AudioTechnology Issue #92

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COLDPLAY & RADIOHEAD SECRETS TO A HUGE SOUND

ADELE: THE REAL BOND GIRL Skyfall Theme At Abbey Road

KELLY COUNTRY Recording Spring & Fall In A Hall With Paul

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RCF MOVES IN ON THE STUDIO LINE 6 REDEFINES LIVE MIXING... HONEST PEARL DS60: THE SWISS ARMY MIC WHO IS AVID AIMING ITS THUNDERBOLT AT? ISSUE 92

92

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REGULARS

Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au

ED SPACE

Publisher Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au Editorial Director Christopher Holder chris@audiotechnology.com.au

A Year In...

Graphic Designer Leigh Ericksen leigh@alchemedia.com.au

Text: Mark Davie

Art Director Dominic Carey dominic@alchemedia.com.au Advertising Paul Cunningham paul@alchemedia.com.au Accounts Jaedd Asthana jaedd@alchemedia.com.au

It’s been a lightning quick first year as editor of AudioTechnology, so I thought I’d take a minute to remember what’s happened. There’s been: Resurrections: Allans and Billy Hydes, the giants of Australia’s music retail scene, fell hard and took a distribution network with it. It turned into a free-for-all — brands were split across the country and customers picked over the stores’ remains.

Then in the 11th hour, an one-time employee (and significant industry player in his own right, John Gallen) salvaged a deal out of the grave, ensuring the famous marques will live on.

Game changing ideas: Nexo’s STM rethinking the way that production companies do business, Behringer once again changing the price/features ratio with its X32 digital console and living up to the hype, Digico’s UB MADI taking a big idea and squeezing it into a simple small box, Keith Mcmillen’s QuNeo and a whole bunch of innovative controllers; the uptake in rectangular microphone capsule design; and spatial audio innovation between the Sydney Opera House and Iosono, with Dolby’s Atmos system bringing a similar experience to the cinema soon.

The Olympics: With Danny Boyle at the helm, Underworld providing the underscore, a who’s who of British music acts, and a bunch of Aussies on the audio team, the spectacle that comes only once every four years didn’t disappoint. And the Paralympians were treated to a full-blown Coldplay concert that had everyone jealous.

Last Word: Choice wise words from some all-time greats such as Eddie Kramer, Rory Kaplan, Don Bartley, Ern Rose, Elliot Scheiner, Cubby Colby, and, this issue, the irreplaceable Mark Opitz.

Crazy contraptions: A 300-pound gorilla of a MIDI controller, a two-kilometre track of musical instruments played by a car, a satellite iPhone ensemble, and a record player that plays a tree’s rings.

Innovative recordings: Audiophiles hanging around playgrounds sticking contact microphone on slides, and others recreating the sound of the ’60s with plug-ins.

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“

A 300-pound gorilla of a MIDI controller, a twokilometre track of musical instruments played by a car, a satellite iPhone ensemble, and a record player that plays a tree’s rings

”

An icon rebuilt: The dust covers were finally pulled from Victoria’s renovated Hamer Hall to reveal a first-of-its-kind acoustic reflector.

And of course, we’ve been behind the scenes of a bunch of great local and international records and live performances, uncovering the tips, tricks, hard work, and magic of some of the world’s best producers, engineers and musicians.

But as we hit the holiday season, it’s nice to remember a few moments of good will. A couple that come to mind are Andrew Bencina’s trip to the WAAC in the town of Balgo where he flew in a Cessna-load of gear generously donated by a number of Australian pro audio distributors that were thinking more local than most of us. And Jack The Bear giving up a regular day of mastering income to donate the proceeds to charity.

I’m sure there’s more, but all in all, a great year, and can’t wait to see what comes in 2013. Thanks for reading and be sure to drop us a line; let us know what you’re up to over the break.

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

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 © 2012 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. 10/12/2012.

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CONTENTS92 LIVE

Coldplay & Radiohead Two of the biggest bands in the world tour Oz at the same time, and AT was along for the ride.

38 & 44

FEATURES 32 34 38 44 58 64

Nobody Does It Better

Adele & Co pull out all stops to deliver a theme song in the grand Bassey/Barry tradition.

52

Space Time Concerto Inside The Music Group Home Playtime: Coldplay Live Good Buzz: Radiohead Live Kelly Country: Recording Spring & Fall Messaging The World

REGULARS 74 Mac Notes 76 PC Audio 98 Last Word, Mark Opitz

TUTORIALS 48 Live Recording Do’s & Don’ts 66 A Standard Mix Up 70 Stav’s Word: Facelift Vox

Avid HD Thunderbolt Bolt out of the blue. Who is Avid aiming its thunderbolt at?

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90

REVIEWS 24 78 82 88 92 94

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Cover Image: Marty Philbey

REGULARS

YOUR WORD Readers’ Letters

I was lucky enough to escape to Melbourne a couple of weekends ago with my beautiful wife (the three kids left behind) and departed Sydney armed with an interest in seeing the newly renovated Hamer Hall as described in Issue 90, and enjoying some quality time together. I was well pleased to find the ‘Impossible Orchestra’ 24-hour concert raising awareness for carers was scheduled for the same weekend. We caught the Orchestra around 9am and stayed for their 17th hour of performance and even got to waltz in the aisles! The venue is a fantastic collage of technology and tradition. The performance, sound quality and multi-camera visuals on that massive screen created a very absorbing experience. The acoustic reflector looks amazing and certainly made me appear brilliant as I rattled off its amazing features to anyone who dared listen to me for the next several days. Thank you AT for continuing to publish diverse and interesting audio stories that can augment our experiences in the ‘real world’.

— Phill C, High School Music Teacher on the South Coast, NSW

FYI — Presonus has released a firmware update that introduces phase two of their Smaart integration to the Studiolive 16.4.2 and 24.4.2.

Both now have wizards for room analysis and delay calculation.

— Alvin Prasad

With reference to the discussion of Windows 8 audio drivers in your PC Audio column (Issue 91), one change Microsoft has made is to the way hardware audio peak meters are handled.

Any KSPROPERTY_AUDIO_PEAKMETER handler exposed by drivers is now ignored, with Windows 8 instead looking for KSPROPERTY_ AUDIO_PEAKMETER2 handlers. The only difference in functionality is that the latter expects 32-bit peak values instead of the 16-bit values previously used. Any driver not supporting KSPROPERTY_AUDIO_PEAKMETER2 will instead have its peak meters created in software, adding to the CPU burden of any applications reading peak meter values.

Eskimo Joe are the latest group to declare independence, self-funding their next album through a fans’ pledge system using Pozible. The target is $40,000 to create EJ’s sixth album and they’ve already smashed that mark. Topping the pledge options is a $6000 Eskimo Joe-cooked barbeques for 20 of your mates… and they sold out! Is this the way forward for musicians, or blatant cashing in?

Doesn’t really count if your band is ex-major label.

— Rob Mac

This is interesting. They’re still signed to Warner though yeah? Have they split or are major label bands using crowd funding now? I guess it would take some of the guess work out of it for the label. Anyway, not that I have a problem with it; it’s just interesting.

— Fronz Arp

What will the $40k go towards more curiously?

Recording/studio costs clearly aren’t the issue, what with their own facility at their fingertips (other than this mystery producer they have onboard). Perhaps they’ll get a good mix engineer too who will eat up the dollars nicely.

Or is it going to be used post-the-creative process? Not agreeing or disagreeing with it at all, but it is very interesting indeed.

— Tristan Hoogland

Depends on whether a band needs to get selffunding by crowd funding. I don’t know EJ’s circumstances. Some bands may need to if they can’t fund it themselves. It may be the sign of the times, people are struggling…?

— Mark Killey

I can’t understand how they would need funding for their projects, seems like taking advantage.

— Paul Clark

— Jeff Pages, Senior Development Engineer at Innes Corporation

I agree Paul. The idea is pretty cool, beats the prostate exam that is record companies — but yeah, not sure why Eskimo Joe would need it.

They should have buckets of cash — seems more like a publicity stunt for the upcoming album if you ask me...

––

— Rory O’Donnell

They own a studio and yet they need 40g to make an album? Somebody’s taking the piss...

— Greg Reason

Are they chronic alcoholics? $40,000? Or are they writing it while three top producers mix their jams to play back to them?

— Luke Shreddar

I suppose the money will go to decent packaging and quality product. Fuck the flimsy jewel-cases, I’d much rather a nice gatefold vinyl. The money is actually going to getting a copy of the album itself, not just the production costs.

— Dean Andersen

I’m curious where the $40k is going myself. Is it post-the-creative/production process? I mean these things can easily reach $40k if done that way. It can cost anywhere between $2-5k a track for a big name mix engineer, so you have that, on top of that a producer that’s top notch enough to remain nameless, that can be similar per track for enough days. Mastering by a big guy for an album, again $3-5k. That said, these would be considered luxuries in this situation. Begging should be left to those who haven’t got such a facility at their fingertips.

— Tristan Hoogland

CLA is not cheap, ya know!

— John Nymo Nyman

It has been revealed in a number of other cases that these sites are being used purely to publicise a project, with many of the contributions coming from the fundees or their backers. They’re going to spend the money anyway so this gives them viral promo. Perhaps....? Hmm. — Jonny Honestly

“Black fingernails red wine I’m gonna make you all mine”.... Maybe they need to buy some better lyrics?

— Tommy Grules

In the end nobody is being held at gun-point to invest but, if Eskimo Joe need this style of fundraising after the success they’ve had then it tells a pretty sad story of where the music industry is at in this country.

— Grant Ferstat

AT 12

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AT 13

REGULARS

WHAT’S ON All the latest from around the studio traps

The team at Deluxe Mastering, Melbourne, congratulates Jeff Lang and all involved for the ARIA Award win for ‘Best Blues and Roots Album’ Carried In Mind, recorded by Dave Manton, mixed by Colin Wynne, assisted by Rohan Kay at Thirty Mill Studios and mastered

by Tony ‘Jack The Bear’ Mantz. Jack has mastered projects for Eddie Bravo, The Big City, Captcha, Peking Duk, Electro Mafia, Waking Eden, Ben Caruso, DJ Rubz & Sherlock, Rattlin Cain, Anna Johnson and finishing off (Dirty Three’s) Mick Turner’s solo album. He has also started the Jack the Bear Foundation offering mastering for a donation one day a month in aid of various charities. Getting the analogue mastering treatment with Adam Dempsey: an album for vinyl release from Matt Bailey (The Paradise Motel) produced by Brent Punshon at Head Gap, two new albums for acclaimed jazz saxophonist and clarinetist Adam Simmons’ Origami Trio, engineered and mixed by Myles Mumford, The Pierce Brothers, engineered and mixed by Fraser Montgomery at The Aviary, The String Contingent, and instrumental rock trio The Boats. Andrei ‘Ony’ Eremin has mastered releases for The Honey Badgers, Brightly, Rat & Co and House of Laurence.

Whilst Coldplay were out here on tour, Studios 301 were very happy to host them in their Sydney Neve Studio, assisted by Jono Baker. Also in the studios, they’ve had The Vines, Vydamo (a new side project from Jim Finn of Art vs Science) with producer Tim Carr, Nantes with Simon Todkill and Dialectrix with Simon Cohen.

Up in Byron Bay, Nick DiDia has been working with Adam Eckersley and Pete Murray. 301 has also launched a brand new website for the recording studios, where you can see complete tech specs, producer bios, discographies and 360 degree tours of all the recording studios. Over in mastering, Leon Zervos has been mastering tunes for Stan Walker, The Cat Empire, Justice Crew and X-Factor. Steve Smart has been working on tracks for Tripod, New Primary Groove, and Midnight Oil re-issues, Andrew Edgson has mastered Vydamo and 5 Seconds of Summer, Sameer Sengupta has been doing more tracks for Rick Lee and Ben Feggans tweaking songs for Trinity & Beyond, Hubert Folmli, Mighty Joe and Deya Dova.

Victoria’s Toyland Recording Studio has had Adelaide’s Ride Into The Run in for a week, being AT 14

produced by members of Texas-based band The Black Angels who were over on tour with Harvest Festival. Adam Calaitzis has completed mixing The DC3 album, and the boys from Slightly Left Of Centre were in to mix their pop/rock single.

Melbourne singer Melissa James has finished her new single and it has been sent to Brian Gardener in the US for mastering. Hard rockers Killshot have also completed tracking and are moving onto mixing.

The past few weeks at Lush Studios in Brisbane has seen producer/engineer Sean Cook come in for the first time, working with local band The Arachnids. Brisbane Band Little Scout, after successful rotation with their last single on Triple J, have been busy back in the studio working on their new album, again with their drummer (and Lush house engineer) Miro Mackie at the helm engineering and co-producing with the other members of the band. Miro has also been working on mixes for Major Leagues and on the soundtrack for the film Bad Behaviour, written by Luke McDonald from The John Steel Singers. Ric Parker from R&D Records has spent quite a bit of time at Lush over the past two months, including 10 days mixing a new album for DieVsCity and also tracking and mixing a five-track EP for Tessa Marie. Zac Wilson (after completing a three-year Bachelor of Music degree at the QLD Conservatorium of Music) has also joined the team as studio assistant and was assisting Sean Cook on his first session at Lush, Zac will also run the edit/production suite (currently under construction) for Pro Tools editing, postproduction and voice-overs. Meanwhile house studio tech Jason has finally had the chance to patch in the four rather rare and tasty Peach Audio tube mic pres that Lush Studios were lucky enough to snag from Gigpiglet Productions

(a mighty big thanks to Gareth Stuckey is apparently due). Jason also got around to racking up the vintage Federal AM864 and RCA BA6A tube compressors (with Ric loving them both and putting them to work overtime with his mixes).

Amongst new bits of kit purchased, Lush has also added two pairs of Adam A7X monitors, being for both the main studio and the production suite to ensure accurate referencing between rooms.

Nathan Johnson has been chained to his sonic dojo, Mixosmosis, finalising the mixes for The Drawing Class’ first EP and sent the babies off to William Bowden for mastering. Nathan has also mixed a single for local artist Trent Stewart, and a very interesting mix for students from Cranbrook High School’s version of the folk song Tiger & Lightning with Sydney producer Roger Lock.

In his spare time Nathan has been tracking and mixing Sydney songwriter Nathan Brands’ EP. On the post-production side, he’s been mixing several TVCs, a doco on Red Bull Aussie cliff diver Joey Zuber, and several episodes of the International Body Boarding World series. New gear is a lovely Thermionic Culture The Phoenix stereo valve compressor and a pair of JLM Audio PEQ-1 Passive EQs. Blair Joscelyne from Nylon Studios has been busy working on music for the Mazda range including the CX9, Mazda 6 and Mazda 3. He also recently recorded an original song with Glenn Cunningham from The Voice for the IGA chain of supermarkets which is on air now.

Blair’s new single See You At The End received over 220,000 views on YouTube in the first two weeks of release and was created with Cinematic Strings 2 which he recently reviewed in this very magazine. Outside of the studio, Blair is undertaking a project for his YouTube series Mighty Car Mods that involves using beer and urine to paint a car. We were too scared to ask for more details but he promises us a photo next issue.

Matt Dever of D4 Studios has been packing his bags and doing what he can to dodge the weight limits before heading off with Simple Minds, Devo, and The Church. He’ll be making live recordings of each band on-the-fly at each of their eight Australian dates. The recordings will then be duplicated and sold at the concert straight after each act. He’ll also be popping over to the Enmore in Sydney on his day off to do the same for Blondie.

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Bob Scott has been hearing plenty of Voices In The Forest lately. It’s and opera he’s been mixing in the Canberra Arboretum using a large Meyer Milo rig from Coda Audio (18 per side) with the new Yamaha CL5 and CL1 consoles. It’s the first time he’s used the consoles and so far Bob is, “Impressed. Easy to use and sound great.” Bob has also done sound design for Sydney Festival Concrete and Bone, with extensive use of the outrageous Ohmicide plug-in (an oldy but a goody) from Ohmboys. He also had a session with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and the Australian Chamber Orchestra to record a piece Jonny had been commissioned to write. Lastly, Bob has been mixing for the Cope Street Parade Big Band, as well as recording Continuum Sax (sax quartet) and the Sydney Consort (baroque music with harpsichord, sackbuts, early trombones, and strings).

Phil Threlfall had been getting out of his home at The Base Studios with rock duo The Twoks, recording their full-length album Two in a bunch of alternative places — from the 1812 Theatre in Ferntree Gully, to a concrete and tin workshop, to an underground carpark — precisely because they weren’t clean and predictable. In the workshop, drummer Mark Leahy even managed to bang out a few extra percussive sounds with a hammer.

From an engineering perspective capturing the uniqueness of a drum and violin duo in these uncontrolled spaces was a challenge Phil was very happy to tackle. To that end, lots of ribbon mics (Royer 121s) were used because of their smooth sound and equally important figure 8 pattern, along with lots of omni and M/S setups using Schoeps, Neumann and AKG mics for all the ambience. That was supported by the usual suspects on close mic duties — RE20s, 421s, 57s,

SCAN ME!

IN THE DARK Check out a beautiful clip of Xani shot while she was recording You’ll Never Change in the darkness

WHAT’S HAPPENING? Got any news about the happenings in your studio or venue? Be sure to let us know at whatson@audiotechnology.com.au

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D6 and more 121s. A particular favourite track of Phil’s is You’ll Never Change, recorded in the underground carpark. The majority (but not all) of the lead vocals were recorded back at The Base, along with extra, more traditional percussion, and the mix on The Base’s Amek console for a bit of sonic icing. Other sessions at The Base have been equally diverse; some world music with Ajak Kwai, jazz trio Fred Cheah, hip hop with Bliss ‘n Eso, prog rock with Transience, ska with Strada9 and to finish off the year it’ll be an album mix for local Croatian lads Major Minor. Aside from all the recording and mixing sessions, they’ve been playing with the new ethernet-powered 16-channel headphone system from Behringer — which, while very cost effective compared to the competition appears to be working exceptionally well. The response from the players that have used both it and the more expensive alternate systems has been very positive. If it keeps trucking along, Phil reckons they may have a winner.

REC Studios in Sydney has just turned one. The previous Studios 301, then Level 7 Studios, has had a good run in its first year, with producers like Lee Groves and Dean Tuza (The Rubens) working out of the studio, as well as a troupe of in-house producers. In the last 12 months The Presets, The Rubens, The Script and New Navy have all made their way through the studio.

Creative industries training and education provider JMC Academy is relocating the organisation to a new purpose-built threelevel campus in Harris Street, Ultimo, Sydney.

Spanning just under 3000 square feet, the Ultimo Campus sits opposite the Powerhouse Museum within the education hub of central Sydney.

It’s a pretty speccy spot for students, being a stone’s throw from Darling Harbour and China Town — think relaxed afternoons in the sun, cheap eats, and after school gigs at The Metro.

The timely move coincides with the institution’s 30 year anniversary and will provide its music, audio, entertainment business, film and television, animation and game design students with unsurpassed access to four recording studios, seven rehearsal rooms, a film and TV studio and control room, sound and picture theatre, two MIDI labs, two computer labs, two film and TV editing suites, an auditorium, 13 lecture/media rooms, a library, student study area with collaboration rooms and a student café.

Sounds like a great place to learn the craft. JMC will be moving on the 14th of December and opening up shop again on the 17th.

Available from now until the release of Live 9 at your local dealer and at ableton.com Buy Ableton Suite 8, get up to 25% off plus a free upgrade to Live 9 Suite.

Buy Ableton Live 8, get up to 25% off plus a free upgrade to Live 9 Standard.

Buy Ableton Live Intro, get up to 25% off.

Distributed by CMI Music & Audio. Ph: 03 9315 2244. Find a dealer at: www.cmi.com.au/ableton-dealers.html

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GENERAL NEWS NEUMANN MONITORS ACCURACY Expanding its line of studio monitors, Neumann’s KH310A is a three-way system that reflects Neumann’s philosophy of achieving the most accurate sound reproduction using state-of-the-art technology and techniques — the same philosophy applied to its microphones. The KH310A treble, midrange and bass drivers have all been simulated and designed directly by Neumann to give an extremely linear reproduction across the entire frequency response.

Accuracy in the bass, which goes down to 34Hz, is achieved by using a sealed cabinet design to give a fast transient

HEARD, BUT NOT SEEN Shure has released the new FP series of ‘cost-effective’ field production wireless systems. Compatible with the Shure SLX family, the FP series consists of four separate components. The FP1 Field production body-pack has no display and minimal characteristics to allow the body-pack to be used on-camera with little to no distraction — no blinking LEDs or LCD displays to drag the audience’s eyes away from the real story.

The FP2 Field production handheld has a similar design principal, a bare-bones appearance to have minimal on-camera impact. The handhelds are supplied with

UK company Kenton is sticking to its 5-pin DIN guns in the face of modern technology, believing that the popularity of retro MIDI gear creates a need for its new SYNC-5 Active DIN Sync Splitter. It has one DIN Sync input and five DIN Sync output ports to enable users to easily connect several DIN Sync devices to one DIN Sync controlling device — without the usual problems often associated with daisy-chaining devices. Housed in an attractively finished, brushed aluminium box with black screen print, the SYNC-5 ships with an energyefficient, switch-mode PSU appropriate to the destination country including Australia. www.kentonuk.com

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response. The mid-frequencies are re-produced by a dedicated soft dome midrange driver, and high frequencies are handled by an alloy fabric dome in an elliptical Mathematically Modelled Dispersion (MMD) waveguide. Three class AB amplifiers and a high capacity SMPS power supply bring very high headroom to the system with no audible distortion, and there are acoustical controls for bass, low-mid and high frequencies. Neumann assures us that the tolerances are so small that any two KH 310 A monitors can serve as a matched pair. You have to wait until 1st quarter of 2013 to get your hands on them.

Syntec: 1800 648 628 or sales@syntec.com.au

either SM58 or the new omnidirectional VP68 heads. The FP3 is a plug-on transmitter based on the UR3, featuring the same chassis with user-only viewed LEDs for both audio and battery and a direct gain control on the unit. The FP3 comes with a protective skin and belt clip. Finally, the FP5 Diversity portable receiver is a single channel portable receiver compatible with the FP series or SLX transmitters. The FP5 is supplied with a camera shoe mount, a TA4-F to XLR-3 and a TA4-F to mini jack for DSLRs. Stocks are expected to be available soon.

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

ENCO Systems, the software development company of DAD and DAD TV, a specialist in audio play-out and automation solutions has announced Professional Audio Technology (PAT) as its new exclusive distributor for Australia and New Zealand. PAT sees products like ENCO1 as a solution for customers who rely on a purely IP-based system infrastructure within their station, while ENCO’s DAD in combination with a more traditional MADI infrastructure provides broadcasters with delivery options within their plant or entire national network infrastructure.

Professional Audio Technology: (02) 94761272 or sales@proaudiotechnology.com.au

Another couple of lost waifs from the Musiclink fall-out have found a new home. Propellerhead Software announced that it has selected Electric Factory (ELFA) as the exclusive distributor for Propellerhead products in Australia. Starting December 1, ELFA will provide marketing, sales and logistics to Propellerhead’s dealers and end-user customers throughout Australia. Also, Line 6 has moved to Australis who will handle all things Line 6 effective immediately.

Electric Factory: (03) 9474 1000 or www.elfa.com.au Australis: (02) 9698 4444 or www.australismusic.com.au

In a genuine 11th hour reprieve it’s been revealed that Australian Musical Imports has bought ‘most’ of the Allans and Billy Hyde assets, including the trading names, and plans to rebuild the franchise back to a fully-trading chain of music retail stores. AMI’s Managing Director, Con Gallin, reckons the receivers put up a fight and he couldn’t save all 25 stores, but in the final days before the windows would be boarded up for good they agreed to a deal that should see most of the key outlets remaining open. Existing staff have been invited to stay.

Enrol Listen Record Mix Master Tour Produce the next big thing What will your creative future look like?

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Launch your creative journey through collaboration, education and training at JMC Academy.

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Visitjmcacademy.edu.au or call on 1300 410 311. facebook.com/jmcacademy

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CATCH SOME MORE ZEDS Allen & Heath has launched two additions to the ZED series of small analogue mixers, designed for use by solo artists and small bands. The aim is to reduce size and cost with 60mm short-throw, high quality faders. The input configurations of the ZED6010FX and ZED60-14FX are four mono/ three stereo and eight mono/three stereo respectively with two of the mono channels offering high impedance jack inputs that can take a normal line level or a low level input from a guitar pickup, so guitars can be plugged straight into the mixer without the need for DI boxes. These inputs have

been crafted to recreate the sound of a classic tube preamp in a combo or head guitar amp. One of the stereo inputs can accommodate MP3/CD players or keyboards via RCA inputs. Both mixers are equipped with configurable USB audio in/out, making it easy to capture a stereo recording at a gig or in the studio, XLR main stereo outputs, internal power supply and detachable IEC cable, a flexible monitoring section with headphone and speaker feed outputs, and 16 high-quality digital effects developed from the iLive digital mixing system. Retail price in Australia for the ZED60-10FX is $599 and for the ZRF60-14FX $699.

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

RODE REPORTS IN RØDE Microphones has announced a new addition to its line of broadcast and AV products, the Reporter microphone. As we’ve come to expect from Rode, it has given the Reporter a bit of thought with some quite specific features for the task at hand.

Designed for handheld interview and presentation applications, an innovative multi-layer mesh basket protects the microphone from environmental noise without the need for a bulky and distracting foam wind shield. It’s also supplied with a removable microphone ‘flag’ that can accommodate highvisibility branding. The Reporter uses an omnidirectional dynamic capsule

CURE THAT WIND PROBLEM UK-based windshield manufacturer Rycote has announced a new product designed specifically for stereo recording with a matched pair of microphones in an ORTF configuration.

ORT what, you may ask? ORTF stereo recording was pioneered by the engineers at the French state broadcaster in the 1960s, and is defined as using a stereo pair of microphones with the capsules spaced 17cm apart, and at an angle of 110 degrees to each other. Rycote’s new ORTF Windshield kit is designed for matched pairs of Schoeps CCM or Sennheiser MKH 8000 mics, and

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consists of a Lyre suspension, a cable clamp, and a 145mm stereo windshield and windjammer large enough to comfortably accommodate the microphones. A specially-designed Rycote mounting adapter bar keeps the microphones at the correct spacing and angle for ORTF recording, and the Lyre suspension and shared windshield combine to provide a solution that is extremely resistant to wind noise and unwanted vibrations such as cableborne and handling noise. Further protection against cable-borne noise can be achieved by purchasing variants of the ORTF kit which include a Rycote Connbox.

