him, when he moves out of the way the amp feeds straight into his mic. You can’t just gate everything, because it gets too dynamic and sounds strange. It’s a combination of phase, EQ and balance to get on top of it. Sometimes you turn everything up and it sounds amazing. Other times, it’s appalling and becomes a fight.” The goal is to quickly arrive at a balance that works. There’s no automation here, and if you’re rushing and diving all over the mix the whole time, something’s wrong. McCauley: “It’s the same as studio stuff: taming the bottom end, and vocal level.” These days, most bands have background playback of some sort. Either a simple stereo track they play along to, or more elaborate breakdowns of stems. Onstage, Empire Of The Sun is a three-piece, Luke Steele sings and plays guitar, alongside a multi-instrumentalist, a drummer and four dancers. But the drums also have electronic drums playing underneath them. It can pose a problem trying to mix the two together. “If they line up it’s great, but
see a lot of movement, you know your mix isn’t right. Getting a mix together, you can tell how the vocal is sitting just by watching the VU. The spectrum analyser is really handy as well. At a festival like this, the subs are booming and you think it’s sounding awesome, but then you look at the spectrum analyser and there might be nothing below 100Hz.”
the real drummer will never line up exactly with the tempo,” said McCauley. “It helps if you can use the playback tracks as a bed, but you have to stop the playback kick drum from flamming with the real kick drum. You have to roll the bottom end off the real one, then the kit will sit on top really well. If you try to make a massive kick drum sound out of the real one and mix it with the replay version, it will never work. There’s too much energy competing there.” Dave also puts some slow compression on playback, generally with a ratio of 2.5:1. It’s “just to keep it in check if there are any big swells,” he said. “They’re often just stems off the record, so it can be quite dynamic. It goes through the Optimod compressor of doom, and it’s not very forgiving of sudden changes in low sub. When you have a big bass sweep, that’s when you’ll hear your whole mix drop and come back up again.”
WORLDCASTING The blue APT Worldcast Eclipse boxes convert analogue to digital and output either IP or ISDN. McCauley: “If we’re just out doing a normal OB, we book a dual ISDN circuit, so it’s 128k stereo. Plug the codec into ISDN mode, and all it does is dial a phone number to the ABC. But ISDN is really going out of favour. It’s just holding together; prone to dropouts and a little flaky. We’re interested in going down the IP route. It’s basically the same thing, all Telstra is doing is converting ISDN into their backbone anyway, with IP you’re getting rid of that step. They’re multicast as well, so you can feed the APT box one input and it can broadcast to multiple receivers. “The ABC leases fibre between all the capital city studios, and just strips that out into APT codecs. So you have Sydney to Melbourne Voice 1, and Brisbane to Sydney Voice 2, Brisbane to Sydney Music 1.” All of which are available at any time to anyone with the right box to decode it. It’s a simple system, but one that works.
LOUDEST PART IS THE HARDEST
Finding a monitoring balance is one of the hardest parts of the job. With the PA raging just next door, the temptation is to monitor loud. But according to McCauley, “The louder you monitor, the worse it sounds. If it sounds good quiet, it will sound good loud. If it sounds good loud, it may not sound good quiet. You’re not that awesome, your ears are just shutting down and turning themselves off.” To help his ears, Greg uses a combination of hardware VU meters they had to dig up, pure peak monitors and a spectrum analyser. McCauley: “The VU is a very useful tool, the peak meters are going to tell you the actual signal, but you can see the general power of the mix on the VU. The more you fine-tune a mix, you should see less movement on the VU. If you
They also use two stages of compression on the final output. In the Sydney truck, an Al Smart C2 compressor is set to a ratio of between 2:1 and 3:1, an attack of 1ms, and auto release. The settings change every now and again, but the aim remains the same: to help glue the mix together. After that, everything goes into the TC System 6000, which as well as serving up effects does the final limiting and multi-band compression. The System 6000 splits the signal into mid-side. In the ‘mid’, the attack is set consistently across the board at 25ms, but the release gets progressively longer the lower you go, while the ratio gets higher. The ‘sides’ have the same release pattern, but a shorter attack time that gets even shorter at the high frequencies. The threshold is also tapered in the ‘mid’, coming in a bit earlier down low to keep the kick and bass under control. “We have gain reduction in the lower mids,” said Greg. “If I have the Threshold around -2dB, that reflects the curve. So if I’m not sure what’s going on in the lower mids and lows, it will help me out if it gets too crazy.” BUMP & GRIND
It’s Day 3, and down to a bump and grind: grind out the day, then bump out. The queue for coffees has doubled in size. A pick-me-up that barely scratches last night’s itch. The Triple J crew will be ready to go tonight after whoever Paul Piticco gives Frank Ocean’s headline slot to. Alt-J is a firm favourite around the traps, but they’ll have to leap a few bands to go from their mystery band slot to festival closer. And in the end Of Monsters & Men move up one to headline. The mud is everywhere. Everyone stepped into the gumboots on Day 1, and they never came off. It was a teething year for Splendour, having moved into the new site co-owned with Falls Festival, and there’s still plenty of infrastructure to lay. The long weekend has taken its toll on the Mayor of Splendour, and he hasn’t made it in for his 10 o’clock. Linda Marigliano gets a hazy Chewbacca on the line, chastising him for standing her up. The call finishes with Alex jumping on the mic and prompting the sleepy Wookie for one last hurrah, “Did you tear the lid off it last night?” Without hesitation, the kid lets off a big roar, “Riipped it offf!” It’s energising, a bit of a pep up to spur the troops on as they search for the last bits of colour and movement amongst the mud.
