AudioTechnology Issue #93

Les Miserable Job Of Recording Live Vocals On Set

MUSE DIPS IN THE KITCHEN SINK The Band’s Return To Big Budget Form

SOME LIKE IT RED HOT Dave Rat Mixes Chili Peppers On Analogue At BDO

ORCHESTRAL KARAOKE How MSO Keeps Up With The Times

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Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au

ED SPACE

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

NAMM 2013. Really?

Graphic Designer Leigh Ericksen leigh@alchemedia.com.au

Text: Christopher Holder

Art Director Dominic Carey dominic@alchemedia.com.au

NAMM. We’ve all heard about it, even if we’ve not been.

Winter NAMM in Anaheim — just outside of LA, in Walt Disney’s backyard — is a real zoo… in a good way.

And really, we’re bit players. If NAMM is designed for music store owners to go shopping (which it is), then it’s an unrivalled barometer of how much real estate that hi-tech and pro audio can command in the high street.

Not much, is the short answer.

To give you a sense of scale… Fender’s presence alone would be as large as your average Safeway. Peavey has its own postcode. There are literally acres of drums; two soccer pitches worth of pianos; brass for days… you get the idea.

Huddled together assailed on all sides by ukeleles and bongos is hi-tech and pro audio with some live sound for good measure — a little like Asterix’s village ‘holding out against the Roman invaders’.

And you’ve never seen so many rock dogs. Leather pants are the defacto uniform, closely followed by ripped denim. Not that I’m complaining. You can stumble across some amazing performers and performances. I caught a few minutes of some breathtaking fretboard filigree work from someone who sounded the dead ringer for Stanley Jordan… only to discover after the event that it was, of course, the notoriously shy/retiring Stanley Jordan. And there’s dozens of other serendipitous treats of that ilk for lovers of music.

So here’s my first astonishing insight into NAMM. It’s about the music. We’re here to serve the best interests of musicians; whether that be yourself as a one-man muso/producer, or the band paying for time in your studio. Which isn’t a bad reminder when you’re obsessing about ribbon mics, Neve-copy outboard, or retro-styled plug-ins; it’s nice to be confronted, or at least share the same oxygen with musicians… notwithstanding their bad dress sense and straggly hair.

NAMM this year threw up its fair share of surprises. You’ll read about the best of the new product releases later this issue — and there are plenty — but what I’m talking about are the more odd-ball offerings. It’s my view that it’s the new gear releases that you didn’t see coming that may well pave the way of the future. Not to downplay the new gear that will set the cash registers ringing and instantly meet a need in the market, but it’s the gear that makes you go ‘really?’ that most interests me.

When it comes to ‘tales of the unexpected’ you can reasonably expect weird-arse products to come from AT 8

small-fry companies with nothing to lose — I’m thinking about Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, for example. But what about JBL? The first press conference I attended at NAMM was on the JBL stand where the speaker behemoth unveiled its ‘game changing’ M2 monitors. My jaw dropped. Really? Who’s demanding huge two-way floor-standing main monitors? I’ve not met too many JBL monitors I’ve liked the sound of, but I simply cannot wait to hear these things fired up.

Ditto Korg. A big operator in the keyboard sector; certainly no back room schmucks. When CMI’s Ian Flowers took me over to the Korg stand the first thing he showed me was the MS20 Mini. My jaw dropped.

Really? I had no idea I wanted a lovingly replicated 86% scale-modelled, fully-analogue MS20 semi-modular synth, with real patch cords, like it was 1978 again… but you know what? I do! And if you have any love for synths, I’m guessing you do too.

Steven Slate’s Raven is more your classic ‘what the?’ surprise packet from a small time operator. Sure, Raven, wasn’t officially launched at NAMM but it was the first time most of us had seen it in the flesh. Steven should have been a Southern Baptist preacher; boy can he work a crowd. Raven is a ‘Multi-Touch Production System’, and it’s much more than ProTools with a big touchscreen telly. As Steven effortlessly dragged/dropped his customised toolbar around his 46-inch display, or pinched and zoomed on a waveform, a very appreciative crowd encouraged him with enthusiastic applause and some whooping ’n’ hollering. A big part of me wonders if he’ll sell any at all. But I love the idea of Raven, I love the commitment and innovation, and doubtlessly the big software players are paying close attention.

If I promised not to talk about the ‘normal’ cool stuff in favour of the ‘Really?’ cool stuff I need to sign off by making an exception for PreSonus. For a company that’s been chugging along for years with solid yet unspectacular new products, NAMM saw a supernovastyle blowup. A new PA, new studio monitors, and the new 32-channel StudioLive mixer, are the obvious evidence, but it’s the vitality that impresses the most. I guess the French call it the je ne sais quoi. Mackie had it in the mid ’90s, and it’s palpable. You look at what PreSonus is doing and you instantly know that its stuff is good, designed by people who care and marketed by people who know their customers.

Thanks to Mark for letting me take over Ed Space this issue. Normal transmission will resume next issue.

Advertising Paul Cunningham paul@alchemedia.com.au Accounts Jaedd Asthana jaedd@alchemedia.com.au Subscriptions Miriam Mulcahy mim@alchemedia.com.au Proofreading Cal Orr 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

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All material in this magazine is copyright © 2013 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process with out written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974.

The responsibility is on the person, company or advertising agency submitting or directing the advertisement for publication.

The publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, although every endeavour has been made to ensure complete accuracy. 12/02/2013.

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CONTENTS93

Recording Live Vocals On The Set Of Les Mis

54

FEATURES A Dip In The Muse Kitchen Sink Recording The 2nd Law

35

42 Some Like It Red Hot: Dave Rat At BDO 46 Orchestral Karaoke: MSO Tackles West Side Story 60 Simian To Think About

REGULARS 12 What’s On 66 Stav’s Word: Compression Without Parallel?

70 Mac Notes 72 PC Audio 98 Last Word, Dave Smith

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

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SEE PAGE 97

REVIEWS 74

78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94

500 Series EQ Shootout Mackie DL1608 iPad Mixer Heritage Audio Neve Clones Allen & Heath ICE 16 Live Recorder Waves Element Soft Synth Apogee Quartet Desktop interface Korg Krome Workstation Miktek CV4 Tube Condenser ADAM F Series Studio Monitors AT 11

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REGULARS

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

At Deluxe Mastering they’ve hit the ground running again. Tony ‘Jack the Bear’ Mantz has mastered projects for Veludo, Ghost Loft, The Resignators, The Human Electric, Mike Callander, The Neighbourhood, The Soulenikoes, Sam I Am, and James Frew. Adam Dempsey has been mastering new releases for Sticky Fingers, Dru Chen, Neon Bogart, Westall 66, Lucy Wise, Guy Hilson, Strine Singers, Luke Legs & the Midnight Specials for digital and 7-inch release, and composer Jonathan Dreyfus.

At Studios 301, producers Tim Carr and Simon Todkill have been getting settled in Studio 8 (one of the new production studios) getting together what is going to be one of Australia’s best spec’d mix and overdub rooms. Whilst doing this, Tim has been working with Matt Corby, Tommy M and the Mastersounds and Rockets, and Simon has been continuing work with Nantes and recording and mixing a project with PVT. Elsewhere in the Sydney recording Studios, Jack Prest has been engineering US artists B.o.B and Action Bronson whilst each of them have been touring Australia, And Alison Wonderland has just finished a long stint in Studio 6 with producer Chris Colonna.

In Byron Bay, Nick DiDia and Jordan Power have been locked in the studio for four weeks and counting, working on one of the biggest releases for 2013…

While in Mastering, Leon Zervos has been working on songs for Pete Murray, Andy Bull, Redcoats and Brian McFadden, Andrew Edgson has been perfecting work for PVT, Rockets, and Eden Mullhoulland. Steve Smart has just returned from an extended summer break and got stuck straight into songs for British India.

Ben Feggans has been working on Aril Brikha remixes of Christian Vance, an EP for Mighty Joe and singles for Sui Zhen whilst Sameer has mastered the recently released Clubfeet album Heirs & Graces and a track for MC Big Dave featuring Snoop Dogg… or is it Snoop Lion?!

In between getting back and heading off to the Grammys Will Bowden has been mastering singles, albums, EPs and remixes for Emma Louise (album mixed by Matt Redlich), Spit Syndicate, P.Smurf, Archer & Light, Dubmarine, Kingfisha, La Mancha Negra, Lee’mon, Worldfly, Boys Boys Boys, Caitlin Park, Ukes of Today, Edouard Bronson, Colour Bomb, Permaculture,

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All Sparks Burn Out, The McMenamins, Bearhug, Karifi, Tina Harrod (finishing the album mixed by Stu Hunter), Juerlain Prideaux, and Jess Morhall. In other news he’s just bought a Tomo Audiolabs LISA dynamic mastering equaliser saying, “It’s pretty wild, the German sports-car of EQ!”

Tracked drums at GPHQ and did some overdubs at Alberts Studio 2 using my JLM modded Quad 8 pres and UAD Apollo El Fatso plug-in as the front end. The Apollo prints really well — very happy with that combo. I used the LA2A and Pultec plug-ins to track Jeremy Oxley’s vocals in his house in Brisbane and was well happy with the result, the Apollo is a very handy bit of kit.”

Gigpiglet Recordings had a super busy end of the year, while Brendan Gallagher was in at GPHQ mixing his upcoming solo record, Gareth was away on tour with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. Gareth did manage to slip in a few days though, mixing a track for Boy and Bear, several live recordings for Moshcam, and the live to air broadcast of FBI’s SMAC awards.

Brendan Gallagher just finished mixing 23 tracks for his new solo double album Wine Island at Gareth Stuckey’s GPHQ studio in Redfern. Why a double album? Galagher says, “Sometimes in the music business you just have to be competely stupid.” He used a combination of studio outboard (Distressors, LA610, 6176s, Focusrite, Neve Purepath, TLA EQ), his new UAD Apollo Duo Core plug-ins, mainly the 1176, El Fatso Jr and particularly the Neve 1073 which did the trick on vocals and acoustic guitars. For some ‘artistic’ reason he ended up using mono effects — an old Ibanez AD 230 analogue delay and Electro Harmonix Holy Grail spring reverb pedal — straight up the guts, no phase issues.

His Roland Space Echo pedal got a work out too, mostly printing effects. He also re-miked a lot of stuff through his Studer B67 tape machine’s 5-inch speaker, and maxed out some drums through the Studer (1/4-inch tape at 7.5 ips), his Broadcast Passive Link proving indispensable for running signal out of ’Tools.

Gallagher also recently mixed five tracks for a new Jeremy Oxley (Sunnyboys) EP at Ian Haug’s (Powderfinger) Airlock studio in Brisbane.

Gallagher: “A really great place to work, top gear, beautiful surroundings and a wonderful host (and fab engineer/producer Yanto Browning helping out). I became very fond of Joe Malone’s PEQ 1 Pultec-like EQs, one of the most musical boxes I’ve ever put an acoustic guitar through.

Speaking of Joe, I recently started work on a new Bernie Hayes album (my second, his fourth).

The new year saw a short break that was used to add some new gear into the outboard rack (a pair of refurbished LA4A’s and Lexicon PCM60) as well as a complete update to the headphone system. Now easier to patch, and more flexible, in addition to two stereo ‘main’ mixes appearing on all patch panels, there are eight patchable individual sends to any of the three recording spaces. The biggest change however was the beginning of building a new mix and post room to handle the ongoing broadcast and music-topicture work. A new ProTools HD2 rig (and upgrading the main room to HD2 at the same time) with Waves Mercury and SSL bundles will do nicely thanks! Look out for an update next month that is hopefully a completed room!

At Damien Gerard’s, the main studio finally received its ProTools upgrade with a massive jump from the old rig to a state of the art PT10 system running on a Thunderbolt iMac with 16GB of RAM and 3.6GHz processors.

Nothing stopped at the studio over Christmas, with Claude Poffandi of Blow producing a new project by young acoustic virtuoso Richie, Andy Meehan (Aeriel Maps) finished his new album project, Fleur and The Apparitions from Sydney Art College used the EP deal for their debut, Norma O’Hara Murphy travelled down from Queensland to create another country album just in time for Tamworth, The Mark Boersma Duo also travelled down from Brisbane to work with Russell, Thuderchild plit time between DG’s and Dave Skeet Music, Marvin Priest did some more vocals with Andrew Beck, and Daniel Allars demoed some new tunes.

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Toyland Studio in Northcote has had a busy, and international, start to 2013 with an eightday mix session for Russian band B2, solo artist Diana Joselle recording and original song with session drummer legend Gerry Pantazis, and Adam Cal recording voice overs for an LA-based multimedia company involving 5-6 hour Skype video calls. In February Toyland Studio is host to Grammy-winning US producer Scott Mathews for his recording masterclass series, helping local artists produce their music to a world class standard. Adam Cal has also mastered albums for Melbourne’s A Greed Science, and Adelaide’s Ride Into The Sun (produced and mixed by Texas-based Water Moccasin).

THE REGROWTH CONCERT FOR BUSHFIRE RELIEF I live on the Tasman Peninsula. It was January 6th, 2013, and there I was chatting with some muso/production colleagues in a bushfire evacuation centre, having fled our bushfire threatened homes with a few precious instruments and whatever studio gear we could stuff in our cars. And the idea hatched to plan a small benefit gig. You know the type; a few local bands, basic 1kW rehearsal PA, put out the hat and collect a few bucks.

The first week of planning the gig was done whilst trapped by fires which had cut the only road out, with no electricity, running water, shops, internet, or any of the modern conveniences we take for granted, all the while worrying about the fires that surrounded us and had destroyed so much of our community.

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

I’ve worked in live production for over 20 years, and have been running the APRA People’s Stage at Falls Festival since semi-retiring to Tasmania in 2006, so I had plenty of contacts to approach for a hand in putting on the concert. I had secured the iconic Dunalley Hotel’s adjacent campground as the venue, it was the staging ground for the emergency services, in the heart of the worst affected town, so it was perfect in many ways. Australia Day seemed the only logical date, so it was quickly locked down on the already healthy Facebook page and I now had the foundations for a concert!

The following fortnight was a blur of 18 to 20-hour workdays/daze, plenty of phonecalls with bands, production personnel, insurance companies, driving 1000s of kilometres on fire damaged country roads and numerous other tasks normally handled by a team of event organisers. I’m largely unemployed for most of the year, a few small mixing jobs and some general labouring, so the bank balance is usually single digits. I don’t exactly know how, but between emergency grants from the Government, pawning a guitar and spending my pay from Falls (which was only days before

the fires), I somehow managed to scrape enough money together to rent a van, buy materials, do printing and get the concert underway, as the external funding had yet to be received.