Syntec: 1800 648 628 or sales@syntec.com.au

that is designed to give the user better results in a media scrum, avoiding issues typical of directional endaddress microphones when the ‘talent’ is addressing a multitude of handheld microphones at the same time.

Additionally its frequency response has been specially tailored for voice reproduction, to maximise intelligibility and deliver crisp, clear results in almost any conditions. The microphone features a durable die-cast aluminium alloy body coated in a discrete matte black anti-glare finish. The only thing lacking is a BS cut-off filter for the pollies on parliament steps.

Rode: (02) 9648 5855 or www.rodemic.com.au

Obsessing with linear frequency responses and other technical details, or in fact just wanting to please your ears, is not the right recipe for a good studio monitor. What is usually needed is a good balance. A balance between the work you’re listening and a realistic sense of what your final output will be. Exceptional sound reproduction is of course fundamental in good monitoring speakers. But it’s equally important that your work is properly translated in a way that your music sounds consistent in other speakers or rooms.

Listen to EVE Audio for yourself. And let your ears decide. Find a dealer at elfa.com.au

Electric Factory Pty Ltd 188 Plenty Road Preston VIC 3072 T: 03 9474 1000 E: sales@elfa.com.au

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GENERAL NEWS NEW AGE NUAGE We know that Yamaha and Steinberg joined forces long ago, but on this occasion they have worked closely together to create an advanced production system with Yamaha hardware tailored specifically for Steinberg software in a cohesive platform. The Nuage integrated audio production system offers Yamaha control and interface hardware hand-in-hand with Steinberg Nuendo DAW software in a purpose-built system for all things audio, but of course being Nuendo-based, postproduction will also be a strong focus.

The Yamaha hardware is modular, and all units communicate with each

other and the central computer via a Dante network, so it’s easy to create custom configurations to match any application. Nuendo 6, the latest version of Steinberg’s DAW postproduction software, is at the core of the system. Hardware components available for Nuage systems include the Nuage Fader channel-strip control surface that works with standard LCD monitors, the Nuage Master controller unit with everything needed for Nuendo editing, Nuage Workspace units for creating a unified system layout, three Nuage I/O units that deliver up to 128 simultaneous channels, and a Dante Accelerator card.

Yamaha Music Australia: (03) 9693 5111 or www.yamahamusic.com.au

RADIAL PLUG & PLAY Radial Engineering has announced the 500 series Q4 EQ, claiming it “could” very well be the world’s first 100% discrete state-variable class-A parametric equaliser since mid-last century. The Q4 features four EQ bands with fixed low and high frequency shelving at 100Hz and 10kHz, plus two semi-parametric mid bands. The Q4 is made in Canada and guaranteed for three years. Adding more fuel to Radial’s workhorse series is the Chaindrive 1x4 Distro and Line Driver,

PRISM TURNS 25 Prism Sound has been in business now for 25 years — always a number worth celebrating. To mark the anniversary, Prism Sound announced the launch of a limited edition Orpheus, its flagship firewire interface. Only 25 of these limited edition units will be offered for sale and each one will numbered. Every Orpheus in the series features a black chassis and blue LED panel, and carries the signature of its creator, Prism Sound’s Technical Director Ian Dennis. The units also come complete

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with a Thunderbolt adapter. Prism Sound is anticipating a “huge demand” for the limited edition — creating just 25, symbolic or not, could come back to haunt them — so the limited units will be sold on a first come, first served basis. Ian Dennis has even been dobbed in by Prism management to personally fine tune and polish every one. The Orpheus provides state-of-the-art clock technology in a FireWire unit compatible with all recent Windows versions (32 and 64-bit,

which lets you split a signal four ways for some creative signal chains.

Also new from Radial are the Gold Digger Microphone Selector and the Cherry Picker Preamp Selector. The Gold Digger lets you compare up to four microphones and quickly switch between them using radio-style pushbutton selectors. The Cherry Picker lets you compare up to four preamps in the same way. It’s a great idea, although at $499 each, you’d want to be switching between some pretty pricey gear to make it worthwhile.

Amber Technology: 1800 251367 or www.ambertech.com.au

ASIO and WDM) as well as Mac OS X 10.4.11 and later (Intel and PPC). Once configured with a computer, Orpheus can also operate stand-alone using its AES S/PDIF or ADAT I/O accelerator card.

CDA Professional Audio: (02) 9330 1750 or www.cda-proaudio.com

DISCOVER WHERE YOU FIT IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY

For more information visit: www.sae.edu.au or call 1800 SAE EDU Brisbane | Byron Bay | Sydney | Melbourne | Adelaide | Perth AT 23

REVIEW

ZOOM Q2HD

HANDY VIDEO RECORDER A handy recorder that gives you plenty of audio to go along with your HD video.

Review: Mark Davie

Zoom makes great hand-held audio recorders, in a range of styles. For example, the H4n’s input combination, quality and price has made it a go-to field recorder for the DSLR revolution. There’s plenty of competition in this market, but it’s hard to pip the Zoom for features at its price point — it’s packed.

The Q2HD is badged as a ‘handy’ video recorder, and, there’s no doubting its handiness, but don’t expect miracles out of its small lens — we’re talking about an image quality similar to your smartphone. The bit rate of the compressed H.264 file going into the camera is about 15Mbps, which means static video is represented well, but it’s not going to cope so well with lots of detail and motion in the frame. There are a couple of video setting options for low light, but again, this isn’t a low light, high ISO beast.

The video features are plentiful. Probably one of the most enticing for musicians would be the incorporation of live streaming video via services like Ustream, direct from the Q2HD. You just have to plug it into the computer via USB, and you’ve got a great stereo capture and video fans can view, or artists you might be collaborating with. A lot of options there.

MS DELIGHTS

Video aside, like all the other recorders in Zoom’s range, it is a genuinely ‘handy’ audio recorder.

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Zoom has gone through a range of stereo miking methods on its recorders: coincident setups in varying degrees, four input surround, and MidSide. The Q2HD uses a Mid-Side configuration hidden inside a disco ball grille propped on top of the recorder.

It’s a nice configuration, that allows you to set the gain of the sides to capture a 30- to 150-degree stereo perspective, or purely mono. The sound is crisp, detailed, and incredibly wide at its furthest point. Obviously the gain of the side microphones goes up the wider you get, but it’s not very noisy. You can also set a low cut filter, and there are three auto gain settings for Concert, Solo, or Meeting.

You can record PCM wavs in 16- and 24-bit, at 44.1, 48 and 96k, as well as AAC compressed files at 64 to 320kbps. You can also turn the camera off to save battery and space if you only want to use the Q2HD as an audio recorder. While recording HD video, you’ll get a couple of hours of battery life (two AAs, alkaline or rechargeable Ni-MH).

The menu is really easy to navigate, though hampered a little by the touchpad. My fingers were a little big and often would move the cursor when I was aiming to select an item. One thing that always irked me about the H4n was the on/ off slider. While neatly tucked away so you don’t accidentally waste your batteries in transit, it

had the tendency to come off. The Q2HD has a nice push button instead. You have to hold it down for a second to turn the unit on or off, but it’s unlikely to detach. The mic gain is set by a roller on the side. The only problem I see with the buttons — and a common trait with most portable recorders — is that you can hear them click in the recording, and handling noise isn’t the best.

HANDY CAM

While the Q2HD’s video quality is not best afield, it’s also intended more for portability than high quality broadcast. It’s like a smartphone, but with much better audio. I’d look at it as a great audio recorder that doubles as a convenient way to capture a moment and share it easily. Very handy indeed.

The price is $329, or $369 with the accessories pack, which includes hardshell carry case, HDMI lead, USB lead with attached power supply, and a pop filter.

Dynamic Music: (02) 9939 1299 or info@dynamicmusic.com.au

FREE SATELLITE or UAD-2 QUAD CARD YOUR CHOICE OF FREE SATELLITE QUAD OR UAD-2 QUAD IF YOU BUY A 4-710d MIC PREAMP

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External Firewire 800 and 400 DSP accelerator unit Includes “Analog Classics” plug-in bundle, featuring LA-2A Classic Audio Leveler, 1176LN / 1176SE Classic Limiting Amplifiers, Pultec EQP-1A and Realverb Pro plug-ins.

High-bandwidth Firewire DSP Accelerator with four Analog Devices SHARC processors

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Flagship quad-processor DSP Accelerator Card for UAD Powered Plug-Ins on Mac or PC Includes “Analog Classics” plug-in bundle, featuring LA-2A Classic Audio Leveler, 1176LN/1176SE Classic Limiting Amplifiers, Pultec EQP-1A and Realverb Pro plug-ins.

High-bandwidth PCIe card w/ (4) Analog Devices SHARC floating-point processors

UAD-2 QUAD

Offered while stocks last. Find your nearest UA dealer at: www.cmi.com.au

Re-thinking the DJ Mixer TRAKTOR KONTROL Z2 is the world’s first 2+2 DJ control mixer. The Z2 connects with controllers, turntables and DJ CD players for seamless TRAKTOR integration across diverse DJ setups. All-new Macro FX and Flux Mode expand your creative arsenal, while the beefy aircraft-grade aluminum chassis and Innofaders™ assure rock-solid dependability on any stage, in any club. Welcome to the future of mixing.

Features:

► 2+2 channel DJ mixer/controller and 24-bit audio interface ► Best-in-class, tour-safe build quality with robust, aircraft-grade aluminium chassis ► Ergonomic industry-standard layout with 3-band EQ plus dedicated filters per channel ► Precision-designed, high-end knobs and buttons, plus premium faders

by Innofader™ ► Multi-colored Remix Deck™/cue point trigger buttons and LED loop display ► Built-in powered USB hub* for 2 add-on DJ controllers such as TRAKTOR KONTROL F1 or TRAKTOR KONTROL X1 ► Instant plug-and-play setup, with full TRAKTOR SCRATCH PRO 2.5 software** and timecode media included ► One-knob Macro FX for effortlessly expressive sound manipulation using the comprehensive array of TRAKTOR effects ► Innovative Flux Mode for maximum creativity and point-perfect timing ► Lossless post-fader effects using the industry-leading TRAKTOR effects suite

Distributed by CMI Music & Audio www.cmi.com.au

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SOFTWARE NEWS

HOMING IN ON CUBASE 7

THE EXTRAS IN X2

Steinberg has announced Cubase 7 and Cubase Artist 7 and since the DAW has advanced a whole number (rather than the last 6.5 release) this is, as you’d expect, a major update. Top of the feature list is a completely new mixer, plus brand-new tools for composing, more effects, more content and “countless” workflow enhancements. The new MixConsole mixer is promising neverbefore-seen transparency, fidelity, and functionality. And a new channel strip module is designed to avoid opening a bunch of separate plug-ins for a basic track sound. Built into a single plug-in you get high and low-pass filters, noise gate, the four-band StudioEQ, three compressors, a spectrum analyser, tube/tape saturation, a brickwall limiter, maximiser plus 150 factory presets created by US producer Allen Morgan — that lot should keep you busy for a while. Next is Chord Track and Chord Assistant, taking all the hard work out of harmony structures and chord progressions. You also get Voxengo’s studiograde 64-band spline CurveEQ, EBU R128 standard compliant loudness metering and the latest version of MixConvert for individual down-mixes in unmatched quality. The full version in Australia is $599, with upgrade prices and Artist versions available too.

Regular as clockwork, Cakewalk has released a Sonar upgrade. Sonar continues to add to the list of features each time usually without giving any the chop and it’s starting to run off the bottom of the page. However, bucking that trend, a lite version of Guitar Rig has been replaced with Overloud’s TH2 guitar emulator — only available in the Producers Edition though. Another new contribution from Overloud is its Breverb plug-in, which has a range of vintage and modern reverb sounds. An updated Matrix View is designed for live performances, triggering samples instantly and the Arrange window now has dedicated Automation Lanes instead of overlaid envelopes. Something that will really get tongues wagging is a Console Emulation feature. These are three channel modes that can be applied to either individual tracks or buses and promise to faithfully mimic the sonic characteristics of three famous British mixing consoles including the A Type Console which “emulates a revolutionary British console, of which only 13 consoles were ever built”.

We’ll let you stick a fork in that. In all, Sonar X2 has over 100 new features or tweaks and comes in three flavours of Essential ($109), Studio ($219) and Producer ($549).

Yamaha Music Australia: (03) 9693 5111 or www.yamahamusic.com.au

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

Genelec has announced its SpeakerAngle app is now available for Android devices at GooglePlay, priced at USD$0.99. It works on all Android smartphones and tablets running OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) or later and equipped with a gyroscope chip.

In other mobile news, an update to FL Studio Mobile 2, the iOS version of the DAW adds recording and editing audio among other small tweaks. An Android version is also on the way. www.image-line.com.

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Universal Audio has been doing some work with its Windows 7, 64-bit compatibility and with the release of its UAD version 6.4 software announced the availability of 64-bit UAD plug-in support for Windows 7. Also, the UAD-2 Satellite FireWire DSP Accelerator is now compatible with Windows 7 64-bit edition operating systems, using a qualified PCIe-to-FireWire 800 adapter card. And finally, the Apollo audio interface is now okay with Windows 7 64-bit edition operating systems, again using a qualified PCIe-to-FireWire 800 adapter card. Mac 64-bit users aren’t going to miss out. UAD is releasing a Mac public beta of a driver package soon with an official version not too far behind — obviously with any bugs ironed out.

Native Instruments has released the 5.8 update to its REAKTOR 5 virtual instrument. The update has tweaks to mouse operation and sample management, but mostly addresses new Open Sound Control (OSC) features. It has also added another expansion pack for Kontakt, Session Horns. A trombone, tenor sax and two trumpets have been sampled, as well as 170 playable phrases.

Propellerhead has released Radical Keys, a new Rack Extension instrument for Reason that faithfully recreates three classic electromechanical keyboards— Rhodes, Pianet and Wurlitzer. Based on the same ‘Radical’ technology as Propellerhead’s existing Radical Piano, Radical Keys promises to go beyond emulation by enabling users to sculpt their own instruments from the originals.

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

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

A TRIUMPH IN WAVE EDITING We normally associate cost with quality, so with an introductory price tag of just sixty bucks (on special from US$79.99) a lot of people will dismiss Audiofile Engineering’s Triumph software as simply not major league. However, with some innovative features and a new collaboration with iZotope it’s well worth a closer look. Previously known as Wave Editor, Triumph is the sequel application from Audiofile Engineering, which creates professional audio software only for Mac OS X and iOS. Triumph has undergone a complete rethink and rebuild to take advantage of the latest technologies Mac OS X has to offer. Notably, Triumph features a unique and patented method for editing audio called Layers. It’s similar to image editing in technique, but is specifically tailored for audio. The Layers method is a means to create combinations of sounds and (presumably, since it’s Photoshop-like) turn Layers on and off to compare results. IZotope’s involvement is that Triumph now includes iZotope Restore and Restoration as well as the advanced iZotope MBIT+ and 64-bit SRC options for disc burning. For US$60 you can’t go wrong — unless you don’t own a Mac. Not surprisingly you need to buy it online.

Are your wireless mics ready for the Digital Dividend ?

www.audiofile-engineering.com

OURS ARE !

By the end of 2014, all analogue TV transmitters will be turned off and all digital TV transmitters will have changed frequency.

The band between 694 MHz and 820 MHz will be cleared of all users so it can be used for mobile data services.

Check your wireless microphone systems now ! If they operate between 694 MHz and 820 MHz you need to start planning to

STUDIO ONE UP HALF A NOTCH

operate between 520 MHz and 694 MHz before the end of 2014.

PreSonus has announced the release of Studio One 2.5, a major update to the company’s Studio One 2 DAW. It’s a free update to Studio One 2 users adding nearly 100 enhancements and features, as well as many bug fixes. All versions of Studio One 2 have been updated, including Studio One Artist, Producer, Professional, and Free. Although the update adds some entirely new features, it mostly builds on existing Studio One 2 specialities, completing and enhancing functionality based on PreSonus’ original vision and on user feedback — the latter being a very active component with PreSonus priding itself on the high level of interaction between the company and its users. Interestingly, Studio One’s Ampire XT guitar simulator has been completely overhauled again after already getting serious attention for the Version 2 release — proof again that PreSonus listens to its users. In addition, all Studio One Producer and Professional users can now download a free copy of Softube’s Saturation Knob plug-in provided as a Studio One Extension. Studio One Free isn’t as limited as you’d expect and it can instantly be turned into a 30 day demo of the full version reverting to S1 Free afterwards, if you’re not tempted.

Make certain your systems are ready!

visit

ddready.com.au for more information

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

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SOFTWARE NEWS PLUG IN SHADOW HILLS No one really demands that plug-ins designed to emulate specific pieces of equipment be 100% accurate. It’s simply not a realistic expectation, and besides, plug-in versions are often an opportunity to chuck in an extra bypass switch or slight tweak that the original didn’t have. But the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor is a different kettle of compressed fish. Created by Shadow Hills Industries’ mastermind Peter Reardon, the original device is a bit of revered studio kit (five rack-spaces worth) never to be taken lightly.

If you’re going to create a SHMC plug-in, you’d better do it properly or not at all. Shadow Hills Industries has announced it’s done just that, working in partnership with Brainworx, releasing its hallmark mastering compressor as a UAD Powered Plug-In. Priced at US$299 direct from UAD it requires a UAD-2 DSP Accelerator Card or an Apollo interface — and promises results comparable to the real thing, which you can pick up for a mere $7000 or so.

All the switches, controls and parameters have been faithfully reproduced, meaning there is the wealth of versatility and variable signal processing that made the SHMC so renowned. If that’s a little daunting for you, Peter Reardon himself has written a collection of custom presets that come included with the plug-in. You can download a 14-day demo from www.uaudio.com to hear what all the fuss is about — as long as you have the UAD hardware of course.

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

WAVES SEES REDD If you’ve always wondered what it was like to record in Abbey Road studios back in the 1960s with the likes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd walking through the door, Waves Audio has come up with a way to bring you a step closer to that experience — except without the bands. Oh well, it still sounds okay. Teaming up with Abbey Road Studios, Waves has developed its new REDD console plug-ins. REDD consoles were custom-designed, built by and named after Abbey Road Studios’ in-house Record Engineering Development Department (REDD). Renowned for their EQ curves, extraordinary warmth and lush stereo imagery — and of course the mythology of the studio and the era — the REDD consoles enjoy a reputation that no other mixer can claim. To bring them back to virtual life Waves has done its homework, meticulously researching and recreating the unique colour, character and tonal complexity of the original desks by accessing the REDD.17 still belonging to Abbey Road Studios and the REDD.37 console now owned by Lenny Kravitz. The result is REDD and they’re certainly not your normal channel strip — kind of like a history lesson and a plug-in rolled into one.

Check them out at www.waves.com and talk to Sound & Music about the introductory price.

Sound & Music Distribution: (03) 9555 8081 or www.sound-music.com

NOW WE’RE DE-MIXING Unveil is a real-time, de-mixing based plug-in that allows attenuating or boosting of reverb components within a mixed signal of any channel count, including mono sources, as well as modifying reverb characteristics. Additionally, Unveil allows you to bring the key features of a recording into focus, or move them to the background, by attenuating or boosting “perceptionally less important signal components”. Perhaps Unveil is a way of settling arguments between band members about who is actually pulling their weight? Run Unveil over a final mixdown and see who gets shoved into the background, perceived as unimportant… Based on its proprietary, artificial intelligence-based MAP (MixedSignal Audio Processing) technology, Unveil allows fixing previously unusable location audio and dialogue, tightening up live music recordings, removing reverb and ‘mud’ from musical signals, as well as creative sound design. Zynaptiq recently announced version 1.5 of Unveil, a free update adding VST, RTAS and AAX support for both MacOS X and Windows systems, as well as several workflow enhancements. It’s not cheap at US$399 direct from www.zynaptiq.com.

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LIVE NEWS SOUNDS LIKE DOUBLE-DUTCH Dutch audio systems developer Alcons Audio has released the BC332, a self-contained, high-output cardioid subwoofer system for both permanent and portable groundstacked applications. The BC332 is designed to offer a directivitycontrolled, high output, tight and accurate sub-bass response, for low-frequency extension of any Alcons pro-ribbon system. Using a front and rear located woofer design, in combination with dedicated processing, the BC332 enables selectable cardioid low-frequency pattern control and rear rejection (up to 18dB), without the need for additional cabinets. On the front side, one 450mm long-excursion woofer with a 100mm voice-coil and a double-spider and demodulation

AWARD WINNING SILENCE GOES LIVE Cedar’s original dialogue noise suppressor, the CEDAR DNS, was designed for offline studio use and quickly found its way into many post-production facilities and even won an Academy Award — yes, the Academy hands out gongs for all sorts of things that never get a mention in the tabloids. A lot of DNS1000s ended up

on location carts despite it never being intended for live use. Cedar has fixed that by announcing the DNS 8 Live. With eight simultaneous channels of dialogue noise suppression, the DNS 8 Live hosts a new DNS algorithm with a simplified ‘2-knob’ approach as well as a detailed editing mode that offers more control. It promises near-zero latency, making it suitable for all live situations, not just live-to-air broadcasting. Cedar gave it all some

Allen & Heath has released the latest version of its iLive firmware, V1.9, featuring a range of enhancements including new GEQ, Dynamic EQ and Multi-Band compressor emulations, increased MIDI control options, and improvements to the functionality in the supporting iLive Editor software and MixPad app. A complete list of fixes and enhancements can be found at www.allen-heath.com.

Electro-Voice happily admits that the ZX1-Sub was conceived primarily for configurations involving EVID, ZX1 and EVU systems, but of course won’t stop you pairing it with loudspeakers from other manufacturers. The ZX1-Sub is passive with a 300mm EVS-12S woofer operating in the 42-200Hz (-10 dB) frequency range with a frequency response of 53-125Hz (-3 dB). It’s designed for portable or permanent rigs.

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

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

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ring frame, is mounted in a frontloaded configuration. On the rear side a similar driver (except it’s 380mm diameter) is mounted with a FlankVenting port. This folded port design enables optimal reflex-breathing, under minimal baffle dimensions, reducing destructive interference between speaker and reflex-vent.

The 2 x 4Ω system impedance caters for optimal amplifier loading and the BC332 is powered and controlled by the ALC amplified loudspeaker controller. Through the integrated processor, the ALC optimally drives the BC332 with specific response optimisation, protection and hybrid filtering processing. If it’s all a bit double-Dutch don’t worry, there’s an ALC preset library and more info at www.alconsaudio.com.

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

thought. Recognising that many people will want to use it where there’s no ready access to mains power, the DNS 8 Live has a standard 4-pin 12VDC input. And catering to the ubiquitous iPad, with the DNS 8 RC software due for release later in the year, the DNS 8 Live will work with almost any web browser. The DNS 8 Live itself is available now.

CDA Professional Audio: (02) 9330 1750 or www.cda-proaudio.com

Holophone, a company that specialise in multi-channel surround microphone technology, is introducing a new line of single-channel stage and studio microphones it claims will take on the big names in the industry and “slap some life into today’s stagnant market of monotonous, generic microphones.” The new Super C handheld supercardioid condenser is the first in a new line of customisable performance mics with a design that allows the user to quickly alter the mic’s appearance on the fly. www.holophone.com

Martin Audio has appointed Chris Pyne, one of the world’s leading sound engineers — and, we’re not shy to point out, a very familiar figure to our AudioTechnology pages — as its new technical support specialist for the Asia Pacific region (APAC). Chris joins the Martin Audio technical application support team, which already includes Andy Davies and his counterpart Jim Jorgensen in the United States.

NOW IT’S KLARK TEKNIK’S TURN

FLAT FREQUENCY RESPONSE

We’ve recently seen the release of Behringer’s X32 digital mixing console, which was developed together with Midas. Now Behringer has announced a major collaboration with another of its Music Group cohorts, Klark Teknik, with the arrival of its Xenyx QX series mixers. The eight new models feature custom-designed effects engines from Klark Teknik with 32 studio-grade presets, dual addressable parameters, tap function and storable user settings, plus “wireless-ready” integration with Behringer’s upcoming ULM Series digital wireless microphones. With configurations ranging from 10 to 24 inputs, QX Series mixers feature Behringer’s Xenyx mic preamps, one-knob mono channel compressors, built-in USB/audio interface, 48V phantom power and ‘British’ 3-band EQs. Xenyx QX Series USB mixers are suited for all live sound, recording and podcasting applications and, in Behringer’s own words, “Are affordable even for those on a tight budget.” As an added bonus, a free recording/editing software download is available from Behringer turning any Mac or PC computer into a complete audio workstation.

AKG has been thinking with its feet. As an alternative approach to the typical antenna design normally applied to wireless microphones and in-ear monitoring systems — basically festooning a stage with antennae that need a clear line of sight — AKG’s Floorpad is placed on the floor.

Hard-wearing, it’s capable of being hidden under a stage, carpeting or podiums with a high-quality RF link to wireless audio devices. Floorpad is connected to microphone receivers or in-ear monitor transmitters via low-loss coaxial cable and placed in the area of operation. The concept allows Floorpad to sacrifice some sensitivity and range with performers practically sitting on top of it, which reduces the risk of interference from other devices nearby. The Floorpad is a round, flat rubberised package approximately 500mm in diameter by 6mm thick with a 10-foot RG316 coaxial tail terminated with a female BNC. The device has a hemispherical radiation pattern, circular polarisation and a deliberate reduction in sensitivity across its 470-740MHz frequency range. Between gigs you can disconnect the cable, take it to the local park and throw it for your dog… no, not really. Frisbees are a bit cheaper. The Floorpad is due early next year with a RRP in Australia of $799.

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

Audio Products Group: (02) 9578 0137 or www.audioproducts.com.au

TRADE UP TO SHURE PSM 1000/900 WIRELESS NOW AND SAVE $$$$ Shure PSM 400

Trade up to Shure’s new Personal Stereo Monitors, PSM 1000 and PSM 900 and update your ‘in ears’ to the latest technology. Importantly, by upgrading you can also be sure that your new inventory works after the introduction of the digital dividend in 2013.

Trade in your existing inventory of PSM 400/600/700 and receive an amazing deal on Shure PSM 1000 and PSM 900.

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By acting now you can be confident for the future and you will save money. And if you are yet to hear the superior sonic quality of the PSM 1000/900 systems to anything else on the market, why not organise an audition via your local Authorised Shure Reseller asap.

For more information

(02) 9582 0909 www.jands.com.au

Offer valid until 31st December 2012. For full terms & conditions please visit www.jands.com.au/psmtradein

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SPACE TIME CONCERTO The Space Time Concerto competition, run by the University of Newcastle, is a mash-up of history and innovation. Entrants can pick their poison, either working with more traditional music from the Romantic and Modern/Postmodern eras, or creating something entirely new with an emphasis on performance, visualisation and digital resources. Why Space Time?