REGULARS
MAC AUDIO The iPad: we’re getting the band back together. Column: Anthony Garvin
I’ve recently formed an iPad-based techno outfit. Originally it was as an experiment, but as I’ve delved deeper into making music on an iPad I’ve been discovering just how fun, creative, and practical it can be. Sure, there’s no iPadorientated record labels, studios, or production courses yet (I think), but the device is increasingly becoming a formidable production tool that is worth a look-in, particularly if you already are in possession of one. I’m a big fan of the touchscreen interface of the iPad, and in previous Mac Notes I’ve been through some of the newer hardware tools for the iPad, and mused over some of the untapped potential of iOS apps as a platform… But now I thought it worth going over some of the essentials for music and audio production on the iPad. HARDWARE CONNECTIVITY
To turn your iPad into a more serious production tool, it’s going to require some connectivity to the outside world of audio and MIDI interfaces. In recent times, brands such as IK Multimedia, Yamaha, Apogee, RME and Focusrite are making iPad-compatible hardware, some of which plug directly into the iPad, and some of which simply have a USB connection. How exactly do you plug USB into your iPad? For those who own any iPad with the 30-pin (older) connector, get hold of Apple’s Camera Connection Kit, available for $35. Part of the kit is a USB socket for your iPad, which will interface with any compatible audio or MIDI device. Similarly, for the latest iPad (and iPad Mini), Apple’s Lightning-to-USB Camera Adapter (also $35) serves the same purpose. Added to this, in theory, almost any class-complaint USB device (ie. one that works on Mac OS without installing software drivers) will work with the iPad. However, some have presented issues. Often it is a power problem and as such a powered USB hub
between iPad and USB device can resolve this — plus allow you to connect multiple USB devices like Audio and MIDI interfaces. SOFTWARE CONNECTIVITY
The simplest way of transferring audio data between your iPad and the outside world is via iTunes on a desktop or laptop. Most apps that can import or export audio will allow you to synchronise your iPad with iTunes on your Mac to pull off (or add) audio files. To do so, click on your iPad in iTunes (when connected), select ‘Apps’ and then scroll down to ‘File sharing’. From here you can drag and drop files either to or from the iPad. However, this method has already become old school in many ways, with many apps now adding Dropbox functionality. For example, Fingerlab’s DM1 drum machine app now has Dropbox import and export, from which you can load custom drum samples to create much more complex drum kits. All that’s needed is some source files preloaded into your Dropbox. Then once you’ve got a bangin’ loop, it just as easy to export it out to your Dropbox account. Also worth exploring is a feature called ‘AudioCopy’, developed by Sonoma Wire Works and Retronyms. It allows for copying and pasting of audio between apps on your iPad, and is as simple as, for example, making a loop in Yamaha’s TNR-i (a Tenori-On software clone), AudioCopying it, and then AudioPasting it into iKaossilator (Korg’s Kaoss pad-style app) for some sampled-loop manipulation fun. It’s these kinds of features that, for me, really shake up my workflow and get me into another headspace, and by doing so, make it so much easier to create new and interesting sounds, ideas and songs. SYNCHRONISING MULTIPLE iPADS
So, you’re now thinking about starting an iPad band, but your iElectribe drummer ain’t the best and you’re wondering how to keep him
(it?) in time… Well, Korg’s apps are some of my favourites (particularly the iPolysix), because along with great sound, they have developed a technology called WIST. The acronym is Wireless Sync-Start Technology and essentially, using this feature on any compatible app (which are far more than Korg’s own) will allow you to wirelessly sync two iPads — one as the master and one as the slave. Unfortunately, WIST only works between two iPads (hopefully there will be expanded features down the track?), which can be a problem if you’re trying to sync the whole band. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that while WIST is definitely easy for starting, stopping and syncing, the latter may not be essential — the inherent timing in the iPad is fantastic. Without any synchronisation ‘the band’ and I were able to run apps like Korg’s iMS20 (for sequenced bass), DM1 (for drums) and Akai’s iMPC (for samples) together in time, simply by using a bit of coordination to cue the playback of each app’s pattern by ear. All patterns stayed in time for what felt like indefinitely, which was a pleasant surprise considering the timing flaws that other hardware and software have had over the years. WHERE TO START
There’s just too many to mention more specifically, but here are two starting points: AudioCopy Compatibility list: www. sonomawireworks.com/iphone/audiocopy WIST-compatible apps: www.korguser.net/wist Lastly, make sure you are running the latest version of iOS on your iPad – I found that latency greatly improved with newer releases.
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REVIEW
ABLETON PUSH
Controller For Live
Ableton’s controller will push all the right buttons, especially if you have a thing for Isomorphic note layouts, all-in-one drum arranging, and pads that glow all the colours of the rainbow.
NEED TO KNOW
Review: Tim Shiel
PRICE $699 CONTACT CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or info@cmi.com.au
PROS Multi-colour pads enhance feedback and Live Set integration Pad real estate opens up Drum Rack possibilities Built-in isomorphic note layouts Built to last with quality, customisable pads
CONS Limited LED display readouts can be confusing
SUMMARY Ableton’s first in-house controller for Live is more colourful and productive than its forebears. Push easily navigates the main modes of working in Live, bringing more production nuance to the fingertips with intuitive multi-colour pads. A hybrid Drum arrangement and isomorphic note layouts are just two of the ways Push will have you creating music quicker and easier.