After 18 days had flown by, it was more or less organised and with the aid of my fellow band member Dave and SAE student Saphia from Sydney, we began assembling a concert from scratch. The staging was donated by The Friends School in Hobart, FOH system was Sylphonic Production’s Midas Venice/Dynacord Madras combo, with RCF monitors donated

by Norwest Productions at the eleventh hour.

Combined with a mountain of cables, drinks, signs and various bits donated by Falls Festival and other sponsors, we had managed to build a good stage as well as a funky backstage hangout area for VIPs and artists. The gates opened on time, 11am on the 26th, the entertainment commenced and the entire day/evening went exactly to schedule, with no problems whatsoever, we ended the concert around 10:30pm and absolutely everyone involved was elated, audience included. We all needed a release after the fires, I think we got our wish.

Thank You Australia!

Dave Campbell

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PRESONUS NAS: 1800 441 440 or sales@nationalaudio.com.au

The two biggest movers at NAMM this year were Behringer and Presonus. While Uli has been busy building on his recent acquisitions, Presonus has been forging into new territory, but they both seemed to cover a lot of the same ground in different ways. Here’s a head-to-head of what’s new.

V MONITORING THE ACTION KRK’ING MONITORS: It was worth a quick check first – no, The Music Group hasn’t snaffled up KRK, but Behringer did lure KRK founding speaker designer Keith R Klawitter (thus KRK) into the office to help with Behringer’s new active near-field monitors. The 100W NEKKST K5 and 150W K8 next-generation, high-resolution near-field monitors come with ultra-high-resolution 1-inch silk dome tweeters and long-throw glass fibre cone woofers; 8-inch and 5-inch respectively. An array of innovations, including a patent-pending means of switching between studio tunings, as well as ultra-linear DSP correction, multiple analogue and digital inputs, iOS and Bluetooth connectivity are included. Hooking up digital sources is accomplished via the onboard USB input. Analogue inputs feature XLR, TRS and RCA connectors — and can be used simultaneously with the USB source. Both monitors feature Bluetooth connectivity for streaming audio from a Bluetooth-enabled device. An iOS app allows the user to adjust the K8/K5’s acoustic characteristics via iPhone or iPad. In addition, if you still don’t like what you’re hearing, users can download models of iconic studio monitors, as well as world-class ‘listening environments’.

The latest pedal from TC Electronic, the Ditto Looper is absolutely packed with features… hang on, no it’s not. It just loops. TC Electronic decided to take all the Star Trek science out of loop pedal design and come up with a simple, one-button stomp pedal. TC Electronics claims the Ditto Looper can keep guitarists amused for hours — always useful in the studio when you have an impatient Rock god who can’t wait for the rhythm sections to be tracked.

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

Canadian-based Holophone is at it again. Last November the company threatened to “slap some life into today’s stagnant market of monotonous, generic microphones” with its new Super C handheld supercardioid condenser.

Now Holophone has released the Big O omni-directional and the C+ cardioid microphones to save us all from “a microphone market overrun with boring, unimaginative mics.” Phew, thanks guys!

All mics feature ultra-low handling noise, internal pop filters, and ergonomic design. In Oz, you’ll need to source them direct from Holophone.

Holophone: www.holophone.com

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DOUBLE DOWN: For a first dip into active, studio monitors, Presonus has really dug deep with not just one design sized for different applications, but tow completely different technologies. The Sceptre CoActual studio reference monitors feature a coaxial design that works with a 32-bit, 96k, dual-core processor using Fulcrum Acoustic’s TQ Temporal Equalization technology (Fulcrum and Presonus have struck a deal). The series includes two models with the Sceptre S8 CoActual Studio Monitor ($849 each) combining an 8-inch low/ mid-frequency driver and a 1-inch, horn-loaded, high-frequency transducer into a single coaxial unit with aligned voice coils. The Sceptre S6 ($699 each) is similar, except using a 6.5-inch low/mid-frequency driver. A four-position Acoustic Space switch control lets you tailor the monitor’s sound. The standard configuration Eris range offers the E8 ($269 each) and E5 ($169 each) models.

The E8 has an 8-inch Kevlar driver and 1.25 inch soft dome tweeter, while the E5 has a 5.25 inch Kevlar driver and 1 inch soft dome tweeter. Presonus obviously intend going into the studio monitor business with a circuitprotected bang.

German-based company Kemper has announced its Kemper Profiling Amplifier for guitars is now available in a standard 19-inch rackmount model called the Kemper Profiler Rack ($2599) with a near-identical interface to the original model. There is also the Kemper Profiler Powerhead ($3499) which is exactly same, but with a 600W Class D amplifier built in — just BYO your own cabinet.

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

The Panorama P1 is Nektar’s new USB controller surface with integration for Cubase and Reason just like the P4 and P6 keyboard/controllers — except without any keys — simple enough. In all, the Panorama P1 has nine 45mm faders, 16 endless encoders, eight LED buttons, 11 transport buttons, 22 navigation buttons, 11 F-keys buttons, one assignable foot switch socket and a colour high-resolution TFT display. That’s over 60 assignable controls. Don’t panic if you haven’t got Cubase or Reason, the P1 will control any MIDI-based software or hardware. Post Musiclink, Nektar are planning to announce an Aussie distributor soon.

V SPLITTING UP THE FAMILY X32 BUZZ CUT: In Guy Harrison’s review of the Behringer X32 he summarised the console as a game-changer. Behringer obviously think so, promoting the X32 as “Game Over” as well. Still, it hasn’t been resting on the good impression the X32 has made. It’s sent the X32 straight back into the Behringer Boffin System and come out with four new derivatives of the console, the Compact, Producer, Rack and Core models. Each one is still the X32 at heart, but with a focus on a more specific role. The Rack and Core models are the most radical departures from the original desk because they are, as you might guess, rackmount versions of the X32. The X32 Rack has only 16 preamps in a 3RU unit (compared to the standard X32 inputs) and is designed to be best controlled via an external device such as a laptop or, of course, an iDevice of some kind. The X32 Core ($999) takes the idea further, squeezing down to a 1RU and requiring a digital snake for connections. Back to a ‘proper’ console, the X32 Compact also has only 16 preamps with motorised faders but returns to a console form factor, just smaller, for venues lacking space. The X32 Producer is similar, but even smaller again, and this time, rack-mountable — it’s aimed at home and project studios. And sitting just under the X32 series is the iX16 Digital Mixer for iPad featuring 16 digitally-programmable, high-resolution Midas-designed microphone preamps.

THE BIGGER, THE BETTER: Rather than downsizing, PreSonus has fattened up its golden goose — releasing the StudioLive 32.4.2AI 32-channel digital console. The mixer features next-generation Active Integration technology, including a dual-core computing engine that — putting the boot (applaud the pun) into its predecessor — packs over 64 times the processing power and 10,000 times more RAM than the StudioLive 24.4.2. Integrated communications makes possible wireless control of the mixer without requiring an external computer. The 32.4.2AI has 32 Class A Xmax mic preamps, 32 line inputs, 14 aux mixes, four subgroups with variable output delay, Fat Channel dynamics processing and parametric EQ, a 48x34 FireWire S800 audio interface — plus many more lesser features too numerous to list here. The Active Integration technology gives the 32.4.2AI plenty of neat tricks such as being able to create two complete sets of EQ and dynamics settings for a channel and A/B comparisons with the Alt EQ/Dyn button. Also new in this model is six mute groups and six user-assignable Quick Scene Recall buttons — a sort of a ‘speed dial’ for mixer scenes. Price: $4499 (price for the 24-channel console has dropped to $3799).

GRATUITOUS PRO AUDIO —COVER UP If you always thought the money was in covers but wasn’t worth having to play My Sharona every Friday night, you best check that attitude and have a look at Channel Ten’s new show Wedding Band.

Brian Austin Green from Beverly Hills 90210 is back on TV again, somehow looking the same age he did when he was a coked up club promoter and one hit wonder. He’s continuing that (musical?) trend, posing as the lead singer of a wedding band struggling to make it into the ‘big money’ of Rutherford Events’ weddings. But for a band finding it hard to pay the bills, their basements are full of some pretty esoteric, and pricey, gear. Stacked up behind the kids’ dolls kitchen, plush

toys and hanging mobiles, are what looks to be an original Gates Sta-Level with the black knobs on top of what could either be another original or a Retro Sta-Level (either way, we’re talking big bucks), on top of a Teletronix LA2A. Other choice bits include a couple of 1176s, a dbx 165a, what appears to be an Avalon channel strip, and a bunch of valve profile looking gear that would be the envy of most studios worldwide. Someone’s pulling the wool over; either the guitarist isn’t telling his wife how much his gear is really worth, or a prop manager thought the band needed a little cred — maybe a bit too much cred. Can anyone pick out the other knobs and faceplates in this liar’s den?

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V PA ANNOUNCEMENTS IQ GOES UP: Behringer has launched the iQ Series networked loudspeaker line as its flagship live PA range. Those TMG resources come into play again with networking and signal processing technologies for the iQ Series from Klark Teknik and acoustic design by Turbosound. Behringer chipped in the wattage with its 2500W iNuke Class-D amplifiers. Aside from system control the Klark Teknik DSP gives you speaker modelling of some of the industry’s ‘most respected loudspeakers’. Hmm… Users of Behringer’s mixers incorporating Ultranet can now route digital audio across a network of connected speakers using only Cat5 cable, and the range includes four top boxes and two subs.

SPEAKERS WITH AI: The StudioLive AI-series Active Integration loudspeakers are active cabinets equipped with DSP and wireless or wired remote control for monitoring using an iPad or laptop. All StudioLive AI-series loudspeakers include a USB Wi-Fi module to connect to SL Room Control software for Mac OS X, Windows, and iPad over a wireless network. An included Ethernet port on each speaker can be replaced with an AVB option card, which is expected to available in late 2013. Full-range AI-series loudspeakers are available in three 3-way, tri-amped configurations (quad-amped in the 328AI), delivering 2000W. But if that’s not enough the StudioLive 18SAI powered, 18-inch, ferrite subwoofer ($1499) with 1000W amplifier can stretch even lower. Prices for three-way speakers start at $1599 each.

NUKE EM: Behringer is claiming to be redefining the category of high power, lightweight amplifiers with its iNuke12000 and iNuke12000DSP models, which deliver 12,000 total watts – 6000W per channel at 2, , or 3000W at 4, , while weighing less than 8kg and occupying only two racks spaces each. The iNuke DSP Series amplifiers come with 24-bit/96k converters and built-in DSP including a sophisticated delay, crossover, EQ (eight parametric, two dynamic), and dynamics processing with lockable security settings.

PRECISION MIC TECHNIQUE: Presonus has also released its own affordable reference microphone. The PRM1 employs a 1/4-inch pre-polarised electretcondenser capsule and delivers a linear frequency response between 20Hz and 20kHz using an omnidirectional polar pattern. Sensitivity is rated at -37dB/ Pa, EIN (A-weighted) at 26dB, S/N ratio of 70dB, dynamic range of 106dB, and maximum SPL of 132dB SPL. The microphone has an all-metal chassis and comes with a clip, foam windscreen, and hard case. Price: $129.

BEHRINGER EXTRAS Updating it’s long-in-the-touth converter, Behringer’s new ADA8200 now features 8-channel Midas microphone preamps, Cirrus Logic AD/DA converters and an ADAT connection.

Its new CMD DJ controllers have come about from an alliance with Image Line, the company behind Fruity Loops and Deckadance software.

The full-featured set of MIDI controllers consists of the CMD MM-1 Mixer Module, CMD DV-1 Digital Vinyl Control Module, LC-1 Live Control Module, CMD PL-1 Platter Control Module and the CMD DC-1 Drum Control, all of which will now come with Image Line’s Deckadance Software.

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Its four new USB audio interfaces called the U-Phoria series begin with the UM2, built around Behringer’s Xenyx mic preamps, while the remaining three UM22, UMC202 and UMC204 models feature Midas-designed mic pres.

Compact and bus-powered, they’re all about portability and using with laptops. iStudio for iPad provides straightforward connectivity for microphones, guitars and basses, MIDI devices, line level sources and even turntables — all with adjustable gain, independent output and headphone controls plus a direct monitoring option and video out.

The iStudio Thunder features the new Lightning connector needed for the latest-generation iPad and iPad mini.

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 21

RODE DIALS UP THE iXY Rode announced the iXY at the Consumer Electronics Show, which is where Rode is pitching this product.

That said, it’s a handy, and cool piece of gear. iXY is a stereo microphone for iPhone and iPad with a 30-pin connector that allows high quality recording at sampling rates up to 24-bit/96k using Rode Rec iOS app, claiming it’s the only iPhone microphone on the market to do so. At the heart of the iXY is a matched pair of 1/2 -inch cardioid condenser capsules, fixed in a perfect 90 degree ‘near-coincident’ alignment resulting in immersive and true-to-life stereo

recordings, captured in high detail. The iXY uses its own high-fidelity analogueto-digital conversion ensuring all recordings are accurate. The iXY’s small form factor makes it suitable for field recording and also is ideal for use oncamera as a dual-system recorder for DSLRs. A foam windshield is provided for outdoor recordings, as well as a zip pocket. Released in conjunction with the iXY is Rode Rec, an app designed for the iXY. The Rode Rec App is available for purchase or you can get a feature-limited free version.

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

FOCUSRITE SEES RED Focusrite has been seeing red lately, and added a whole bunch of new studio interfaces to its line up. Starting from the top down, we’ve got Focusrite’s new RedNet Ethernet-based interface system. RedNet units 1-4 provide multi-channel analogue preamps and digital I/O combined with the RedNet PCIe card for system-wide low latency, while RedNet 5 provides a direct link to Pro Tools HD. RedNet 6 is a 64-channel interface providing connectivity with MADI, which will see use in the live sphere too, and can also run two different sample rates, one on RedNet, the other on MADI. With each subsequent release of Focusrite’s Scarlett USB 2.0 interfaces they just get bigger. From the original 2i2, then the 2i4, Focusrite has made a quantum leap to the Scarlett

IT’S A GO FOR LAUNCHKEY Novation’s new Launchkey is a hardware/software instrument based around a 25-, 49- or 61-note keyboard controller with 16 velocity-sensitive multi-colour ‘launch pads’. Launchkey features the Launchkey app (an iPad performance synth) as well as a Launchpad app. It also ships with a suite of software for Mac and PC. Launchkey is a fully featured DAW control surface with over 50 hardware controls (33 on the 25-note version).

Standard MIDI control is also provided, making it suitable for any digital audio workstation, giving you control of track volumes, panning, sends and other settings with Novation’s InControl software integration system.