Well, music exists in time, and sounds out in a space.

So, it gives the innovation category something to stew on when they’re plotting their performance, whether it be a remote satellite link-up jam or linking up with a light sculpture. Entrants competed for $50,000 in prizes, and AT talked with two entrants who both took home part of the $10,000 Vice Chancellor’s Prize.

Concerto For Light Sculpture

By Robert Jarvis

Robert Jarvis’ entry into the innovation category comprises a light sculpture driven by music he creates on a Monome and Macbook Pro. The combination of light and music is something Jarvis has had a long interest in, saying, “You get something that’s greater than the sum of the parts.”

Robert walked AT through his setup: “I’m using a Monome 128 and a Macbook Pro. The Monome is running into MAX/MSP 6 where its configured for playing as a musical instrument as well as controlling certain aspects of the video. The Monome is set out to play notes with the X axis moving across in semitones and the Y axis rising in fourths.

This makes it very similar to play to a guitar or bass. The MAX patch also contains two VSTs — Togu Audio Lines Noizemaker which is set up as a warm pad with slow vibrato and AAS Chromaphone set up as a plucked string modeller. The final part of the MAX patch takes the Monome’s input and converts it to OSC to control the video.

“On the video side of things I’m using VDMX loaded with video prepared in After Effects.VDMX VDMXreads readsOSC OSCfrom fromthe theMonome Monometo totrigger triggerevents eventson onthe the after effects. sculpture. VDMX is piped into Mad Mapper via Syphon where it’s mapped to the sculpture. The video output is sent through a Triplehead2go out to two short-throw projectors, one for each sculpture.”

His nextplan project involves work a 13-piece choir in Melbourne, where He next involves work withwith a 13-piece choir in Melbourne, where each each singer’s microphone willinto runainto a laptop, generate OSC messages singer’s microphone will run laptop, generate OSC messages and and control its own sculpture or video projection so person the person control its own lightlight sculpture or video projection so the composing composing thealso music can alsothe compose the music can compose imagery.the imagery.

Transposed Dekany

By Greg Schiemer

I was first introduced to Gamelan in junior school in a vain attempt to incorporate world music. While most of the complexities of rhythm, timing and structure were completely lost on our group of pint-sized musicians, it was fun to bang along together. Greg Schiemer’s Satellite Gamelan taps into Gamelan’s “emphasis on the collaborative aspect of making music.” But using iPhones as pocket synthesisers.

The piece he devised is intended to be played across four different locations. In the actual concert it was Linz in Austria, Beijing, Newcastle and Singapore.

The sounds he’s programmed are recreations some of the 580 software instruments created by Frenchman Jean-Claude Risset at Bell Labs in the ’60s: one that implements a chorused effect, and synthesiser bells.

The piece consists of 15 different ‘states’ that the iPhones run through together, each running 32 seconds. Four colours, yellow, magenta, blue and green, represent the different venues, and whether or not it appears in that ‘state’ dictates whether the venue should be playing its part or not.

In each venue are 16 musicians, each with a phone, and the sound of the phones is captured with ambience by a microphone. The musicians play along by either tapping or shaking the phone.

The 15 states go through all the possible combinations of the four venues, never repeating in the sequence, with the tenth state representing the climax of all four venues playing at once.

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FEATURE

BUILDING AN EMPIRE Uli Behringer now owns Midas, Klark Teknik and Turbosound. AT went to The Music Group Factory to see the effects of this transition firsthand.

Story: Mark Davie

They only know how to build one way in China: Up. The entire economic zone of Guangdong is stacked layer upon layer to squeeze every last drop out of the landscape. Even rural townhouses are built vertically and left freestanding, waiting for a neighbouring upshoot to cover their exposed, featureless concrete sides.

It’s no different at Uli’s house, where Behringer’s foundations are making way for more elaborate designs as Uli builds on the reputations of Midas, Klark Teknik, and imminently Turbosound, to give Behringer’s facade a facelift.

Both the Midas and Klark Teknik badges have already surfaced on Behringer consoles, but the question on everybody’s lips is: Will that influence cut both ways?

Implied in that question is fear; fear for the demise of much-loved audio brands, suspicion of Behringer’s motives, and not being convinced about the quality of Chinese manufacturing.

FAST FOLLOWER

In some ways, Behringer does have a history of disrupting the futures of other brands. Its unashamed ‘fast follower’ business model has been to take a product that already has a strong market demand, then one-up them by producing it for a cheaper price and usually with more features.

The constant mantra when talking to Behringer is, “Doubling the features at half the price means four times the value.” Which isn’t a bad mission statement, regardless of the brand.

Secondly, all of the competitors Behringer managed to one-up have since moved their AT 34

production to China — it’s not where you produce, but how you manage it. There’s no magical set level of manufacturing quality in China, it can be great, fluctuating, or incredibly bad — especially when you sub-contract.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTROL

Uli knows all too well the perils of sub-contracting manufacture: “Subcontractors here in China don’t think long-term. For them, it’s a deal today, and not knowing if the customer will come back tomorrow. When I first came to Hong Kong, I met up with a sub contractor and asked him if he could make something. He said, ‘No problem.’ I asked again, if he could make something else. ‘No problem’, was his reply. It was fantastic, paradise, I thought they could make gold the way he was talking. They sent a prototype, and it was fantastic.

At that time, I put $150,000, which was all had into it. The container arrived, and we opened the package and my heart dropped, it was junk. It was like a container full of bananas. We had 40 people working for us at the time, and we had every secretary, every cleaner, with a screwdriver in hand to rework a full container. That was my first experience, it almost killed the company.”

The experience left a mark, and he immediately relocated to Hong Kong to try and manage his way through sub-contracting, till finally, over ten years ago, he began manufacturing in China. “If you want quality,” he says. “You have to build it yourself, or have so much power, like Apple or Nike, that you can control the subcontractor.”

THE REAL DEAL

One of the worst quality culprits was flat ribbon

cables. Cables in general are the single biggest point of failure, with failure rates excessively high for outsourced versions. These days The Music Group makes all its own cables. “It’s not very sexy,” Uli said. “And it’s not cheaper to do in-house either, but it’s necessary if you don’t want gear flowing back. We bought specific machines to align the connectors and the cables and apply a very defined amount of force.”

Fake semi-conductors was another problem. Sub contractors would wipe out the surface of a lower speed processor and restamp a higher speed on it. So when you ran the processor at the speed you thought it was intended for, it would burn out. “Now we buy components directly from the manufacturers,” said Uli, “which is the beauty of the volume game we have. We can buy stock from Cirrus Logic, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices.

“One bad product can wipe you out. We’re not nervous, but we’re very cautious.”

THE RIGHT WAY UP

So what effect has Behringer had on Midas and Klark Teknik? Well, let’s start the other way round.

When Uli wanted to move much of Midas’ manufacturing to China, the simple answer was, ‘No. You don’t have what we need there.’ So he asked them what they did need, which resulted in a $20m-long shopping list, including pick and place machines that rattle off collated components faster than a machine gun, but with accuracy in the points of a millimetre. There were plenty of other improvements too; X-ray machines that take the guess work out of solder joint quality,

(l-r) We all know pitch control is vital, but especially important when you’re trying to stick components into a circuit board at machine gun speeds; Uli checks out the water tank in quality control; purple Midas circuit boards travel right alongside amber Behringer boards.

dedicated production rooms for Midas’ Pro fader, 14-layer circuit board production, machines dedicated to moving faders millions of times. And it’s not just investment in Midas, at each station you’ll find amber Behringer circuit boards right alongside the purple Midas boards as they go through the same processes. Uli dipped into his pockets for processes Midas gear won’t see; new ovens for baking speaker cones, as well as automating a lot more processes like applying glue — which is likely to have some correlation with Turbosound.

As it stands, the Pro series, Midas’ most successful range of consoles, is made solely in China, with the big boy, XL8, still made in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in the UK. And the shift is paying off. While Bosch was losing millions a year holding onto Midas, The Music Group has turned it completely around, by doing the one thing that keeps a console manufacturer afloat — selling loads of consoles. While Midas always had a rich heritage, and a mountain of R&D, the failure to stimulate the market place was a killer.

QUALITY EQUALS CONTROL

It’s hard to give a complete insight into the other side of the coin in a couple of brief visits to the Music Group factory, but it seems like quality is high up the checklist regardless. At the end of the line, consoles are left to power soak on eight hour cycles, there are water resistance-testing tanks, heat-testing ovens, RF chambers for EMC testing, component testing down to the last resistor, heat mapping, a room for safety testing, teams of Chinese workers dedicated to prodding the buttons, and working the faders of each console before they make their way into a box, and testing stations on every line.

It can’t all be attributed to Midas’ occupation, Uli’s been steadily growing The Music Group’s manufacturing as a core competency. The stairwells are lined with posters detailing updated manufacturing techniques, or linespecific changes. And Chinese labour isn’t as cheap as it used to be, with a 20% increase in wages year on year. These days, with so many manufacturing jobs available, workers are free to pick and choose, with incredibly high staff turnover rates often of 30%. The Music Group quotes its turnover rate as less than 3% a year, which only adds to its level of quality control.

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1,000,000...1,000,001... okay, that’ll do, I think these faders are ready for prime time now.

up has given The Music Group confidence to give three years across all ranges, and all price points.

It’s part of a wider program that has seen a lot of investment in customer service. The message is that The Music Group has been growing faster than it can keep up with, and now it’s trying to fix the bad bits. With 25 people employed full time to trawl forums and answer people’s concerns online, you may have already had an interaction with the new-look Music Group.

“

One bad product can wipe you out. We’re not nervous, but we’re very cautious

”

PRICING CONVERSION

People will always ask how Behringer gets its prices so low, and will they begin to cheapen Midas too? Well, in a way, yes they will. “The quantity of components we’re buying is so massive, that we’re obviously buying at very different pricing,” said Uli. “For instance, we buy our AD converters from Cirrus Logic directly from the US, and we’re the second largest customer after Apple. In the Behringer X32 we have the CS5368 AD converter, which I believe is one of the best. That component is also used in Midas’ Pro 2 console. Before [the takeover] they were paying $18 for each chip, and we’re paying a fraction of that. We also have our own factory, so we don’t have to make a profit on the factory, which gives us a 25% cost advantage.

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“And we hedge. When the oil price is low, we buy tonnes of granulate, which is what you use to make plastic injected speaker cabinets, and stock it in the warehouse. When you’re a public company, you can’t do that anymore.”

One of the common themes is a lack of servicing when it’s required. It’s an issue that will become only more crucial as The Music Group moves from ‘fast follower’ to innovator. Walking through their R&D department, there are some bonafide game changers soon to hit the market.

But the new innovations must work, and be easily serviced when they don’t. The Music Group has already set up new service centres in the UK and Nevada as part of this underlying pledge.

AUSTRALIAN SOIL

Thomann recently stopped publishing its failure rate figures. Probably because it was too much for some brands to handle. But as the biggest retailer in Europe, it’s certainly got the sample size. In early 2012, the three-year average failure rate for Behringer was 0.74%, compared to some other manufacturers registering as high as 3%. And that was based on returns for product mostly built before the $20m capital injection. Likely, it would be lower now.

In Australia, Galactic Music has just gone from being the sole fulfilment partner to effectively representing Behringer in full in Australia as of December 21. It brings to an end the problematic arrangements Behringer has had in the past.

Going from its own Australian distribution, to Galactic being the fulfilment partner while Behringer still had a small support and product specialist team, to a more traditional distribution arrangement, where the one distributor handles all aspects. A one-stop shop is a good thing, and Galactic has already made some changes in lieu of this announcement. Firstly, having built their reputation with the Kosmic stores in Western Australia, Galactic is now opening a Melbourne branch that will handle their products up the Eastern seaboard. Also, effective January, all Behringer products under $2000 will be replaced under warranty, and there will be service centres in every major city to handle everything else, or in cases where it would be faster to repair than replace.

In the 20 years since Uli began manufacturing in China, over 11.5 million consoles have gone out through the gates. And a total of about 5 million pieces annually. If you’ve got tens of millions of product pieces out in the world, you have to get it right, or you’ll have millions of pieces coming back through the door. Confidence in a product is usually shown in a warranty, and the tooling

It’s interesting times for The Music Group. It’s no longer just Behringer, it’s a family. If Midas is happy being in China. Shouldn’t we be? Someone once said of the Behringer factory, “It’s like a Swiss factory on China soil.” With the proposed $50m plant in the vicinity of mountains and water, Feng shui would say that Chinese soil might just be the best place to be.

It’s not to say that all Midas and Behringer products are now the same. A simple example is the pot shafts on the consoles: on a Midas console they’re all metal, while on Behringer consoles, they’re plastic. Another difference is in the console fader systems. Both are made in-house, but Midas uses a specifically-developed Pro fader, of which they can only make a handful a day, but is guaranteed to last one million moves.

THE ONLINE ONSLAUGHT

Freecall 1800 441 440 AT 37

FEATURE

PLAYTIME Coldplay cares. 50,000+ punters piled into Etihad stadium, and they all enjoyed nearfield sound.

Story: Christopher Holder Main Photo: Marty Philbey

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If you mix gigs for fun or for a living, here’s a lifestyle to aspire to: Fly the world in first-class luxury, stay in primo hotels, travel with the band to stadium gigs, mix a bunch of highly-professional musicians with the very best gear available, wave goodbye to your tech team at the end of the final encore, hop in the band’s limo to be wined and dined somewhere very pleasant indeed… and in another couple of days, repeat as necessary.

end bite on most sounds to cut through. I mean, you’re not going to stick up a Neumann U67 three metres above and behind the drumkit as a ‘room’ mic, for obvious reasons. So I tend to use more dynamic microphones: SM57s on guitars and a Shure Beta52 on the bass drum. And also the Earthworks microphones which are really good for drums. They’re my close mics and from there I get a sense of depth using reverb and other plug-ins.

You could say FOH engineer Dan Green is one very lucky bastard.

AT: You clearly like what the Earthworks mics are doing.

But you might also acknowledge he’s an indispensable cog in the machine that keeps the world’s biggest touring band purring. At least, that’s clearly what Coldplay must be thinking.

DG: They cut through really nicely and they preserve a lot of the front-end attack of the sound, which is something you really need. In stadiums and arenas you can’t really have a sound that has too much decay because the room has so much decay anyway — ‘sharp’ and ‘short’ wins every time.

After working briefly with the band on the recording of X&Y, Dan has been involved in building Coldplay’s studio in North London, and remained on the recording team for Viva la Vida and Mylo Xyloto. At this level it’s unusual for someone in Dan’s position to occupy pivotal roles in the studio and on the road, but it does provide him with a unique insight into how best to get 50,000 people in a venue like Etihad Stadium, Melbourne, rocking.

I rang Dan the morning after, at his deluxo hotel in Sydney (he and the band flew back to Sydney after the concert in a private jet) for a chat. I guess I was imagining him on a balcony overlooking an opalescent harbour, sipping on a Nespresso and picking at a fruit platter… probably in a white hotel robe. I started by asking him how the studio and live disciplines influence each other on a tour like this: COLD CALL

Dan Green: We have live performance on our minds right from when a song is taking shape in the studio.

AT: To the extent of constraining some of your studio production so it would translate well live?

DG: Exactly. You don’t want to cram too many elements into a song when you’re playing it live.

We’re performing in stadiums and arenas with huge reverb times, which means you’ve got to work hard to ensure the vocals and key elements shine through. I tend to just stick to the core elements of a song, and I’m not so particular about including all the subtle atmospherics.

Which doesn’t mean there’s no detail or subtlety.

For example, Jonny [Buckland, guitars] has a lot of little melodies that weave around the vocals, so I’ve got to make sure that people can appreciate those parts. But ultimately, it’s about giving the audience what it needs to sing along, and providing a solid bass and drum sound to keep the momentum.

AT: Are you able to borrow much from the studio mic cabinet on tour?

DG: A few bits and bobs, but the demands are very, very different on the road. In the studio, your mic choice can be all about character. But in a live context you’re after mics that reproduce transients very clearly — you need that front-

DINING OUT ON LUNCHBOX

AT: I’m fascinated by your 500 series lunchboxes at front of house. What’s going on there exactly?

DG: Anyone who’s worked on a Midas XL4 will remember how you really only needed to give it some gain and push up the fader and you were good to go. Now with digital consoles — and as happy as I am with the Digico SD7 — you don’t get that, especially on drums.

In my search to rediscover that instant ‘analogue’ sound I began to play around with effects pedalstyle boxes, but they were a bit flakey. On the other hand, I’ve always found Radial gear to be super-reliable. When it came out with the 500 series Workhouse, I tried out a few different pres, and settled on eight modules of Neve 1073 (which work really well on Chris’s SM58), four of the Helios Type 69-500 EQs (I love what the Helios high/mids do to the guitars) and four Shadow Hills Mono GAMA mic pres.

If anything does go awry with those, there’s a macro on my SD7 that’ll instantly flick back to the preamps on the SD stage rack.

CH: So you can easily A/B the two sources and hear the difference?

DG: I can, and the difference is just incredible.

The level is the same but the depth of the sonic image is quite different. I think their impact is cumulative. If you had one or two 1073s I don’t think you’d hear much of a difference.

AT: Are you concerned that if you’re using analogue preamps and/or outboard — routing in and out of the SD7 — you’ll get a bit of phase smear?

DG: I had a few concerns on that front with the drums. What I’m doing is using Waves’ MultiRack [live sound plug-in platform] where I’ve made a dummy plug-in group and I can send every drum-related channel to that group.

So regardless of whether that drum element is sourced from an analogue mic pre or a digital plug-in, it becomes aligned. I’ve also done that with other groups of instruments that need to be phase-aligned, and I think that sorts out any kind of latency issues.

AT 39

FOH Engineer Dan Green (left) with the technical mastermind of the tour Tony Smith. Photo by Brian Petersen.

AT: Can you tell me a little more about the Waves MultiRack setup?

DG: Well, take, for example, my kick drum sound.

I’ve got three kick drum channels. I’ll do a bit of basic kick EQ’ing or processing on the SD7’s console channel, I’ll route those to a group and process the three channels together. In the Waves MultiRack, as a group, I’ll apply a filter and then that goes into an API compressor, and then into an H EQ. By doing it that way — grouping and processing those kick channels together — it helps glue the sound together a little more. Which means if I want a bit more click on my bass drum, rather than EQ it I’ll push up the more clicky microphone which then doesn’t affect the way it fits with all the processing. To me this approach sounds nicer than EQ’ing it in isolation. Then I’ll save that clickier kick drum submix as a snapshot for songs where the bass drum needs to cut through some more.

BOARD & PA

(Right) The rendition of Viva la Vida sees drummer Will Champion cracking an old church bell. The bell is effectively a prop. Inside, a trigger sends MIDI to the main keyboard rack. The previous two triggers were proving too sensitive, re-triggering as the bell resonated.

AT: I’ve never seen so many speakers in the air at Etihad Stadium. There’s certainly no sense of the band demanding a ‘bare minimum’ approach.

DG: We’re lucky that the band is up for doing what it takes. Basically they leave that to myself and Tony Smith [system tech] to get the system design we need.

AT: How long have you been using the d&b J Series?

DG: We used them on the Viva tour prior to this one. I just found them to be a line array that has character. I found V-DOSC, and other recent line arrays, are a bit too clean for this band. Take the drums, for example, you won’t hear the crack you’ll get from the J — there’s a pleasant harmonic distortion there that you won’t get from V-DOSC or the like. Saying that, V-DOSC will be perfect for its own thing, but for this particular tour it’s the J sound that I’m after. The J Sub and Infrasub are also great reasons to go with d&b.

AT: You touched on using the Digico SD7. How’s it working out?

AT: I noticed the sub bass wasn’t oppressively high in your mixes — which made for a nice change.

DG: I’ve had it since the start of this tour. Prior to that I was using an Avid Venue and we just ran out of channels. The SD7 gave us the ability to handle all of the channels and it has enough buses such that we can set up mix stems for the broadcast trucks when we need to — preferable to giving them 128 channels, which was just too complicated. For example, going back to my three channels of kick drum, I can simplify that to one channel for the OB truck.

DG: When you’re mixing in stadiums it’s easy to be personally impressed by bass. It’s easy to just think, ‘oh I’m really enjoying the bass’. But a lot of people find it distracting if the bass drum is really pounding — it starts to become annoying after an hour-and-a-half. At dance events? Sure. But with Coldplay, we don’t want it to be physical, you don’t want it to be poking out, you just want it to be a balanced part of the mix as a whole.

AT 40

“

ultimately, it’s about giving the audience what it needs to sing along, and providing a solid bass and drum sound to keep the momentum

”

It’s a big rig that requires plenty of power. Seventeen d&b D12 amp racks power one side of the FOH PA — all the subs included. That’s 51 amps in total (three D12s per rack) or 102 amp channels. Delay and filtering is performed in the amps’ DSP, via remote control from FOH. The power requirements for a show like this are considerable: 200 amps, three-phase a side. Overall, that’s 400 Amps a leg in full show mode.

VOCAL PLAY

AT: Could you run me through Chris Martin’s vocal chain?

Jonny Buckland’s pedalboard is a two-man lift. Meanwhile, the rack (which is replicated for redundancy’s sake) packs his wireless receivers, TC2290 delays, Line6 processing and an Eventide Harmonizer. The Fender amps are serviced by Shure SM57s, with a coincident Royer SF121 ribbon on one cab.

DG: It starts with a Shure SM58 radio mic which he just loves singing into — the sound and the weight is just right for him. It goes to the Neve 1073 500 series module, and into a channel on the SD7. Then I just use a little bit of channel EQ to clean up the low end, to avoid pumping the compressor unnecessarily — the stage volume is blisteringly loud up there from PA spill, so there’s always going to be some low-end filtering. And then it goes into one of the Waves Puigchild 660 plug-ins. From there, into a Waves H EQ for some general EQ’ing. I really like that EQ for its visual feedback — the spectrum analyser is really handy to quickly pinpoint any frequencies that are poking out or not quite right. Then it finishes with the Waves C6 multiband compressor, which is the most incredible plug-in. I really rely on the C6 for the sound of Chris’s voice because when he’s getting into his low register, his voice is very bassy. But I find if I take some of those overpowering low frequencies out with a regular EQ, when he goes up to his falsetto voice, it sounds a bit thin. With the C6, because it’s a dynamic EQ, as soon as he hits his falsetto voice, all of those rich lows return. Effects-wise, I’ve got an old TC 2290 delay which is MIDI’d up to be part of my snapshot automation. I really like it because it’s hands-on. Saying that, after it’s set up the only control I touch is the tap tempo button.

Finally, I have a Bricasti M7 reverb, which I prefer to a Lexicon for its character.

Aussies, Josh De Jong and Conor Dunne, have followed the sun in the last year or two. After the summer season in Australia working at JPJ they knocked on the door of Wigwam in the UK. Before too long they found themselves divvying up duties as Crew Chief (Conor, right) and Head of PA (Josh) for the current Coldplay tour.

TAKING AUDIO SERIOUSLY Coldplay takes its live sound seriously. It’s clear that no expense is spared to ensure that a) everyone in the entire venue experiences first-class sound, and b) nothing short of a meteor strike will put a stop to the show. There’s dual redundancy up the wahzoo — two Digico SD7s at front of house is one very visible manifestation of this, but you’ll find doppelgangers everywhere.

Tony Smith is the technical mastermind of the audio.

He’s pulled together an interesting PA design with d&b J series at its heart — all supplied by JPJ. He’s flown 10 J Subs in behind the main J Line hang (20 deep) and rotated the subs some 30° away from centre to help push the low end into the stands, and reduce the ‘power alley’ syndrome of bass collecting and summing in front of the stage. Not to say there’s any lack of low-end firepower on the ground. Tony Smith combines J Subs and 3 x 21-inch Infrasubs along the stage, arcing and splaying them, such that each is specifically delayed to bend the image around — covering some 60° of the audience. The subs were all stepped at intervals based on calculations from d&b’s ArrayCalc modelling software.

The Infrasubs are brand new off the boat, extend down to 20Hz and give the lows the extra oomph required.

Certainly JPJ director, Bruce Johnston, liked what he was hearing, as he pulled out the chequebook and added them to his inventory.

An array of d&b V Series were used as a side hang with Q Series as infill. Delay towers ensure punters are feeling the love downfield.

Bruce also reckons its the first time he’s seen any touring band going to the effort of flying a delay ring to cover the Etihad Stadium ‘bleachers’. With what must be every J Line box in the country employed on the gig, a call went out to Novatech Productions, which sub-hired its KUDO inventory for the purpose. Each of the nine clusters packed six KUDO elements which were hung high in the stands. It was a tall order that would have been very welcome for those in the nosebleed seats.

AT 41

“

Ultimately, it’s about giving the audience what it needs to sing along, and providing a solid bass and drum sound to keep the momentum

”

Dan Green’s two Radial Workhorses pack a very tasty array of Neve 1073s (“which work really well on Chris’s SM58”), Helios Type 69-500 EQs (“I love what the Helios high/mids do to the guitars”) and Shadow Hills Mono GAMA mic pre’s.

Dan Green prefers the Bricasti reverb flavour over a traditional Lexicon 480L or even the 960 he used previously. And in the spirit of everything on tour having a spare, there are two M7s — just in case.

AT: And is it much of a challenge when Chris is running around 20 metres in front of a PA? DG: No because of the way Tony has zoned it and designed the system, we rarely have any problems with feedback. We know what he’s going to do and we’ve planned in advance for that. And Chris is such a consistent singer and gives out such a good level, it’s not really a problem.

BE PREPARED

AT: Any advice for the next time I’ve got a stadium gig on for 60,000 people?

DG: When the stakes are high, the most important thing is pre-production — the most important thing. I really get involved on a band level. For example, Jonny and I sat down and meticulously planned his guitar rig before we even got on stage. So from pre-production stage we had everything ready to go. Get pre-production right, then by the time the band steps on stage they’ll be supremely confident in their sound, and as the engineer you’ll simply be polishing the sound. Let’s not forget, when you’re getting ready for that first big concert, there are a million other AT 42

distractions — you’re not really going to get a great deal of time to work on the sound with the band at that point.

So my advice is to make the most of your rehearsal time: getting your input levels right, making the right mic choices and experimenting with mic positions.

AT: All in the preparation then?

DG: Yeah, it’s all in the preparation. Getting things right on a band level, before you’re even mixing. Another huge thing as well is virtual playback. Having a ProTools rig is just amazing because you can stick your headphones on the day after and really hone in on the detail you might miss in the middle of a concert.