Try explaining to your mother why your studio is filled with keyboards that don’t actually make any sound, and you’ll realise that the modern MIDI controller is a recent phenomenon with only a short history. Generally cheap and cheerful bits of kit, these plastic controllers might feature keys, pads, faders, knobs or some combination of all these. Though unable to generate sound themselves, they can liberate a world of synthesis hidden deep in the bowels of your computer. Utilitarian and affordable, they’ve played an important role in the ongoing democratisation of music production, allowing producers and performers to unlock waveforms stuck inside their laptops in a way they feel comfortable with — using their fingers. As useful as these devices are, it can be hard to think of them as being musical instruments. After all, you don’t need to hook up a grand piano like an inkjet printer for it to generate sound. But Ableton would prefer you refer to its newly developed controller, Push, as exactly that: a ‘music making instrument’. FOCUS ON THE ACTION
Developed in-house by Ableton (with some engineering assistance from Akai), Push is designed to tightly integrate with Ableton’s flagship DAW, Live. This is made obvious by the central design feature of Push, an eight-by-eight grid of pads that instantly echoes Live’s Session View. This grid is used not just for clip triggering and navigation, but for playing both drums and instruments. One of the more notable differences between Push and previous Live-geared hardware such as Novation’s Launchpad or Akai’s APC is the full gamut of colours available on each pad. By opening up the colour palette, it allows Push to integrate more unique features and increase user feedback. Surrounding the pad grid is a host of backlit buttons that integrate with Live’s transport, scene and workflow systems. These buttons black out when not relevant to Push’s current mode, which is a small but useful detail. There’s also a touch strip, a monochromatic LED display providing text feedback sent from Live’s devices, and a series of endless rotary faders whose functions are context-sensitive. In the top left corner, an embossed black-on-black Ableton logo typifies an overall design philosophy of keeping the unit’s peripheral features in the background, leaving you to focus on where all the action truly is — those full-colour, velocity and pressuresensitive pads. PUSH START
Once you’ve run your fingers over the pads a few times, it’s time to plug Push into your system and open a Live set. Adding a Drum Rack will take you into Push’s drum entry mode, which splits the grid into a step sequencer, a 4x4 grid for drum triggering, and a 4x4 grid for pattern navigation. Having enough grid real estate to simultaneously accommodate a step sequencer and finger triggering section provides a lot of flexibility for improvisation: drum hits can be
programmed into the step sequencer or recorded and overdubbed live, and the pattern navigation allows multiple custom patterns to be generated. The resolution of the sequencer is easily adjustable, and tempo and overall swing amounts are accessible through dedicated rotaries in this mode. Creative beatmakers will find the combination of the Push’s pressure-sensitive pads and the dedicated Note Repeat button instantly rewarding — in-vogue trap-style patterns and drum fills are only a hand’s stretch away — and dedicated buttons for setting drum accents, and doubling and duplicating patterns, round out a full set of features in the Push’s drum entry mode. All the while, the pads change colours in intuitive ways to keep you grounded. A NOTE ON ISOMORPHIC LAYOUTS
Adding an Instrument will take you into Push’s note entry mode, transforming the entire grid into a playable surface adapted to the scale of your choosing or, by default, the key of C major. While scale-folding features such as this — often referred to as ‘isomorphic note layouts’ — have been retrofitted into grid-based controllers like Launchpad via crafty Max for Live scripts, the built-in execution on Push is a first for mainstream controllers. Depending on your scale selection, the colours of the pads change to keep you oriented — root notes are marked deep blue, other notes within the scale are white. If you enter Push’s Chromatic mode, non-scale notes are also shown in the grid but are greyed out. This has the effect of turning Push’s grid into a glorious cheat-sheet for those without the relevant musical training to always play in key; good news for anyone short of their 10,000 hours. It also means that as you explore and learn melodic patterns and chord structures on the grid, these patterns and shapes can be transferred between scales — learn to play a major triad in C major on Push (a simple triangle shape), and you’ve instantly learned to play a major triad in any key. Generous Ableton users are already uploading charts of the most common chord shapes online — which suggests the possibility for Push to be used as an educational tool. If you’re a guitarist or pianist you’ve probably forgotten how intimidating the fretboard or keyboard appeared during those tentative first lessons. An isomorphic note grid, with colour-changing pads as a guide, allows those who are just beginning to understand how music is made to easily access the building blocks of harmony, and its not hard to imagine how the Push could be a used in a music classroom to teach music theory. With an increasing number of electronic music producers looking to conventional music theory principles for inspiration, the Push’s unique isomorphic mode opens the door into a world that can otherwise appear intimidating to self-taught musicians and composers. NOT JUST PADDING
In the end, the Push really is all about those pads, as you’ll be spending the majority of your time on the unit tapping, hitting and pushing them.
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This has the effect of turning Push’s grid into a glorious cheat-sheet for those without the relevant musical training to always play in key
”
I found them to be responsive and expressive, and immediately musical. In instrument mode, I quickly found myself trying to emulate fluid melodic sequences that I might otherwise be executing on a piano or guitar, which is not something any other grid of pads has suggested to me before. The pads are firm and have very little give, and do not depress like the buttonstyle pads found on the Launchpad. Some users have found the pads to be ‘hard’ on fingers — the default settings for pad pressure means that many will find themselves hitting the pads uncommonly hard to achieve maximum velocity hits. Those with a light touch will want to adjust Push’s velocity curve settings hidden away in User mode. Finding the right balance of sensitivity and expression when adjusting velocity and pressure curves is really the key to making the pads “feel right” for you, and some might be disappointed that there aren’t more options in terms of finetuning that balance on the Push, especially given how crucial the pads are to the device’s workflow. For example, a simple calibration tool via Push’s LED display could give visual feedback as to how the pads are reacting to a user’s specific style of playing - or, perhaps, a software-based tool could allow advanced users to draw their own custom velocity curves. The good news is that Ableton is at work on developing these tools in a coming update - in the meantime, elite users in need of deeper customisation could perhaps turn to Max for Live to create custom solutions. LIGHT UP YOUR SESSION
Finally, Push’s session mode rounds out its trio of workflow modes. It allows you to arrange, edit and trigger clips in Live’s Session View. Musical ideas that are generated through improvisation in Push’s note entry modes are automatically captured as clips in Session View, and you can move fluidly to flip between note entry modes and session mode to continue the development and arrangement of your ideas on the fly. The full-colour RGB pads allow Push to accurately relay any custom colour-coding you have made for your clips in Live; this most simple of hardware improvements makes Push instantly feel more tightly integrated with Live’s session than previous clip-triggering hardware options. A note about the lights however — Push can be
powered via USB but to get the full brightness out of your lights you’ll need to attach the supplied power adapter. In a dark room or on a dimly-lit stage, the slightly dimmer USB-powered lights would be more than sufficient, but I found in my brightly lit studio that I had difficulty knowing whether a backlit button was enabled or disabled. Once you know Push’s layout like the back of your hand this won’t be an issue, but to start with you’ll want to plug that power adapter in. There’s a lot to take in, in terms of Push’s multiple modes and workflows, and to be honest, my initial experience was a bit disorienting. Despite being very familiar with the Live software — or perhaps because of that familiarity — I didn’t immediately warm to Push’s way of working, and found myself hitting brick walls soon after plugging it in. This may not be a device you can simply feel your way around, so to get the most out of it you’ll want to dig in to Push’s manual or, like I did, make your way through the extremely helpful series of Learn Push videos that have been uploaded to the Ableton website. CHARACTER FLAWS
Some more attention could definitely have been given to Push’s LED display and menu system. Its bleak monochromatic orange-on-black text display definitely lends the device some retro cool, but at times it can feel like you are interfacing with an MS-DOS terminal rather than a next-generation controller. I get the sense that hardware limitations have forced the hand of the UI designers — menus are clunky, and text is fixed-width and large, which makes it very readable but also seriously limits the space provided to display information. One example of this is that device and track names — and, crucially, device parameters — are squeezed down to eight-character abbreviations. Drag a multiband dynamics plug-in onto your newly improvised instrument, for example, and it’ll appear as MltbndD in your device chain. This I can live with; less useful is how its eight default parameters are communicated: AbvThrsh, AbvRT(Lw, AbvThrsh, AbvRt(Md, and so on. Seasoned Live users and experienced sound engineers might quickly be able to decode these runes, but beginners will struggle, and as much fun as it is to simply explore sounds and
not sweat the text so much, clear communication of information is important if you’re going to do more with Push than fool around. An overall lack of context means that, especially as you are familiarising yourself with the device, it’s easy to get lost. When other hardware can make creative use of limited display space and resolution — the Elektron Octatrack, and the quirky but also very intuitive Teenage Engineering OP-1, immediately spring to mind — Push’s display appears rudimentary. Future upgrades of Push’s firmware may be able to make more creative use of the limited monochromatic display. These display limitations are perhaps a reminder that Push is intended as an adjunct to Ableton’s powerful software suite, and not as a replacement for it. Ableton’s tutorial videos themselves acknowledge that after indulging in a session of experimentation and composition on Push, you will then be moving into the software environment to then mix and edit your arrangements in greater detail. This puts the focus back on the more creative, playful aspects of Push — use the Push to express yourself and to smoothly capture that initial spark of an idea, and then delve into Live’s powerful DAW options to mould your composition into a layered, structured work. LIVE SKETCHPAD
So is Push a ‘music making instrument’? I think a more accurate term might be ‘sketchpad’. There’s a learning curve that might throw up a couple of obstacles initially, but once Push’s workflow becomes instinctive, it becomes a powerful tool. Push and Live make a formidable combination, allowing the smooth and freeflowing development of musical ideas from their embryonic form through to final arrangement and mix down. The Push’s execution of an isomorphic layout for note entry is truly inspiring, and hints at entirely new modes of performing and composing. Its drum sequencing and entry mode is solid, the pads feel great, and the unit is built to last. Push represents a new generation of MIDI controller that goes beyond the cheap and cheerful, and is a desirable addition to any studio or stage setup, especially for fans of Live’s unique and intuitive workflow.