All models feature the 16 pads, two AT 22

Launchpad control buttons and eight rotary controls. They also all have a 3-digit LED display, transport controls, pitch and mod wheels, sustain pedal input, transpose buttons, and more.

The main difference is the 25-key Launchkey includes only a single assignable fader, while the 49- and 61-key versions feature nine, with a backlit mode button and eight mute/ solo buttons. The Launchkey 49 should be available at the end of February, the 25 and 61 key models will arrive April. RRP will be $249.99, $299.99 and $359.99 for the 25, 49 and 61 key models respectively.

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

18i20, which offers 18 inputs and 20 outputs. With Focusrite preamps and bundled goodies it looks good, but just make sure it has enough analogue connections for you. As always, the I/O count includes digital ports.

Focusrite has also found a new role for the Scarlett 2i2 by bundling it into the Focusrite Scarlett Studio package.

This is a starter bundle including the Scarlett 2i2 interface, which has its own small collection of good plug-ins, the Scarlett Studio CM-25 condenser microphone with a 3m cable, a pair of Scarlett Studio HP60 reference headphones and a copy of Cubase 6 LE. You also get thrown in the Bass Station soft-synth and Loopmasters sample pack.

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

GRAPHITE & CARBON USB MIDI CONTROLLERS Samson’s line of controllers offer stunning displays, intuitive controls with smooth semi-weighted keys that invite you to start playing.

With options for every level of performance, production & portability, these controllers betray an elegant sophistication at superb value for money.

Š 2013 Samson. Apple, MacBook Pro and iPad mini are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. | www.elfa.com.au Distributed by Electric Factory Pty Ltd 188 Plenty Road Preston Victoria 3072 Telephone: 03 9474 1000 elfa.com.au E & EO 2013 AT 23

JBL’S MASTER OF THE STUDIO JBL Professional introduced the deceptively brutish looking M2 Master Reference Monitor, a large-format speaker. The largest in JBL’s studio monitor line, the M2 integrates new JBL transducer technologies and patented innovations in a free-standing, two-way system. The M2 Master Reference Monitor design employs JBL’s new D2 Compression Driver which uses two annular diaphragms and two voice coils to deliver extended high frequency response and very low distortion at very high sound pressure levels. The D2 is mated with JBL’s new 2216ND Differential Drive 15-inch woofer also with dual voice coils, incorporating a patented wire application that reduces power compression enabling linear

output regardless of playback level.

The result is an in-room response of 20Hz to 40kHz and 123dB SPL at one meter, providing the necessary dynamic range for demanding music and film production. For the M2, JBL engineers pioneered a new patent-pending waveguide dubbed ‘Image Control’ that enables neutral frequency response, not just on-axis, but off-axis in the vertical and horizontal planes all the way down to the M2’s 800Hz crossover point. Crown I-Tech power amplifiers complete the system. The M2 Master Reference Monitor will be available spring of 2013 in stereo and surround sound configurations.

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

KORG MINI-ME You could argue that heaps of classic gear from the past has been miniaturised by the process of turning it into a VI plug-in, but Korg decided it can do better than that. It recreated a mini-sized hardware version of the MS20 synthesiser and it even includes the original circuitry from 1978 (yes, there was circuitry in 1978, not just valves connected by bits of string). To date, Korg reckon over 300,000 people have used the distinct MS-20 sounds from the original, from Korg’s MS-20 plug-in synth or the iMS-20 iPad app. Now the sounds of the MS-20 have been reborn in hardware. The same engineers who developed the original MS-20 have perfectly reproduced

BRIGHT ORANGE NAMM is mostly all about the biggest, best and brightest new gear from everyone, so it’s cool to come across something that’s a little more downto-earth, practical and not to mention downright handy. Orange Amplification has launched the Orange DIVO VT1000 Valve Tester claiming that this groundbreaking new product will help every guitarist, rental company, valve amp manufacturer, guitar tech and guitar store across the planet — and Orange might actually be right. Valves are black magic trickery to most of us. Just being able to test them would be a bonus. The compact VT1000 is a fully automatic valve tester, which performs a wide range of tests quickly and accurately,

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including matching valves. The unit has one octal and two nine-pin valve sockets for different valve types; simply insert the valve to be tested into the correct socket, select the valve type from the list on the unit and press ‘Start’ to test. The results are displayed clearly and concisely using LEDs and will test for a wide range of fault conditions. The simplicity of operation belies what is going on ‘inside the box’, where a CPU controlled testing system is in operation. We don’t need convincing and a lot of guitar amp techies won’t either.

Australian Musical Imports: (03) 8696 4600 or www.gibsonami.com

its circuitry and fit into a body that’s been shrunk to 86% of the original size, yet retains the distinctive look of the original. The MS-20 Mini has the same 2VCO/2VCA/2VCF/2EG/1LFO structure, self-oscillating high-pass/ low-pass filters with distinctive distortion, an external signal processor (ESP) and the same flexible patching system — which mostly needs a handful of patch cables. Some things aren’t entirely original — there’s a USB connector. Otherwise, even the package and manual are replicated. No shrink wrap? Awesome. Price: $799. Also new for Korg are the King Korg ($1599) and the Wavedrum Global ($799).

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

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SENNHEISER’S WIRELESS MASTERPIECE ROLAND’S LATEST CATCH

DIGITAL 9000

Roland’s new Studio-Capture USB 2.0 interface gets the ‘compact’ tag, making it suitable for travelling production, tabletop use in home studios or, of course, permanent installation with the included rack ears. It has 16 audio inputs, 12 of which are microphone preamps with four on the front facia and the other eight on the rear. Studio-Capture also offers four independent Direct Mixers for zero-latency monitoring, operated via the software control panel.

Powered by internal DSP, each mix can be routed to any of the outputs including the two headphones jacks. A second Studio-Capture can be easily daisy-chained to double the I/O count.

The 12 digital preamps, Roland’s VS Preamps, have XLR/TRS combo inputs

with independent phantom power, a low-cut filter, phase invert, and digital compression, all accessible via the included software control panel.

The two headphone jacks each have a separate control knob. A unique feature is Roland’s Auto-Sens facility.

Press the Auto-Sens button, play your connected instruments, and Studio-Capture automatically sets the ideal recording level for each input in seconds. Studio-Capture supports high-resolution, 24-bit recording at rates up to 192k using Roland’s proprietary VS Streaming technology.

All current Mac and PC DAW platforms are supported. SSP in Oz is $1299, due in April.

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

Fully Digital Rock Solid RF Pure Audio No Companding No Data Compression

WAVES MAKES WAVES

Sennheiser Reliability Designed and Built in Germany A pinnacle of innovation and a future proof investment.

Freecall 1800 648 628 sales@syntec.com.au www.sennheiser.com.au

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Sennheiser Aust & NZ

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Waves, Digico and Soundtracs have banded together to create a new DigiGrid series, a range of audio interfaces and devices that combines the three companies’ expertise. The DigiGrid line-up all connects via Cat5 ethernet, thus every unit can be networked and shared within a studio or, in a live situation, potentially allow separate mixing consoles to share a ‘pool’ of Waves plug-ins or any external MADI I/O. Units vary from the comparatively straightforward DigiGrid IOX, which is a 12 preamp audio interface that can be used as a stand-alone DAW rig, to the DigiGrid DLI device which allows ProTools systems to link together and share resources — specifically Waves plug-

ins. This however is where many in the ProTools community are up in arms.

Waves announced in the past that it won’t port its catalogue of plug-ins across to the AAX DSP format for use in HDX systems. Now that DLI is revealed as the ‘solution’ to using AAX DSP plug-ins in HDX, PT users smell a rat, and are furious they need to buy another piece of hardware.

The discontent among ProTools users is spoiling the party thrown for the DigiGrid release, but really the concept behind DigiGrid is an interesting one and certainly worth a closer look.

Sound & Music: (03) 9555 8081 or info@sound-music.com

Better Sound is Elemental VUE Audiotechnik is advancing loudspeaker design, utilizing ultimate performance

cutting edge technologies to achieve dramatic results. A

powerful example is VUE’s flagship h-Class, which deploys a revolutionary compression driver with pure TruextentŽ beryllium at its core. Beryllium outperforms both aluminum and titanium thanks to an unparalleled stiffness-to-mass ratio, which dramatically reduces mechanical deformation (breakup), and shifts resonant frequencies outside the audible range. These unique qualities allow the h-Class to deliver exceptional high frequency definition at much higher SPLs than more conventional designs.

Visit www.vueaudio.com to find out how you can hear the difference.

Distributed in Australia by Amber Technology Unit 1, 2 Daydream St Warriewood NSW 2102 FREE PHONE 1 800 251 367 sales@ambertech.com.au

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WHAT’S FOR LUNCH?

Worlds best audio interfaces www.apogeedigital.com

Symphony I/O Next generation convertor quality. 32 channels I/O with future proof connectivity.

The Red 1 500 Series Mic Pre from Focusrite is a return of the popular Red Series mic preamps in a lunchbox format. The preamp has switchable phantom power, polarity invert, and an illuminated VU meter. And, of course, it’s got the signature red anodised aluminium front panel, so it’ll stand out from the crowd. By the way, the Red 1 500 Series Mic Pre is still made in the Old Dart — no cheapas-chips offshore manufacturing for Focusrite.

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

Rupert Neve Designs announced two new 500 Series modules, the 511 Mic Pre with Silk and the 542 True Tape Emulator with Texture. The modules have the distinction of being the only 500 Series devices actually designed by Mr. Neve himself.

Hard to beat that pedigree.

Awave: www.awave.com.au

Symphony 64 Thunderbridge Symphony I/O to Thunderbolt™ connection

Rosetta 200 2-Channel, 24bit/192kHz AD/DA Converter

Quartet The ultimate desktop USB audio interface

BigBen 192k Master Word Clock

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

One USB Interface & mic for the Mac. Single 24-bit input, stereo output.

Duet 2 2 IN x 4 OUT USB audio interface for Mac with 24-bit/192kHz recording Apogee Mic Compact studio quality USB microphone available for iPad, iPhone and Mac. Jam Studio quality guitar input for iPad, iPhone and Mac

Symphony PCI 64-channel Express Card

Phoenix Audio’s N90-DRC/500 compressor, also known as the David Rees Compressor, is an API 500 series format compressor and gate module that was originally conceived 20 years ago by David Rees, but was never released in this format — until now, obviously.

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

GiO USB Guitar Interface and Controller for the Mac & Logic Studio

Wide Eye Cable

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Crane Song’s latest addition to its inventory is called the Falcon, a classic sounding tube compressor in a 500 series package. Falcon features three attack and three release time settings, hard and soft knee choices for compression or limiting, two different audio path sounds, wet-dry mixing for parallel compression, and is linkable — capable of connecting enough units for doing 5.1.

Earthworks’ ZDT Preamps now come in a 500 Series version, the ZDT 521. The solid state ZDT 521 features switchable phantom power, polarity invert, and peak amplitude clip detection. The transformerless output stage of 521 ZDT will easily drive long cable runs without loss of quality.

Transparent gain is switchable from 5dB to 60dB in 5dB steps.

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

UNEARTHING GOLD ON EBAY How much is a gold Shure SM7 worth to the right person?

This 1991 Shure SM7 was selling on eBay as a trophy awarded to “The Newmans” from The Young & The Restless and CBS announcer Bern Bennett (who was also the announcer for the enduring soap). The funny thing is, the mic looked to be an original studio mic that was retired to be used as the trophy, was still operational and ‘sounds amazing’. The winning bid was US$255.14, which is just under the going rate for a second hand SM7. So who got lucky? A fan of the soap, or a prospecting audio engineer?

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SOFTWARE NEWS UA AT NAMM, SORT OF Universal Audio released a trio of new plugins at NAMM... sort of. A couple were only promised as ‘impending’. The two latecomers are the API 500 Series EQ Plug-In Collection and the Teletronix LA-2A Classic Leveller Collection, both for the UAD Powered Plug-ins platform and Apollo interface. The API 500 Series Plug-in Collection is an APIendorsed, UA-developed collection featuring emulations of the legendary API 550A 3-band and API 560 graphic equalisers.

And replacing the original LA-2A plug-in (UA has apparently learnt a few things in the last decade) the new LA-2A plug-in collection provides emulations of three distinct Teletronix hardware units, right down to their transformers, amplifiers, and aged luminescent panels.

Finally, and actually available, UA announced the debut of Softube’s Vintage Amp Room, Metal Amp Room, Bass Amp Room, and Acoustic Feedback Deluxe plug-ins. If you find the ‘room’ tag a little confusing, this is guitar amp software. In the hardware department UA unveiled numerous future (again, did nobody tell them the NAMM dates?) enhancements for its Apollo interface — primarily multi-unit cascading, which combines two Apollo interfaces into a single system via firewire or Thunderbolt.

The boost in Apollo connectivity is navigated via a redesigned console application with a new Mix-Merge mode and a ProTools mode which simplifies integration with ProTools systems.

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

DIY TONEPRINT It’s unthinkable to TC Electronic, but you may not be full-bottle on what TonePrint is. TonePrint stomp pedals are effects pedals such as chorus, delay, reverb… the usual suspects, but into which you can load custom settings. Where things get a little funky is that TC Electronic has invited lots of famous musicians to create their own signature effects that TonePrint users can download for free — so you can have a Steve Morse chorus or John Petrucci delay right there at your fingertip (or toe-tips, really). Not surprisingly, TonePrint users have been asking awhile for the ability to create their very own TonePrint sounds from scratch, and TC Electronic has come good.

Steven Slate’s Raven MTX is a large touch screen display featuring the Raven Mixer, a powerful multi-touch mixer that can control all major DAWs. The mixer gives you complete access to faders, pans, mutes, solos, sends, automation and even plug-in inserts on an ultra-thin, 2mm glass-coated 46-inch screen, plug-ins become the size of standard rack-mount outboard gear. The Raven also incorporates a full-featured analogue monitoring section.

Awave: (03) 9813 1833 or www.awave.com.au

Antares’ Auto-Tune For Guitar has a basic String Tune function that can instantly correct poor tuning, plus the Solid Tune function will take care of bad intonation. Then you get Virtual Capo, Alternate Tuning and Guitar and Pickup Emulations that change your sound to classic pickup tones or even an acoustic sound. ATG needs some dedicated hardware installed inside your axe or an alternative is to buy a guitar already fitted with the hardware — like the Peavey AT-200. You have the choice of running ATG via an iPad app (of course) or there is a floor pedal model.

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

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While the entire audio industry was staying up late and NAMM-watching like it’s the Audio Olympics or something (which maybe it is) Avid took the opportunity to remind us that not everything happens on the right-hand side of the Atlantic. It had just helped Abbey Road Studios complete a studiowide upgrade of its ProTools systems to ProTools HDX. And check out the Abbey Road Studios and Avid Song Contest at www.avid.com.