I’ll also take notes as a show’s happening so when I come back to it I’ve got a list of things I want to tweak — I just play it back from my ProTools rig and update my snapshots. Even just prior to the gig when the support act is changing over, I’ll be getting into my playback mode and listening through my headphones — it’s never too late for some 11th hour fine-tuning.

The drum mics are an Earthworks love-in. Dan Green: “The transient response of these microphones is incredible. Before, I used to rely on transient enhancing plug-ins to get a similar sound, now it’s all from the SR40 overheads. One of the other benefits of the new DP30/C periscope microphones are the rugged flexible arms, this gives me options on placement.”

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FEATURE

GOOD BUZZ Radiohead’s FOH engineer Jim Warren turns in a dynamic performance.

Story: Mark Davie Photos: Marty Philbey

When you lay your head on the pillow after a great gig, you usually have two types of buzz. The first is good: an electric satisfaction of having shared an enlightened musical moment; having ‘been there’; touchy-feely moments to stuff in the memory bank. The second is bad: a gentle hum that slows your descent into sleep as the early stages of tinnitus set in. You usually have to take the good with the bad, or stick your earplugs in and shut out half the moment.

Radiohead live was all good, no bad.

Bafflingly so. Here was a band, in an arena, with enough PA to scare the neighbours, and no bad buzz. And before you go saying, ‘Radiohead are soft anyway.’ Listen to Myxomatosis on Hail To The Thief, and imagine two drummers, two analogue bass synths, two guitars and mega vocals, performed like a maniacally heavy club jam through an arena PA. Not light stuff.

In the week leading up to the Melbourne show we’d heard an entirely different buzz, about how good the show sounded. But we’d already committed to covering Coldplay, having covered Radiohead the last time they were out. So we left it at that.

AT 44

But the superlative reports were well-founded, and it was impossible not to catch up with Radiohead’s engineer, Jim Warren, and ask the long-time mixer how he pulls it off these days.

UPS & DOWNS OF LIVE MIXING

Mark Davie: One of the striking things about the show was after a couple of hours with no ear-plugs you could walk away without any ringing in your ears. Is it purely about level or something more than that?

Jim Warren: One of the biggest things with Radiohead is they’re very dynamic, which is a huge help for not mixing loud. There’s plenty of parts where it comes right down so you get the impact and excitement of the next surge in volume, even though it’s only as loud as it was earlier on. You don’t have an ever-increasing volume.

Ever since I started mixing I’ve always tended to mix quieter than a lot of other people. When I was a young lad I would mix the opening acts. Quite often I’d worked with the band in the studio and knew their music pretty intimately so I’d mix it accordingly. Then the headline band would come on stage and it would

“

The louder you go, the harder it is to hear everything that’s going on

”

be like a volcano explosion and everybody would go nuts. And I’d be thinking, ‘Maybe this is what I have to do? This is what people expect from a live gig.’ Where everything shakes your chest and blisters your ears.

I’ve been mixing this lot from back when we were in little clubs 20 years ago now, and they lend themselves to being mixed at a reasonable level.

Plus, he can actually sing, so it pays to be able to hear the vocals. Also, it’s quite complex music, and the louder you go, the harder it is to hear everything that’s going on. The people that come to see them seem to appreciate the fact they can listen to it and hear everything, yet not go away with their ears ringing. So it’s self-perpetuating.

I like to see people with earplugs in at the start of the show, getting two or three songs into it, taking their earplugs out and this look coming across their face of, ‘Oh, that’s okay!’ It does strike me as odd that after 50 years of live rock music it’s almost accepted that if you go to watch a live band you need to wear earplugs.

MD: So did you end up differentiating your live mixes from the studio work?

JW: When you do a studio recording it has to work on everything from the tiniest speaker to a club system to going on the radio, and you therefore tend to make a lot of compromises.

Live music is just about the only place where dynamics exist because you can control them while in the same listening environment as the listener. Quite often people go and listen to the records and come back and say, ‘It sounds so small on the record. I can’t believe how powerful it sounds when it’s live.’

As much as I’d like to say, ‘Yeah, well that’s my powerful mix.’ It’s because it’s happening right in front of you and you’re wrapped up as a part of it. If you were to take that mix away and listen to it on your laptop, it will come across completely differently and you might start making those compromises again to make it work on the laptop.

What I enjoy most about live mixing is certainly the spontaneity of it and also that you’re there with the audience listening to it at the same time, so you can be happy with what you’re hearing at that time rather than having to try and project that into 20 different listening environments over five different media.

DOUBLE DRUM TAKE

Probably the biggest change for Warren this tour has been the addition of a second bald drummer, Clive Deamer, to the lineup. He and Phil Selway lay down some incredibly complex rhythms, and at times both guitarists Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, join in the fun on their own concert toms. Funnily enough, Warren had just come off a tour with Arcade Fire, who aren’t shy of a little double drummer action. So he was well prepared to take on the task.

JW: My take on two drummers is always to try and find differences between the two drum kits and highlight them to get some sort of definition

between the kits. Because Radiohead plays a range of songs from full-on loud, rock styles to stuff that’s basically jazz, Phil’s drum kit has never been a pure rock kit. I’ve always got him to leave plenty of life in it. So when we started rehearsals at the beginning of the year, I assumed that Clive’s would be the rock kit, and Phil’s would stay as it was and be the jazz kit. As soon as I heard Clive’s kit I realised that wasn’t the case — his is completely jazz and tends to be more funky and crazy sounding — so I went along that road.

I do a little panning, though not too much because it starts to get a bit weird in arenas.

I essentially mic up both kits the same way. It wasn’t necessarily an artistic decision, more a practical one. During the last 10 years they’ve always promised to simplify things. We started off as a basic three guitars, drums, bass setup and then they started adding in the keyboards, the samplers, the Rhodes, the piano, and it quickly became pretty big and unwieldy.

This time we started with a more simplified setup, but then they added in everything that they’d ever had before, and more. I said to them in rehearsals, ‘The absolute limit for channels we can get into the stage boxes is 96, and we’re already at 90. So be aware that if there’s much extra we’re going to have to leave something out.’

Some people use 20 channels on a drum kit, but I don’t have 20 to use on each, so the miking is pretty basic. Each kit is covered by eight or nine faders, a couple of which will be stereo for the electronic parts. For instance, we only have one mic on the snare drum. I have done stuff within the last few years where I used the top and bottom snare in the traditional fashion, but it always strikes me as being a bit of a bodge — trying to make a snare drum sound out of two that don’t sound like snare drums at all. Whereas if you play around you can usually find a place to get a good snare sound with one microphone.

I have this technique I started using with Radiohead on one of their records. The drum sounds were really funky and sounded like they were recorded in someone’s bedroom.

Phil isn’t a very hard hitter and that tends to mean the cymbals are relatively loud compared to the drums. You don’t get much more volume out of cymbals by hitting them harder, they’re always loud.

So rather than using an overhead I’d stick a mic right in the middle of the kit and I was amazed at what a fantastic sound you can get out of one microphone, especially with a bit of compression on it. Every now and then I’ll pull that fader out and be astonished by how little of my drum sound is left if I just take one microphone out.

It’s the drum sound, and you can add in what you need to make toms a bit more meaty and things like that — that technique alone has made it.

I use different mics in that position, depending on the style of the drummer and the sound of the kit. The ones I’m using at the moment are little Audio-Technica ATM350 gooseneck cardioid AT 45

mics that just clip onto the top of the kick drum.

The 6-inch long gooseneck takes it out in front of the kick drum to where it sits right in the middle of the kit, with almost equal space between the kick, snare and two toms. And then I squash it with a compressor to take care of the level differences.

You get such good presence out of it. You can use it on days that are a little darker and things aren’t cutting through so well, you know that just a little push on the fader will bring it alive, rather than having to go to the EQs on every single piece.

Even within a song, just a little push on that will really bring the drums forward in a section.”

MD: Do you use any specific style of compression on it?

JW: All my compressors are plug-ins and I’ve experimented with various ones, but I’m actually using the Waves V-Comp, their ‘vintage’ compressor. It’s got a little bit of everything, and some interesting adjustments on it.

You have to make all those decisions very early on. People seem to imagine that you have all the time in the world to muck around and experiment with different mics. But the reality is our monitor guy would have a heart attack if I was turning up wanting to try a different mic on things. He’s got to make it work instantly in who knows how many mixes. And for monitors, it’s all about stability and consistency. So things only get AT 46

THE EGYPTIAN MAGICIAN

Jim calls his assistant tech, Sherif El Barbari, the Egyptian Magician. He’s worked with a lot of assistant techs, but despite all the protocols, the courses, he reckons some just have a “sixth sense” of how things should work — the magician being one. Warren: “A lot of it just comes from experience in having seen the same thing before and knowing what’s worked and what hasn’t.”

Here’s the magician’s spec for Radiohead’s arena tour, which stays the same for most dates: Both main hangs had 12 K1 with four DV-DOSC as underhangs, complemented by eight K1-SB subs flown side by side with the K1. Both side hangs used nine V-DOSC with six DV-DOSC underhangs. On the ground were 24 SB28 subs, three stacks of three high each side and three double stacks in the centre, all in a cardioid configuration. For nearfills they used four ARCS each side, with four DV-DOSC as lipfills across the front of the stage. There were three delay lines made up of six KUDO, flown behind FOH in an LCR configuration. Everything was powered by L-Acoustics LA8 controllers, with three Dolby Lake Processors as a front end to distribute and tune the system — one

at FOH (8-in x 8-out Mesa EQ) and one each side of the stage (4-in x 12-out aux), returns were AES via Rocknet I/O and analogue via copper.

JW: We have a very strong relationship with L-Acoustics, and when we were doing the shows in France, we spent a lot of time with them talking about where they go next with PA. Our biggest request was trying to get the same control over the low end as they’ve already managed to achieve with the higher frequencies. And Christian Heil, the guy who first came up with the whole line array design, was basically saying there is no answer!

It’s a bunch of compromises. High frequencies pretty much travel in straight lines, and you can pretty much predict what’s going to happen. You can take the venue out of the equation and know you’re putting the right amount of energy in the right places. What happens as soon as it has hit a wall or seats though becomes almost too complicated to calculate, certainly on a day-to-day basis.

So you try to get the PA up high and point it at places where there’s going to be people so you’re minimising the amount of reflection. You just have to deal with whatever randomness you’re left with.

But there’s almost no controlling low frequencies. We are using a cardioid-type sub arrangement, but every day it’s almost a lottery down low. The only thing you can do is generate low frequencies in that room and see what happens. There’s almost no way you can look at that beforehand and say what a given building is going to do.

Time alignment is another compromise. You pick a place to align those two sets of speakers to, then you step 10 paces to the right or left and the time alignment starts to go out. There’s a lot of science involved in what system techs do, but there’s also a lot of art, a lot of feel.

ACCIDENTAL SAVIOUR

MD: What are some of the biggest changes you’ve made with Radiohead?

changed if there’s a major problem, otherwise you just go with the stuff that you know.

And because that one mic has such a huge impact on the sound of the whole drum kit, once you’ve got it in there and working, to make any major changes to say, the compressor, you’ve got to change or revisit that in 30 to 40 different snapshots. On my desk at the moment I think I’ve got 80 snapshots, sometimes more than one per song.”

ALWAYS SPACE FOR MORE ECHO

One addition Warren has made to his setup since the start of the year isn’t a superlative vocal channel strip, or an outboard drum bus compressor, but a humble Roland RE-20 Space Echo guitar pedal that sits right on top of his Venue console. “For all the amazing creative power that you get from having plug-ins on the desk, they still lack that tactile response,” said Warren. “With the pedal, I can just bang a tap delay into something, and crank the feedback.

Finding your way to the correct page in a plugin can sometimes be more complicated than actually performing those functions themselves.

It does the bulk of the spun-in vocal delays. It makes you realise that you can make a particular pot on a desk as multifunctional as you like, but there’s no substitute for having a machine that sits there and does one thing well.

JW: Well the biggest thing is the digital desk.

Back in the good old days when there wasn’t such a thing as a live digital desk, I had a small digital console that I used for effects returns. I was using a Soundcraft desk that had snapshot recall of a kind. It would at least allow you to mute channels that weren’t in use. But even 10-12 years ago the band’s channel count was verging on the unmanageable.

And when the band introduced the samplers, it added another 12 channels that I didn’t have room for on the analogue desk, so I put all those on the digital desk too. It meant I was already into mixing in snapshots so it was a fairly easy transition.

Now I think of how different they are from song to song, and the amount of work I can do by just pressing a button and moving to the next snapshot. I would have to mix very differently on an analogue desk.

I’ve been using the Venue for getting onto seven years and I’m very comfortable with it and can work very fast, but if you were to give me a band that I’d never met before to mix that night in a club, I would still prefer to be given an analogue desk. The digital desks really only come into their own when you have pre-production and rehearsals, and time to program everything up.

What scares people about them is I could push a button and it will pull all my faders down to nothing. Even on this tour I think I managed to do it once. I have a snapshot called ‘The Workshop’, which is how the desk sits all day long when we’re not using it, so it doesn’t matter if something gets accidentally pushed or nudged.

I’ve managed to store that over a song. I recalled the song halfway through the show and suddenly watched all my faders drop to the bottom...

You’re trusting the machine to take a lot out of your hands, so you have to be confident in your use of it to not give yourself heart attacks.

LAYERED CHAOS

MD: Does the looping and layering ever get so out of control that you’re pulling your hair out?

JW: Yes. That’s part of the beauty of what they do.

There’s a lot of stuff they do that could be done a lot more repetitively and a lot more dependably. Jonny basically has an FM radio onstage that he fires into all of his pedals.

In the lead-up to the show, his tech will get six presets — some classical music, some spoken word — come the gig, sometimes radio reception is so bad that all you get is interference. In the past we’ve floated the idea of having some sample backups, and they always say no.

Recently, someone was asking one of the guys, ‘Who does the playback?’ And he replied, ‘There isn’t any.

It’s all generated live.’ And it’s the way they want it to be. Sometimes it creates problems and leads to a bit of a disaster, but they just shrug their shoulders and go, ‘Oh well.’

Sometimes it’s absolutely magical. They get away with it because they’ve managed to establish themselves as a pretty successful live act and a bit alternative about the way they do things. Their fans realise that you have to take the rough with the smooth. The magic only happens if the random element is there.

I’ve worked with bands where everything was sampled along with backing tracks. It’s reliable and predictable from day to day, but with that predictability you lose a bit of the creative spark.

AT 47

TUTORIAL

G N I D R O C E VE R

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Story:

Recording a live gig is a great excuse for studio folk to get out of the control room, breathe some fresh air, and mingle with the other side of the audio production team. It combines the fundamentals of studio recording with the rush of a live gig. There are no second takes here!

High quality live recordings are commonly broadcast on the radio, streamed online, and released on CD and DVD; whatever the final destination might be for your recording, the goal should be to capture the event as completely, and as clearly as possible. For me, this generally means going beyond a stereo desk-tape.

The first thing you will need is access to all of the channels being used on the stage.

SHARING CHANNELS

Deciding how you will share channels with the live sound crew usually depends on the make and model of the mixing consoles, so obtaining this information should always be your first port of call when planning a live recording. Remember you are potentially creating more work for the live sound crew, so always be as polite and helpful as you can!

Often it will be necessary to use a combination of the following methods to get the channels you need, so keep a pile of different looms on hand!

Direct Outputs Utilising the Direct Outputs on the live console is a simple way to obtain the channels coming from the stage, but beware of a few disadvantages of this method that can make the recording difficult to mix, or even unusable!

Firstly, be aware that many consoles come with their Direct Outputs wired post-fader, which means you will record all of the fader moves, EQ, and inserts that the live engineer uses; certainly not ideal! Most consoles have the option to switch the Direct Outputs to pre-fader, but this often involves opening the console to change jumpers, and sometimes soldering is required.

Secondly, using the Direct Outputs means you are using the microphone preamp inside the live console. This means you will record the sound of that preamp, along with any gain adjustments and clipping!

AT 48

USB / FireWire Numerous live consoles now boast the ability to connect to your computer and record signals directly into your DAW of choice. This is a fantastically simple way to obtain a multitrack recording with minimal equipment, however there are disadvantages (of course!).

Firstly, recording this way means you are using a computer, which I simply cannot recommend as the safest way to record in a live environment, especially if you are being paid to do so.

Secondly, this method can make it difficult to record ambient microphones. If there are no spare channels on the console, an additional audio interface may be required; if your software allows this.

Double Mic’ing There are a lot of advantages in using your own microphones and cables; independent gain control and no need for splitters.

However, it is only practical to mic guitar amps, and possibly the kick and snare drum independently of the live system. Placing two microphones in front of a singer, or on every single drum, is not an option.

Microphone Splitters Using transformer isolated microphone splitters provides you with complete control over the microphone signals, totally separate from the live console. This means that you can set your own recording gains, and use whichever preamps you desire.

The drawback of this method is that microphone splitters and preamps don’t grow on trees, nor do they carry themselves to the venue.

AT 49

The

Do’s & Don’ts OF RECORDING A LIVE GIG

Do contact the live sound engineer prior to the gig.

Aside from it being polite, you will need to know the model of their console to decide how you will share signals.

Do use ambient microphones. The crowd is part of the show too, put a mic on them! My favourite ambient microphone setup is to use a pair of shotguns, one either side of the stage facing towards the audience.

Place them above head height, and aim slightly upwards so the audience is captured off axis. Using a shotgun in this way captures the sound of the audience as a whole, rather than hearing only the closest few people.

Do use a backup. The recorder crashing is not an option; so use two of them! Alternatively, an excellent backup is a four-channel recording of the stereo FOH mix along with a pair of ambient microphones. I also make duplicates of hard-drives after each day of recording; all for Justin.

Do use a power conditioner. I have lost a few racks of microphone preamps over the years, and every single time it has been while not using a conditioner. Maybe it has been co-incidence, but I don’t take the chance anymore.

Do keep a pile of different looms and sex-changers on hand. Also remember that some looms can be joined together if necessary; an XLRF-TRS plus an XLRM-TRS can join to make a TRS-TRS for example.

Do leave the recorder running in Record if you have to leave it unattended for some reason; recording nothing is far better than missing something!

Don’t use direct outputs from the monitor console if you can avoid it. Monitor engineers tend to mute channels that aren’t used in the monitors, which will usually mute the direct output. Monitor engineers also don’t care too much about the gain levels of channels not used on stage, such as overheads and toms. Direct outputs from FOH are a much safer option.

INPUTS

Now that we know the Outs of a live recording, let’s think about the Ins! Most commonly you will need a combination of TRS line inputs and XLR microphone inputs; having enough of these inputs will allow signals to be recorded from virtually any source.

There are a number of choices for the recording medium, with most falling into one of two categories; DAW or Hard Disk Recorder.

DAW Using a computer to record a live concert is not my preferred method, but laptop performance and stability has improved to a point where they can be trusted to do the job, providing everything is set up correctly.

Always run a test recording on the system to ensure it can handle the number of tracks and the length of time you hope to record for (studio guys might not be used to recording for an hour straight!).

Hard Disk Recorder Hard disk recorders are, in general, a very stable and reliable recording medium. They give me confidence that a computer has yet to deserve. The only downfall of the humble Hard Disk Recorder is their bulky size, but even this is changing with modern systems like the JoeCo BlackBox, and the brand new Allen & Heath ICE-16, both of which are 1U systems weighing less than 3kg.

Don’t send phantom where it’s not welcome. With all of the interconnecting systems, it is important to be aware of where phantom should and shouldn’t be sent.

Don’t use Y-split cables. These cables work, but can cause grounding and phantom power issues. Use a transformer isolated split instead.

Don’t put hard drives full of your day’s work in the boot of your car. Call me paranoid, but I don’t want my time and effort wasted because someone rear-ends me at the lights! Treat these things like cash.

AT 50

TIP! An exciting live recording technique is to mix the recording on the fly, recording directly to stereo. This requires a mixing console, decent monitoring, a multicore, a two-track recorder, a quiet space near the stage, and a lot of skill. This method can be a whole lot of fun, and is an extremely efficient way of producing a (hopefully) great sounding live recording, but it only gives you one shot at getting the mix right! An extensive soundcheck is the key here.

TIP!

Data management may not be a huge issue if you are recording a one-off show, but when recording festivals it can become a big headache. A 24-channel recording at 24-bit/48k will get to 10GB in around 50 minutes, which doesn’t sound like much until you are recording on six separate stages simultaneously for three days straight! Always know how much space you will need, and if you are recording with a DAW, never fill the drive more than 80% otherwise you are likely to get fragmentation errors.

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AT 51

FEATURE

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER

The sky’s the limit for the team behind Adele’s Rolling In The Deep who, with the help of Karen Carpenter’s ghost, brought to life a bona fide classic James Bond theme song.

Story: Paul Tingen

If you had to ascribe the archetype for a ‘classic’ James Bond theme song partnership, you’d be a fool not to put down the martini and coolly bet the farm on the Bassey/Barry double. A classic James Bond theme song has drama, tension, an orchestra, and preferably — no offence to McCartney, Tom Jones and Chris Cornell — a Bond girl. Not the hapless heroines and femme fatales who take Bond’s fancy, but seductive crooning beauties like Shirley Bassey and Nancy Sinatra.

Adding herself to this historic roll call is Adele, who along with her writing partner/producer Paul Epworth has managed to create one of the most ‘classic’ Bond theme songs since Diamonds Are Forever, and claiming their place as the modern day Bassey and John Barry.

When it comes to Bond theme songs, success isn’t a guarantee, it’s a prerequisite. Even for someone that sold 25 million copies of her last album, there’s a lot of pressure following in the footsteps of best sellers like Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Madonna, Chris Cornell, Alicia Keys and Jack White. Skyfall, however, exceeds all expectations. The track begins with restraint, just with orchestra and then solo piano, later joined by bass and electric guitar, over which Adele sings the first two verses. Drums, bass, and a huge orchestral arrangement come crashing in AT 52

at 1:24 for the first chorus, immediately raising the level to 11. Yet somehow the track sustains its momentum until its ending at 4:50. Critics have widely praised the song, calling it a “majestic ballad”, a “classic James Bond song”, and noting “the rousing instrumentation elevates the vocals to soaring heights.” The song’s commercial reception has been exceptional, with the track reaching number one in more than a dozen countries. After the seemingly non-replicable success of her album 21, Skyfall was in every respect a perfect next step for Adele.

WIN FOR THE TEAM

The success of Skyfall could largely be attributed to the old adage ‘never change a winning team’.

Adele co-wrote the song with Paul Epworth, who also produced it, and it was mixed by Tom Elmhirst — both men had fulfilled the same roles on smash single Rolling In The Deep. In an anteroom in Air Lyndhurst in London, where Epworth was working with Paul McCartney on the British legend’s forthcoming solo album, he explained how Skyfall came into being. Which takes us back to the second half of 2011.

“Initially the film’s producers were sounding Adele and I out. Then they gave us the script to read,” recalled Epworth. “It got to a point where it said, ‘Title Music’. And I was thinking, ‘Shit, this will be a tough one.’ Adele wrote the lyrics for the song

right after she’d read the script and texted them to me. So they came before the music. We actually sat down and discussed what the emotional quality of the song should be, and we decided that it had to be like two people standing back to back against all odds with everything coming down around them, and then to have an all-conquering ending. For me it was a challenge to do something that was so specific to a brief. I spent nearly a year on it in terms of thinking about it and learning what the other Bond songs and film scores were.

All the James Bond music has a certain modality to it, like the C minor 9th chords and all those John Barry and Monty Norman inflections which are indicative of 1960s jazz arrangements. I spent a long time figuring out these chords and how to put them together.

“The chords for the song came to me when I was working at Henson Studios in LA and had this weird eureka moment. I had been talking to one of the assistants in Henson and he was saying, ‘Legend has it, Karen Carpenter haunts the place.’

About an hour later I was on my own noodling around on the piano in the live room and began feeling like I wasn’t necessarily alone. I don’t want to make out I saw a ghost or felt a presence, but I found myself playing chords which I’d never played before, in a key I never use, with inversions and voicings that I had never discovered until

arrangement, but all the band parts were replaced.

We also recorded the climactic call and response vocal parts at the end, which was Adele’s idea.

She demoed that in Beethoven Street and then we thought, ‘Why not go all Ennio Morricone, and add a choir?’ That was done by the Metro Voices.

Adele and I really thought about the dynamic shape of the song, and we had this idea for the arrangement at the end of the track to create this huge, grand ending. The swell of the first chorus was like the euphoria of standing against the odds, while the second half was like a death knell, and then a rebirth at the end.”

Epworth recalled that he had recorded Adele at Beethoven Street using a Rode Classic microphone going into a Telefunken V72. At Abbey Road she was recorded with a Neumann U49, but he wasn’t clear on other details, saying, “I’ve never been less hands-on with the engineering of a project, because the intricacies of the music required so much of my attention.

At Beethoven Street I had been assisted by my assistant Joe Hartwell Jones, and the whole approach was very throwaway, much in the same way as with Rolling In The Deep. We had also used the Rode on that song, and because it sounded so good we used it again. The first Abbey Road sessions were recorded by my assistant Matt Wiggins, although I did guide him in the sounds I wanted.”

WIGGINS RECALL

“

In my mind I imagined Karen Carpenter handed me the chords

”

that moment. It was really spooky. Maybe in my mind I imagined Karen Carpenter handing me the chords and that was the inspiration. But if you go back and listen to them, they do have that resigned melancholy the Carpenters specialised in. In any case, I felt lucky the chords came in a way that I would remember.

“You can hear that exact piano part at the beginning of the song. I continued to work out the chords and the song structure, and I had this descending motif in the chord sequence that sounds like something is falling.

“I then put a demo arrangement of the whole song together in my studio, Beethoven Street, in January. I played everything: drums, bass, guitar, and piano, though Nikolai Torp Larsen came in to redo the piano. I had to find a way to make it

swing and played this drum arrangement that was almost like a Bernard Purdie shuffle. I also wrote an orchestral arrangement and demo-ed it with samples and MIDI. After that I called Adele and asked her if she wanted to come over and have a listen. She came in and immediately cut her vocal. Most of the vocals you can hear in the final version are that first take. She heard the music and just sang the part. It was pretty amazing. I also had never imagined that she would do those Shirley Bassey jazz inflections so well. It shows what a great singer she is.”

TAKING THE ABBEY ROAD

The next steps for Epworth and Adele involved replacing the demo arrangement, completing the singer’s vocals, adding backing vocals and editing the song to make sure it had the desired structure and length. This was done over three days of sessions at Abbey Road Studio 2, during May. The musicians were Leo Taylor on drums and Tom Herbert on bass (both from the band The Invisible), James Reid on guitar, and Danish pianist Nicolaj Torp Larsen on piano.