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REVIEW
LOGIC PRO X Has X hit the spot?
NEED TO KNOW
Review: Brad Watts
PRICE $210 CONTACT www.apple.com.au
PROS Cheap Solid power in full 64-bit Drummer is eminently usable iPad app more than just a remote Better GUI Huge and useful library
CONS You’ll need OS X 10.8.4 You’ll need 64-bit plug-ins
SUMMARY Logic Pro X didn’t ditch pro features like other X upgrades, it just hid them in the Advanced tab. New MIDI plug-ins that will shift you out of the environment window, 15 very smart Drummers, and new effects, simulators and synths are all wrapped in a more intuitive GUI and solid powerful-feeling 64-bit operation. An iPad app that goes well beyond being just a controller is thrown in to make the upgrade to X well worth the paltry asking price.
How long have we heard about the impending release of Logic Pro X? Three years? Maybe it’s four years since I first heard whispers of a spanking new Logic Pro on the event horizon. Typical rumours surrounded the hearsay. “It’ll be dumbed down.” ‘GarageBandification’ was the overriding concern. And frankly, this trepidation wasn’t completely unfounded. Apple disenfranchised Final Cut Pro users with the release of Final Cut Pro X, many claiming the application had been over simplified. And indeed it had. Features professional users had come to rely upon were literally missing. So Apple reintroduced these over a raft of upgrades during the following 12 months or so. The move lost Apple a swathe of video editing devotees unfortunately. Many, however, were impressed with the ascendancy, with the ‘X’ iteration being 64-bit compliant and inevitably more powerful than its predecessor. Much the same speculation has surrounded Logic Pro X. Again, understandably, tell-tale indications of a simplified Logic Pro manifest as the appearance of various Logic-esque concepts in Apple’s GarageBand — both the desktop and the iOS version for iPad. It would seem Apple has learned from the Final Cut Pro X rollout, and is determined not to make the same mistake with Logic Pro X. ADVANCED ROLLOUT
Everything you’ve come to expect within Logic Pro still exists within the DAW. However, upon first boot of the application you may feel there are important features missing because Logic Pro initially boots in a simplified state. Activating various ‘pro’ features involves switching on a raft of Advanced Tools — such as destructive audio file editing and additional, more complex editors. So do rest assured. Logic Pro has not been stripped of complexity. Everything a power-user has come to know is still available — it just needs switching on from the ‘Advanced’ preference panel. Like Final Cup Pro X, Logic Pro X is a completely 64-bit application with all the advantages of running a 64-bit application on a 64-bit processor. Advantages such as access to up to 1024GB of physical RAM, better parallel processing, faster bus architecture, and the ability for applications to access scads of virtual memory. Without making the leap to 64-bit code, Logic Pro 9 was restricted to a 4GB chunk of RAM, and like all 32-bit applications running on a 64-bit processor, is susceptible to more errors in operation. In other words, crashing due to topping out the available 4GB limit of virtual RAM available in a 32-bit operating system. It’s been a nine-year transition for Logic Pro and Apple thus far. Apple acquired the application from Emagic in 2002, and with the release of Logic Pro 7 in 2004, has since developed the DAW to be far easier to use. To be honest, as a long-time user of Logic, there were cracks appearing in the framework of Logic by version six, and it wasn’t until version nine came
along when I thought the DAW had settled into its stride again. Along the way there has been the usual consolidation of the program’s aesthetics to bring it more in line with the company’s ‘Pro’ application suites, along with a plethora of improvements and additional features; the integration of Apple Loops, Flex Time, pedalboard-style guitar effects and amp simulations, further effects and instruments, to name just a few highlights. 64-bit operation appeared with version 9.1, and although this iteration would still run 32-bit Audio Unit plug-ins when operating as a 64-bit application, it was a convoluted process and cumbersome in practice. As it turns out, most third party plug-in manufacturers were slow to rewrite code in 64-bit, so most Logic Pro users would operate the DAW in 32-bit mode — an option that has remained until Logic Pro X. From now on, Logic Pro is 64-bit from head to tail, and third-party plug-ins must also be 64-bit to operate within the application. It’s only now I see just where Apple had its sights set with Logic Pro — the DAW has finally matured into the everything-for-everybody composition and audio editing platform it was always destined to be. So with some presumption and suspicion dispelled, let’s dive in. THE LOOK
Much of Apple’s task when it acquired Logic Pro was assimilating the DAW into the Apple stable of Pro applications. This process began at v7 and hasn’t really hit the mark until now. Mind you, Apple has been consolidating the grey-on-grey look for many of its Pro applications during that time also. With the relatively recent proliferation of apps on the iOS platform such as GarageBand, that aesthetic has settled into an across the board GUI that is effective and not-at-all garish or gaudy. The interface is predominantly dark grey, with colour only appearing when absolutely
Drummer Tracks has got to be the most compelling new feature. It manages to combine incredible power, finesse, and flexibility with fall-off-log usability. Amazing.