Avid: 1300 734 454

The TonePrint Editor software allows you to build a TonePrint pedal from the ground up within the framework of your chosen effect. Everything is tweakable with the TonePrint Editor including knob assignment — you can customise the TC Electronic base sound into something utterly different.

Theoretically you can mimic a vintage effect and leave the originally dented and scratched pedal with its dodgy knobs and connections at home.

Brilliant. TonePrint Editor isn’t quite available yet, but when it is it’ll be free.

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

For those of you who have ever slung a Rickenbacker bass around your neck and suffered the resulting chiropractic fees — early models weighed a ton — rejoice that Native Instruments has released Scarbee Rickenbacker Bass, capturing the unmistakable sound of a Rickenbacker 4003. Scarbee Rickenbacker Bass was painstakingly sampled by Thomas Skarbye. Ideal for distortion and the first Scarbee bass to be played with a pick, this officiallyapproved instrument delivers all the character and versatility of the original.

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

PRO SERIES AAX Avid has launched the Pro Series line of AAX Native and AAX DSP plugins, featuring three new advanced processors. Pro Compressor and Pro Expander (available now), along with Pro Limiter (coming soon), are the first plug-ins in the series, joining an expanding line-up for the AAX platform. Avid’s Pro Series plug-ins work with AAX DSP and AAX Native systems, including ProTools HDX, ProTools HD Native, and any system using ProTools 10 and higher software. Pro Limiter is a ‘transparent-sounding’ limiter that enables you to maximise the loudness of any mix, without distortion or harshness. It offers

a variety of features that enable you to control how it reacts with precision. Pro Compressor is a high-quality derivation of the Avid System 5 console and Channel Strip plug-in (which is bundled with Pro Tools 10 software). Pro Expander is also based on the Avid Channel Strip plug-in, enabling you to give mixes more energy, gate noise, and duck signals. It offers a handful of easyto-use features and improvements, including some unique elements not found in Pro Compressor.

Avid: 1300 734 454 or www.avid.com

VINTAGE HITS

Ear Monitors Australia #44

1/12/05

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Adding another expansion pack to its Abbey Road Drummer series, Native Instruments has released Vintage Drummer, which promises to bring the smooth, dynamic sound of early incarnation drum kits back to life.

Extremely rare instruments dating from the 1920s to 1940s were meticulously recorded at Abbey Road Studios using a mixture of period equipment alongside state-of-the-art recording chains that allow users to blend the best of old and new. Brush articulations — available for the first time in the Abbey Road Series — add another expressive dimension to Vintage Drummer. Two ultra-rare kits, each

with a choice of three snares, deliver the sound of pre-1950s jazz and big band recordings. The Ebony kit is an open, mellow, and smooth-sounding kit featuring original James Blades 12- and 13-inch toms, and a 26-inch Leedy bass drum — all skinned with original calfskin drum heads. The Ivory Kit is a classic Slingerland Radio King kit from the early 1940s with 13- and 16-inch toms and a 24-inch bass drum. Vintage Drummer includes a groove library full of beats and fills for everything from jazz and swing to the most modern pop productions.

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

“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

custom moulded and generic fit in-ear monitors

Ear Monitors Australia ® 38 Hall Road, South Warrandyte VIC 3134 T: 03 9844 2524 W: www.earmonitorsaustralia.com Ear Monitors Australia and the EMA logo are registered Trade marks of Australian Hearing Laboratories Pty Ltd.

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LIVE NEWS

MORE DIGITAL EXPRESSION Soundcraft’s Si Expression range of compact, digital consoles comes in three frame sizes, Si Expression 1, 2 and 3 offering 16-, 24- and 32-fader and mic inputs respectively. All three are capable of up to 66 inputs to mix by connecting any Soundcraft stagebox — including the two new MADIconnected, internally powered Mini Stagebox 16-in, 8-out and 32-in, 8-out models (plus four pairs of AES outputs on the 32-in model) — or by connecting additional inputs over MADI or AES/EBU. All external inputs are additional to the connections on the desk itself. The mixer is loaded with processing from Harman siblings BSS, dbx, Lexicon and Studer and features like a colour touchscreen, iPad ViSi Remote control and Soundcraft FaderGlow — all adopted from Soundcraft’s Vi Series.

A DSP engine provides 4-band parametric EQ, delays, gates and compressors on every input, parametric and 30-band graphic EQ, compressors and delays on all outputs, as well as four Lexicon stereo effects devices, all capable of being utilised at the same time. Soundcraft ViSi Remote allows remote control of the console from an iPad. Freelyassignable fader layers allow you to place inputs and outputs anywhere on any layer, optimising your mix control for the most important channels. A new option card has been added that allows 16 x 16 channels over firewire or USB, with eight channels over optical ADAT. Also coming is a Dante card, and a BSS BLU link to go along with existing MADI, AES, CobraNet and Aviom cards.

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

TC-Helicon’s VoiceLive Touch 2 provides a complete suite of production-quality vocal effects, including the all-important Harmony (always top of the list for gigging solo musicians). The original VoiceLive Touch was popular and the development of VoiceLive Touch 2 is a result of feedback from professional users. Rich in effects, there is USB for audio recording and playback, preset backup and more. It certainly sounds like a solo performer’s best friend — and one who won’t take half the gig fee.

Yamaha has announced the Ri8-D and Ro8-D input and output racks, which are compact 1U enclosures for providing more Dante system design flexibility.

Using the same Dante audio network protocol as the CL series, the 1RU units allow extra options for system design and implementation. Tentative Australian RRP for the Ri8-D is expected to be $1900 inc GST, with the Ro8-D expected to be $1700 inc GST. The first units aren’t due to be delivered until June 2013.

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

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

Anything that reduces setup time in the studio or on stage always gets our thumbs-up. The Sound Control 6 by Diablo FX is a wireless all-in-one guitar effects pedal management system.

Sound Control 6 can control up to six effects pedals or effects loops across four different channels. Being wireless means no cords and power strips at the front of the stage or littering the studio floor with the SC6 doubling as an effects pedal rack, ready to go. www.diablofx.com

Amber Technology has added Californiabased loudspeaker manufacturer VUE Audiotechnik to its roster. CEO Ken Berger was co-founder and CEO of EAW until Mackie took over in 2000. Michael Adams, Head of Engineering, has 40 years experience as a FOH/Monitor engineer, as well as helping develop JBL’s Vertec series and QSC’s Wideline series.

Jim Sides, the Executive Vice President of VUE, was part of the founding management team at Apogee Sound and later spent five years in Europe as MD/CEO of Meyer Sound Labs. VUE Audiotechnik has started with three series — the h-class, a-class and i-class types, which will be available here soon.

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

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AVIOM MAKES IT MORE PERSONAL Aviom made a fair-sized splash when it launched its personal monitor/ mixing system called the A-16 in 2002.

Providing performers with a means to mix their own monitoring using a digital audio Cat5 link has avoided many terse exchanges between mixing engineer and musician. In the 10 years since, Aviom has refined the design and the latest offering is the A360 Personal Mixer. The A360 features an advanced 36-channel mix engine which can be used to mix up to 17 mono or stereo channels plus mono or stereo ambience. For each of the A360’s standard mix channels, users can adjust volume, tone, and reverb. The

A360 also includes a Stereo Placement pan-spread control that allows the width of a stereo channel’s image to be controlled independent of its left-right placement in the stereo field. This approach, which is ideal for IEM and headphone users, improves spatial perception as well as sonic clarity of the mix. The new A360s can be seamlessly integrated into existing Aviom personal mixing systems, but Aviom also announced that it will be introducing the new AN-16/i v.2 Input Module to support the A360 Personal Mixer.

Production Audio Services: (03) 9264 8000 or sales@productionaudio.com.au

MONITOR CITY GOES FIRST Monitor City gets dibs as the first Australian production company to bring the new Nexo STM system into its inventory. Monitor City, started in 2006 by live sound engineers and production managers Matt Dufty and Ade Barnard, already boasts a healthy list of Nexo gear and took an initial 36 box system comprised of 18 x M46 main units, 18 x B112 bass units and 6 x NUAR intelligent amplifier/controllers. That allowed Monitor City to do Angus Stone’s Australian tour with the system straight away. The plan is to stock a full, arena-sized system that will also break down to many smaller PAs. Monitor City’s STM system was used during New Year at the Falls Festival in a 6000 capacity tent. Next it will be used across four stages at the Port Fairy Folk Festival in March.

There, with the stages ranging in

capacity from 1000 to 3000, the STM’s ability to be broken into a variety of system sizes over the course of the festival will get a real workout. And with Capital Sound, Sound Linear, Acoustic Network and more already taking on STM around the globe, it puts Monitor City in a good possie for future tours. But while some big riders would be nice, the modularity is what really sold Matt and Ade on the rig, that and it’s return to Alpha form. “I had toured Alpha for many years,” said Ade. “I was a big fan and familiar with the Alpha sound. STM seemed to be a similar PA but would throw a lot further and be very flexible for our purposes. The scale of each gig tends to vary a lot so the modular concept fits really well.”

Group Technologies: (03) 9354 9133 or www.grouptechnologies.com.au

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LIVE NEWS

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LIVE PAS 1

Alcons Audio has introduced the QR24 line-source array column, a modular two-way column loudspeaker to be used as a vertical array system for both permanent and ‘limited’ portable applications. The QR24 measures only 660mm in length, and is fitted with 4 x 165mm woofers and two purposebuilt 300mm pro-ribbon drivers. Specifically for this system, the RBN03 pro-ribbon platform was developed, offering Alcons’ non-compressed hifi sound quality with the lowest distortion possible.

Loud and Clear Audio: (02) 9439 9723 or info@loudandclear.com.au

2 Turbosound’s Milan series has been completely re-engineered from the ground up — which isn’t to say there was anything wrong with Milan in the first place — you sometimes question the marketing hype. The Milan series offers five loudspeakers including the new 12-inch two-way M12 and compact 15-inch band-pass M15B subwoofer. The M10, M12 and M15 twoway full range loudspeakers all have two fully independent channels with electronically balanced microphone and line inputs, two-band EQ and a Mix Out function to extend a Milan system with additional speakers.

Hills SVL: (02) 9647 1411 or nsw@hillssvl.com.au

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3 It’s fair to say that 12-inch and 15-inch pole-mounted, powered cabinets represent a fiercely competitive section of the PA market. The ZLX is the next generation of such portable active loudspeakers from Electro-Voice, tempting potential customers with 1000W of power — unthinkable not so long ago, if you wanted to be able to chuck the thing onto a pole all by yourself. Passive versions are available too and it’s interesting to note the weight difference between the powered and passive 15-inch models is 0.7kg — that 1000W amp must be made of balsa wood. The ZLX has a single-knob DSP control with an LCD display and choice of presets, and it can still double as a floor monitor.

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

4 QSC has launched the AcousticPerformance line of professional, twoway, full-range loudspeakers ideal for a variety of installed sound reinforcement applications. All models feature a three-inch voice coil, high power-capacity compression driver combined with high-output woofers.

AcousticPerformance grilles are unadorned, eliminating the need to coverup logo treatments, and are available in black and white finishes.

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

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FEATURE

When Muse decided to abandon the home studio route and head back to the big budget studio world for The 2nd Law, Adrian Bushby and Tommaso Colliva tracked them across multiple studios and countries. The result is a veritable kitchen sink of styles with that undeniable Muse touch, and a good helping of excess.

Story: Paul Tingen

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Muse is arguably the ultimate 21st century kitchen-sink act. Adjectives like ‘overblown’, ‘over the top’, ‘ridiculous’, and ‘pompous’ are regularly used in describing the band’s music, and the British trio’s master stroke is that they have turned these normally damning qualifications into badges of honour. Muse’s many fans adore the band’s bombastic intensity, the classical influences, the juxtaposition of heavily-distorted, in-your-face, over-compressed, monolithic rock with orchestras, choirs, diminished chords, key changes and other divergent ingredients, taking it all to the limit and, well, far beyond. It makes the band’s music a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ affair, but with their six studio albums selling 15 million copies to date the trio doesn’t have to worry about the nay-sayers.

The 2nd Law, Muse’s sixth studio album, is the follow-up to the commercially successful The Resistance. For the new album, the band were on record saying that they were “drawing a line under a certain period”, would do “something radically different” on the new album, and quoted influences of dub-step and electronic music as inspirations for a new direction. The 2nd Law does have some different touches in that it sounds more electronic than previous Muse albums and there are indeed some dub-step elements thrown in on a couple of songs, plus in other places the rather un-Muse sound of an R&B brass section.

But overall it’s very recognisably Muse, admirably succeeding in obliterating the divide between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the kitchen-sink approach isn’t only a central pillar of Muse’s music, it’s also at the heart of their approach to recording it. Almost all their albums have been big budget productions recorded in ways that are reminiscent of the good/bad old days of the ’80s and ’90s, when spending months if not years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on recording an album was the norm rather than the exception.

Yet their previous release The Resistance was recorded at frontman Matt Bellamy’s own home studio near Lake Como in Italy, and was still extremely successful by world standards.

Interestingly, Muse opted not to double down on his studio investment, and returned to the big budget studio world for The 2nd Law, hopping between Air Studios in London, Los Angeles to record at East West, Capitol, and Shangri-La, and Milan at Officine Meccaniche for string sessions on the tracks Explorers and Prelude.

On top of all this studio jumping, before they’d even put down the first tracks of The 2nd Law, Muse turned Air Studio 1 into what surely must have been the world’s most expensive rehearsal space for six weeks from mid-September to November 2011. And that was before three of the world’s top mixers, Chris Lord-Alge, ‘Spike’ Stent, and Rich Costey were brought into action.

There were other elements of excess: recording the drums with a PA system, the hundreds of tracks that were recorded for each session, the wealth of additional musicians and singers that were recorded, and so on. This was undoubtedly a Muse project…

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MAKING NO RESISTANCE

DEMO DAYS

At the controls for The 2nd Law were Adrian Bushby and Tommaso Colliva, hailing from the UK and Italy respectively. On the phone from Milan, Colliva took the story from the top. After Muse, he’s probably the person with the deepest insights into the band’s working methods, having worked with them since 2005 on Black Holes and Revelations. In addition to working on every Muse album since, he also played a central role in building Bellamy’s Lake Como studio, did the pre-production for the The Resistance tour and is also the band’s live ProTools engineer. “I used to be chief engineer at Officine Meccaniche,” added Colliva. “Which is Milan’s largest recording studio and one of Italy’s top facilities. Muse came to record there at the end of 2005, and because I was the only person who spoke English I was asked to assist them and ended up recording a bunch of things. Because Matthew had an Italian girlfriend at the time, he bought a house in Italy, near Lake Como, and I helped him turn the rehearsal space in his villa into a fully-fledged studio, with an SSL 4048 G+ series desk and tons of outboard. That’s where we recorded The Resistance.”