“James is an old friend of mine,” explained Epworth. “Nicolaj plays with The Specials and he’s an amazing pianist. We cut the band live to a click track. They played basically the same parts as were on my demo, embellishing things a little bit here and there. The orchestra was still my MIDI

Matt Wiggins cut his engineering teeth at The Pool studio in south London. Epworth used to visit the studio regularly and it was there they first worked together. He then went on to work with Epworth on records by Florence + the Machine and Bloc Party, and began assisting Epworth full time about a year ago. Wiggins recalls, “We spent much of the first day at Abbey Road Studio 2 with Paul in the live room conducting and producing and getting his vision across, and everyone playing the parts over and over again. After that we recorded the band in just a couple of takes. We also recorded several overdubs, because while the feel is better when everybody plays together, you get more precision with individual overdubs. The guitar and bass amps were placed further away and baffled, so we had enough separation to be flexible, with spill only being a problem on the piano.

“The desk in Studio 2 is a Neve 88R and because we were at Abbey Road, there’s a lot of EMI stuff, compressors and EQs and so on, and we went mad with those. I had a Neumann FET47 and AKG D30 on the bass drum, and a Shure SM7 and Sennheiser MD441 on the snare, Neumann U67s on the toms, Neumann KM84s on the ride cymbal and hi-hat, AKG C24 for overheads and Coles STC4038 and a couple of Schoeps M50 mics for the ambience. There was also a kit side mic, the Coles STC4041, which has a really gnarly sound. I always set up loads of mics, but don’t use everything. We had a rack of Neve 1081 preamps and for the most parts used those and then went through the desk, using EMI gear like the TG12345 Curve Bender EQ on overheads AT 53

Leo, Tom, James and Nikolaj laying down the basic tracks at Abbey Road.

and plenty of other things on the way in, like API 550B EQs, and Fairchild and Distressor compressors.

“The bass was recorded with a DI and an AKG C12, and then treated with compressors such as the Distressor, Fairchild, EMI RS124 and Teletronix LA-2A, and EQs like the API 550B and the Pultec EQP-1A. We had three guitar amps set up, but only used two, and we recorded them with Shure SM57s and DIs. The piano was recorded with two Neumann M49 mics and a Sennheiser MD441 and captured the piano room with an old RCA 44BX. I also put up a Shure SM7 so I could listen to what Paul was saying while I was in the control room. As for Adele, we began by recording her with a Neumann U47 but then changed to the M49, because it sounded better. Her vocals then went through the Neve 1081 and then a Urei 1176 compressor. The choir consisted of just four male singers, who were recorded with the piano mics, being the two Neumann M49s and the RCA 44BX, but placed just a bit further away to capture more of the room sound.”

J.A.C.’D UP ARRANGEMENT

Following the session at Abbey Road studio 2, recalls Wiggins, “Paul and I spent two to three days editing the song and doing monitor mixes, to give the mixer, Tom Elmhirst, an idea where

AT 54

Paul wanted to go with the song, and then Tom took it to the next level. The work I did was all in the box, the main area of concern was ensuring Adele’s vocals sound consistent throughout the track.” After Elmhirst completed his mix, at his room in Metropolis in London (see below), Epworth presented the song to the Skyfall producers, who gave the song the final go-ahead and the budget to re-record the MIDI strings and brass with a real orchestra.

Epworth elaborated: “I was hoping that Thomas Newman [who composed the Skyfall movie score], would do the string arrangement, but his schedule was so crazy that we went with J.A.C. Redford, who is a great arranger and composer in his own right. J.A.C. and I sat down for a day with the MIDI parts that everyone had lived with for a while. He ran with it and turned it into something amazing. His arrangement was a hybrid of my MIDI parts which had existed from day one, a conversation we had about how I intended to hear those parts, and J.A.C.’s detail, colour, voicings and dynamics. He was very receptive to my input and we changed a fair amount of it again when we recorded the orchestra at Abbey Road Studio 1 in the beginning of September.”

Wiggins added, “They were recording the cues for the movie score, and we got to use the orchestra for one afternoon. It was incredible. Paul was pretty involved with the arrangements during

the recordings. Simon Rhodes was the engineer, and I sat in. After the session we went through everything to be able to send it as quickly as possible to Tom, who by that time was in New York and was planning to start the mix the next day. The session was in 96k and quite large, so we had to start uploading the 5.1 orchestral stems that same evening. When they record an orchestra, stems are always routinely created, both in stereo and 5.1. We later sent the entire session over so Tom had all the individual tracks to work with as well. Tom then made everything sound great. It’s a really dynamic song, and the dynamics that he created were phenomenal.”

TYING STRINGS TOGETHER

One of Britain’s star mixers, Elmhirst was until last Summer based in Studio C in Metropolis studios in London, but moved in July 2012 to Electric Lady Studio C in New York. “I felt I had become a little bit too comfortable in London, so I wanted to shake it up a bit,” explained Elmhirst, adding that he bought an identical desk to the one he had at Metropolis, a Neve VR72, at CRC studios in Chicago. He also had his extensive collection of outboard gear shipped from London to New York, including pieces from Shadow Hills, Manley, EMI and plenty more. The only genuine gear change involved him abandoning his beloved KRK9000s, because he had problems finding new drivers, in favour of ATC SCM50s. “I love them,”

enthused Elmhirst. “They’re great. They and my Auratones are the monitors I use the most now.

“I mixed the Skyfall session in two parts,” said Elmhirst. “I first mixed it in London, which was the band recorded in Abbey Road with MIDI strings and brass. This was the bulk of the work and it was a complete mix in itself. Many people would have been happy with that version. The strings sounded great, even though they were programmed. Once they got the go-ahead and scored and re-recorded the MIDI material with a 90-piece orchestra at Abbey Road, I did a second mix, using mainly stems from the first mix and of the orchestra. I had a strange day in New York pondering whether to mix the whole orchestra again, but I ended up working in the box with the provided stems, only bringing some of the

“

Then they gave us the script to read... It got to a point where it said, ‘Title Music’. And I was thinking, ‘Shit, this will be a tough one’

”

original tracks back in when I wanted to have more control.”

you can get screens that are absolutely massive, but for me it’s still about clarity of thought.

There’s a significant difference between the premix session screen shot sent by engineer Matt Wiggins, which shows some extensive, sprawling guitar, vocals and choir tracks recorded in Abbey Road. Elmhirst’s own screen shot, by contrast, is exceptionally tidy and compact, with the final mix at the top, and then an aux track, the band in stereo, an instrumental version track, timpani, new percussion, piano, brass, horns, strings, and Adele’s vocals all neatly arranged. “We do a lot of bouncing,” explained Elmhirst. “What I’m left with is one page of extremely clear information that makes it easy for me to work. I can’t work by looking at page after page of stuff. Obviously, the one page idea is slightly redundant now, because

“My assistant, Ben Baptie, prepares my mix sessions, organises everything and does a lot of the bouncing, so when I first look at the session, I’ll immediately be able to understand it and assign outputs on the console without complex bussing. It’s my job as a mixer to get to the core elements and concentrate on those. I always equate going into the studio to going into the ring with Mike Tyson, which means I have to give everything every day. You can’t do it halfhearted. And when I sit down, I want to be able to go straight into it and reduce any complexities, problems, and distractions, so I can focus on what is essential.”

ELECTRIC LADY VOCAL The essentials of Elmhirst’s mix of Skyfall involved a particular focus on the vocals, the orchestra, and most of all, the dynamic shape of the track as a whole.

Elmhirst explained, “Adele’s vocals were a constant fiddling process. Because her vocal was recorded in sections in different places, and not in one take or on one day. I had to do a lot of work to unify it sonically.

That’s why I brought back the original vocal during the second mix at Electric Lady, rather than just using the vocal stem. I used a Decapitator, because it can put an extra harmonic in there and change the timbre. It’s not driven hard, so there’s no distortion. Other plug-ins I used on her vocals were the Waves De-esser, UAD 1176 compressor and UAD Pultec EQ, and the Digirack EQ. The outboard was probably my Urei 1176, Tube-Tech CL1B, a Neve 1081, and reverbs. Doing her vocals took a lot of time!

AT 55

DOUBLE REVERB “My two main reverbs in the session were a Trilliam Lane spring and UAD EMT140 plate.

These two often are my general reverbs. The spring is quite particular and would not have been used on everything, but the UAD EMT is really good and would have been used on many different things, including the vocals. During the first mix session at Metropolis I would have operated them from the console, but once I was

in the stem session they would have been on a bus in the computer. Aux 2 is the TL and Aux 4 the EMT. The song lent itself to a more divaesque vocal sound for Adele, and the reverbs helped here, but I also wanted it to sound like Adele, which is quite simple, without too much processing. She had to sound quite grand and classic, but at the same time, natural.

STRUNG OUT

Elmhirst’s house warming at Electric Lady

“The orchestra stands very proud in the final mix. In the pop world an orchestra can be quite lush and nonaggressive and non-attack-like sounding, with a lot of bass, and all that stuff gets lost in the mix. It can be a battle to get the orchestra to cut through. This being a Bond song, the orchestra had to be a real feature. That wasn’t too hard, though, because there was very little fighting the strings and the brass, apart from perhaps the guitar and the piano. But once the drums kick off, the main areas of interest are the vocals and the orchestra. I wanted to keep the drums in there and for it to sound chunky, but there’s a lot going on and it’s not easy to discern everything. It does become a wall of sound, even as everything finds its place.

“At Electric Lady I used the Waves Q10 EQ and Q4 parametric EQ, and the UAD Neve 33609 compressor and 1081 EQ on the real orchestra to try and replicate what I had done to the MIDI strings in London. They were really well done, so I kept some of these MIDI orchestra parts in the final mix. The Q10 dips out specific frequencies that were bugging me, 1074, 3175, and 5301Hz, with very narrow bandwidths. I do that a lot. High mids can really bug me, and I often find myself fighting this harshness in the 2-5kHz area in pop records. It looks drastic, but it doesn’t sound that drastic. I use EQ much more frequently to reduce things than to boost. I didn’t use any outboard on the strings during the New York mix session, but they’re bussed to an aux track (NUST) where I did a lot of riding and also had some EMT140. But the orchestra was well-recorded; they know how to do that at Abbey Road, so the volume automation was the main thing.

In general, the dynamics were the hardest and most important part of this mix. I had to make sure that things kept on going and kept on building.”

Elmhirst used Waves’ Renaissance Bass to intensify the bass guitar.

AT 56

Squeezing every bit out of those ghostly Karen Carpenter piano chords makes the intro really stand up.

“ ”

STRONG BOND

I felt I had become a little bit too comfortable in London, so I wanted to shake it up a bit

BUS COMPRESSOR “I had the UAD SSL bus compressor on the final stereo mix. I really like it and I used it because of the weird hybrid I had in New York of stems, original parts, and the new orchestra. So all the tracks were bussed to an aux, on which I had the SSL compressor to hold it all together. Everything went through my EMI Curve Bender EQ and the Manley Vari-Mu compressor boxes. 1:47 The latter Ear Monitors Australia #44outboard 1/12/05 PM is quite Pageslow, 1 so the SSL would have done most of the work. Finally, things went back into the same session via my Cranesong HEDD.”

Surveying the end result a few months later, with a track that is regularly described as “the best James Bond song ever,” and that also made serious dents in charts around the world, Elmhirst reflected, “It’s quite tough to create a James Bond track to order, but I think they did an amazing job. It touches on many things, including the nostalgia of John Barry’s string moves, yet at the same time it’s contemporary. They did that brilliantly.”

So did Paul Epworth know he was onto a good thing during the making, or did the response take him by surprise? “I knew,” said Epworth. “I always felt like we were doing the right thing. I found chords that I would not normally play, and that was a real learning process for me as a songwriter.

But I can give chords to people all day, and in the end it might not mean anything. It was Adele’s lyrics and vocal performance that made it all count. That’s what makes it worth everything.”

“My EMA in-ear monitors are really good when it comes to pitching my vocal. And the vocal sounds great – it’s right up close. My in-ears let me go anywhere on stage and I get the same result.”

Jimmy Barnes

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AT 57

FEATURE

Paul Kelly’s music is naturally Australian, so what better way to capture the icon’s latest record, Spring & Fall, than surrounded by natural country hall reverb.

Story: J. Walker Photos: Andrew Doherty

AT 58

“

A real lesson in the art of musicians listening to each other, being patient, adjusting tones and parts until the magic started happening

”

When I got the call to work with Paul Kelly on a new record I felt really fortunate. I’d worked a little with Paul years ago, and had also done some co-writing and producing with Paul’s frequent collaborator and nephew Dan Kelly so I knew I was going to be working with quality people as well as (do I even need to write this?) amazing songwriters and musicians.

We talked a little about what kind of record Paul wanted to make and it soon became clear that he was after something pretty intimate and stripped back; less full-band arrangements, more space around the songs. Paul and Dan had just finished up touring in support of The A To Z Recordings and book — a catalogue of Paul’s songs performed alphabetically, often just with the two of them onstage — so they were really tuned in to each other musically and had developed a powerful sound with Paul playing rhythm on his beautiful old ’40s Martin acoustic and Dan playing more melodic riffs and solos on electric and acoustic guitars.

OUT OF THE STORM

We talked about the kind of acoustic-based records that had inspired us over the years, the kind of sounds we liked and the way the songs seemed to be heading stylistically. It seemed to me that this record didn’t want to be made in a conventional city studio. In the end we had it narrowed down to a couple of larger multi-use spaces we could rent in Melbourne, my studio in South Gippsland or one of my local country halls — there were a few I’d been using in recent years with good results.

On our first day of pre-production at my studio we were subjected to an almighty storm straight out of the Southern Ocean. Just after dark we had a blackout in the middle of a song followed by a minor flood in the studio which ‘put the dampeners’ on things at my place for the night. As the catastrophes mounted we happened to hit on just the right feel for one of the key songs on the record. I was playing along on double bass and Dan was weaving lovely arpeggios around Paul’s dobro guitar chords. We were excited enough by it that we kept jamming it out right through the blackout in the pitch darkness — we knew we were onto something good. My wife Karen somehow managed to keep the kids happy and cook us a roast by candlelight in the gas oven that night, and Paul and Dan went away damp but in good spirits. I meanwhile was wondering how we were going to go about recording a whole album down here in this wild place in the middle of a cold wet Victorian winter, especially if we ended up liking the sound of one particular hall (which I was secretly pinning my hopes on).

We had another couple of days of pre-production booked so I figured we’d better do a dry run up at the hall and see how we went before making a final decision.

MAWSON HALL

NATURAL HALL REVERB Last but not least were the room mics. I had a Neumann U87 and a Neumann TLM102 way up the back of the hall on each side, low down, facing up into the rafters and a Sennheiser 441 dynamic at head level in the middle of the room pointing straight at Paul.

I also ended up putting a BeezNees Arrabella in the middle of our rough semi circle of players in omni with the low pass filter in to give a bit more of a picture of the whole sound from one perspective. The BeesNeez went through an API 512b preamp but the other room mics had to be content with the humble Digi 002 mic pres that had just enough headroom to get the job done. AD Conversion was via an RME ADI8DS or direct through the 002, and we recorded at 24-bit/48k.

I discovered Mawson Hall a couple of years ago when I made one of my rare C-grade appearances for the local tennis club in an away fixture and it’s become one of my favourite places in the world to record music. It ticks all the boxes — it’s back off the road a little, no close neighbours and the road itself is pretty quiet. It’s run by a very supportive local community who are happy to have acoustic music in there at a generous hire rate and it’s on top of the world with views of the lush South Gippsland hills in every direction.

It’s even got a well-equipped kitchen separate to the main room and a little library off to one side that works well as an amp booth. Most importantly of all it’s got clean 240V power and a beautiful big main room with a sweet, woody, darkish reverb that’s ideal for solo artists and acoustic combos to play in. My experience in this room is that artists come in a little unsure and leave with a big smile on their faces.

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CAPTURING THE BUZZSAW From the ‘flood’ session I’d already discovered that my default vocal chain of Neumann U87 microphone into Neve 1272 preamp alongside an Octava ML-53 mic into UA 6176 pre wasn’t cutting the mustard on Paul’s voice.

The U87 sounded scratchy with too much midrange, and to my surprise the Octava (the darkest mic I own) sounded barky and harsh. Paul has enormous amounts of 1-3kHz in his voice, which he jokingly refers to as ‘the buzzsaw’ and we needed some smoother options.

I decided to go upmarket, renting a Neumann U47 valve condenser and an old RCA DX77 ribbon mic from Sing Sing Studios. The idea was to have two very different sounding mics working together on the voice. In this case it allowed us to play the power and fidelity of the condenser off against the warm ‘chest’ character and midrange grit of the ribbon. I spent a lot of time working with the positioning of these two mics to minimise guitar spill and catch the best angle of tone out of Paul’s mouth, while not getting in his line of sight for lyric reading and sight-lines to Dan and myself. Using the figure-8 polar pattern on the U47 further limited spill from the guitar and I placed some soft material down on the floor where the other lobe was pointing to minimise reflections. It was also vital to constantly check phase with each mic adjustment so the whole process took a while. We ended up swapping the RCA for an AEA A840, basically a modern active version of the same mic, and the results were just a little less ‘coloured’ and more tonally controlled.

With this old-school approach it’s really important that the artist fully buys into the idea of live vocal takes because there will inevitably be imperfections, even when you cut between takes a fair bit. However, there’s a massive pay-off in terms of overall performance levels and atmospherics in what goes down. My other favourite thing about working this way is that after the first day everyone can listen back to the takes and hear what is basically the sound of the record — vocals, spill, ambience and all, not some carefully honed ‘bed tracks’ that you imagine will one day feel vibey and alive after you’ve spent days overdubbing and messing with them in the mix. It’s very immediate and the emphasis shifts from modern studio trickery back to the bedrock of songwriting, arrangement and performance. Of course, you need quality singers and players to pull off live takes but I had no concerns on that score.

PRE-PRODUCTION — A BAND IS BORN

Despite nervous looks at the weather forecast (rain on a tin roof sounds a lot like white noise) we got a good couple of days in up at Mawson Hall with no problems. One of our other main concerns was staying warm, but between our collection of bar and column heaters and the handy addition of ‘the rocket’ — a diesel-powered flame heater that sounds like a jet engine but heats the room up in about five minutes — we seemed to be able to play comfortably. I had decided to go the whole hog and rent, borrow and scrounge everything I

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thought I might need for the main sessions to come. I’ve always got a fair range of mics and preamps to bring along but I borrowed a few extra goodies from colleagues Cal Orr and Andy Stewart.

As it turned out, our pre-production went extremely well and three of the four cuts we did over those two days ended up on the album (exactly what should happen in pre-production as far as I’m concerned). It’s great when you’re making the album before you even know you are, and a good reason to always set up for real. Paul and Dan fell in love with sound of the hall and we all really liked what we were hearing back.

Contrary to what you might think, recording in a live space like a large country hall doesn’t mean you have to make a really reverb-drenched album. With all the room mics muted you can hear a lot of detailed, close articulations of the sounds but you can feel the warmth of the space that lies beyond the detail without being particularly aware of the hall reverb itself. Then of course when you wind the room mics back in, the whole thing opens up and becomes more ambient, but the important thing is that you can control it depending on the needs of each song.

The other thing that happened in those two days was that we started to really gel as a three-piece. I was (and still am) going through a bit of a double bass phase, and that instrument just seemed to sit right for this particular group of songs and the way the album needed to feel. When it worked right, the double bass played the role of

BAGGING A GUITAR SOUND The other issue was vocal spill in the guitar mic so, as well as a Beyerdynamic M88 dynamic mic in close near the soundhole, we used an L.R Baggs pickup on Paul’s Martin that ended up being a godsend, particularly when Paul was finger picking softly and singing loudly.

LOUD IN THE LIBRARY Dan’s set-up revolved around two amps, a pint-sized Vox that we baffled off in the corner but let bleed a little into the live space, and a Fender Blues Junior locked away in the library. I miked the Vox with an AKG 451 pencil condenser and the Fender with either a Shure SM57 or the Octava ML-53 with either Universal Audio or Phoenix Audio solid-state preamps. Dan would generally split his signal with a dry, unaffected tone hitting the Vox and whatever combination of echo, distortion and tremolo effects pedals he had going into the Fender. The combination of these two tones gave us plenty of options. When Dan switched to acoustic I’d grab the 451 or the 57, swing it around facing somewhere near where the neck joins the bridge and off we’d go. My own set-up for the double bass (and occasional guitar) was a Neumann hand-held condenser heavily baffled off and placed a foot or so away pointing somewhere between the bridge and F-hole. This mic went into a Retro Powerstrip with just a little EQ lift at 3kHz and a tickle of compression.

bass and kick drum while the shortish decay of the notes left plenty of space open for the other instruments. At first I was a little concerned that I might be losing my producer’s focus by becoming part of the band, but that seemed to be the way the music wanted to flow and the others were into it. Dan felt that because I was pinning down the bass notes it freed him to concentrate more on melodic ideas, and it also added a bit of extra rhythmic propulsion to Paul’s powerful acoustic playing.

BOMBS AWAY

The set-up for those two days ended up being our blueprint for the whole project and we didn’t deviate from those basic mic placements and signal chains too much. Not a lot of compression, plenty of room mic options and a fair bit of attention to detail regarding Paul’s vocal mics and Dan’s sounds and amp level in the hall. Once we’d got everything sounding sweet there wasn’t really that much to it and we could focus in on the song arrangements.

We seemed to fall into a pattern where we’d work a song for a few hours and get it to a particular stage, and then there’d be a shift. Dan would put his electric down and pick up a dobro, or Paul would switch from the Martin to a parlour guitar, or I’d put the bass down and grab a high-strung, Nashville-style guitar, and then the arrangement would suddenly come together and what had been sounding a bit average half an hour before, sounded fully realised.

It was funny how often this happened and it was a trick that kept working for us. I found the whole thing enormously satisfying and a real lesson in the art of musicians listening to each other, being patient, adjusting tones and parts until the magic started happening. The real luxury was that Paul, being such a consistently great singer, was willing to sing all day as long as we were making progress. While he was feeling out how to approach each song’s delivery (now and again tweaking lyrics on the fly) Dan and I were sorting the wheat from the chaff among the melodic and rhythmic ideas that were flying around the room. Dan is a consummate guitarist and made an art form of working up subtle delay and tremolo effects to wring memorable, character-drenched melodic lines out of his Gibson SG. He’s equally at home on a classical guitar or an organ too, and his arrangement skills and musicianship were central to the shaping of every track. He also possesses absolutely sensational cooking skills that quickly became mission critical.

ROLLING ON

The weeks rolled by quickly, a flurry of gear set-ups and pack-downs, ensemble recordings, careful listening sessions and edits between takes, excellent Kelly-cooked meals and kicks of footy out the front of the hall in the fading South Gippsland winter light. We set up for four days at Melbourne’s Head Gap studios where a superb roll call of guests came through the door; Dan and Peter Luscombe on keys and drums,

Vika and Linda Bull singing fireside harmonies, Attila and Carolina Kuti adding violin, viola and cello and Laura Jean singing something between harmony and duet on some key songs. Before we knew it we were out the door, out of the city and back at the hall or my studio for more overdubs and evaluations of the songs. Some quality songs didn’t quite make the album because of it’s thematic nature — the whole thing is really the musical anatomy of a relationship in first bloom that then starts to drift before hitting rock bottom break-up terrain, and then there’s a bit of a recovery at the end. We were still debating the merits of certain songs when the mix began at Andy Stewart’s Mill studios down near the South Gippy beaches.

TANDEM MIXING

As I’d hoped, Andy came into the mix full of zest and fresh perspective after a holiday in California, and we were ready for the delicate task of mixing the record together on Andy’s 51 series Neve console. It can be quite tricky mixing with someone else, but Andy and I have done a few projects like this and we seem to have the knack of making it work. I generally lay out the song on the console and get it functioning as a basic mix after a few hours, then Andy takes over and hones in on key elements; the main vocal (Retro 176 compression, console EQ, lots of volume automation to keep the lyric front and centre), guitars (old Neve compressors, console EQ), bass (Calrec compressor, Retro valve EQ), and effects (Lexicon 480L and AKG spring reverbs). Eventually I’ll come back in and focus on some of the flavour elements like the backing vocals, string and piano overdubs, and then we’ll finish it off together, in this case with key input from Paul.

Another hidden bonus of working with another mixer was the bits of downtime that we both used to drive around the hills with Paul, evaluating mixes and testing out the tricky business of song AT 61

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sequencing. I even snuck in a couple of excellent surfs at the beach down the hill, and once we ended up at the local pub where we were invited to come down later for an old fashioned session.

We went back late in the evening and there were about 20 older country folk all playing together, something they do every second Thursday apparently, all instrumental abilities welcome. We spent a couple of hours listening and joining in with a bunch of the most friendly country folks you’ll ever meet, all singing at the top of their voices and having a ball. Later they took photos of Paul and made him pour them beers at the bar.

While this kind of thing doesn’t exactly advance the cause of the mixing, it’s pretty handy to walk into the studio with fresh ears after a couple of hours and hear what needs to be adjusted. At least that’s what we told ourselves….

NEW FOUND PERSPECTIVE

Back to the mix — for this album my new trick was to have an Al Smart compressor set up to parallel compress and ‘crush’ a few key acoustic elements such as acoustic guitars, percussion and BVs and then just ride a little of it in behind the main treatments. I also won the argument on which mix bus compressor to use, favouring the JLM Mac stereo pair over the Amek. Both are transparent (which is what we were after) but I like the sound of the JLM better and Andy sweetened up the mix with some high shelving Avalon valve EQ. There was one song that wouldn’t quite come right. Predictably, it was the first song on the album, New Found Year, and critical to the whole song cycle to have it there. After much discussion Andy pulled out his drum kit and brushes and rerecorded the rhythmic elements at the Mill while Paul and I made one last dash up to Mawson Hall AT 62

POOR MAN’S ABSORBER Using two stacks of chairs, a long broomstick and some hanging doonas I made a poor man’s absorber behind Paul up on the little stage to further reduce roominess in the close mics. I knew Paul wasn’t really that keen on reverb in general and had some legitimate concerns about recording in such a live space so I wanted to make sure we had some options in terms of dry and wet sounds for the mix.

to do a fresh vocal and guitar take. When we put it all together the song worked much better and a lot of back-patting ensued. Dan agreed via email from London where he’s busy working on a new Dan Kelly record.