necessary. Even the sans-serif Helvetica-style font prevails throughout the GUI making cognitive adjustments to reading menus far more fluid. You don’t actually notice this until you reboot version nine, at which point you realise the slight shift in perception when juggling between viewing window-based menus, the Finder, and the Helvetica-esque font found in some sections of Logic Pro 9 such as the transport. Equally refreshing is the banishment of the ‘Pro Applications’ file delegation and prompt windows, these having returned to the familiar Finder-style format. Long-time users will no doubt abhor the change as they’ve seen the DAW go through more costume changes than Kylie Minogue at Mardi Gras, with important menu options changing positions just as flippantly. I’m certainly a fan of the colour scheme as it’s much the colour I’d usually attempt to achieve in older versions of Logic. Grey on grey, especially dark, seems to be the least distracting environment to work within. Plus, the overall aesthetic now dovetails with the iOS apps such as GarageBand. Hopefully the app can (please Apple) continue in this style for a good while to come.
“
For the price of a plug-in you’re getting one of the planet’s greatest DAWs
”
Double Screening: Logic Remote connects faultlessly to Logic Pro X and offers mixing, track creation, automation recording and editing, navigation and transport controls along with some handy instrument playback devices. The real Easter egg, though, is Logic Remote’s Smart Help: hover over anything in Logic Pro X with your cursor and Smart Help immediately displays the relevant help document on your iPad.
THE FEEL
I’m delighted to report how incredibly solid and stable Logic now feels. You know what I mean: how the application performs generally. Far more solid than version nine. No doubt this has a lot to do with the app being utterly 64-bit running within a 64-bit operating system, but the difference is quite astounding. Graphics are swift and fluid, and the application jumps to life immediately when prompted with a button or mouse-click. I’ll point out here the minimum operating system for Logic Pro X is 10.8.4 — Apple’s first completely 64-bit OS. In other words, to run Logic Pro X you’ll need a reasonably recent and capable Mac. Anything from late 2008 will do it, and that’ll be powerful enough to extract exceptional performance from Logic Pro. Incidentally, Logic Pro 9 will happily coexist on the same drive and system as Logic Pro X so you can keep both versions online while making your transition to X. While on the subject of feel, I’ll chip in on the topic of pricing. Logic Pro has become progressively more inexpensive since Apple took control of the DAW from Emagic. Nowadays there’s no such concept as ‘upgrading’ your present version to the current X version. Instead of the carry-on with upgrade pricing and so forth, Apple has reduced the price of Logic Pro from $599 to the ridiculous price of $210. Absolutely incredible for a DAW of Logic Pro’s capabilities. You’d not bother upgrading — just buy the new version. For the price of a plug-in you’re getting one of the planet’s greatest DAWs with enough editing and plug-in action to keep you professionally indulged in audio creation for quite a while. The only issue I see with Apple’s
sales model is if your particular Mac happens to be pinned at version 10.7. Because you can’t actually purchase the ‘legacy’ v9 from the Apple App Store any longer (bear in mind those machines are now over five years old). Downloading Logic Pro X is a 780MB task, and then there’s 36GB of additional data downloadable from within Logic Pro, from which you can pick and choose. This is an entirely new batch of sounds designed to take advantage of Logic Pro X’s new feature list, instruments, and effect plug-ins — well worth battering your download limit for. THE NEW
So without further dithering, let’s inspect some of the highlights of Logic Pro X’s new features. First up is the many changes to the overall interface, as alluded to earlier. Alongside these changes come interface improvements such as Track Stacks. There are two ways of instigating this feature. The first is a Folder Stack, and is basically the same regime found in earlier versions when packing folders — in other words; consolidating a group of tracks into one Arrange Window track. The second, new variation, creates a track hierarchy allowing multiple tracks to be combined into a Summing Stack with its own volume control — the multiple tracks are assigned to an auxiliary fader. Think of it as a fast way to build a stem. It’s also a great way to build layered instrument patches and there are many examples of these style patches in the newly designed content. In a similar vein, Smart Controls provide an interface to control multiple plug-in parameters. These are quite handy, with various themes available to build your own interfaces and
control these via external controllers. Smart Controls can be saved with patches and recalled at your convenience. Perhaps the most important interface change, however, is the complete revamping of Logic Pro’s mixer. To start with, plug-ins can be moved, copied and bypassed more easily. Plug-in insert slots now provide three discrete sections comprising a popup menu for plug-in instantiation, a bypass switch, and the middle section for opening the plug-in window. This negates the need to hold the Option key when bypassing, which is now used to copy a plug-in into another insert point — far more in-line with the familiar Option-key method when copying regions in the Arrange Window. Plus plug-ins can be moved without requiring the Command key to be pressed. Plug-ins are also now opened with a single mouse click rather than a double click. There’s also a gain reduction meter appearing in a channel strip when dynamics plug-ins are instanced. Just as useful is bus send knobs indicating by their position whether placed pre- or post-fader. The mixer also looks a lot better, with lovely shaded fader knobs and pan controls. Now the Mixer Window feels like a mixer rather than some cobbled together approximation of the audio side of the Environment Window. At the end of the day, this makes mixing feel more like mixing. I recall (vague pun intended) the same change in perception occurring when Avid redesigned the Mixer window in ProTools. When it looks more like a mixing console your perception is more akin to working from a console. If you actually
The Mixer section has been completely revamped. Aesthetically, the faders and pots now look amazing. The management of plug-ins has also been re-thought.
prefer the old look you can still access the mixer controls in the Environment Window just like days of old. That said, I doubt you will after moments within the newly designed Mix Window.
along with tutorial scripts to get you up to speed with writing your own scripts. With these MIDI plug-ins and the new Mixer Window you can almost smell the demise of the Environment.
Further interface enhancements include the ability to save alternative arrangements within a project. This is positively brilliant, allowing you to audition vast arrays of changes to an arrangement, yet still keeping all changes within a single project file. Swapping between alternative arrangements is incredibly quick.