The working method described by Colliva sounds sensible enough… until that last sentence. Why spend two months recording what are essentially demos in one of the most expensive studios in the world? Air wouldn’t say, but comparing it with the world’s other top facilities, Air Studio 1, with its 72-channel custom Neve/Focusrite desk (it has 56 Neve 31106 and 16 Focusrite ISA110 channels) is likely to cost north of $1000 per day.

Spending $40,000 (or whatever deal the studio offered) on six weeks rehearsal space, however deluxe, seemed like a throwback to the excessall-areas eighties and nineties and not very 21st century at all.

“

The PA system was in the room behind Dom and pumped out really loud, synthetic, dancey sounds while he was playing

”

Bellamy and his Italian girlfriend split up towards the end of 2009 and the Briton moved back to the UK. “For the new album the band wanted to record in London,” elaborated Colliva. “Like with The Resistance, they wanted to do preproduction using ProTools. They had done this at Matthew’s Lake Como studio for that album, but for the new album they asked me to set up everything they needed at Air. This took me three or four days. They wanted a big setup, with quite a few microphones, and all signal paths and ProTools sessions ready to go. They like to be left alone during this phase, which meant that I set ProTools up so that all they had to do was open up a template that gave them access to every instrument at the touch of a button. They didn’t have to think about the technical side of things. It allowed them to sketch out ideas and arrangements very quickly, and any new ideas they stumbled upon were also captured. There was an assistant if they needed some support, and I was always on call via telephone. Every two weeks I’d go to London to check that everything worked and that the recordings were okay. Then in November, Adrian and I joined them in the studio to record everything properly.”

Colliva was almost able to hear the raised eyebrows on the other end of the telephone, and explained, “The band wanted to be able to do things in a very modern way, including the abilities to edit things and try different arrangement in ProTools. But they wanted to be able to do this without anyone around. If Adrian and I had been there, it would have been more expensive, and also, the days would have been standard production days during which they’d have felt obliged to go to the studio for at least eight hours a day. Instead they could go to the studio whenever they wanted, whether just for two hours or longer. It gave them a lot of freedom. It’s true that with the mics and signal paths that I had set up it would be possible to track any band and get top quality results, but when we switched to the actual recording process in November, with Adrian and I there, we really stepped things up. We changed the miking of the drum kit, we put up many more room mics, we used different guitar and bass amplifiers, and we used a PA to enhance the drum sound.

In September and October the band was busy writing and sketching out arrangements, and in November it was a matter of: ‘Okay we now know what the songs are, now let’s get the exact sounds we’re after.’

“Yes, we did replace almost everything they had recorded during the rehearsal phase, apart from some of the soft synth sounds, because Matthew had lived with them for months, and it would have been hard to abandon them. The main three soft synths they used were ProTools’ Vacuum, Native Instruments’ Massive, and Rob Papen’s Predator. We also had a separate computer dedicated to samples from VSL and East West.

Many of the drum samples came from Battery, and East West’s Stormdrums and RockDrums, with the last one only for demoing. With regards to using the PA system to augment the drum sound, it’s something that I had done when working with Afterhours, one of Italy’s leading alternative rock bands, and when Matthew asked me for ideas, I suggested it to him. The setup consisted of Roland triggers on the drum kit connected to a Roland TMC 6 trigger-to-MIDI converter, that fed a MacBook running Native Instruments’ Battery, with our own sounds in it.

We ran these through the PA, and recorded them via the drum kit microphones together with the live kit.”

SPLITTING THE CREDIT

During the seven months of tracking, Bushby and Colliva had fairly well-defined roles, with Bushby mainly responsible for the actual recording, ie. mic choices, placements and signal paths, while the Italian manned the ProTools rig. “I was, in fact, doing two things,” said Colliva. “One was handling everything that was digital, meaning Pro Tools, samples, synths and so on, and the other thing was coordinating everything else that related to the logistics side of production, meaning moving instruments around, making sure everything that the band needed was there, and so on. That was a lot of work when we were in LA, because we didn’t have the same degree of support from Muse’s management and the bands touring crew was far away.”

Colliva’s logistic contributions were one reason for his additional production credit, which was also given to Bushby who said, “I think we received the additional production credits because recording The 2nd Law was more a group effort than The Resistance had been. We were five in a room, and when decisions had to be made, everybody put in their opinions.”

Bushby is a London-based engineer, mixer and producer, who has worked with My Bloody Valentine, New Order, U2, Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Dashboard Confessional, Depeche Mode, and the Foo Fighters, and has won two Grammy Awards, one for his engineering work on The Resistance and one for recording the Foo Fighters’ Echoes, Silence, Patience, Grace. He has a formidable reputation for his awareness of sound, and he reckons that Muse involved him “for the sonic point of view.”

From his state-of-the-art studio in North London (see sidebar), Adrian Bushby gives his side of the goings-on during the making of The 2nd Law, first of all clarifying that, for him at least, the seven-month production period for the album wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone, 16-hour a day, 7-day a week affair. “It was always a matter of working for two or three weeks and then I’d have a few weeks off. Having breaks like that meant that we didn’t get too tired. The approach was a bit different than with The Resistance, because when I arrived in Italy for work on recording that album they had three songs ready to go and the rest was very sketchy. But when I turned up at Air, there was a whole wall with write-ups and details of tracks that were ready to be recorded.

In either case Matt always knows what’s going on, which is incredible, considering the complexity of their music. He always knows what has been done and what still has to be done, and where he is going.

“When they were rehearsing and doing preproduction, they pretty much recorded the songs as a band, with everything miked up as if they were tracking for real. When we were recording them they regularly played as a three-piece but they also did many individual overdubs. We used the recordings they’d done during pre-production as a template. Sometimes we used the guitars and pianos that Matt had recorded for the demos as backdrops for Chris [Wolstenholme, bass] and Dom [Dominic Howard, drums] to play to. We made sure that everything was well separated, so we could overdub without spill. Chris and Matt’s amps were in different booths and rooms, so everything was very isolated. Also, the band

Muse visionary Matt Bellamy hard at work at the controls of East West studio. Photo: Tom Kirk

AIR Studios — not a bad little practice room... if you can afford it.

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Tommaso Collivo in Brooklyn Recording Studios, NYC Photo: Francesco Balatti

“

We sent the DI signal through a pedal that we automated to make the wah-wah sharper and faster than a human could play it

”

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works with in-ear monitors, which meant that we didn’t have any problems with things blaring from monitors. They control their own headphone mix with a 16-channel mix system by Aviom. They also use that live, and they’re really happy with it, which made my job a lot easier!”

According to Bushby, on his and Colliva’s arrival in November 2011, one of the first things they did was adjust the recording space: “The live room has a glass dividing wall, and during pre-production they had closed it and placed the drums behind it so the drums didn’t sound too loud in the room.

But for some reason the drums sounded really uncontrolled with that partition closed, I think because there’s so much glass. It sounded really big and trashy with no focus on the cymbals. So we opened the doors and turned it into one big room, which sounded much better. It gave the extra close microphones on the kit a lot more focus. In general we carried on from where they had left off during pre-production, trying out new setups with different amps, and putting up additional microphones for a more in-depth sound.”

DRUM REINFORCEMENT

Adrian Bushby: “Whilst the band had been demo-ing, Dom had treated many of the drum tracks with plug-in EQs, going for very bright and attacky sounds. I decided to go along with that vibe for the drums. But instead of trying to record the drums very flat and natural and then EQ everything afterwards to get the sound they were after, I tried to get the sounds they wanted as they went down. I recorded the drums with a whole range of microphones, generally the same as most people use. But I always tried to have something interesting and different and set up lots of different mics in different places and gave them different treatments. Sometimes I used them all, sometimes only a few. I had some AKG D90s floating around that worked really well, a Russian Lomo mic, which is one of mine, as well as an SM57 and an AKG C414 on the floor behind the kit. There was also a Sennheiser, I can’t remember the model number, but it looks like a bullet mic, and it sounded great when put through an amp, just pulling it back from distorting. The drums for the track Unsustainable in particular were recorded with many unusual microphones.

“For more regular sounds I generally had a couple of mics on the kick, one of them the Shure SM91, as well as a Neumann U47 slightly outside the kick and an NS10 speaker mic. The snare mics were an SM57 on top and an AKG C414 underneath, and I also had a contact mic on the floor. I recorded the toms with Sennheiser MD421s on top and Neumann U47 Fets underneath and I had AKG C451s for the overheads, which I hadn’t used for a long time, but they gave the cymbals in that big room at Air some more focus. There also were a couple of Sennheiser MKH40 mics for closer room sounds and Schoeps from the orchestral setup at Air for ambience, stuck as far and high back in the room as possible. Like on the previous record we had a piano in the room, and I used the piano mics for additional drum ambience. It’s something that I discovered by accident and it works really well.

Because of the resonance of the piano you get some unusual ambience that you don’t get from normal drum ambience mics.

“The PA system was in the room behind Dom and pumped out really loud triggered synthetic, dancey sounds while he was playing. I’d never done that before. The PA shifted a lot more air than just the acoustic kit, so we got this huge pumping sound in the room, which was very effective. The point of using the PA was to create a more dancey sound for the live kit, because they wanted to incorporate this dubstep thing. I miked up the kit as usual and obviously the room mics were going to pick up most of the PA. The close mics also picked something up, and altogether this added up to a bigger, very interesting sound. We occasionally put live bass and snare drum sounds through the PA, but mostly they were the synthesised sounds from Battery. We also recorded these Battery sounds dry, but generally speaking only used the sounds that had gone through the PA and that were picked up by the drum and room mics.

“Regarding the signal paths, generally speaking everything went through the Neve 31106 mic pres in the Air desk, with some Neve EQ and Pultec EQ on the bass drum and the snare drum groups.

I don’t like to compress the bass drum too much when recording, yet the snare drum had some compression from a Distressor, but again nothing drastic. Most of the compression was on the room mics. I love compression on room mics, and we initially went for quite a compressed drum sound, but when we switched the PA on it obviously squashed everything down, so we tried to keep the room mics more open this time round. There were just a few close drum mics that were treated with some extra compression, while the room mics generally remained quite open.”

MACHINED BASS

Colliva: “Both Matt and Chris are very fond of their live sound, but I always feel that their live setups include pieces that are not really needed in the studio, so the challenge was for them to have the same functionality in the studio, but with shorter signal chains and better sound quality. I had a Radial JD7 Injector splitter, and we would have three chains for the bass, one clean channel via his Markbass amplifiers [MoMark and SD1200],

and two distorted channels, one with distortion coming from some kind of Big Muff or Animato pedal sound and the other channel would have a more fuzz-like sound coming from fuzz pedals by ZVex, like the Mastotron or Woolly Mammoth.

There would also have been a fourth chain with a hot DI if we wanted an aggressive sound. Chris may also have used pedals, which we automated if they were MIDI controllable. We’d do a take with Chris playing via a wah-wah pedal and getting it roughly the way he wanted it to sound, and we then sent the DI signal through a pedal that we automated to make the wah-wah sharper and faster than a human could play it. We did similar things with Matt’s guitar.”

Bushby: “Chris’s sound is incredible. He knows how to get his sounds, and that makes it much easier when you are recording him. The Markbass setup covered the clean sounds, I think we had two different heads and cabs on which I had an AKG D19 and an EV RE20 plus an NS10 speaker mic, and they all came into the Neve desk with an 1176 on the clean bass group. The more distorted bass sound was played via two vintage ’80s Marshall DBS heads going into two different cabs, placed in the back of the room, and on them I had a Shure SM7 and another RE20, panned left and right, and a couple of Neve compressors just touching things. When you have that much distortion on the track, you don’t really need compression. I didn’t want to squash the life out of the sound. Depending on the track we would sometimes change pedals and trigger different effects from the computer. Generally speaking we didn’t use the DI.” STACKS OF GUITAR & KEYS

Bushby: “Matt used Diesel V4, Vox AC30, Marshall 1959HW and HiWatt 100 amplifiers and Mills 4x12 cabinets and a Roland JC120 and a couple of Fender combos as well, like a Fender Twin. I’d normally have two mics on the speakers, like a Shure SM57, a Sennheiser MD421, a Neumann U47 Fet, a Royer 121 (Matt really likes the sound of that), an AKG C414, or an AEA ribbon. The latter works really well because it can handle quite a lot of level.

Generally every amp would have a Shure SM57 and whatever went with it to taste. We also had a couple of Neumann U87 room mics, which usually picked up the 4x12s, because they were in the big room, while other amps were screened away or in other rooms. I tended to use the desk Neve mic pres, and then a Pultec or AER EQ across the group, adding a bit more treble and bass overall. I EQ-ed the individual mics as well as the overall summed sound.

“There were many keyboards on this album, and most of them were soft synths. They went Native Instruments crazy during the recordings. They generally remained in the box, so it was mainly a question of miking up the piano and the Fender Rhodes. We went for the same setup as with the previous record, with a couple of DPA mics for the nice classical sound on the piano, and also a couple of Telefunken ELAM 251s, and then I’ll generally add a couple of dynamic mics to do something unusual. These would be a Shure

Muse’s set up at East West. Photos: Brendan Dekora

BUSHBY IN THE BOX

Adrian Bushby is one of the leading engineers, mixers and producers in the UK at the moment. The GrammyAward winner started out training at Trident and Eden Studios in London and went freelance in “1993 or 94.”

As so many freelancers these days, Bushby has his own facility, which is based in North London. He explains,

“Having one’s own studio has become a necessity because of the way the industry is going. Plus I have young children, so it seemed a good idea to have a place that’s close to where I live. I came up in the days of big mixing desks and when digital was in its infancy, but at the moment I am leaning towards mixing entirely in the box, in Pro Tools. I have a Digidesign C24 control surface in my studio and am running a Pro Tools system with lots of plug-ins. This is my main mix system, but I also have a DAV 32-in 32-out passive summing mixer.

I don’t think the sound gets flat when you’re mixing in the box. I’ve done a few tests, and mixed the same things in and out of the box, and nine out of 10 times what I had done in the box sounded punchier and more focused. The practical advantages of staying in the box also outweigh other considerations. Most of all this is to do with instant recall, with everything coming up exactly the same way you left it when you open the session. I also recently discovered the Waves NLS (non-linear summing) plugin, which really makes a difference when you’re staying in the box. It creates a kind of harmonic colouration that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it sounds great. It definitely adds some width and extra scope.”