When the last mix was printed there was a palpable air of relief all round and we shared a quick drink before we all raced off to embark on other projects. Altogether the record took 17 days of tracking and 12 days of mixing — a pretty economical way to make an album and an absolute pleasure to be involved with from start to finish. Time will tell where it rates in Paul’s stellar recording career. It’s an album that’s been created to be experienced as an album — perhaps a rarer thing in this day and age — and it certainly isn’t geared towards any particular audience or radio station. It’s just a great collection of acoustic songs from one of our best songwriters. Time doesn’t stand still for Paul Kelly. He’s as curious about the world and as creatively committed and hard-working as ever, so it’s no surprise he’s effortlessly avoided the later career fadeouts of many a contemporary.

As I write this he’s collaborating on an amazing spoken word performance event with modern classical composer James Ledger. Can’t wait to see what he does next.

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FEATURE

CARDTALK A needle attached to a folded cardboard backing that doubled as an amplifier, supply your own rotating stick.

MESSAGING THE WORLD Global Recordings Network has a history of ingenious methods for delivering the gospel to hard to reach places.

These days they’re hoping to go viral.

Story: Mark Davie & David Hughes

THE MESSENGER A hand-cranked cassette player was hardy but wouldn’t survive tribal electronics servicing.

MP3 PLAYER The next-gen messenger still required a bit of handcranking, but was hands free when travelling.

We just hit the 30th anniversary of the compact disc. It had a good run, but it’s already hitting the pile of obsolete media, alongside tape and vinyl. Global Recordings Network (GRN) knows obsolete media all too well. When you’re trying to spread a global message like the gospel to the furthest reaches of the earth, a little old-fashioned ingenuity goes a long way. In the ’60s it was CardTalk, a simple cardboard record player that could play phonograph records without electricity. The folded piece of cardboard — connected to the device’s needle — doubled as an amplifier.

No motor was necessary, just a sharp stick to turn the record. Hundreds of thousands of these were distributed worldwide.

case. One tribal group encountered a problem when their Messenger cassette player failed to work. Their strong belief in the spirit world led them to the conclusion that it had been afflicted by an evil spirit. The evil spirit could be cast out of the machine by either throwing it into the fire, or smoking it out. Needless to say, neither was helpful to the Messenger. Another tribe believes that healing comes through immersion in water — also not helpful for a sick Messenger!”

“

Another tribe believes that healing comes through immersion in water — also not helpful for a sick Messenger!

”

In the ’70s and ’80s GRN brought out a range of hand crank robust cassette players, the Messenger, which bumped up the quality and continued to let the message spread without electricity.

While these might not be considered ‘modern’ technologies — even in their day — the introduction of any technology into these tribal groups provided a few humorous moments.

“In the western world it is largely understood that if machinery of any type is not working, it needs to be repaired,” said GRN Australia CEO Christine Platt. “But for those with a limited knowledge of technology, this is not always the

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In its 73-year history, GRN has distributed over 13 million records, cassette tapes and CDs in over 6000 languages (Ethnologue’s catalogue of known living languages tips the scales at just over 6900), and has most recently developed and produced robust, hand-wind mp3 players.

These days though, everyone has a mobile phone. There are over four billion active around the world, and on each of those phones is an audio player. Even places which have been historically difficult to access, like Mongolia, Afghanistan and Vanuatu, have a high penetration of phones. In Tanzanian families, the penetration rate is 98%. “Even where they don’t have electricity connected, people will pay the one person in the village with a generator to charge it for them,” GRN’s Mobile Strategist James Thomas said.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

While the possible reach into the third world is much greater, GRN’s distribution problems have

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turned entirely first world: First, there’s the technical challenge of being ‘cross-platform’. You think it’s bad having to code for Apple and Android devices, spare a thought for the guy that has to think about old Nokia bricks, and Motorola flip phones. “In addition,” said Thomas, “Internet bandwidth can be quite slow in many locations, so we have challenges relating to the compromise between audio files sizes and their quality.”

Then of course, there’s the challenge of their message vying for attention amongst the Katy Perry’s and Rihanna’s of the world.

Though wouldn’t you rather have a song in your own language, recorded with your traditional music, over a pop princess bleating about partying on a Friday night with her posse of ‘bitches’? “When we record their languages we often record some Christian songs with their traditional music, so they also enjoy hearing their own songs,” Thomas said.

GOING VIRAL

Currently, GRN is working on a mobile outreach website, (5fish. mobi), an Android app, and continuing work on GRN’s main website (globalrecordings.net). All house free-of-charge audio recordings of the gospel. And the hope is that like a good lolcat or OK GO video, once the recordings touch down in a community, they’ll go viral.

Thomas: “The phone users are familiar with the Bluetooth transfer of popular music and so can use the same methods to transfer our materials.

“It is not an easy task to make millions of people aware that our materials are available. We need to put more work into making GRN easy to find on search engines like Google. And we need to continue developing relationships with the missionaries and churches on the ground who are reaching these groups, so that they can make use of the materials. We are confident that the effectiveness of the materials speak for themselves, so once they become initially aware of their availability, the materials can spread by word of mouth.”

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GRN also does its own audio editing training for young people keen to get some hands on experience. While the more adventurous can get trained and tooled up as field recordists, travelling to some of the most remote regions on earth. Not a bad day job.

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TUTORIAL

Getting to know level standards across the audio disciplines so we can all speak the same language.

Tutorial: Brent Heber

I’m often asked by engineers how easy it is to transfer knowledge between the four traditional mass media industries involving audio editing and mixing. Namely, Music, TV, Film, and Radio. Short answer: Think of it like dialects. While many audio skills are translatable, our cousins in the broadcast suite aren’t necessarily speaking the same language as those native to cinema, or engineers brought up in the music studio. For instance, an understanding of levels in the digital realm and how to meet delivery specifications can be universal, but without knowing each industry’s specific standards you could end up with a mix of gobbledygook. In this article I’m going to dive into the key differences in approach when managing levels between the various formats.

TYPICAL DYNAMIC RANGE Music: Varies in level between -13 and -8 LUFS with an average 1 LUFS dynamic range (i.e., none) Radio: -24 LUFS with 5 LUFS range TV: -24 LUFS with 10 LUFS range Film: -27 LUFS with 20 LUFS range *LUFS (Loudness Units, relative to digital Full Scale)

“0 LUFS”

-10

ON THE LEVEL

The key difference when approaching a project destined for mixed media is to remember the target listening environments — that’s how the various standards have been developed. If we look at each format and compare them in the digital realm with each approaching zero dBFS (Decibels relative to Full Scale — zero being the maximum possible digital level measured inside your DAW), then a format that’s generally listened to as background sound with speakers turned down (i.e., music) will want to be the hottest and most compressed in order to compete and be heard. In contrast, a format with a listening environment where speakers are up nice and loud in a soundproof environment, like the cinema, will want the ‘softest’ delivery, far away from clipping and with the most dynamic range. Film mixing engineers are constantly provided music hitting close to digital zero, and the first thing we have to do is drop the level by 20dB so it doesn’t blow up our speakers, which are set much louder than in a comparablysized music studio.

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-20

-24

-24

-24 -27

-30

-40 MUSIC

RADIO

TV SHOW

FILM

MUSIC MASTERING

Most readers can relate to delivery for Red Book audio CD: 16-bit/44.1k, get the peaks as close to zero as possible without clipping and job done. This sort of simplistic overview does nothing to illuminate how loud the material is and it’s often the first thing a new engineer notices when comparing his home recordings versus a commercial release; the mastered retail disc is massively louder and ‘fuller’ across the frequency spectrum. Of course, a quality mix destined for CD can’t simply be mastered into shape with Ozone or similar, there needs to be a loud, punchy, clean mix going into the mastering process for it to really shine. Loudness is a key measurement in all mixing and it’s only in recent years that an objective measurement scale has been developed to shed light on what has traditionally been the ‘art’ of mastering. With loudness meters an engineer can now say with certainty this track is exactly as loud as that track and standardise across a release. More about loudness meters later.

With the advent of digital delivery and online music sales we are increasingly moving away from the CD as a delivery format and this has changed the game when it comes to mastering.

The MP3 format, love it or hate it, has to be a big factor when mastering a commercial release and given iTunes’ domination, the Apple AAC format is as important if not more so.

Two tools have been released in recent years to assist here, the Sonnox Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plug-in is the ‘pro’ solution. The plug-in allows real time auditioning of various delivery codecs, so it can be inserted over your mix and you can

hear exactly what each adjustment you’re making will sound like once the uncompressed wav has been converted into an MP3 or AAC. The plug-in allows multiple formats to be auditioned easily and if you have a selection you use regularly, you can speed up deliveries by simultaneously bouncing your mix out to an uncompressed master as well as your common formats. At USD$295 it’s quite an affordable mastering tool.

The second option is a suite of applications called the Apple Audio Mastering Tools — freely provided by Apple. The tools contain reference guides, droplets, and command line instructions to assist engineers converting uncompressed wav files into the Apple iTunes Plus format (VBR 256kbps AAC with an .m4a extension). A bit more labour intensive (but free!), you can simply batch process your wavs to AAC and a roundtrip plug-in will convert it back to wav for you to AB the results. The suite also includes tools to check for clipping. Interestingly Apple suggests that 24-bit/96k masters are the submission format of choice for highest quality encoding — seems someone has been talking to the industry. Their algorithms and filters are optimised for ‘HD’ files and won’t create aliasing artifacts upon sample rate conversion.

THE AIRWAVES

Much like the music industry, the radio industry is another one locally without any specific delivery requirements. Each station seems to run their own preference for ingest although the largest radio networks do standardise across their stations for obvious reasons. One of the biggest networks that I’ve had a bit to do with over the years is DMG and their peak level is -6dBFS for

“

Loudness is a key measurement in all mixing and it’s only in recent years that an objective measurement scale has been developed to shed light on what has traditionally been the ‘art’ of mastering

”

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content submitted or created in-house. Other networks I’ve worked with have been at -3dBFS. VU is king in the radio networks, you’ll see them in every studio. VU meters have been discussed in detail in AT in the past, be sure to dig back through if you have any niggling questions on how to best use average/RMS meters like VUs. It’s interesting that in my (albeit limited) research, with the glacial shift to digital radio this would be a great time to develop some specs across the Australian radio industry but so far nothing firm has emerged. The closest thing to a standard simply states that advertising should be clearly recognisable by the listener. For example, the US specs are for “average levels at -15dB RMS and peaks at -3dBFS typically with speakers set to a reference level of 83dB SPL of pink noise at 0dB.” SPEAKER CALIBRATION

Moving on from Music and Radio to Film and TV we start using calibrated speaker levels in studios. How does this approach differ? Simply, the engineer is working with his speakers set to a fixed level for all mixing decisions and often a large chunk of the editing process (since mixing and editing are so indelibly linked these days).

This means that a freelance engineer should be able to walk into any TV/film room in the country, fire up the system and make informed mixing decisions from a sense of ‘audio memory’ rather than watching meters compulsively. If you mix at the same level all the time, you get a feel for where dialogue should sit, or in Music terms, where the drums/vocal balance should be. This approach has been standardised in the soundfor-picture industries for many years.

Reference levels for speaker calibration are spoken of in terms of how loud you have set them when pumping pink noise through them individually. Pink noise is chosen as it represents even power across the frequency spectrum. The pink noise is set to -20dB RMS inside your DAW of choice and then with a handheld SPL meter you turn your speakers up/down until they are sitting at the required dB SPL (acoustic level, c-weighted, slow response), typically 79dB SPL for small edit suites scaling up to 85dB SPL for film dubstages. If all this sounds a bit confusing there are plenty of tutorials online for students to grapple with setting their studio up to industry levels that will walk the uninitiated through your first speaker calibration. Best practice is to use an analogue SPL meter rather than digital for your measurement at the mix position.

TELEVISION BROADCAST LEVELS

TV has been going through a fairly serious amount of change of late. Transmitted picture sizes have increased massively from standard definition to 1080 vertical pixels and we have online streaming services putting pressure on local channels to fast-track shows from The States. On the audio side of things a common complaint in years gone by has been that advertising was massively louder than the program it was inserted into, causing listener AT 68

fatigue and channel surfing to avoid ads. In answer to this a bunch of research was done and a new way of monitoring sound has evolved.

Loudness meters are modelled on the behaviour of the human ear (building on Fletcher-Munson et al.) and our level of listening fatigue. This is in part due to specific frequency ranges where our ears are most sensitive but mostly due to intensity of audio over time. This is a key difference in how we’ve worked in the past.

Here’s a simple analogy of how we perceive loudness. Think of a loud car passing once, it’s a bit annoying but you can live with it. Think of the same car parked in your driveway creating the same dB SPL for 30 minutes — less friendly to our ears and more likely to be described as

“

Think of a loud car passing once, it’s a bit annoying but you can live with it. Think of the same car parked in your driveway creating the same dB SPL for 30 minutes — less friendly to our ears and more likely to be described as ‘louder’ even when measuring the same peak dB SPL in both instances

”

‘louder’ even when measuring the same peak dB SPL in both instances.

Consequently we’re (very slowly) moving into a new world driven by loudness specifications.

Overseas specification documents with impressive names like ITU-R BS.1771, EBU R128 and my personal favourite the USA’s CALM Act (Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation) embodied in ATSC 85 are ratifying new scales of measurement and metering for us.

MEASURING LOUDNESS

Various metering salespeople would have you believe that loudness measurement is a brand new thing, but that’s not the case. Empirical loudness measurement has been around for some time in various forms, although the development and understanding of loudness has certainly

escalated in the last five years. Dolby has used the Loudness scale equalised for Movie loudness/ annoyance or Leq(M) scale in their cinema ad program for some years. Loudness equalised to A-weighting or Leq(A) was the earliest of the recent crop of loudness specs to be ratified. It was rapidly replaced by Loudness K-weighted Full Scale or LKFS as a measurement of loudness as the human ear perceives it. Many broadcast specs currently use the LKFS model including the Australian FreeTV document Operating Practices 59 which dictates programs should be mixed to measure an overall loudness of -24LKFS. Where the US and Australia are referring to loudness in terms of LKFS, the Europeans use Loudness Units Full Scale or LUFS. Originally these measured slightly different, but LKFS has been modified slightly in BS 1770-2 so it should now read the same as a LUFS measurement.

MIXING TO A LOUDNESS SPEC

In mixing for TV and incorporating loudness measurement, the simplest thing to do is download a piece of dialogue that measures -24LKFS, play it on your system and modify your speaker level to suit for comfortable mixing by ear as you’ve always done. In doing this most engineers may move from the traditional 79dB speaker level to as low as 76dB or as high as 82dB depending on the acoustics of the space, the type of speaker, how big the room is and how loud the engineer usually mixes.

Another approach would be to simply do what you have always done. At the end of the mix, run a loudness measurement over the program and due to dBFS and loudness being inter-related specs, you can simply normalise up or down by the number you are out by — for example your program ends up measuring -21 LKFS so you drop the overall gain by 3dB and it will read -24LKFS on next measurement, ready for submission. This obviously drops your peak levels by 3dB as well so your takeaway would be to compress a little less in future to meet specs, opening up your dynamic range a little.

TWIN PEAKS

Peak levels have been our main reference for many years, measured in various ways. As broadcast moves into LKFS specifications and loudness measurement an opportunity arose to deal with another problem that has haunted transmission for some years — intersample peaks. An intersample peak refers to a digital signal that is technically within spec, perhaps measuring -10dBFS precisely when it’s hitting the limit, but on conversion from digital to analogue for play out through a transmission chain, the digital signal actually peaks over -10dB in the analogue realm. This problem has largely been created by heavy use of limiters in the digital domain. Consequently we now have meters for use inside our DAWs to measure ‘true peak’ or intersample peak, so we are setting our digital limiters to accurately meet specs in the analogue domain. There are also a few intersample peak

limiters now appearing on the market for this exact reason — which would replace a traditional limiter coupled with monitoring a true peak meter.

Unfortunately Australia has yet to embrace the intersample peak side of the new specs and we are left with half of the revolution — loudness specs but without the dynamic range that they promise, as most broadcasters are still insisting on peaks under -10dBFS rather than -3 True Peak (TP) as is the trend overseas.

This is due to our legacy analogue transmission chain which has yet to be switched off. Hopefully this will change in the new year with a fully digital network.

It’s also important to note that these specifications for -10dBFS peaks and -24LKFS loudness only relate to stereo material at present. If you are submitting a surround program for broadcast there currently is no specification for this in Australia. What we hear on the Dolby Digital stream should be the original 5.1 mix for the program, which may have cinema-style dynamic range.

MIXING FOR CINEMA

Cinema is the most controlled listening environment and consequently has the most allowed dynamic range, which in a way means the content is the least controlled. Peaks can reach as high as 0dB and dialogue will sit 15-20dB below that. Cinema standards are governed by reproduction level, by the level of the replay system, as opposed to the content of the audio signal.

This has led to a loudness war of sorts in the cinema of late. A properly calibrated cinema will set its Dolby Cinema Processor (a box that decodes Dolby signals and provides a room EQ curve) to volume level ‘7’, which equates to 85dB SPL when situated two-thirds of the way back into the room. In Australia, most multiplexes have pulled that level down as low as level’ 5’, giving a reduction of nearly 7dB across the board. This means that quiet scenes of dialogue are 7dB lower than intended, to compensate for explosions that are too loud in US mixes.

The effect of turning the level down on mixes also strips those moments of their punch. Aussie films often suffer most from this problem as interesting detail in ambiences and surrounds that make such a difference for the typical Aussie drama are lost when the film is played too quietly.

In the past, Dolby were the arbiters of quality control on the mix levels but that is disappearing as Digital Cinema Packages (DCP) become the standard method of film distribution — a DCP replays six or eight uncompressed wav files (one per channel) as opposed to a Dolby proprietary stream which would have been encoded onto film in the past.

Word is that Dolby is trying to remedy the problem. Their new format, Dolby Atmos, is a groundbreaking system of objectbased reproduction. This means a mix can be played in a traditional 5.1 cinema, in a full-blown, 64-channel Dolby Atmos room, or anything in between, as Dolby’s new range of cinema processors will assess each room’s specific speaker layout and format, and use that information to intelligently position each element of the audio content into the room. There’s rumour that the new range of cinema processors may incorporate some loudness control as well to standardise reproduction levels but this isn’t confirmed as yet. Fingers crossed!

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REGULARS

MAC NOTES iWish: Some iPad wishful thinking.

Column: Anthony Garvin

Since the iPad was introduced a couple of years ago, there have been many interesting music apps developed covering a vast area of music production: drum machines, synthesizers, effects units, seemingly limitless DAW controllers, plus GarageBand itself. However, I’m questioning why there still aren’t some software tools available for the iPad that could be put to excellent use on this technology. Here is my wish list....

At the top of my list for iPad apps is Ableton Live. The unique hands-on aspect of Live, combined with the success of controllers like the APC, Launchpad, and other iOS controllers like Griid all say something obvious — the iPad itself would be an ideal platform for Live! You have a relatively cheap, reliable and hi-tech touch surface on top of a CPU that compares to a computer of only a few years ago, how would it not work? How would it not be awesome?! Ableton’s unique session view — in my opinion it’s distinguishing feature — would come aLive on the iPad’s touch screen. It would make an excellent sketch pad for starting a project when inspiration hits and then transferring to your desktop computer for editing and final mixing later.

But on the other hand, with audio interfaces like the RME Fireface now functional on the iPad, perhaps it could even become a complete Ableton studio tool itself?

IPAD TOOL BAG

The next item on my wish list, or perhaps we should say firing line, is Pro Tools. Ok, expecting a Pro Tools HDlike system to run on an iPad is crazy (though it won’t be one day soon), but how about something like ‘Pro Tools GarageBand’? GarageBand is a simplified version of Logic that offers compatibility to its bigger brother desktop application; can we please have similar iOS software for Pro Tools users? Or something else to think about — how many Pro Tools users spend time on their laptops between sessions tuning, editing, drum replacing, beat detecting, etc, etc? What about four different versions of Pro Tools iPad that focused on these tasks? Pro Tools iTune, “Pro Tools iEdit, Pro Tools iReplace and Pro Tools iDetect perhaps?

The pinch, swipe, zoom interaction on the iPhone and iPad has resonated with its users so well that Apple has now implemented this functionality on their computer hardware.

Imagine what this control could do for us when editing!

We could pinch zoom on a waveform, swipe to scrub, taphold to select, double tap to cut and so on, and so forth.

The interface has the potential to immensely speed up our workflows on those repetitive tasks.

Ok, I’m going to review my expectations. Perhaps the development time is so immense that they are already working on it and we just need to wait a little longer?

HAND OVER CONTROL

In the meantime, let’s go back to basics. I mentioned the huge variety of MIDI style DAW controllers available for iPad earlier. But there are a few apps missing... Where is Avid’s own controller for Pro Tools? Steinberg’s custom Cubase Controller? Apple’s specific Logic controller?

Well over a decade ago, Mackie had a revolutionary idea of combining a mixing console’s ergonomics with the power of a DAW in the form of the HUI. The idea was refined and within a few years the technology had hit it big, with many hardware brands creating their own DAW controllers. In 2004 the Lemur was released, which operated remarkably like an iPad (with a touch screen for controlling MIDI commands) and really got us geeks salivating (it has also been released for iOS). But really, what revolutions in DAW/MIDI controller technology have we had in the last few years?

So, what if we took some of the editing workflow ideas mentioned above, combined them with the concept of a DAW controller and had the inside knowledge, understanding and access to the DAW code? We could have a controller that blends a hands-on console-like experience, with the editing finesse of a mouse and the feedback of a high-resolution screen — all on the iPad. Editing a waveform on an iPad could be so easy... controlling multiple parameters on a plug-in that is actually the plug-in on your iPad would be creatively invigorating! Automation could be both fast and hands on.

MIDI sequencing would become less technical and more musical. (While we wait for this, check out V-Control by Neyrinck — this is the closest I’ve seen to this concept with their ‘V-Window’, but it lacks the elegance and finesse that could be achieved if these apps were made by the same developers as the desktop software.)

As tablet and smartphone technology continues to improve and proliferate, we will see the use of desktops decrease — in India already, mobile internet traffic has surpassed desktop Internet usage — but for the foreseeable future desktops will still have a place in music and audio production. However, why not make better use of this technology that is currently so accessible (and so cheap) to improve our workflows and bring more creativity into our interaction with the software?

What do you think? What is on your app wish list?

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REGULARS

PC AUDIO What’s the most suitable PC format for the musician — desktop, laptop, or tablet?

Column: Martin Walker

Lots of musicians, DJs and producers now routinely use PC laptops, because they let you make music on the move, collaborate more easily with other musicians, and perform live without having to cart around several heavy flight cases full of gear. Although Windows 8 itself is still getting mixed press and its touchy-feely interface is beginning to be seen as a huge gamble for Microsoft, I do expect the PC tablet to become a far more common format among musicians in the future, because a multi-touch graphic interface can be ideal for real-time sound and music creation, arranging and mixing, as well as looking so much better to the live audience than being seen to click a few keys.

However, apart from perhaps acting as MIDI controllers, I doubt that the cheaper PC tablets running the lightweight Windows RT operating system and its associated ‘apps’ will prove particularly popular among musicians — a far more likely alternative is a tablet running Windows 8 and the standard Windows audio applications that we already know and love such as Cubase, FL Studio, AudioMulch, Reaper, and Sonar. Some industry pundits predict that tablets will outsell desktops in 2013, and there’s no doubt that mainstream users already prefer laptops to desktops because they take up less room, require fewer cables and can be quickly packed away in a cupboard when space is at a premium. Having said that, the desktop PC format (in most cases more accurately described as a floor-mounted tower or rack-mounted system) remains the most expandable and upgradeable alternative for studio use when you want a workhorse that will last the course for some years.

FLIPPING THROUGH OPTIONS

Meanwhile, the desktop, laptop and tablet formats have been morphing into fresh formats, so let’s take a look at some of the alternatives from the musician’s point of view. One natty option is the new flipover tablet/laptop hybrid format of the Lenovo Yoga — fold its hinge one way for a traditional laptop experience; or bend

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it almost 360 degrees the other way to use as a touch-screen tablet. Another similar approach comes from Dell with its XPS Duo 12, whose touch-screen flips over within a frame for laptop or tablet duties. I can see these formats proving popular with musicians who sometimes need to do lots of fine editing, but want more hands-on flexibility for live use.

While iPad competitors tend to stick with a 7-10inch diagonal tablet display, other manufacturers are exploring different visions of the PC touchscreen future. The Asus Transformer Prime tablet can plug into a keyboard dock accessory that morphs it into a laptop-type device, while Gigabyte manages to combine 11.6-inch notebook, multi-touch tablet and desktop formats with its Booktop T1132 PC model using a rotatable docking station. However, Intel has pushed the size boundaries somewhat further with their latest Adaptive All-In-One prototype.

This can be used as a standard desktop PC with a keyboard and mouse interface, or its generous 27-inch screen can be detached from the charging dock and transformed into a standalone touch-sensitive tablet that runs for about four hours on battery power. The 2.5-inch thick screen incorporates an optical drive, and can either be used horizontally for communal games (I suspect it would also make a wonderful audio controller or replacement for a mixing desk), or hung on a wall to watch TV or films. The main drawback at this stage is the weight — at almost 6.5kgs it’s not exactly portable, although Intel are working with screen and battery manufacturers to reduce this.

GET IT TOGETHER

Moreover, if you’re fed up hiding a tower case next to your feet or taking up space in your rack, more streamlined desktop PCs are also appearing that incorporate the guts of the PC into the monitor and its stand. This ‘all-in-one’ approach has often been seen on the Apple platform (on the original ’80s Macs and various iMac models for instance), but now that Windows 8 incorporates extensive touchscreen support

some manufacturers are also coming up with slick all-in-one PC designs. For instance, the Hewlett Packard Spectre One features a 23.6inch aluminium display that’s a slim 0.45-inches thick, incorporating an Ivy Bridge processor, 1GB Nvidia graphics card, and up to 2TB storage with SSD option. It ships with a matching aluminium keyboard and wireless touchpad that sits alongside the keyboard to help you navigate through Windows 8. Its all-aluminium design looks extremely upmarket, and you may well manage with its two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports if your audio interface is a USB model, although the all-in-one approach does of course preclude internal expansion slots.

Some musicians may find the cheaper Hewlett Packard Envy 20 and 23 models of more interest, since these incorporate touch-screens, Ivy Bridge processors and up to 3TB of storage, although I still have reservations about touchscreens on a desktop machine where you don’t get the option of laying the screen flat or at a slight angle to the horizontal as you can with a tablet. After all, you’ll always get a better stereo image if you can keep your monitor screen out of the line of fire of your loudspeakers, either by moving it further away to sit between (rather than in front of) them, or laying it down out of the way.

I also doubt that many people could use a larger near vertical touch-screen for any length of time without getting aching arms, while of course a horizontal touch-screen mimics the mixing desk so much better.