DRUM IT UP
GUITAR GAINS
Imagine you need drums for your latest song (not difficult, I know). You create a Drummer track in Logic Pro, create a region on that track, and hit play. Voila! Instant drumming. The drums will play for the length of the region you created. While this may sound over simplified, it isn’t. That’s all you need do. The drum track appears as audio within each region created and intelligently ‘plays’ drums according to bar position, adding slight variations and fills accordingly. If the performance suits, just go on ahead composing. If you want something more bespoke, that’s entirely possible also.
Additional plug-ins make the cut with a new Bass Amp Designer: it’s along the exact same lines as the original Amp Designer but, you guessed it, for bass. There are three familiar amps and a range of bass cabinets with all your usual bass driver sizes and configurations making an appearance. The Pedalboard plug-in gains seven new guitar stompbox effects including Tie Die Delay (reverse delay), Tube Burner (tube-style overdrive), Wham (pitch whammy pedal), Grit (classic distortion), Dr. Octave (sub octave enhancer) Flange Factory, and Graphic EQ. An improved guitar tuner is available from the transport bar with a single click for any audio track that’s assigned an input, or as a plug-in. And I can report this tuner works. While on the subject of plug-ins there are also new virtual instruments comprising of updates to the vintage keyboard style instruments such as the B3, plus a new ‘Retro Synth’ plug-in that will emulate analogue, FM, and wavetable style synthesis. Unlike Logic Pro’s usual synths such as the ES1 and ES2, Retro Synth is easy to operate and extremely accessible. ESCAPING THE ENVIRONMENT
The processing augmentation doesn’t end there, however. There are eight new MIDI-based plug-ins you can use on virtual or external hardware MIDI devices. These present with cool retro interfaces and include an Arpeggiator, Chord Trigger, Modifier, Modulator with LFO and ADSR envelope generator, Note Repeater, Randomizer, Velocity Processor, Transposer, and the most powerful of the lot, the Scripter. This is a highly editable MIDI processing plug-in whereby you can use Javascript to create just about any MIDI processing you can dream up. Already there are folk out there providing interesting and useful scripts for the Scripter such as step-sequencers and keyboard splitters and such. With these plug-ins you’ll never again need to strap together MIDI processing using the Environment Window. This has long been a major drawback of Logic Pro, with most steering clear of intricate Environment editing. Apple provides a bunch of Scripter settings such as harmonisers, MIDI logging, arpeggiators and the like,
Possibly the most riveting addition to Logic Pro X is Drummer Tracks. This is truly revolutionary. Forget your pile of drum-kit emulation plug-ins because Logic Pro’s Drummer sets a completely new standard for both sound and usability. Here’s how it works:
Double clicking a Drummer track region opens the Drummer editor in the bottom of the Tracks Window. This is where, with your producer/songwriting hat on, you can choose from various drummer personalities. These take on the guise of various drummers — like real people! 15 of them in total, each with their own style of drum-kit. ‘Logan’ reminds me of John Bonham. ‘Anders’ plays metal-style strums. The stable of drummers is categorised into four groups comprising Rock, Alternative, Songwriter, and R&B. Choose your player, choose a preset pattern style, then adjust with the X-Y grid how hard or soft, and how simple or complex the drumming is for each Drummer Track region. Choose the degree of fill action, choose percussion, choose the complexity and occurrence of kick, snare, hats, toms, and cymbals. You can then deliberate over further feel such as the loudness of ghost hits, push the feel forward or backwards, alter the swing, and even lock the kick and snare to follow another audio track in your Track Window — bass would be a good starting (and possibly ending) point. If you need a completely new style for the chorus, simply create a separate region for the chorus and make adjustments to suit. Need a super fancy roll toward the end of the chorus? Chop that last bar into its own region and edit it to taste. Hell, you could even have another drummer sit in for the rolls! It’s that simple. Now with your engineer/producer hat on, you can edit the instruments within a drum kit, picking out suitable snares and kicks, and alter the tuning, dampening and gain for snare, kick, individual toms and cymbals, and the hi-
Going digital ain’t so bad... The new Bass Amp Designer with three familiar amps and a range of bass cabinets with all your usual bass driver sizes and configurations.
hats. It’s very simple and incredibly intuitive. Plus all these changes happen in real-time as you tweak away. If you want to get more finicky with the mix, you can choose from a further eight multi-output kits which allow the kit pieces to be split out to individual outputs in the Mixer Window. Then for microscopic editing, a region can be converted to MIDI data which can continue to play your Logic Pro kit, or even send the MIDI data off to one of your own sample libraries or virtual drum instruments. Extremely flexible. Extremely intuitive. And it sounds really good! DRIVE BY WIRELESS
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Apple hasn’t missed a trick with a dedicated iPad controller application for iOS. From within Logic Pro X you can access Logic Remote and you’re whisked off to the iTunes Store to download the free app and insert it into your iPad. Logic Remote connects faultlessly to Logic Pro X and offers mixing, track creation, automation recording and editing, navigation and transport controls — all the functions you’d expect from an iPad-based control surface. Yet there’s even more lurking within Logic Remote such as instrument playback devices like drum pads, guitar strumming devices and keyboards, along with key command pads that can be assigned any key command you wish — perfect for nudging objects backwards and forwards in a mix from the comfort of your leather lounge suite. What really impressed me, however, was Logic Remote’s Smart Help. When selected in Logic Remote, hovering over anything in Logic Pro X with your cursor immediately displays the relevant help document on your iPad. This is actually quite brilliant. Instead of ploughing through a table of contents or the index of a manual, Logic Remote finds the associated information for you. Even if you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking at on-screen, or what it may be called. It takes the RTFM ethos to a much more transparent and easily accessible level. Top marks, Apple. THE FINAL MIX DOWN
Admittedly there is more to this upgrade than I can cover here, and much more than you’ll initially experience when first booting Logic Pro X. Please be assured there’s nothing missing from Logic Pro that will be missed — all the ‘Pro’ features are still there for the many who utilise them. One caveat on the M.I.A. front is the absence of direct Avid ProTools support, but this ship sailed long ago with the release of Native ProTools and Apogee’s wonderful Symphony hardware. If you’re still running TDM hardware in Logic Pro it’s high time you moved on. With a hefty Mac and a suitable interface you’ll achieve far more than you could using TDM-based Avid DSP cards. If not, stay in ProTools world. As for Logic Pro X, I’ll say again that I feel the DAW has finally come of age and is now a true Apple application. Solid, easy to use, and brimming with useful, creative composition and production tools. More than worth the paltry asking price.