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SM58 in the sound hole on the sound board and this time round I also used AKG D19s. Obviously the sound of the dynamic mics would be different than the lush, open classical sound, and I’d EQ and compress the dynamic mic sound for it to be more interesting, and pan the mics wide. When you balance them with the posh sound you can add some nice extra character. The EQ was mostly done on the desk, and any compression would have been whatever was lying around. I can’t tell you exactly how I did everything, because I just experiment until it sounds right. There is no formula. The Fender Rhodes was recorded with a couple of Neumann U67 microphones.”

HEADING EAST WEST

Bushby: “I don’t know why we went to LA, but it probably had to do with the fact that David Campbell [Beck’s dad – Ed], who did the string arrangements with Matt, is based there. I’d never done any classical recording work in LA and it was an interesting experience. The Americans were incredibly efficient, quick and focused. They’d look at a score, play it through once, and you couldn’t fault what they had done. Sometimes you did a second take, just to make sure there were no errors, and that was it.

The first sessions in LA took place at Shangri-La, where Matt did guitar and Fender Rhodes overdubs, while the strings and brass were recorded in February at East West Studio One, which has an 80-channel Neve 8078 Console. We recorded the choir in a separate session at Capitol Studios.

“I used Neumann U67s above each section of the choir, and we also had this sort of Decca tree thing, with a three microphone setup, and a stereo pair as well. The brass was recorded with Neumann U87s as close mics and Telefunken ELAM 251s a bit further away for a more classical sound. I left the recording of the strings to the assistants at East West, because they do strings in that room day in and out and in my experience it’s generally best to go with their know-how. They used valve Neumann U47s on the cellos and basses and ELAM 251s on the violas and violins.

There was also a Decca tree and a couple of room ambience mics, but I can’t recall what they were.”

SOLO VOCALS

Bushby: “Chris recorded all his vocals at his house with the help of Paul Reeve, and Matt recorded his own vocals. You just set Matt up with some gear in another studio, and he gets on with it. It’s amazing what he does.

Generally I set up a Neumann U67, a U47 Fet, and a BeyerDynamic M88 and they went into a Neve-1176-Distressor chain and there also was an RCA ribbon mic, which went into a Mercury M72 Telefunken clone.

Matt owns it, and it has a nice, warm valve sound, just like the original Telefunken. We set up these four mics with four stands and four different input chains, and he tried them out and chose which he wanted to use.

He knows exactly what he wants. He’d say, ‘I’m going to do some vocals now,’ and you wouldn’t see him for the entire day, and then he’d come out with his vocals done, comped and everything.”

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Muse’s predilection for excess had a predictable effect on the size of the sessions. “Most of the sessions for this album were immense, off the scale,” remarked Bushby. “This meant that we regularly had to bounce things because we were running out of tracks and outputs. We did all the bouncing in the computer, so that the faders on the monitor side of the desk always remained at zero. We were always mixing what we had during the sessions, and this was a matter of whoever was closest to ProTools bouncing and balancing what was necessary. If I had just recorded four tracks of a guitar part recorded with four mics, I’d just grab them and balance them. Maybe they got tweaked later on, but the main thing for us was that we were always working to a mix, so we knew whether what we had was working, and whether what we were adding fitted. I wasn’t involved in the process of selecting the guys who mixed the album — CLA, Spike and Rich. They obviously each have a different slant on things and the band wanted to use that. It’s a taste thing, and I don’t get involved. The band knows what they’re doing, and nobody needs to babysit them to make sure they’re not doing something crazy.”

Amidst all that kitchen sink excess, seems a band that really does know how to keep track of the song.

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FEATURE

This year’s Big Day Out was a return to form, and the Chili Peppers rocked the house, at least everywhere but the Gold Coast it seems. Dave Rat spills the beans on what went ‘wrong’ and sheds some light on his systematic analogue approach.

Story: Mark Davie Artist Photos: Marty Philbey

It’s drawing to the end of a long Big Day Out. The sun’s set, stage lights are taking effect, video screen is back online, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are getting ready to take the stage, and their FOH engineer Dave Rat has just rocked up, laid back and smiling, unperturbed by the responsibility of mixing the festival’s headline act for close on 100,000 people. His angel assistant and partner Kim hands out beers and pours wine for friends while Dave chats to a few punters and hoists a couple of Ratsound seminar junkies over the barrier so they can watch him in action. He doesn’t even touch the console before the band make it on stage. Yet he’s relaxed, calm and ready.

BIG DAY OUT WEST Last year’s festival run were wild days for Ken West.

He’d gone from being in a long-term partnership with Vivian Lees to flying solo as the remaining founder of Big Day Out, with a headliner who could only commit to half the dates. The vitriol flowed in the press, and West became a headline grabber, dropping bombs on the future of festivals in Australia, his ex-partner, and anyone that got in the way. But this year, West kept his head a little lower to prove that Big Day Out can still take on Australia’s other festivals.

One of the main, non-audio related improvements this year was the addition of Chow Town, a Lollapaloozainspired dining destination. Rather than grabbing a quick German banger with sauerkraut, or a bucket of chips, you can buy lobster rolls and other top dishes from some of the best chefs in Melbourne. It was a great idea, not that expensive, and made grabbing food an experience not a chore.

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Rat loves sound. He’s been mixing the Chili Peppers for 20 years, has run his own production/rental company Ratsound for 30, invented speaker designs like the Microwedge, and also worked with other big name acts like Soundgarden and Blink 182. And he’s all about sharing his experience and knowledge with like-minded people, running seminars at every tour stop for local sound engineers. Even that morning he’d flown in off a 4am lobby call in Adelaide, went straight to the seminar, finished up around 4pm, then headed over to Big Day Out still looking as fresh and excited as ever. I ask him how he can be so relaxed, and he explained that it’s all in the setup.

ALL SEEING, ALL DANCING

Rat is the only engineer on the tour running an analogue board, a Midas Heritage 3000 —

everyone else is on a mix of Avid Venue Profiles, Yamaha PM5Ds, and Digico SD7s. He has the Midas set up sideways, running down the length of the FOH tent with a couple of 6-foot tall racks of outboard gear at the stage end, and a couple of measurement mics hooked up to a range of metering equipment. He positions a small rug in front of the console and his own stool adorned with a Chili Peppers logo floats nearby, but neither see more than sporadic action during the night.

If you’ve ever mixed a band in a big festival FOH tent, you’ll see the logic of not locking yourself behind the console. Typically, the desks are set up like a NASA command centre. The festival system tech sits at the very back, with the main processing gear and talkback stations connected to the stage. Next in line is the console for the opening acts, usually defacto standard Profiles, flanked by a lighting console. If the second tier headliner’s tour manager has thrown their weight around enough, there may be another console row in front with a slightly different flavour. And at the forefront is the headliner’s console. These tents are usually quite deep, and typically only the headline act’s engineer will actually be able to see the entire PA. And it’s not even guaranteed.

So throughout the course of the show, you’ll see most engineers squeeze out from behind their console, head to the front of the tent and take a moment to digest the balance of the entire PA to see if it’s in line with what they’re hearing at the mix position. Rat’s setup allows him free rein of his environment.

AGAINST ME!

“I see my purpose as not to make perfect sound, but to connect the artist with the audience,” he explains. “Better sound helps that, but ultimately it’s the connection. So I want to pay attention to that connection rather than hover over the board. It’s like driving a race car. I can have all the interior lights on at night, paying attention to the controls, or turn all the lights off and pay attention to the road. The road is the band and audience connection.”

MODERN ANALOGUE-Y

Everything Dave Rat does eschews the modern live sound mould, especially at festivals. It’s the luxury of having a band that recognises the importance of letting a sound engineer operate the way he wants to, and the budget to do it.

While he has mixed on digital consoles before, it’s the layers that really bother him.

“I’ve mixed on digital, not by choice,” he says.

“There are several reasons why people choose one or the other, usually it’s application based.

If you have to patch a lot of things really fast, analogue may be a better way to go. Whereas, if you’ve got to do a bunch of different bands and store shows in the memory, then digital might be a better way to go. I don’t have a lot of scenes, or demand for digital in the way that I mix.

“If I had a lot of inputs, more than 60, and I’m muting scenes, or was mixing a band that had multiple sets on totally different instrument sections: If I was moving around pretty quick on a smaller budget and had to make concessions,

then maybe. But as far as what I’m doing, the ability to see everything, and to hear something, reach over and change it instantly works for me.

I don’t even have to look. I can reach over, feel where the knob is and change it while I’ve got eye contact with the band. I don’t use any board lights, and I don’t label, I just remember where everything is.”

Rat sees the Midas as less of a technical instrument to navigate with manuals and labels, but an instrument to play on. Rat knows the Midas H3000 in the same way that a guitarist can shape chords on a fretboard without looking at their hands. During the show, he looks at me while picking out channel assignments like a pop quiz. “Snare,” he says as he reaches for a fader, then sliding his hand along a few rows calls out, “Guitar.” It’s the same with EQ knobs, VCAs, sub groups — his hands flow across the console with the efficiency of a blind man reading braille.

He effuses that people who dedicate their lives like he does, in the pursuit of sound, are really chasing a fringe sense. As a population, most of us trust what we can see above all else, so for Rat, it’s about getting all of that visual input out of the way so he can better concentrate on hearing, not seeing.

COMPRESSOR DIAL UP

Prior to Rat’s arrival, his long-time system tech, Jim Lockyer, preps the gear and runs through the line check. But night to night, the majority of Rat’s setup stays the same. He uses his headphones as a reference. So, his EQ’ing

Scott Edwards has mixed that alt-rock/heavy rock sound in downtown LA and on-tour for a long time now. When he’s not doing house jobs at the El Rey. Henry Fonda or Nokia Club, he’s been out on tour with Coheed & Cambria, Sparta and the recent At The Drive In reunion. The last couple of years he’s been on tour with Against Me!, and was pulling a rock solid sound early on in the day at the main stage. Recently, Against Me! lead singer announced that he (now she) was transgender, taking on the name Laura Jane Grace.

Being a hard rock band, I asked Scott if he’d noticed any vocal changes or if things were status quo. “It’s still the same vocals,” said Scott. “I don’t really want to speak for her, but I don’t think she wants her voice to change, because that’s the sound and it would be a whole different band if that happened.”

It’s a pretty simple mix with only 21 inputs, but Scott has spent a lot of time trying to find the right mics for the job. “There’s been a lot of trial and error with microphones,” he said. “I love the Heils, the PR30s are my guitar mics. And I also use the Palmer DIs with the speaker emulation between the amp and the cab. It gives me a good basic sound, and I see the mics as my lead — if I want to ride anything, I ride the mics up. The Heils are really flat, full and nice. I don’t need to add anything to them, they’re just present. There’s also 40dB of rejection out the back of them, so you don’t get a lot of drum noise or anything like that. I use another Heil for the bass cab, a PR40, combined with the direct signal.”

One usually important part of his sound that he didn’t get to bring across to Australia is a Yamaha sub kick. “I’ve been mounting it inside the kick drum with bungee cords and ring terminals and running a loom out,” he said. “You just bring it up and ‘boom’, there’s your kick. I run a plate mic too so I get that attack. It’s about 20 pounds to travel with, so it’s also an extra case I have to check. I can rig it into any kick drum, but when we fly I have to take the kick apart, and it’s about an hour process to put the whole thing in there. It does come with a stand, so I could put the whole thing in front, but a lot of drummers don’t like to see it, it looks a bit weird. Without it I just find I have to add a lot of EQ to other kick drum mics.”

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TOWERS OF POWER Audio-wise, the biggest difference for anyone that had been to Big Day Out any time in the last few years was the retirement of the three-array, single FOH tower strategy for the two main stages. Typically everyone mixing FOH on either of the main stages would be mixing from directly in front of the centre stack, forced to work more of an LCR configuration. This year, the addition of a huge video screen separated the two stages more than usual. It meant that each stage had its own left and right hang of 12 L-Acoustics V-DOSC and 3 d-VDOSC underhang a side supplied by JPJ Audio (though everywhere outside of Melbourne they used 14 L-Acoustics K1 a side).

So instead of the central tower of power, there were two FOH tents that operated central to their designated PA, giving the engineers more of a chance to mix with a true left/right configuration.

“I like this configuration better,” said John Kerns, longtime BDO main stage system engineer. “It’s a little bit more tricky timing-wise. Essentially they want all those things running at the same time, so you’ve effectively got a left/right, then another left/right another 18m away. We’re doing a block of subs in front of each PA as well, so our ability to steer things is minimised a little bit because you’ll just steer it into another system next door to it. Overall, the imaging is better, and you’ve got a direct line of sight to your band, instead of looking around the corner to try and see what they’re up to. It’s interesting, because you can pan things, but you’ve still got another left right next door to it. So no one misses out.”

There weren’t any delay stacks this year, which caused the Chili Peppers a bit of consternation, but Kerns said he designed the system to throw 120m. Of course, when you factor in windy nights, anything’s up for grabs in the top end.

The setup hasn’t changed much except for the addition of the second tent. Kerns: “I do my time thing and use Spectrafoo. Then I’ll listen to half a dozen songs, and Karl Sullivan (FOH tech) will walk around with me. Once I have the general curve in, I store that, and everyone goes from there. I have another DSP set up as an EQ in the other tent, so if anyone wants to grab something that isn’t in their console they’re more than welcome to. The Killers have their own separate rig based around a Digico SD7 over there, so they’re self-contained, and the Chili Peppers have their own self-contained rig as well.

“I stay on the Blue Stage, I’ve got a Midas XL88 and the main drive rack here. And Tim Millikan has another XL88 in the other tent. He routes between the myriad consoles he has over there and sends me left, right, sub. And I engage or disengage what I need to over here. We’ve got communication between the two of us and the stage, so it works pretty well.”

It’s a great crew at Big Day Out, most everyone’s been doing it for a long time. Kerns has been with the tour for over 10 years, and crew chief and monitors main man Tristan Johnson has been around the tour for at least eight or nine. Playing the part of Kerns’ alternate over in the other FOH tent was Tim Milikan, with Karl Sullivan floating inbetween.

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Dave Rat’s rack; including a dbx RTA and plenty of Dorrough metering, outboard graphics over his mix, with a bit of parametric EQ for taste. Individual channels go mostly through ELI Distressors, while his sub groups are all dynamically controlled by BSS compressors with thresholds set to 0dB for everything except the vocals, which are at +4dB

of the individual channels is how he wants the relationship between any given microphone and its source to sound, regardless of the system EQ. Then he tunes his main graphic EQs to align what he’s hearing out of FOH to the reference in his headphones. So by and large, from gig to gig the EQ on each channel will remain static, with the only major alterations occurring in his stereo BSS FCS-960 graphic EQs. He also typically doesn’t flatten the graphics before each show, preferring to use the previous night’s settings as a ballpark figure in the festival setting. The logic behind it seems to be that he trusts John Kerns, JPJ’s FOH system tech, to tune and time the system roughly the same for every festival, which should give Dave a pretty good starting point without potentially going flat and fighting major resonances straight off the bat.