Ultimately your choice of PC will be determined to some extent by how much processing power, storage capacity and expandability potential you need, and although I still rely on the floormounted tower because it’s so easy to open up and add more hard drives, RAM, solid state drives, soundcards and so on, I’m fairly sure that this format will eventually become a bit of a dinosaur as mainstream users enter the ‘touching times’. Let’s hope that ‘desktops’ don’t become more expensive as a result!

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REVIEW

LINE 6 STAGESCAPE M20D Line 6’s take on the digital console screens a whole new way of staging a mix.

Review: Mark Woods

TOUCH & LISTEN The silver ‘winged’ operating surface features a touch screen somewhere between an iPad and an iPhone in size (though not quite iPad Mini, there’s still room in the market for another size yet, Apple — Ed).

BUTTON UP

NEED TO KNOW

Below the screen are 12 illuminated multifunction controllers. The five buttons on the left hand wing toggle between different modes, on the right wing there are two mute buttons, and the large rotary knob controls the main output level.

PRICE $3299 CONTACT Australis Music Group (02) 9698 4444 sales@australismusic.com.au

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PROS New mix methodology is fun On-board FX/EQ/dynamics Easy to learn

CONS No EQ on outputs No faders

SUMMARY Line6 has really broken the live mixing mould with the Stagescape.

Turning a technical task into more of a touchy intuitive one, and potentially educating a generation in a different way with its touch and drag tweak modes. Just expect them to use more wishy-washy words to describe sound afterwards.

The digital revolution continues. It began with products that replaced traditional analogue consoles and racks of outboard gear, but now seems to be moving laterally with the development of remote iPad control devices and different ways of looking at how live sound is managed. The Line 6 Stagescape M20d exemplifies this change by re-defining what live mixers can be. Designed primarily for artists/bands to mix themselves, or for bands that nobody wants to mix, it combines an operating surface unlike any mixer I can think of with innovative connection and control concepts.

IT’S ALL A GAME

The M20d looks like a gaming console, with only the top panel of audio sockets hinting that it’s an audio device. In some ways, it’s both. In ‘setup’ mode, the screen displays a virtual stage surrounded by roughly grouped icons with setup and channel information across the top, and others below the stage that represent common types of band members and instruments, which can be tapped or dragged onto the stage — it’s like audio Sim-City. Below them are 12 labeled controller strips corresponding to the 12 multifunction controller knobs below the screen. The drag ’n drop architecture is markedly different to every other audio console... and dare I say it, it’s fun!

SENSITIVE TO OUTSIDE INPUT

Most of the connections are familiar enough. The M20d has 12 XLR/1/4-inch combo-socket mic inputs plus four ¼-inch line input sockets. All are auto-sensing, as are the four XLR monitor outs and XLR left/right main outs.

Individual, switchable phantom power is available on the mic inputs. Two ¼-inch footswitch sockets are a giveaway as to who Line 6 envisions will end up operating the M20d, and can be easily configured to control effects muting, scene changes, media player stop/start/next track or to activate the on-board ‘Quick Capture’ recorder that records up to 20 seconds of all channels to the M20d’s internal memory. Other in/out/record options include an SD card slot, and two USB ports for connecting external devices for either record or playback. There’s a headphone socket with level knob and a 1/8-inch Aux input. The final socket is labeled L6 Link and this proprietary system enables L6 Link compatible products (Line 6 StageSource speakers for instance) to be automatically configured and controlled by the M20d.

The auto-sensing input sockets know when a mic or instrument is plugged in and automatically brings up a generic mic icon. The corresponding level knob lights up and if you turn it and the master level knob up, ta da!

You get sound. It’s much easier than most digital desks, where the routing can be like navigating the backstreets of Bangkok for the unfamiliar. The generic icon can be replaced by a preset icon, which can come ready-laden with things like reverb already attached and operating, and level control. And the instrument icons are pre-EQ’d with typical settings; ‘kick drum’ has added low end and compression for instance. Input level (trim) can be set both manually and by using ‘Autotrim’, which prompts you to put a loud level into the mic on cue and the M20d decides the correct level.

Setting input gain levels is often confusing for people with limited engineering experience and this is a handy feature.

effects options. It defaults to the Quick Tweak mode with a ‘tweak pad’ to touch and drag the sound through various EQ/dynamic options that are laid out in simple language.

For instance the EQ section has ‘neutral’ in the middle of the pad and the descriptions ‘full’, ‘project’, ‘air’ and ‘clarity’ in the corners. By dragging your finger towards the descriptions the EQ changes to settings that match.

It’s certainly gimmicky but it’s been well-calibrated to ensure the settings are not radical enough to throw the thing into feedback or render the channel unusable. By selecting Deep Tweak’ it’s possible to access the parameters in more detail — or in fact, the detail engineers would be most familiar with — and parameters can be changed by either the touchscreen or the multifunction controllers below the screen.

Users who are familiar with other digital consoles will be right at home here but casual users or non-technical musicians will probably prefer to stay in Quick Tweak.

Settings arrived at by using the tweak pad can be seen by switching to Deep Tweak, so users have the opportunity to learn while they tweak. A handy educational tool, and perhaps everyone could then speak the same language when describing how something ‘sounds’. The same procedures can be applied to the dynamic processors, although the simple language descriptions in Quick Tweak are not as intuitive as they are for the EQ section, and closer listening is required to hear what the processing is doing. Four effects are available per channel — including two reverbs, modulation effects and delay. The levels of these effects can be accessed in both the setup and tweak modes, and the parameters changed in either of the two tweak modes.

MIXING A LA MODE

Entering record mode allows configuration of the recording and playback options and access to the handy 20 second Quick Capture mode that can be used for grabbing a part of a song and replaying it at soundcheck to check balances, etc. Monitor mode controls the level of each channel in the four monitor sends, and effects can be sent to the monitors if desired. ‘Perform’ mode is for showtime and allows control of level, pan and effects levels. There are plenty of ways of grabbing levels in a hurry if you need to. Individual channels are accessed by touching the relevant channel icon on the controller strips in all modes except ‘tweak’ and each channel’s level can be accessed in all modes except ‘monitor’.

Thankfully, the master level control always works.

GETTING TWEAKY

Once the instruments/vocals are connected to the M20d they can be individually accessed by entering ‘tweak’ mode, which offers a comprehensive range of EQ/dynamics/ AT 75

required to confidently operate any console. I also wonder what would happen in a situation where a channel stopped working or developed a noise. It takes longer to trouble-shoot menu-driven devices. Using rotary knobs to control levels is another limitation.

It’s OK for set-and-forget situations; the encoders are well labeled and easy to tweak, but when I mix I constantly ride the faders as required and knobs don’t give the same feel or fine control of the level. If a band using the M20d wanted to do a show with a sound engineer, it would be difficult for them to drive it from the knobs.

If the M20d had faders I’d use it as a FOH desk for small shows because it’s small, light and has heaps of processing, but without faders it’s less appealing.

Wireless control via iPad is possible with the optional USB Wi-Fi adapter and free SoundScape software, and could be used to either set monitor levels on stage or tweak channels from around the room.

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

Acts wanting to use the M20d can set their channels, levels, effects etc, using either pre-set or custom settings, then plug into their own or any other system, set a master level, and perform. Tweaks can be made wirelessly via an iPad or on the unit itself. Settings for different songs can be stored as scenes and activated via footswitch, and settings for different venues can be stored as setups.

It all sounds great in theory but I do worry about a few aspects of bands running their own sound. Static settings might work some of the time, for some acts, but the subtle changes made by a responsible sound mixer following the music is not really replaceable. By contrast, band members with toys are not always subtle; I’m always apprehensive when acts present any devices of their own they want included in the signal chain, like the singer who brings an auto-harmonise device or a distortion pedal. I just know it’s going to sound like crap, cause level feedback issues and impose itself on the sound I’m trying to control. On the other hand if I’m not there I guess it’s up to the band to work out what works and what doesn’t.

NOT CHEAP

The cost is also a consideration. Digital consoles are getting cheaper and it’s possible to buy devices for half what the M20d is selling for. Other consoles may not be as much fun but they provide similar functionality and for the average technicallychallenged musician there’s going to be a fair amount of learning

Line 6 lets you draw broad strokes between ‘punch’ and ‘pump’, but underneath you can get into some deep tweaking.

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Of course my concerns are mainly from a sound mixer’s viewpoint. While I was showing the M20d around I had a lot of positive feedback from artists who really liked the idea of being able to create settings that worked for them and being able to apply them wherever they perform. Acts without mixing people are often in situations where they have to figure out systems themselves. That can be frustrating, and may affect their performance, but if they are using the M20d, they can recall scenes for different songs, and make use of its multi-band feedback suppressor to keep things from getting out of control.

The only head-scratching moment might be figuring out how to connect it to the speakers/amps. Though if they subscribe to the Line 6 methodology end-to-end, then the L6 Link connectors and a compatible pair of powered Line 6 speakers will take care of that for them.

DIFFERENT WAY

The Line 6 SoundScape M20d is fun, it looks great, and it’s certainly a different way of mixing. To my ear the sound quality is not quite as good as the best digital consoles, there’s some graininess and the quality of the delay in particular is only fair, but it’s quite OK for the intended use. There will still be a learning curve for new users but once familiar with the way it works they should be able to make adjustments quickly and confidently. It will appeal to the countless number of acts that don’t want, or can’t afford, their own sound mixer. Or acts that have had bad experiences with sound engineers and prefer to control their own sound. There’s enough channels and functionality for most small bands, duos etc, and some clever design tricks to make life easier, such as the auto-sensing inputs, tweak pad, scene recalls and multi-channel feedback suppression. Its price is higher than some other options, though not so high that it will be prohibitive to those who see the value in its functionality and touch-screen aesthetics.

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REVIEW

Arturia V Collection 3.0 Arturia has stuffed nine vintage synth emulations and 30 vintage drum machines into its updated V Collection, and given the one-stop production shop a bunch of new moves.

Review: Robert Clark

The V Collection 3.0 is the latest version of Arturia’s bundle of virtual analogue synths.

For the uninitiated, its all about the faithful — almost fanatical — emulation of some of the classic analogue synths that helped shape the music world over the past fifty-odd years.

Instruments such as the Moog Modular and Mini Moog, the Prophet V and the CS-80 are responsible for some of the best music — and worst dance-moves — in history, and Arturia are making them available to a new generation of music-makers who probably haven’t touched wood-panelling in their lives.

Each of the synths sound and look pretty convincing in most regards. They are all 32- and 64-bit compatible, work in any DAW as well as in stand-alone mode, and have enough presets to keep you indoors for days. Most of them also possess a new method of selecting between presets called the Sound Map. It offers up a virtual galaxy of presets spread out in space and represented by different shapes and colours according to their characteristics. I first thought this was a bit gimmicky to be honest, but it actually does improve on the usual method of selecting presets, where you scroll down lengthy lists of names and categories. This is just one of the numerous updates and enhancements that Arturia has made to these synths though. Here’s a look at each of them in a bit more detail.

The Modular V The famously imposing Moog Modular synth. If you prefer leather elbow-pads to leather jackets, then this is your kind of thing. The first difference users of Arturia’s original reproduction will notice is that you can now see all of the modules on screen at once (provided you’ve got the screen real-estate), which is certainly a lot better for work-flow and those periods of frenetic experimentation where you splash cables about like Jackson Pollock attacking a canvas. Arturia has also added new modules that they’ve either invented or that were once available as additions to the original analogue synth. The Bode Frequency Shifter was one such accessory that, back in the day, could be ordered from the manufacturer to install by yourself at home (when men were men I guess). I found it particularly handy as it allows you to easily and powerfully fatten-up your tones by adding a little phase shifting, or create extra colour by tweaking

The Mini V If you’d prefer to work with three oscillators instead of the Modular’s nine, and you prefer a few knobs and dials to a maze of cables, the Mini V is a good option. This is of course, why it became so popular and why we’ve been hearing it in the pop world from the seventies right up to now. When you start playing with the Mini V you also appreciate how simply it’s laid out. Unlike the Moog Modular, it’s also quite easy to plot the path of your signal and keep track of your tweaks. So everything is there that current or past owners of the analogue synth will expect, plus a couple of extra buttons such as an on/off switch for polyphony, soft-clipping, unison and legato. You can’t escape the major addition, however, which is the panel that pops up when you’re in ‘extended mode.’ Here you can play with some pretty AT 78

impressive modulation tools, such as the Motion Recorder which displays a graphic interface that gives you the ability to draw freehand envelopes in real-time to manipulate up to four different parameters. I found this to be a lot of fun, and handy in that you can begin creating very complex sounds straight away — as soon as you’ve selected what type of waveform you want to build from. Also included in extended mode is a formant filter called the Vocal Filter, which I also found to be a very quick and powerful tool; particularly with the addition of a hard-wired LFO that can easily automate variation within it. Other bonuses include an extra LFO, arpeggiator, chorus and delay FX, and a Modulation Matrix which allows for up to eight modulation connections from a variety of sources including externals.

the rate and scale of tuning frequencies. There’s quite a few additions that weren’t in the original, too, such as Sample and Hold and an Envelope Follower that can be used on external sources.

Simulated cabling is nothing new in music software of course, but I think it’s worth noting that Arturia has done a good job of giving it an authentic feel whilst also adding in some helpful advantages over the real thing. For example, you can insert more than one cable into any input or output, which expands the capabilities of the synth immeasurably and also allows you to make short cuts (purists will not indulge I imagine). Also helpful is that it won’t allow you to insert a cable where it doesn’t belong, such as linking two inputs for example, which I imagine will save novices and pros alike many hours of head-scratching in the wee hours of the morning.

The CS-80 V For me the CS-80 is one of those synths that you just want to touch.

Setting aside the famous sounds that have emanated from it (Stevie Wonder, Brian Eno etc.), those daggy, brightly coloured paddles just beg to be fondled, and the ribbon controller is much more satisfying to use with your fingertips than a mouse. Still, very few of us are lucky enough to own the real thing, so if there is a good emulation of one out there it’s worth knowing about. The CS-80 V seems about as close as you could get to the real thing. It looks and sounds as good as I could have hoped (well, it passed my “do I feel like I’m Vangelis scoring an eighties sci-fi film?”-test).

It is a bit curious that those terrifically cheap-looking but indispensable preset buttons that were originally (ambitiously?) labelled Clavichord, Guitar, Harpsichord etc have been replaced with just the numbers 1 to 12.

I’m not sure if it was a resolution thing

but it would’ve been nice to see them stay, not just for reasons of nostalgia but because they were always useful as an anchor point for building sounds.

In addition to all of the standard features, Arturia has significantly beefed up its multi-timbral capability with a modulation matrix that allows you to re-direct sounds from 12 different sources to 38 different destinations for up to 10 different modulations. So you can route LFOs, EQ filters and even the ribbon to frequency envelopes, noise generators, VCOs or VCAs with relative ease, just don’t forget to sleep at some point. There’s also a Multi-Mode which allows you to assign sounds to each of your polyphonic voices and also to create a key-map; which seems a particularly good idea.

I am a fan of the functionality of this addition and also the way in which Arturia has made the whole panel ‘fit-in’ stylistically.

The Jupiter 8V I first encountered the Jupiter 8 when my music-technology lecturer wowed his class of music-nerds and BA weirdos with its acoustic charms.

The first thing we did was make a bird-call, which wasn’t exactly ‘phat,’ but it did show me that this synth is capable of some very cool sound design in addition to the rich musical tones you hear from Depeche Mode to Moby. So it’s many different things to many different people, which is testament to its flexibility and power. Unlike other synths in the V Collection 3.0, the extras that Arturia has created for the Jupiter 8 soft-synth haven’t been embedded so lovingly into the virtual console.

The ‘extension panel’ appears smoothly from behind the original

edifice, but it looks decidedly digital and takes away from the whole vintage feel in my opinion. But that’s really being picky. For me one of the highlights of this extra panel lies within the modulations tab, where there is an effect called Galaxy. It includes three interconnected LFOs that modify different parameters on an X and Y axis, which sounds complicated, but once you get in there and have a play you discover some great effects, and the little graphic display helps a bit in figuring out what you’re doing. There’s also a step sequencer which I found to have some cool options, such as being able to hand draw envelopes along your sequence to shape melody or a number of other parameters.

The Prophet V The original Prophet V was and remains incredibly popular, but anyone who has owned one will testify to its susceptibility to de-tuning and the difficulty in repairing any faults. Not to mention the lack of MIDI in/out of course.

The beautiful thing about software synths is that those issues are no longer present and, at least in theory, we’re all free to just create to our heart’s content. Perhaps the biggest advantage of Arturia’s Prophet 5, though, is that it comes bundled with the Prophet VS, which can be used independently or as a hybrid unit with the 5. So it’s almost exponentially

superior to either original model in terms of programming power and flexibility. The original Prophet VS was also a tricky beast to program, mostly because all the modulation was happening underneath a panel of bland buttons with limited information appearing on its tiny screen. I found Arturia’s re-imagining of the interface a bit more friendly, although the modulation matrix took a bit of head-scratching. Still present, though, is the joystick for mixing your four oscillators together, which is both very effective and quintessentially ’80s in style. Thank God they kept that in.

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The Oberheim SEM V This is, in effect, the expansion of an expansion module, so as you can imagine there is a lot of sonic possibilities offered here. As much as the Synthesiser Expander Module was capable of enhancing other synths, it was its own sounds that made it famous, so if Arturia didn’t get that right they would’ve been in trouble. Consequently they seem to have paid a lot of attention to the multimode 12dB/octave filter responsible for those sounds and the result is quite impressive. You can pretty quickly find those bass lines that made the SEM famous, which is the real acid test I think.

Also, the simplicity of the original unit’s layout was a true thing of beauty, so it’s great to see that Arturia has kept that understated yet powerful feel with the SEM V by only adding one panel on either side

for their additional effects knobs.

Arturia has also hidden its fancy new modulations and effects features on a pop-up screen display that can be hidden (although, like the Jupiter 8V, it doesn’t fit stylistically). It could have been much worse. When Tom Oberheim and his associates first decided to expand the module’s capability to eight-voice polyphony, the result was a mammoth unit that basically welded together eight individual SEMs, which on paper made sense I guess, but in practical terms was pretty insane. Using the SEM V in its basic form is simply joyful. I think part of Oberheim’s success was that he combined powerful modulation possibilities with a straight-forward, pleasing user experience, and for my money, that has been nicely retained here.

The Wurlitzer V

NEED TO KNOW

There are lots of thoughtful features in the Wurlitzer V that are worth a mention. It’s one of those instruments that’s brilliant in the real world but has been sub-par in the virtual, so Arturia have made an effort to give as much authenticity to the experience as they can, which I for one appreciate. For example, you can toggle the amount of hardness and/or noise of the key hammers, and even note-off and pedal noise.

These features will really help if you’re writing something that has to feel ‘grounded’ in your mix. On that note, the fact that you can choose your output to be either direct, or coming out of a Leslie or guitar amp, is pretty useful, and if you go the

PRICE $499 CONTACT CMI (03) 9315 2244 or cmi@cmi.com.au

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amp option you can choose from a couple of well-known mics on or off axis. The choice of mics, amps and positions is somewhat limited, but at least you have them right there within the interface. Effects are housed in pedals that appear below the keyboard itself, which I thought was a nice touch, and the sounds you get from it — arguably the most important feature — are convincingly rich, dirty, and everything else a Wurlitzer needs to be. It’s so much fun toggling through the presets, which are comprehensive in terms of style and variation, that you can and will spend many, many hours beating your MIDI keyboard senseless. For me this is a real highlight of the package.

PROS Even more incredible value than version 2 Accurate emulations, even the new Wurly Spark modelling allows core tweaks of vintage drum machines Additional modes and automation expand palette

CONS Some out of place GUI additions

SUMMARY The addition of Wurlitzer V and Oberheim SEM V emulations should be enough to consider the upgrade from version 2. But add the Spark VDM analogue-modelled (not sampled) drum machine, and the inclusion of Analogue Laboratory in the package for convenient mixing and matching of the extensive library, and Arturia’s V Collection 3.0 is an absolute steal. That’s not even going into the extended mode and automation updates.

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The ARP2600 V Imagine the hide I’d have to give an appraisal of this semi-modular synth’s merits. It’s one of the most lauded analogue machines in the history of music. On a fundamental waveform level, to me the replicated tones are very convincing. Notable is that the famous 16-step sequencer, the ‘1601’

is included by default, and as far as the original features are concerned, it’s all there. In addition you’ll find chorus and delay effects and a module that pretty much is the Mini V’s Motion Recorder but they’ve called it the ‘Tracking Generator’ and made it fit aesthetically with the overall look of the synth.

The Analogue Laboratory There really is such a thing as too much choice, and with nine vintage synths to decide between you’d go mad trying to find the exact sound you’re looking for by going through them one by one. Therefore, were I to be the owner of a V Collection 3.0, I would start with the Analogue Factory. I can’t recommend it highly enough, in fact. Not only does it lay out a library of every preset for every synth in the collection according to sound type and characteristics, but you can play, edit and key-split those

sounds within the plug-in itself. If you want to go more in depth, you can also just open the synth responsible for that sound right alongside the Laboratory. There are standard controls within it, too, such as cut-off, resonance, chorus and delay, as well as two ADSR envelopes, so if you want to choose something quickly and make minor tweaks it’s very easy to do. Basically it acts like the mothership of your collection but is playable and powerful enough to be a solid stand-alone synth.

The Spark VDM This is the vintage and softwareonly version of the Spark Creative Drum Machine. And just like its hardware/software sister, it emulates analogue kits rather than samples them, which means you can effectively tweak your favourite vintage sounds from their foundations; resulting in a more authentic response. When I affected the pitch of a bass drum or snare, for example, the tone remained satisfyingly pure. It’s well set-up for live performance as well. The centre module is clearly designed for creating on the fly, with an embedded FX screen offering powerful filter, slicer and roller effects that are

easy to modulate in real-time.

Another cool feature for me was that you don’t have to settle for the individual preset sounds within a specific kit. You can choose an 808 bass drum with a Linn snare for example, and the entire library of individual sounds is accessible in the bottom slide-out panel. There is of course a step-sequencer, good MIDI integration, song and pattern mode, a mixer and a great library of famous drum-machines. The key thing for many people, though, will be its analogue emulation and live play features, which I think will impress nine times out of 10.

So, a pretty comprehensive collection, and for my money, the technology is impressive and the synths are convincingly rendered. If you’re after the classic analogue sound that was responsible for so many embarrassing dance-floor moments in your youth, I don’t think you’d be disappointed. And if you want to tweak the hell out of those original tones to erase the past and forge new territory, there’s plenty of scope to do that as well.

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Mid-Side recording means total control Mid-Side recording allows independent adjustment of all parameters of direct and ambient sound offering exceptional control over the stereo field width. The first handheld recorder to offer Mid-Side stereo recording, the H2n features our best microphones yet and is the only portable recorder with five mic capsules onboard. Isolate mid and side tracks for adjusting, affecting and individual processing at any time after recording. Convert to mono for broadcast without phase cancellation. Get great recordings instantly by capturing 360째 sound without monitoring and refine your recordings into finished works with the included WaveLab LE software or your choice of digital audio workstation.

The H2n offers four unique recording modes: Mid-Side (MS) stereo, 90째 X/Y stereo, 2-channel and 4-channel surround sound. USB 2.0 interface.

Analog Mic Gain for precision volume control. Edit audio onboard. Onboard reference speaker and stereo output. New data recovery function. 20 hours of battery life. Linear PCM recording at up to 24bit/96kHz quality. Broadcast Wave Format support. 32GB SDHC card support. WaveLab LE software included for editing and mastering. Two Year Warranty when purchased from Authorised Australian dealers

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dynamicmusic.com.au AT 83

REVIEW

RCF AYRA MONITOR SPEAKERS RCF’s AYRA series come with throwback NS10 looks, solid construction, and a price to get you moving into the Italian stallion’s stable.

Review: Mark Woods

REFLEX LOWER LIP The bass reflex port along the bottom of the front of the cabinet is rectangular with a slightly recessed lower lip.

DEEP DISH

NEED TO KNOW

All speakers in the range are quite deep, which may need to be considered when deciding where to place them.

PRICE (each) AYRA 5 — $299 AYRA 6 — $399 AYRA 8 — $499 AYRA 10-inch Sub — $699

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CONTACT Group Technologies (03) 9354 9133 or sales@grouptechnologies.com.au

PROS

CONS

SUMMARY

Good price

No bass trim

Solid cabinet construction

Slightly hollow low-mids

RCF’s live speaker legacy is evident in the AYRA series’ build quality. A solid box that can be forgiven for sounding slightly hollow in the low-mids for the price.

Effective heat management Wide sweet spot

It’s probably safe to say RCF is the audio world’s favourite Italian speaker manufacturer. Best known in Australia for their popular range of live speakers they make a wide range of audio gear for applications ranging from domestic use to large-scale concerts. According to RCF, its recently released AYRA range of powered near-field speakers combines the company’s expertise in live speakers and hi-fi audio to create speakers that provide a ‘connection’ between these two areas. The result is a range of speakers aimed at the home studio/multimedia/gaming market.

The series consists of three models and a matching sub, all available at very reasonable prices.

A LOOK THAT WON’T DATE

All three models combine active two-way designs with a strong family look that is distinctive in its old-yet-new colour scheme. I suspect the look is quite deliberately an update on the classic Yamaha NS10 with a black cabinet and white woofer cone.

The AYRA series has reflection-busting rounded corners on the front panel and its sleek, smooth matt-black finish looks modern and stylish. MDF lurks below the lacquered surface, but it feels like strong plastic. The cabinets are resonance-free and weighty enough to give a solid, quality feel. Studio monitors don’t get knocked around like live gear but the surface feels like it would be quite resistant to scuffs and scratches. Though I couldn’t bring myself to test the hypothesis.

The smallest of the range is the AYRA 5 and, as its designation implies, it’s got a 5-inch composite fibreglass driver and a 1-inch soft dome neodymium tweeter mounted in a moulded waveguide. Coverage is quoted at 110 degrees horizontal and 70 degrees vertical.

Power is supplied by newly-designed 35W+20W Class AB amplifiers, and the DSP includes a soft limiter, while thermal and RMS detection offer protection from damage. The AYRA 6 is the same but with a 6-inch woofer and 50W+25W amps while the AYRA 8 has an 8-inch driver and 80W+30W of power.

Connections are made on the rear panel and include balanced XLR or ¼-inch jack inputs and a single unbalanced RCA input. Controls are a volume knob and a high-frequency adjustment that switches between -2dB, -1dB, 0db and +1dB at an unlabelled frequency. This layout is simple enough for amateur users but comprehensive enough to allow a wide

range of equipment to be connected. Missing is a low-frequency trim that can help reduce the bass build-up that commonly occurs when the speakers are placed with a wall close behind them. Cooling is by convection and even though there are no obvious heat sinks the cabinet only got slightly warm after being on all day. Voltage settings are manual, rather than the modern auto sensing types, but clear to see and lockable.