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REVIEW
POWER OF THREE
The mid/high section combines a 19mm aluminium dome tweeter with a 85mm polypropylene midrange unit. The 180mm LF driver looks very similar to that of the 20/20 BAS Mk3 but pairs a Kapton former with its mineral filled polypropylene cone. The 2030 comes in mirrored left and right pairs. Two Class AB amps separately power the tweeter/mid array and low frequency driver. The 2030 is rated at 111dB SPL @ 1m, long term — loud.
EVENT 2030
Three-Way Active Nearfield Monitors Event’s new active three-ways remind us that you don’t need a big-ticket item to have a rewarding musical experience.
NEED TO KNOW
Review: Andrew Bencina PRICE $1199/pair RRP Expect to pay $899-999 CONTACT Event Electronics (02) 9648 5855 info@eventelectronics.com www.eventelectronics.com
PROS Exceptional performance at any price point Even tonal balance delivers both weight and delicacy Controlled power with ultra-low distortion Look as good as they sound
CONS Variable control of Gain and Filters complicates pair calibration No unbalanced input for consumer applications Omission of Opal’s expanded control section reduces compatibility with Event StudioEQ
SUMMARY The 2030 provides power and tonal balance to more than satisfy the nearfield requirements of any studio; project or professional.
I first heard a set of Event monitors when only a few years out of high school. The experience introduced me to the possibility that a home studio could produce a finished product ready for distribution. As my 20-year reunion looms large on the calendar its funny that another set of Event monitors have given me the chance to reflect on how things in audio technology have evolved and how much we stay the same. 2030 EXPERIENCE
From first sight, the 2030 looks to be a step forward. A three-way cousin to the longestablished 20/20 BAS (see Issue 84), there’s more than just an extra driver on display, and very clearly Event’s development of the flagship Opal is having a trickledown effect. The view is dominated by a sculptural waveguide assembly housing the mid and high frequency drivers. The design not only seeks to optimise audio dispersion but also contributes to the output efficiency and enhanced sensitivity at higher levels to produce impressively minimal distortion (0.02% THD @ 120W). The 19mm ferrofluidcooled aluminium dome tweeter employs a fully shielded neodymium magnet, while the 85mm midrange driver below it features a ferrite magnet and copper voice coil driving a polypropylene cone. Snug in their own little pod it almost looks like you could slide out the high/ mid section for use as satellite speakers. The 180mm low-frequency driver looks very similar to that of the 20/20 BAS Mk3 but pairs a Kapton former with its mineral filled polypropylene cone. The textured satin black front baffle rounds off at its edges and when you add the golden glow of the (now trademark) backlit Event logo, the overall effect is one of simplicity and class. Optimally mounted on its side, the 2030 comes in mirrored left and right pairs and should be aligned with high/mids towards the inside. The manual identifies the acoustic axis at the centre point of the intersection between upper and mid waveguide and recommends angling the monitors inward so that this point directly faces the listening position. BEAUTIFUL ON THE INSIDE
On the inside, the 2030 also inherits much of its technological development from the Opal; employing two fully-discrete Class AB amplifiers to separately power the tweeter/mid array and low frequency driver. The signal is channelled via an Event proprietary 2nd order crossover at 3kHz for the high/mid range and a Linkwitz-Riley 4th order crossover at 400Hz for the mid/low. From behind, however, any allusion to the Opal’s design fades away and is instead replaced by a near replica of the more affordable 20/20 BAS Mk3; rearranged for the horizontal positioning. The MDF is not disguised by any curved finishes here. At 16.5kg, the 16-litre cabinets are lighter than the aluminium Opals but still extremely solid. A rear-firing port distinguishes the 2030 from it’s dual driver sibling but in other respects
they appear much the same. A full-height aluminium heat sink assists convection cooling and while they do include a thermal cut-off switch, it’s advised that adequate space be left around the monitor to maximise air circulation. The toroidal power supply is rated at 270VA and can be switched between 110V and 240V operation. Just be sure to match the fuse to your mains supply. For the green-minded amongst us, average power consumption is quoted at 95W, or 10W during downtime. The rest of the rear is devoted to a balanced XLR input and a simple control section. I understand why Event encourages users to connect a balanced source ‘where possible’, but when the price will undoubtedly attract attention from a diverse range of customers it just seems stubborn to omit an RCA or unbalanced 1/4-inch jack input. Especially when this nod to more professional standards is lacking from the control section. A variable gain knob adjusts input sensitivity ±12dB in relation to a reference of 0.775V RMS. While the default setting is zero the pot is not detented in any position, so gain calibration of pairs (or surround arrays) will need to be done coarsely by eye and, of course, by ear. The 2030, like all current Event models, are impressively loud (111dB SPL @ 1m, long term), so if you need to match levels with other monitors you’ll likely be turning them down. Likewise the provided high (2kHz ±3dB for overall room tone compensation) and low (200Hz ±3dB for boundary proximity bass response inconsistencies) frequency shelf controls also lack detented pots — and bypass switches for that matter.
BACKING UP
The 2030 pack panel, showing the rear port, the XLR input, some basic EQ options, for shaping your sound to your room, along with the amp section and power.
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Event go to some length to promote correct positioning and proper acoustic treatment of spaces prior to any use of these tonal adjustments; so for many they’ll remain untouched. I’d recommend Marcelo Vercelli’s (Event’s head of engineering) White Paper on speaker performance and optimisation for those who can’t resist getting hands-on with these controls.