It’s sometimes hard to follow Dave’s chains, because he doesn’t label them. But it does let you see the compressor gain reduction in action. He’s right, it is nice to be able to see how much every

channel and sub group is being compressed without flipping through pages or menus.

For the most part, Dave uses Empirical Labs Distressors and Fatsos as his channel compressors, and BSS DPR-404s on his sub groups. He sets the compressor threshold to 0dB on most sub groups except for the vocal sub group, which he sets at +4dB. It means that the vocal will always want to sit on top of his mix.

He also doesn’t link the left and right compressors as a stereo pair, because he doesn’t want the listening circuit to react equally on each side. Say the guitar on the left jumps 10dB and into heavy compression, he doesn’t want the right side to be equally compressed and maintain the ratio of the loud to the soft sound.

Rather, he wants the compressor on the left to rein in that spike in volume while leaving the right channel untouched.

He then also sets up two VCAs, one to control all his input channels, the other to control his

Dave Rat’s Midas Heritage 3000 and rack set up longways down the tent [above].

Against Me!’s Lorna Jane has still got it [top right]. Two thirds of Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner’s rig, including a tasty Space Echo [bottom right]

sub groups. It means that he’s able to vary the compression of the entire show by balancing the two. If he wants a more compressed sound, he just has to raise the VCA with all the input channels assigned, bringing them more into compression, while reducing the level of the sub group outputs, like an overall makeup gain control. If he wants more dynamics, he just reverses that process. During the encore he demonstrates the technique, and sends the entire mix into more compression without raising the overall volume. A neat trick.

propagated to the back we would have been in the pocket. It didn’t, it only went so far, so I’m going to have to mix hotter than what I want to mix upfront in order to get to the back of house.”

In Melbourne he mixed everything hotter, but still a couple of dB lower than The Killers. All in all, it was hugely entertaining, and loud, without ripping your head off.

GOT THE METER RUNNING

Pride of place at the top of Dave’s rack is his measurement gear. On one side he’s got a pair of large Dorrough meters so he can simultaneously look at his average and peak levels, while on the other he has an RTA connected to a measurement mic that he uses to help EQ the system. With the exception of one broken bar he aims to get the graph on a nice descending pattern from low to high. “I use a lot of metering, I really want to know what’s going on with the system,” said Dave. “Metering’s one of the things that got lost in digital consoles. They use cheap little meters. I love the big Dorrough meters.”

SEEING RED

Before the Chili Peppers even made it to Melbourne, Dave had copped a fair bit of flak from an underpowered mix at the Gold Coast Big Day Out. Here’s his explanation: “The Killers mix the system pretty hot,” he began.

“I’m trying to go for more hi-fi and clarity in my mix, whereas they’re going more for a brash, ballsy mix. When I did Sydney I mixed pretty hot straight after them. In the Gold Coast I went for a real pristine sound I was really happy with.

There aren’t any delay clusters running, and I couldn’t get back there, so I didn’t know it wasn’t hitting the volume. Well, either it wasn’t hitting the volume back there, or their ears were beat up from the Killers mix. I mix 6dB lower, so their expectations are that I was going to come in hot.

In Adelaide I just went back to hot again, and haven’t heard anything negative. I was very happy with the sound I was getting up on the Gold Coast. Had I had delay clusters and that sound

“

My purpose is not to make perfect sound, but to connect the artist with the audience

”

YEAH YEAH YEAHS Other than a couple of pickup shows over the years, Matt Littlejohn had only mixed Yeah Yeah Yeahs four times before the Big Day Out in Melbourne. He usually does FOH for TV On The Radio. And overall, the sonic picture is a very true one; and when the lineup retreats to the original three-piece (vocals, guitar, drums) for some of their earlier work, he doesn’t add any more low end than what’s there. I asked him why he rigorously sticks to that sonic fascimile: “Because that’s not what’s happening on the stage,” he replied. “My job is to reinforce the sound, not create an illusion of what’s not there. The other thing is, Brian (Chase, drummer) doesn’t play a kick with a hole in it. He has a very particular way of tuning all his drums and has a sound that he likes. So it’s my job to reproduce that sound. I like it aesthetically, so we see eye to eye. I never feel like it’s my job to come in and change the sound of anything.

“I also don’t use that many effects on Karen (O)’s vocal unless they ask for it — I like to have it out there. The bigger delays on the new songs are run from stage, David Pajo [Slint, Tortoise - Ed] is live dub mixing it, with a very King Tubby vibe to it. The energy is coming from them.

Guitarist Nick Zinner has three amps on stage, all miked up, but they’re also all valve Fender amplifiers, so I asked Matt if they were all used simultaneously, or if one was clean and another distorted? “His guitar tone is the combination of the three amps,” explained Matt. “Never once is one amp doing something drastically different from the other, it’s more about the tones, putting more mids in one for instance.”

Mostly it’s a similar balance, but if things change it allows Matt to pick and choose the tone to suit.

“For instance, as windy as it was today I was a little more drastic,” he said of the overcast Melbourne leg.

“I double bus all three guitar amps and use parallel compression. Today I was compressing them a little bit tighter so it was a little more focused. With the wind, all the high end clarity is washing all over the place.”

He also mixes a pure interpretation of the drums.

“I always think that too much drum reverb sounds cheesy,” he said. “That’s just me. I’m really into the natural force of the band man, that band rules! I just want to stay out of the way. The big things that I work on are those dramatic drops, the push forwards and pull backs.”

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FEATURE

Late in 2012, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra took on a cinema classic and in the process elevated a pub pastime into art.

AT catches up with those asked to bring the technical monster to life and the Frankenbernsteins who made the dream possible.

Story: Andrew Bencina Photos: Lucas Dawson

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It’s always risky trying to synchronise any live performance with pre-recorded material... just ask Beyoncé! Whether you’re belting out Eye of the Tiger at your local’s karaoke night or trying to drum along to a metronome, you need only stumble over one line or lose the click during an acrobatic fill and things can get ugly, quickly. Imagine then, trying to keep almost one hundred musicians in sync with pre-recorded vocalists and dancers, projected on a screen they can’t see for more than two hours. All the while directing a performance of one of the most beloved yet challenging scores in cinema history.

I’ve developed a nervous tick just writing about it.

It’s not clear whether he drew the short straw or simply stood still while his colleagues stepped back, but conductor Benjamin Northey was charged with navigating the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra through this musical minefield for their recent performances of the internationally touring West Side Story film with orchestra program.

OUR MAESTRO

I caught up with Ben, after he’d completed an alternating course of ice baths and trauma counselling, to find out how he kept an orchestra and his mind together through such perilous yet perfect performances.

Andrew Bencina: The MSO has recently embraced the opportunity to perform some complete cinema scores alongside screenings of films like The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and now West Side Story. Can you talk about conducting for the screen and how this process relates to the broader orchestral repertoire?

Benjamin Northey: I’ve done some film scores before but never live to screen. It’s always been something that’s been timed through, where synchronisation is not such a big deal. I’m not really a film conductor by any means, there are people who do that as a speciality, so I found it challenging to get my head around how unforgiving the combination of Bernstein’s score played alongside the film would be. You had to be so on! Otherwise, all of a sudden, you’re not with the singers or even more critically the dance sequences. Very different from the Lord of the Rings, which was essentially just scene background requiring the occasional synchronisation of some crescendos with cuts and things like that.

The closest thing — in the orchestra world — would be ballet. Conducting a ballet is similar because all the tempos are dictated to you by the choreographers and dancers and not the reverse.

Though you’d never use a click, you just have to follow the dancing.

We had to remember that we weren’t doing our own version, we were actually replicating the nuances and in some cases the mistakes made during the original recording. Some of the actors had originally sung their parts (Natalie Wood in particular) only for the producers to decide it wasn’t good enough [while dubbing was commonplace in Hollywood musicals, it

was unusual for the decision to be made after filming had been completed. Usually... — Ed]. In the case of West Side Story, they obviously kept the vision of them singing and got professional singers to overdub (Marni Nixon for Wood and Jim Bryant for Richard Beymer). In one sense this is fine, you get a better quality of sound, but at the same time you have to copy all the flaws of the lesser singer. Like the tempos... they might not have had the breath control so they sing faster and all of a sudden certain sections become less musical. It was very difficult; even listening to it over and over it was hard to predict what they were going to do. That’s where the streamers were incredibly handy.

STREAM OF WHAT NOW?

I’m often reminded, when flicking through the pages of this magazine, how diverse the audio technology industry is. So many devices and software tools exist as staples within a single field for decades without any significant impact on the broader recording world. While do-it-yourselfers rejoice in the comparative processing power and flexibility of a portable interface in concert with laptop or tablet, for many, trying to get a single job done well, specialisation remains key.

When I sat down in the revitalised Hamer Hall for a nostalgic Saturday night at the pictures, the only new thing I expected to encounter was the venue itself. But within seconds of Ben raising his baton I was transfixed by a system of visual cues and timing feedback superimposed on the monitor screen before him. This was the solution to a quandary I’d been wrestling with for years; how can we use visual cues to augment the coarse division and aural distraction of the metronome, when sequencing, sample triggering and the use of pre-recorded elements makes timing critical?

As it happens, if I’d bothered to take a few short metaphorical steps from the music studio to the orchestral sound stage I’d have found the answer waiting there for me — twiddling its thumbs for almost 80 years. The use of vertical lines (streamers) predictively moving across a screen to highlight forthcoming cue points is as old as the Hollywood Hills. For those of us who’ve grown up in a DAW dominated digital studio it may as well have been a product of Bhutan.

AB: It sounds like this was your first experience of using streamers as an aide to your conducting, what did you think of it?

BN: They were great. It just makes it easier... still hard, but easier. When you have to look at the screen, your score and the orchestra, it’s great to have that warning; to know what’s coming. It takes the guess work out of it. I think the more you use it, the better you get at making it natural.

Familiarity with the music then brings everything together. The better we knew the piece, the more the lines of the streamers made sense.

The challenge was to make natural music in an unnatural environment. That was the hard part and that was our job... to make it sound musical.

The whole process is an unmusical process, it’s all computers and dots and lines. At times I had

to conduct very metronomically; just lay it down clear. During other types of performances, often it’s nice to simply guide listening amongst the orchestra — you let them go and just help them know who to listen for. You couldn’t do that in this type of performance, they just had to play exactly with me the entire time. They couldn’t take the foot off the gas and they were wonderful.

I just had to say a few times, “Play right up on the stick, don’t play late.” And the more we did it, the more we got to know it, and the better it was.

HANGING BY A THREAD OF TIME

AB: So does that mean you’re ready to conduct an unfamiliar new work; one written especially for orchestra and film, with endless synchronisation of edits and filmed performers?

BN: It’s possible. You can do anything with that system and any piece of music would work. I wouldn’t recommend it for your own mental health but it would be possible.

AB: How about if we remove the click track safety net, could you have conducted using just the streamers?

BN: No. The nature of the orchestra is that it moves as a group. Imagine you’re in a massive ship and you need to turn a tight corner. You just can’t do it. An orchestra is like that. It’s fundamentally an inflexible beast, because of the number of people. That was what the click added to the performance, that sudden manoeuvrability.

All the tempos had to be bang on, for the dance numbers especially. With only the streamers it wouldn’t have been possible. There’s no way that many musicians could cope with the crazy tempo changes that were going on. You’d be playing something that has a straight ahead groove (un-da, un-da, un-da, un-da) and it would be more like (un-da, uun – daa, uuun – daaa, uun – daa, un-da). That said, the click wasn’t always present... it wouldn’t have been used for more than half the score. During the critical rhythmic numbers it laid down time in quarter note beats so that we really locked in with the choreography.

AB: So you’re saying every member of the orchestra was listening to the click track via an ear piece?

BN: Every one!

AB: I know any number of four- or five-piece bands who could never attempt that. In large part because of what it does to their performance, but also because of the train wreck that awaits when you slowly drift out of time.

BN: It’s terrifying when that happens. It certainly happened during the first few rehearsals because the click moved so much. That’s where the orchestra needed to rely on me. As a result of the implosions I knew where those danger moments were and even though a lot of them had been marked in the score, there were just as many that hadn’t. A conductor can be helpful because they show you what’s coming not just what’s arrived (much like the streamers!). Some of the orchestra chose not to use the click and just followed; which I didn’t approve of. I figured they were AT 49

EXTRA SENSORY PERCUSSION It’s about time we opened our eyes to hear beyond a click track that breaks up time into fragmented bits rather than the steady flow or groove to which we all aspire. Here’s a few options for those who’d like to see, feel and touch the beat... as well as hear it.

MOTU DIGITAL PERFORMER 8 ($599) While many of the major players in the DAW market have omitted specialised film scoring features, Digital Performer remains a common choice for composers and arrangers in some part because of its ability to overlay streamers and punches over synchronised video. It hasn’t been implemented with music recording in mind but I’d imagine a stock video file of a black screen would suffice.

You could even try video taping the band during their initial group tracking passes and insert the appropriate synchronised take as the backing video for your overdubs.

Taking the portable DVD player along to a conducting gig used to be bad form.

PETERSON BODYBEAT SYNC (US$129 street price) From the makers of everyone’s favourite strobe tuners comes a tactile metronome that allows you to feel and see the groove as well as hear it. Just as visual input helps us to respond to musical cues, a vibration can be felt using a different part of the brain and augment our sense of time. It can’t provide as constant a source of feedback as a streamer but through the use of accents and different beat divisions you can get much closer than a 4/4 click.

The BBS-1 has MIDI support for direct synchronisation with your DAW and it can also load custom tempo maps via USB connection. You can even synchronise an unlimited number of units together wirelessly with one as Master and all the others slaves to the rhythm.

PEARL THRONE THUMPER ($299 street price) For drummers, there has long been a problem providing low end monitoring with weight that can compete with the volume of stage sound without compromising both microphone capture and in-ear monitoring. The solution is to attach a silent low frequency transducer to the drummer’s stool that amplifies this monitor signal and allows the drummer to hear this low energy by feeling it.

Some more expensive systems come with everything built into the stool in concert with an amplifier/mixer (Porter & Davies BC2) while others require a retrofit (Throne Thumper & Buttkicker). With the right audio input these systems can also be used to transmit a metronome signal to assist you in feeling the groove even when you’re not sure you can hear it.

AT 50

making things harder than they need be, but they said, “No, no, you’re clear enough that we can follow you.” So, no pressure. That’s the thing about this show, if you made one mistake the whole musical number was...you know...trashed!