PRICE IS RIGHT

I’ve been trying the AYRA 5 and AYRA 8 versions and while I’ve had them they have received many favourable comments about their looks from customers, with those of a certain age picking the NS10 similarity straight away. I haven’t used an NS10 for some years, and I don’t miss them… beyond a certain nostalgia anyway. They were OK in the ’80s and they made a reasonable reference monitor at the time. The idea was if the woofer was jumping out of the cabinet on the kick drum and the tweeter was drawing blood from your ears then the ratio of high to low frequencies was about right. The high frequencies were tiring on the ears but the positive spin was they were bright enough to still hear the top end after the 18-hour sessions that were necessary to get a good studio rate in the ’80s.

The NS10 comparison really only applies to the speaker’s looks, although I’m sure RCF would be hoping their sales figures are as successful over as long a period of time. The AYRA series sound more modern and they are a good example of the gains in audio quality versus price in the last 20 years. The supplied frequency response curve is commendably flat and as a listening speaker they are pleasant and accurate enough for most purposes. Their horizontal coverage is wide and even, and you don’t need to be right on-axis to hear them clearly. If I compared them to the best quality (and much more expensive) near-field monitors they exhibit some graininess and blurred detail in the high frequencies. The low frequencies are quite full and reasonably tight, at least at lowmedium volumes. There is some hollowness and lack of presence in the low-mids that you notice when comparing them to other speakers but again, for the price they’re pretty good.

STABLE SOUND

Comparing the AYRA 5 to the AYRA 8 illustrated how consistent the sound is across the range. The mid-high frequencies and coverage are the same with the only real difference being the AYRA 8 is more efficient and reaches down lower. The AYRA 5 is quoted at 55Hz–20kHz although there is no minus point mentioned. Maximum level is quoted as 106dB. The AYRA 8 is quoted at 45Hz-20kHz with 110dB the maximum. The AYRA 8 is a much bigger speaker though and the depth of 328mm could cause problems unless you have a deep shelf or large desk to put them on. In use I found either model is easy to work with as long as you didn’t push them too hard. The slightly hollow low-mids meant I had to be a little more careful not to try to compensate and end up with a boxy, mid-heavy sound when I played them back on other systems.

As you push for higher volumes the limiter becomes noticeable and the cabinet starts to load up. I found the low frequency response to be adequate for general recording and mixing even from the AYRA 5 but if you want more bass, or more volume, the matching sub might be needed.

I didn’t get to try the sub as part of this review but it’s a ported design that uses a 10-inch composite fibreglass woofer with 250W of class AB amplifier.

The AYRA 10 sub has a built-in crossover, a quoted frequency response of 35 – 130Hz, and it’s finished in the same surface as the other speakers in the range.

WIDE RANGE

RCF has designed the AYRA series to work in a wide variety of applications and this makes good sense. The line between reference monitors and general-purpose speakers is getting blurry and at the prices these sell for I would imagine they’ll find their way into project studios, computer gaming set-ups, home entertainment systems or even just as kick-ass computer speakers — you get a lot of style and sound for your money.

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REVIEW

AVID HD

NATIVE THUNDERBOLT INTERFACE Thunderbolt may be the answer to Mac Pro woes, but the promise of Avid’s first thunderbolt interface is tempered by the inability to purchase it standalone. So who is it designed for?

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Brent Heber

PRICE $5499 with Omni interface & ProTools 10HD $4399 (upgrade from MBox Pro or 00x interface) CONTACT Avid 1300 734 454 or www.avid.com AT 88

PROS ProTools HD 10 license included Nice headphone jack Works well with Avid Venue boards Low latency system

CONS Premium price Must be bought with an interface Headphone jack doesn’t work unless an interface is connected Single thunderbolt port

SUMMARY Thunderbolt could be the answer to Apple’s Mac Pro line failings. But Avid’s new HD Native Thunderbolt interface asks a lot of reinvestment for the stalwart HD owner, making it more suited to those fresh into the HD game.

So ‘they’ say Apple will be discontinuing the Mac Pro line in 2013. It makes sense.

Apple is making a stack more cash from the consumer iOS market than the pro space and apparently it costs quite a bit in R&D to make a Mac Pro as pretty as the ones they have done in the past. Not to mention the last three models of the Mac Pro have been nearly identical, so perhaps the writing is on the wall. For those of us in the pro audio space with our beloved PCIe expansion cards, where does that leave us?

Thunderbolt connections are apparently our saviour, with ports connecting straight to the heart of the motherboard at whopping speeds hitherto unheard of. Moving forwards in the Apple space the Mac Mini Server and iMacs may be the most powerfully optioned OSX CPUs for audio work, so the thunderbolt connection and providing pro audio solutions for it is a high priority for many manufacturers, Avid among them. Affordable thunderbolt expansion chassis are already on the market as a migration strategy but natively-connected thunderbolt interfaces seem to be the next wave of pro audio kit.

That’s looking towards tomorrow, when the Mac Pro line is no longer an option. Today most audio facilities are still well equipped with relatively new Mac Pros and do not yet have to face any re-equipping into thunderbolt land. So who is the Avid HD Native Thunderbolt interface aimed at and what does it do?

The Avid HD Native Thunderbolt box can only be purchased as part of a system with an Omni interface and ProTools 10HD. As it stands, you can’t buy it standalone, which for a HD owner like myself is a hard pill to swallow. As a HD user, the ability to connect the interfaces I already own via thunderbolt is an appealing future-proofing measure. But in the same measure, connecting via the thunderbolt box without the PCIe cards would cut a lot of DSP out of the chain and a resultant drop in performance. Thinking through the options, if I wanted to rip a HD interface out of my rig and go portable with thunderbolt, while it would be one less step to just hookup through this new thunderbolt box, an expansion chassis might be the best power to weight ratio anwyay.

So it begs the question, who is it aimed at if not the stalwart HD user? If you’re already a Tools user, perhaps from the LE generation that has been using a USB or Firewire interface but looking for something with a little more grunt, then you’re probably a closer fit.

QUALITY NATIVELY THERE

The quality of a HD Native system is well spruiked. Whether you are using the thunderbolt box or its PCIe brother you end up with snappy low latency performance for tracking and can run twice as many ins and outs as a PTHD system without either box/card (64, up from 32 running Avid software alone). The new Avid interfaces are well regarded, have great clocking and sound extremely transparent. The Omni in particular is a great little box with many high end features crammed into a single rack unit and is one of the most usefully designed boxes Avid has ever made.

Realistically the HD Native thunderbolt should be thought of as a cable. It allows you to plug Avid interfaces into a laptop or iMac etc, it doesn’t add any processing power, it has a nice headphone output (that can only be used if the box is plugged into an Avid interface rendering it fairly pointless, and would make more sense if it was untethered) so basically it’s an adapter cable.

Then why can’t it be bought standalone?

As a standalone product, the HD Native Thunderbolt could be useful in one industry in particular. By enabling more portable, smaller form factor computers for use with up to 64 channels of Avid I/O, you present a solid option for the live sound recording industry. A rack of interfaces, or better yet the new MADI I/O from Avid with one of these thunderbolt boxes would give simple and compact access to the raft of live boards with MADI connections straight into a laptop or Mac Mini Server. Take it a step further with the Avid Venue systems that are doing so well, the thunderbolt box/cable can connect straight to the Profile or Venue’s HD card slots giving 48 fixed and 16 assignable outputs from the console pre-processing, a big step up from the 18 available over firewire which most engineers have used on previous generation laptops. In a live environment it actually makes sense to have that high quality headphone output with high gain for checking what you are tracking.

DAISY BALL & CHAIN

It begs the question, why engineer the thunderbolt box to be so ‘dumbed down’? Why not add an Omni generation pre amp on the front, a pair of XLR/TRS combo outputs on the back and allow it to be used without HD I/O connected? Then you end up with a frankenstein MBox Mini that can also connect 64 channels of HD I/O to your laptop and that would be attractive to the travelling engineer. But in many ways, the issue of pre-existing HD interface owners not being able to buy the thunderbolt box stand-alone stems from precisely that fact — that Avid has made the thunderbolt box a modular piece, not built-in. If they had merely released an updated Omni with thunderbolt onboard, then there wouldn’t be a problem to have.

There’s also the issue of thunderbolt being a daisy chain system. This box only has one thunderbolt port, making it the end of the chain, which is inconvenient, and requires a hub.

So while on one hand it looks like an expensive,

“

For the new startup, a Mac Mini Server and one of these thunderbolt boxes with an Omni would make a great system

”

unnecessarily modular introduction into Pro Tools HD, you’ve got to realise that it’s never been cheap. Pro Tools HD has always existed as a premium product, built on qualified systems that are designed to function to a given spec.

And while tempting to compare it on face value to the only other thunderbolt interface on the market, there are some major differences. While Universal Audio’s Apollo has 18 x 24 I/O, the Omni can accommodate 64 channels of I/O, and it also has a serial port connection for pro level sync, while Apollo trades off its very desirable onboard UAD-powered plug-in platform. So while the computer interface might be the same, the devices aren’t.

Also, if you are a travelling engineer, this box will ship with ProTools HD10 on an iLok (the most expensive software update Avid/Digidesign has ever offered, adding some more value to the equation) so it’s easy enough to work without the thunderbolt box at all, just using your laptop’s sound output and your headphones, something many of us have been doing since PT9 came along and opened up that option. Perhaps that would be preferable to having to plug the box in and potentially drain your batteries that much faster on a long flight.

For the existing market that Avid already dominate this seems a bit of an odd duck unless they decide to sell them without I/O and find a way to make that headphone jack work without an interface plugged in the back. But for the new startup, a Mac Mini Server and one of these thunderbolt boxes with an Omni would make a great system — low latency tracking, solid monitoring capability, great sound and oodles of native software grunt.

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REVIEW

PEARL DS60

DOUBLE DUAL MEMBRANE CAPSULE MICROPHONE Pearl loves its rectangular capsule, so much so it’s put four of them in the one body to create the all-seeing. all-capturing microphone.

Review: Alex Richardson

Who would you kill for a swiss-army microphone? I’m not sure anyone has promised a microphone that does it all before, but Pearl’s DS60 comes close. Before you start guffawing, think of an application. A superlative cardioid vocal microphone you ask? Done. A Mid-side setup for acoustic guitar? Still the same mic. How about an XY configuration for overheads? Please, it’s already in your hands. Other than spaced pairs, anything you can do with two mics Pearl can do with one.

The Pearl DS60 is a stereo/quadraphonic microphone including two of Pearl’s rectangular, dual membrane capsules that are precisely mechanically-aligned to achieve the best stereo image. It’s beautifully black and gold-finished body and grill gives it the microphone equivalent looks of a European sports car front end, but does it have what it takes under the hood?

BREAKING OUT

NEED TO KNOW

The two condenser dual-capsules each output two signals, which requires a mic cable with four breakout XLRs. After a few minutes reading about how to use the mic breakout cable and its mapped frequency response graph — which can be a little confusing at first — the mic quickly reveals itself to be quite a kick-ass tool, primed and ready for almost every situation. You have full control over four signals during recording and mixdown, which is a luxury. Your four signals give you polarity options of cardioid, omni or figure-8. The dual signals mean that you can even work

PRICE $5230 ex GST

PROS More than 2 mics in 1

CONTACT Professional Audio Technology (02) 9476 1272 or sales@proaudiotechnology.com.au

Transparent capture

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Four outputs for greater flexibility

CONS Wallet breaker

with an isolated mix of the rear of the figure-8 patterns if it suits your application. That means you can adjust room reverberance, wall slap backs and noisy audiences in the mix if you want. You could record stereo or quadraphonic, M-S, Blumlein or XY with precise placement. The DS60 clearly outlines its centre focus points for XY or M-S, with gold engraving on the black body.

GETS THE GOOD ANGLES

The capsules are Pearl’s point of difference. For starters the capsules are rectangular. The going line is that circular capsules suffer from a more powerful resonance as a result of their shape. All membranes resonate but the quieter the resonance the less compensating needed in the engineering of the microphone’s other elements. Basically a stretched membrane, much like a guitar string, resonates at a specific frequency decided by its thickness and level of tension. The rectangular shape of Pearl’s capsule helps achieve a flatter response than a circular diaphragm because the centre of the membrane has two different distances to the capsule’s borders, which means there are two resonances rather than one, and each resonance is less prominent or lower in level than in a conventional circular capsule. Another benefit is that the rectangular capsule’s shorter width helps avoid longer distances between capsule borders. Longer distances result in lower frequency resonances, which are a lot more problematic than higher frequencies in microphone engineering. Pearl also declares that the capsule’s rejection is far superior to normal circular capsules.

SUMMARY The Pearl DS60 is the workhorse microphone you won’t have any qualms showing off. It can do most everything two great mics will do in the one, high quality package. It’ll just cost the equivalent.

Now normally I’m a big advocate for curves in a mic’s response for music production. A good tube mic with a slight hump in the mid-range brings beauty and placement in the mix, but the Pearl DS60 boasts a response that’s almost dead straight. That’s fantastic news for on-site recordings, film location recordings and room mics in the live room, but how does it fair for individual parts during music production?

MANY WAYS TO CUT IT

The first instrument I had the opportunity to test the DS60 on was the double bass. I had an idea to try a stereo XY focused vertically to record up and down the neck. I could mono and centre the low-end using another more appropriate mic on the F-Hole and then use a high pass filter on the Pearl’s signals. The XY pattern meant large coverage but could also achieve some interesting stereo movement. The mono low end and high pass filter on the XY setup was intended to avoid panning of lower frequencies, which sit stronger when at the centre of the mix.

It was a great opportunity to test the mic’s sensitivity. On first listen, the mic really shone at picking up the entire range of the bass’s neck (string resonance and fretting). Every nuance was there. The bassist was more blown away by that than myself. He could use the headphones with both cans and still get definition, rather than with one off to listen to the bass itself. More impressive to me was the tight and controlled top end. Often with new, flat condenser microphones I have an issue with the top end being harsh or over accentuated, definitely not the case with Pearl.

My second opportunity to test the Pearl was in front of an acoustic guitar. My usual setup on a guitar is a tube mic on the body and a small diaphragm on the neck about 12th fret, depending on its application.

Though a common issue with this combination is phase. A Pearl DS60 makes a stereo guitar setup easy and avoids the phase caveats.

Going with the M-S configuration this time, I was again impressed by the silky top-end but more so by its extended low frequencies. The microphone boasts an 18Hz-25kHz frequency range and it definitely performs. Its transparent sonic quality suggests an incredibly flat frequency response. In the documentation it shows a ruler flat response from about 60Hz-2.5kHz, a slight hump in the high mids followed by a tapering off after 10kHz, with variations on that theme depending on pattern selection. The sound to my ears is delicate, transparent, full-ranged, vivid and sensitive all at the same time but it lacks a bit of mid-range thickness for certain applications. That’s a very similar quality to its other neighbouring European microphone manufacturers/ enthusiasts who strive for perfect capturing of the original sound source.

SEES EVERYTHING

Vocal recordings of a soft female voice unveiled much the same qualities as the acoustic guitar except it was a single capsule side with a cardioid pattern instead of an M-S formula. It was here I was truly able to test the rectangular capsule’s rejection, with a bit of baffling to help dry it up a little. The vocals sounded upfront and dry straight off the cusp, signalling a high rejection quality of the capsule. It is still susceptible to the commonly experienced proximity effect, though this is not necessarily a flaw and can of course be used to your advantage.

I couldn’t call this review complete without seeing how it might perform for location recording or atmos. My studio’s front yard often fills with Lorikeets, so I took it out there with my mobile recording kit and captured some remarkably true responses of the surroundings. Its sound reminded me of a Soundfield microphone I’ve used once or twice in Melbourne. Once again sensitivity was a big plus with anything in its path being audible without being overly loud.

SHOWHORSE

The Pearl DS60 is a powerful tool in any sound engineer’s box. It’s a go-to microphone for almost all applications. But in life, you get what you pay for, and in this case you might have broken the bank. The microphone is in the higher echelon of price points but it’s a workhorse you’ll be proud to show off. You might not be able to get a pretty lady inside like you can an expensive car but I’d say you could get her to love her voice by the end of the recording.

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REVIEW

SM PRO M-PATCH V2 PASSIVE MONITOR CONTROLLER A simple monitor controller just got better with swappable encoders.

Review: Mark Woods

CHECK FOR MONO The stereo/mono switch is handy for regularly checking stereo work to see how it holds up in mono — a good thing.

STEP UP

NEED TO KNOW

The V2 version comes supplied with two high quality, interchangeable rotary encoders — a continuously variable model, and a 12-step variant that’s great for locking in consistent monitoring levels.

PRICE $249 CONTACT Sound & Music (03) 9555 8081 or info@sound-music.com

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PROS Swappable stepped or continuously variable encoders Stereo/Mono switch a big help Selectable dual inputs & outputs Good price

CONS None

SUMMARY SM Pro’s V2 passive volume controller could and should find its way onto every studio desk that currently doesn’t have good monitoring control, or could do with a highly accurate, repeatable set up.

w

The M-Patch V2 is one of those devices that you may not realise you need at all but once you’ve tried it, you won’t want to be without it.

Following on from the success of the original M-Patch, the M-Patch V2 offers the high-quality passive attenuation of the original version but in a larger package that’s easier to use and incorporates several improved features.

Some apparently as a result of suggestions from users.

An Australian design, the M-Patch V2 connects between an audio interface or mixing console and the monitor amps/speakers to provide analogue volume control and alternate source/speaker selection. For DAW use without a mixing console the M-Patch V2 allows for clean analogue level attenuation rather than potentially degrading digital attenuation. For DAW use with a mixing console it offers the convenience of placing the level control in a more accessible position. In my situation I use a fairly large analogue console but sit at a desk with screens, keyboard and mouse; the mixer is off to the side. So I’m forever leaning over to adjust the monitor level. Aside from the small amount of physical exercise this gives me it’s inconvenient and often means leaning across customers to get to the mixer. The M-Patch V2 has allowed me to place the level control in front of me, within easy reach.

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STEPPING UP TO VERSION 2

Physically the V2 is 2U high compared to the 1U original and this means there’s plenty of space for the controls. It looks a bit like a clock radio with its rounded sides but it’s strong and well built. The main level encoder is large and everything is chunky, easy to see and grab. A couple of stick-on rubber pads are included in the box to stop it sliding backwards when you push a button. A rack-mount kit is included but I would imagine most users would use it as a stand-alone unit, unless the rack is within easy reach; the ability to have the level encoder close at hand is one of its best features. The rear panel has two combo XLR/jack connectors for the main stereo input, two RCAs and a 1/8-inch socket for auxiliary inputs, and two pairs of XLR output sockets for connecting amps/speakers.

As well as the convenience of choosing where to place the controller it has several other handy functions that can be used in a variety of ways depending on the specific set-up. Because it’s a passive device there’s no way it can colour the sound and the V2 version comes supplied with two interchangeable rotary encoders; one is continuously variable, the other operates over 12 stepped positions for easily repeatable settings, and comes pre-installed. The stepped attenuator is specifically designed for the M-Patch range with 470Ω film resistors that have a high accuracy of ±0.1% to keep the impedance to the lowest level SM Pro could in a passive system. A level of accuracy standard variable attenuators can’t match. It’s a doddle to change between them with only four screws and a connector to deal with.

It’s also a speaker selector for those who use more than one set of monitors.

I found the Aux input convenient for the CD player that otherwise takes up a couple of console channels. Having the Mute button close at hand is great for killing the sound quickly. And it has one my favourite functions; a stereo/ mono switch. Currently I can listen in mono via software or by centering the playback channels on the console, but having the switch at hand is much easier and I found I was using it more often — it’s good to regularly check stereo work to see how it holds up in mono.

POWERFUL ADDITION

All the functions mentioned so far are passive and work without any power connected to the unit, but if the power supply is connected then you get indicator lights for input/output/mute selection status. Plus, the headphone amp works, and it works well; sound quality is good with plenty of power and a separate volume control. I liked the way selecting Mute kills the main outputs but not the headphones, making it handy for a quick check with cans. Having the headphone amp means the M-Patch V2 now controls all the main monitoring options, near-fields, wall/large monitors and headphones.

The M-Patch V2 quickly found a place in my set-up and while I used it as a speaker selector and volume control, there are lots of other points where clean level control is required and others will no doubt find different ways of configuring it to suit their own circumstances. This is a very handy device at a good price.

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SUBSCRIBE & WIN A $4400 BEHRINGER X32 DIGITAL MIXING CONSOLE Galactic Music has really pulled out all stops with this subs prize. The Behringer X32 has been the talk of the town lately, and we’re hugely excited to give one away to a lucky reader! Valued at $4400, the X32 is Behringer’s first digital console since Uli Behringer bought Midas. So you get great-sounding Midas pres, and all the trappings associated with the UK company manufacturing consoles in the same place as Behringer. It also features 40-bit floating point processing, super-low latency from Klark Teknik, great-sounding effects and you can use it as the front end for your home studio or make great sounding live recordings to boot! You can read all about it in Guy Harrison’s Issue 91 review, as well as the Building An Empire feature this issue on the X32 being made in China right alongside the Midas Pro range.

To be in the running to win, subscribe to AudioTechnology magazine and answer the following question.

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Pay by credit card online: www.audiotechnology.com.au; by phone, call Miriam on (02) 9986 1188, or mail in the form below with a cheque or money order. Easy!

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AC/DC, The Angels, INXS, Divinyls, Hoodoo Gurus, Noiseworks, Cold Chisel… producer Mark Opitz’s name is synonymous with the best in Australian rock/ pop of the ’80s, but his work in the last 30-odd years has taken him around the world many times over. Get along to Mark’s website (markopitz.com) for more info on his recently released biography ‘SophistoPunk’ and The Mark Opitz Guide to Recording app — well worth the $8.50 asking price. Pictured is Mark Opitz during the Cold Chisel East sessions, Paradise Studios in 1980.

MARK OPITZ

In high school I wanted to be Australia’s best film director or Australia’s best record producer. I came from very humble beginnings — children’s homes, single parent, no money — so I was aiming very high.

In 1971 I set off for Sydney from Brisbane and joined The ABC. After being a cameraman for Seven Little Australians the powers that be wanted to take me down a peg or two: “We’re going to put you in audio… music recording.” Which in the early ’70s was the arse end of the line. But it sounded great to me.

I landed a job at EMI mastering in 1974, working alongside Richard Lush and Martin Benge.

But I was convinced by EMI’s A&R department that I should work ‘in the labels’.

I left EMI under a cloud, sacked by the new studio manager for something I didn’t do. I thought my career was over until Vanda & Young rang me and offered me a gig as their apprentice at Albert’s Productions.

Albert’s was on the fifth floor of a building in King St, Sydney.

Ted Albert was the boss and it was very much a family thing.

Working with George [Young] and Harry [Vanda], it felt like the three of us against the world.

One of my mantras was always make ‘world’ music, not Australian music. It’s about the songs and the feel. My favourite Australian song of all time would be Wide Open Road by The Triffids. If you listen to that recording, it’s average. But what that song and the spirit of that recording captured, I think is immense.

Never write songs that you think people want to hear — you’ll always be disappointed. But if you write songs you like and you’re happy with, you’ll never be disappointed.

Australian bands that made it big worldwide, got their international careers in sync from day one. AC/DC, Little River Band, Bee Gees, made music for the world and worked hard at touring the UK or the US from the start. Cold Chisel didn’t. It took four albums before they went to America — they were so huge here, but they had to start at the bottom over there. It was never going to work.

So you just find a way of doing it. Save up and get the cheapest airfare possible, because that’s your dream. Follow your dream, just f**king follow it.

I didn’t get paid for the first six months. I’d hocked my ’62 Les Paul and my 1935 Gibson Kalamazoo just to keep eating.

I listen to music as a punter not as a music producer. I couldn’t pull out an INXS CD I’ve produced and listen to it in my living room. But the other day I heard Don’t Change on the car radio. I thought: ‘That sounds really cool’.

Ted Albert approached me and said: “Mark, we’re going to give you a $100 a week and here’s a $100 for the last six months. But there’s one caveat; it’s going to be an advance against money that you earn the company.”

I think shows like The Voice and Idol are totally valid because the fact is that a), it’s bringing music to a wider audience and b), these kids line up for two days for an audition and it’s the only way they’re going to get their shot.

He came to me two months later and said, “You owe us $800.

What are you going to do about it?” I’d been working a million hours a week! Luckily Face to Face came out a few months after, sold really well and the rest is history.

We’ve got a house in Brunswick where young bands can record on a budget. There’s a Neve in there and the right gear.

The first Albert’s album I produced was The Angels’ Face To Face.

I still get royalty cheques from Albert’s for my work with The Angels. I can tell you that it’s kept me alive a few times.

I knocked back Appetite For Destruction for Guns’N’Roses! They were covering a couple of songs I’d produced and they wanted me to be the producer. But I kept hearing how this band had wrecked another hotel room or burnt down their manager’s house or whatever. And I’m thinking: this is a brand new band? They hired Mike Clink and Mike Clink never did another album after that.

Rhino Studios was the most popular studio in the country for many years but I made a grand total of four grand out of owning that place with the guys from INXS. It was a buzzing studio — if someone didn’t turn up, we’d just make a phone call and four other bands would be clamouring to get in.

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It’s a little like Studios 301 today. We all know that Tom [Misner, the owner] could put up a block of flats and make 50 times the money he makes from that studio. We were the 301 of the time.

When they ring me up and say, “Geez, we can’t afford that to be honest.” And I say, “That’s bullshit. You tell me what you can afford and then we’ll see if that covers the cost of the studio.”

I say to these guys, “the figure that you come up with, add 5% to it. That way you’ll work really hard. I am not out to charge the earth for what I do.”

It’s hard to have a career in music recording. But it’s always been hard. You’ve got to find a way. If you want to be an actor, you’ve got to be prepared to go to Hollywood and be a waiter. When I moved down from Queensland as a kid there was nothing. I walked into the ABC unannounced, waited around for eight months before they took me in and in that time I worked in abattoirs, warehouses… I did what it took.

It’s all about attitude and desire, it’s all about risk. It’s all about only living once. When I’m at the end of my life I can look back and go, “At least I gave it a f**king good crack.”

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AT 97 8/29/12 7:40 AM

Click, Listen, Demo.

The new RØDE Microphones Soundbooth Broadcast application allows you to listen to RØDE microphones in real-world broadcast situations.

Available now at

rodemic.com/soundbooth AT 98