“
even more pleasing is their re-creation of a spatial depth that to date I’ve always found lacking in more affordable models
”
LOUDER THAN A BOMB
The first and only time I heard the original Event 20/20 BAS was in a mate’s studio/bedroom in the mid-to-late ’90s. At the time, powered monitors still seemed like a novelty to me but the combination of affordability and performance was causing a big stir in the hip hop community. Of particular importance was the view that the 20/20 would help you create a translatable mix while not skimping on the thump and attack that connected the genre to its sound system roots. Judging by Event’s stable of endorsing artists, nothing much has changed with hip hop royalty like RZA, DJ NuMark, Babu and James Lavelle (Mo’Wax, Unkle) still taking pride of place. Over the last 12 months I’ve been reunited with the Event sound, mixing in a studio shortly after they’d made the switch to the flagship Opals. While 17-or-so years had passed, the memories endured and when the Opals almost knocked me off me feet — these gems put the ‘brutal’ in brutally honest — I was that excited kid all over again. The initial impact with the 2030s isn’t nearly as forceful but they still have a solidity about their
sound. I came to realise over the test period that this in fact comes from an exceptional tonal balance across their full range. What this meant for me was a heightened perception of the often problematic low frequency/midrange transition; a clarity perceived as weight. At the same time, the Events manage to vividly reproduce the delicate articulation of stringed instruments and the breathy sibilance of vocals with a heightened realism. Perhaps even more pleasing, though, is their re-creation of a spatial depth that to date I’ve always found lacking in more affordable models. In spite of their modest price tag, they’ve illuminated deficiencies in my existing monitors originally costing five times as much. INSTANT VINTAGE
With the 2030, Event has continued an almost 20-year commitment to push the limits of what can be achieved on a budget and, in my opinion, has elevated the performance baseline to a new level. Inevitably, this achievement will leave many, including myself, greedily craving that little bit more. For a change, we’ll even be prepared to pay more to get it. While it’s not wrong to suggest improvements, we might be missing the point. Computers and affordable audio peripherals have now converted every corner of the planet into a studio. This new classic can’t magically turn every person into a mix balance engineer but it’ll certainly give anyone who’s interested a professional start — and they won’t need to save up for 20 years to get it.
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REGULARS
LAST WORD with
Roger Savage
When I left school my interest was in electronics. I worked for a company in the UK called Associated-Rediffusion, which manufactured TVs. After my training there, a friend called Keith Grant mentioned there was a position in the Olympic Studios’ maintenance department. I got the job. That was in 1959. At that time the only studios in London were Abbey Road, IBC, Lansdowne, Olympic and Decca. Roger Savage is one of the pioneers of Australian music recording and audio post production. His credits span everything from the Easybeats to Moulin Rouge. He’s been the boss of Soundfirm studios (Melbourne, Sydney and Beijing) for 30 years and owns SmartAV, the makers of the Tango mix surface. Pictured is Roger (left) with Philip Webster, preparing for a session at Bill Armstrong Studios circa 1965.
I began to learn the studio trade. For the first three years I was a tape op — working the stereo tape machine and setting up sessions. Keith Grant was Olympic’s head engineer and my mentor. Dick Swettenham was the head tech and he went on to design the first transistorised desk at Olympic, later building them under the Helios name. Clive Green was there — he went on to start Cadac. I recall Ray Dolby coming in with his early noise reduction systems. Olympic had an excellent live room that was large enough to record a full orchestra. That space taught me the importance of a good acoustic balance: getting the musicians feeling comfortable and hearing each other well. Once that was right, then spend time on mic placement. All this was much more important than the remedial use of baffles and isolation booths. In 1963 I recorded the Rolling Stones original demo, Come On. At that point, I’d done some smaller sessions and assisted on quite a few pop records (Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, for example), but I wasn’t a fully fledged engineer. I got to know Andrew Loog Oldham who was the publicist for The Beatles. I’d heard about The Stones and went to see them at The Station Hotel in Richmond, and met Andrew there. He signed them up. I helped him out by recording the demo. It was an out-of-hours favour. He sold that demo to Decca and got them their deal.
the morning, string overdubs in the afternoon and then a rock session in the evening. Studio building wasn’t a fine art, we were making it up as we went a long. But we always tried to innovate. We worked with Graham Thirkell who was a technical genius. First up, he made us an echo plate — a copy of an EMT design. Then he started designing his own multitracks — up to 24-track. It was back in the ’70s at Bank Street that we first started to gravitate towards Harrison consoles. Harrison made one of the first inline designs (with monitoring in the same strip as the input), and they always had very good mic pre’s and EQs. The Series 10 was the first assignable console. It was an analogue design, but each channel had a fader, a couple of buttons and four rotary encoders. The beauty of the Series 10 was it was fully automated — a huge leap forward in technology at the time. By the late ’70s I’d had a gut full of rock ’n’ roll. Some of the characters and the BS were getting me down. But I was recording film scores and enjoying that more and more. In 1979 I saw a 10-minute preview of Mad Max and got to know George Miller and Byron Kennedy. They had no money and needed to mix this film. I did it for them in the control room at AAV after hours. That’s what got me hooked on post production. When I went to start Soundfirm in 1983/4 I knew I wanted to mix sound for picture with my automated mixing console and 24-track tape. So we developed a synchroniser with Graham Thirkell. It was a box that could sync sprocket machines (via bi-phase) to multitracks and video machines — something that was unheard of back then. We were applying recording studio technology to film and Hollywood wasn’t anywhere near that.
I didn’t know much about Australia. I’d heard about Johnny O’Keefe and The Seekers, and that’s about it.
After I’d mixed Mad Max 2, Ben Burtt from Skywalker Sound rang me and offered me a job to work on Return of the Jedi. Apparently they’d mixed the first two films in Hollywood and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. They wanted someone out of the system who had experience using automation in a film mix.
There wasn’t a full-time job to be had when I arrived so I freelanced — mainly working as a producer for the the Go label. This is how I met Bill Armstrong, who was managing a studio called Telefil in St. Kilda.
They were mixing in a big room (this was pre Skywalker Ranch), using a Neve recording console with Flying Faders and automation. They were still on six-track sprockets, but experimenting with other technologies.
There weren’t many true ‘producers’ in Melbourne at that time. I’m credited with ‘producing’ a lot of those 1960s Australian records but more by default — essentially, I was the engineer. There’d be a representative from the record company at the session, but all he’d really do is get out his stop watch and keep timing the length of the song.
Come the late ’80s and into the early 90s we developed our own digital editing machine for post. We called it the Editracker. It had a small plasma touchscreen and was packed with our own DSP board. In those days, hard drives were extremely expensive — a 5GB Maxtor HD was $5000!
In 1964 I married an Australian — Carol, Olympic’s receptionist — and moved to Melbourne.
In 1965 I became a partner with Bill in Armstrong Studios in Albert Road, Port Melbourne. Armstrong’s (later AAV or Armstrong Audio Video) was active throughout the ’70s until The Age bought the studios when it had moved to Bank Street. It was a very active period. You could be recording a jingle in
So we spent a lot of time and money developing data reduction algorithms. Of course, hard drive prices dropped like a stone, so we were wasting our time. Soundfirm has moved again recently. Sadly, there’s no money in music recording. We’ve now expanded into picture post for film and TV.