THE REAL SCORE

AB: When you place such rigid controls on an orchestra does it still work as a musical organism?

BN: It still works, but it does change, it’s no longer a spontaneous thing. That’s not to say it’s not filled with energy because some of the tempos were so fast that it was exhilarating to be in the middle of. It was a fascinating challenge.

In many ways an intellectual as much as a musical challenge; just to actually concentrate that hard for that long — a two and a half hour film — knowing the consequences if something went wrong. I wouldn’t like to do that all the time because I love the freedom of being able to express something unique. That is after all why we do what we do.

AB: In 2013, the MSO will perform another series of orchestra with film programs — including; Fantasia, The Two Towers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Frozen Planet, Wallace & Gromit, and Tan Dun (a martial arts trilogy). Have these live film projects just become another staple part of what major orchestras do?

BN: It’s really become a genre of its own; part of the evolution of this art form. People think of the orchestra as a conservative artistic institution and it’s absolutely not. It’s actually very

progressive and we’re doing some of the most adventurous artistic collaborations of any major arts organisation. The film with orchestra is one of those things and it’s exciting. Especially for something like West Side Story, where the focus is primarily on the music anyway. [Don’t say that around your local dance studio if you value your life – Ed] It’s such a masterpiece of the 20th century. Everybody listens in more focus when you’ve got an orchestra playing a score.

They’re presented with the complexity of the composition right in front of them and it forces new audience members, who haven’t been to an orchestra before, to realise that music doesn’t just come out of a box. That it doesn’t manifest from your TV screen, or your surround cinema speakers. It’s real people behind that sound. It’s an important thing to demystify the process of how film scores work; because that’s where most people first hear an orchestra!

Much of this overview has been made possible by the generosity of those directly involved. Chase Audio, ADX and The Leonard Bernstein Office have all been incredibly open with both their time and documentation. I thank Ben Northey, Bob Heiber, Rick Silva, Kristopher Karter, Ken Hahn and Mike Runice for their contributions along with Garth Sunderland for the fantastic account of his work. Special thanks to Eleonor Sandresky, for connecting many of the dots, Steve Linder from IMG and Alison Macqueen from the MSO for their assistance.

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CLICK GO THE STREAMS Thankfully, for every ignoramus there’s an expert, and I was lucky to have Kristopher Carter to catch me up on the minutiae of ‘streamers’. Kris is an Emmy award winning composer and conductor who’s spent the last 15 years in collaboration with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra; using his knowledge of creating visual streamers and click tracks to help bridge the technical gap between live performance and film technology.

Through this close association, Kris was called upon to work with Oscar nominated and stalwart Hollywood conductor/composer David Newman on the premiere performances of West Side Story at the Hollywood Bowl. A veritable dream team, when you consider Newman’s father Alfred, a record 9-time Oscar winning composer (from 45 nominations!), is widely acknowledged as one of the originators of the punch (a momentary or fluttering flash to reinforce the click or a particular cue) and streamer techniques back in the 1930s.

Kristopher Carter: The general procedure, using a vertical line moving from left-to-right across the screen, has not changed from the time it was conceived. The technical process of creating these lines has been where the evolution has taken place.

Originally, a diagonal piece of wood was placed along a strip of the actual film, with the end of the board positioned at the exact frame the conductor needed to cue. A razor blade was used to scratch off the emulsion. The resulting clear strip would be coloured in, and when the film was projected, the conductor would see a line moving across the screen and would know that by the time it reached the right edge he needed to give the appropriate downbeat to the orchestra. [Interestingly, the same type of mechanical process gave the click track its name, as holes were punched manually into the optical audio track on the side of the film at standardised frame and sub-frame divisions to create metronomic clicks as they passed through the projector – AB] One of the problems with this process was that if changes were made to the music, the conductor would have to remember, “OK, the second blue streamer is good to follow, but ignore the subsequent two green ones!” In the 1980s, a computer system was developed

by Richard and Ron Grant called the Auricle, which

Of course there are myriad mobile metronome apps available. Many employ some form of visual feedback, from emulations of a classic pendulum to modern re-imaginations of ‘follow the bouncing ball’. At this point I haven’t found any that will sync with your DAW but some can sync across multiple devices via bluetooth. Either way it’ll be good practice while you harrass your DAW manufacturers to start hearing with their eyes.

digitally generated the lines and overlaid them in real time on top of a video projection. The system is run on a DOS-based computer and connects to an external box that generates the video streamers and audio click tracks. Other than updates to the hardware, to interface with modern video systems, the system has actually not changed much at all from the time I learned how to use it at the beginning of my career when I was composing for Warner Bros. under the mentor-ship of the noted composer Shirley Walker.

I’ve found that the way composers use streamers is very personal. I adopted Shirley’s method of using the Auricle software, and each colour has a very specific meaning. It turned out that David Newman’s own personal method was very similar, so there was little adjustment required during our collaborations. Many of the colour choices are self-explanatory: Green is used to say “Go!” and Red indicates the end of a cue or section. Blue indicates that an audible click track currently playing is about to end, while Violet streamers indicate tempo changes; sections where the music speeds up or slows down, or is suddenly playing at a different speed than before. The streamers always move at a constant speed, unrelated to the tempo of the music. By having an inner sense of the duration of the passage of a streamer, the conductor is able to make adjustments to the tempo they are indicating to ensure the orchestra’s performance coincides with the picture at the proper time.

The conductor has an enormous responsibility to coordinate a group of 100 or so individuals to play their individual parts in a timing that is measured in mere portions of a second. At a recording date, if a conductor misses a cue one can simply do another take. In a live performance situation, it has to happen correctly the first time! My goal was simply to make David’s job as easy and free from guesswork as possible. He would review the film with the streamers and click tracks in place. If a section of the score with a new tempo was difficult to reproduce accurately on repeated attempts, we’d discuss different ways to make the timing information more clear. Perhaps by adding preparatory clicks in the new tempo (called “warning clicks”) or adding a second streamer to Beat 2 of a bar to visually indicate the new tempo.

When it came to touring internationally, Mike Runice employed a customised Mac Pro running Q-Lab live show control software (Figure 53 Q-Lab Pro Video US$249).

“This allowed me to playback both the audience video containing the (mono) audio track and click track, and the streamers video as separate and synchronised files.”

VISUAL METRONOME (Epoch Day)

METRONOME BOUNCE (KatokichiSoft)

ADAGIO (RisingJ Interactive)

METRONOME+ (Dynamic App Design)

VISUAL METRONOME (MA Apps)

Provides Tap tempo, bluetooth sync between multiple devices and two different visual feedback styles; a stylisation of the movement of a conductors wand and the closest thing I’ve found to a streamer.

A really nice metronome using an animated bouncing ball. The audio click sequence can be varied to play at different speeds against the bounce. I enjoyed getting in the flow as the ball drifts between the beats

A nice metronome with a healthy range of features.

Uses a simple pendulum motion, with a striking resemblance to K.I.T.T.’s (Knight Rider) LED radiator grille.

iOS $0.99

iOS $1.99

A cross between Visual Metronome and Metronome Bounce, Adagio uses a bouncing ball following the classic path of a conductor counting out 4/4 time (only in the reverse direction). A very simple app, tap tempo is the only extra feature.

This app produces a cross between a streamer and a pendulum. An arm rotates around a 180 degree axis but instead of changing direction it jumps back to the start. Beats are reinforced by flashing segments and the length of each cycle can also be adjusted.

iOS $0.99/Android Free AT 52

Many of the colour choices are self-explanatory: Green says “Go!”. Red, the end of a section and Blue, the end of a click track. White marks the downbeat of a bar while Violet streamers indicate tempo changes. Additional violet streamers have been used to indicate Beat 2 of the new tempo. This allows the conductor to communicate the new tempo with greater precision. A Yellow streamer indicates the start of an audible click track, often in advance of the bar downbeat as a warning. In this case, the ‘warning clicks’ define the tempo eliminating the need for secondary violet streamers. Punches are used to reinforce cue points, as important streamers reach the right edge of the screen. The flash is visible even in the conductor’s peripheral vision eliminating the need to constantly stare at the monitor.

iOS $1.99

Android Free

AT 53

SETTLING THE SCORE

It’s easy to get caught up in the moment of any performance. Your version of what took place will always be framed by the interests and motivations you brought to the experience.

For me, in the case of this production of West Side Story, I was drawn to the ability of the orchestra to stay in sync with the projection and spent much of the first half of the concert watching Ben conduct with the aid of the streamers. The difference between the space and tone of the MSO within Hamer Hall, by comparison to the original Hollywood sound stage was for me great enough to create a disconnect between score and image; making it harder to suspend disbelief. Following the interval, this barrier melted away and for much of the time I forgot the orchestra was even present.

Throughout the program it never occurred to me that I was also hearing something special through the house PA. I wondered, in the lead up, if we would be hearing a remastered surround mix of the film but aside from that I barely gave it a second thought. My experiences in the modern digital studio, allowed me to make assumptions, incorrect as they turned out, about how easy it must be to reassemble a version of the soundtrack minus the original score. Of course, you just dig out one of the saved copies of all of the different stems, that you’ve safely archived and hey presto. “If only!” I can hear them plead. I suspect it would take an entire issue of the magazine to do justice to the work of those involved but I’m very grateful to them for sharing at least some of their secrets.

EXCAVATION

When legendary sound mixer Murray Spivack convinced director Robert Wise to employ the new 6-track sound for the 1961 release of West Side Story, he played a major role in establishing a new audio standard for the 70mm format.

Unlike our current surround formats, 6-track was a multi-channel stereo array with a single mono surround channel. The five channels across the front of the stage were assigned Left, Left-Centre, Centre, Right-Centre, Right.

While Spivack’s work was rewarded with an Oscar for best achievement in sound, it has not been heard by audiences for more than 30 years.

A 20th anniversary remaster in 1981, created a new ‘6-track’ mix, using only a 4-track copy as its source (Left, Centre, Right, Surround).

When MGM, the current copyright holder of the United Artists picture, began considering a 50th anniversary re-release of the film on Blu-ray the soundtrack was again in the picture.

After listening to several reels of an original 70mm mag striped print held in the Academy Archive, Chris Lane, the Acquisition Manager for MGM Technical Services, was convinced that the superiority of the stereo separation for the orchestra, dialogue and effects warranted the restoration of an original 6-track mix. Only one problem... they couldn’t find one.

After an exhaustive 12 month search, through the MGM records, interviews with Spivak, and some old fashioned digging through the shelves, AT 54

they had unearthed more than 100 individual reels for Chace Audio by Deluxe to appraise and digitise. Chace itself had been involved in postproduction servicing for West Side Story for over 20 years so its own records also proved critical.

As Chace Audio’s Bob Heiber told AT, “For the restoration we had an incomplete set of 14 reels from the 6-track English master from 1961 (mistakenly labelled, February 21, 1978); we used portions from the 6-track ‘Minus vocals M&E’ (Music & Effects), which comprised a complete set of 21 reels, as well as the most original 4-track LCRS composite mix (21 reels). We later found a second set of 6-track mags, original to the 1960s, to make up the complete set. All told about 42 reels of mag were digitised in the 6-track or 4-track format.”

RESTORATION

Bob Heiber: “Our mag transfers were done using the OMA-SE Chace from Sondor (an archival grade master recorder with a modular headstack system to facilitate the reproduction of a full range of magnetic and optical formats) into Pro Tools at 24-bit/96k using the custom Plangent Clarity Electronics to capture the bias information necessary for the Clarity Nonuniform sampling algorithm to do its magic.”

Take a breath... and a bow! The acetate cellulose mags were suffering from Vinegar Syndrome which causes them to shrink and the edges to curl. Through a collaboration between Chace and Sondor the OMA-SE was modified, including a custom headstack, to minimise the affect of these physical deformations and limit the symptomatic wow and flutter that usually results.

Working with researchers at Cambridge University, Plangent Processes developed their Clarity Audio Restoration. This research revealed that much of the distortion typically attributed to tape machine electronics, is perhaps more accurately identified as the result of the mechanical instability that endures almost unavoidably at the heart of the machines’ designs. Wow, flutter, scrape flutter, bass cancellation, muddiness, grainy midrange sidetones, interstitial haze and transient blurring all contribute to a reproduced signal differing significantly from the original source. Clarity recovers signals in the ultrasonic region that can be found on tape (bias tones... etc) using a proprietary Unix-based engine, running at 768k with 32-bit double precision processing.

These tones are then tracked and ascribed the properties of a moving clock, similar to a variable sample rate. By stabilising these signals to a constant rate and processing all of the audio in the same way, Clarity essentially retimes the recording and in doing so recreates perfectly pitched audio (depending on the original performances of course!) with greater perceived depth and fidelity.

After transfers were completed, the Audio Cube AC-5 was used to correct all of the more typical restoration issues like hiss, pops, dropouts, edit bumps and distortion. Mastering was done in the THX-certified Rick Chace Theatre by

Chris Reynolds (Chace’s Mixer and Technical Operations manager) with Lane from MGM. A ‘five across the front’ array was set up under the screen, using Dynaudio BM15A active monitors, to ensure that all channels could be isolated and scrutinised. While not used within the orchestral project a 7.1 surround mix was also made by James Young using DTS Neural Technology in ProTools.

DISSOCIATION

It’s one thing to have a beautifully restored film, but another thing entirely to turn it into a backing track for some of the great orchestras of the world to accompany. At this point in the process Chace handed off the broadcast waves of their six-track remasters to Audionamix. Head of Production, Rick Silva, was happy to spend some time explaining how Audionamix’s ADX reverse engineering technology all but erased one of the most famous orchestral scores ever recorded; just don’t expect him to give away any trade secrets.

“ ”

We did a gazillion edits to comp the best vocal stem

Rick Silva: “ADX started as a research lab based in Paris, working on technology that could separate both musical instruments and melodic voices from typical mono or stereo music recordings for respatialisation within new multi-channel mixes. After our expansion to Los Angeles in 2010, ADX’s Music Dissociation service emerged following repeated requests from major studios to remove only the music track from a final composite mix, leaving the dialogue and effects tracks completely intact.

This complex problem required the development of sophisticated algorithms by our Paris-based R&D department. It also demanded the skills of an experienced production team with a deep understanding of traditional audio engineering principles. Put rather simply, we gather specific sonic information about what we call the ‘known source’ (music that is to be removed from the mix) and our proprietary algorithms ‘learn’ it, so it can then effectively be removed from the mix.

“For West Side Story, we were given a stereo mix to use as the master for ADX’s Music Dissociation. The learning sources provided were a six-channel M&E with no vocals, the restored six-track mix with various degrees of lead vocal bleed in the individual channels, and a Left/Right from the six-channel M&E. Our instructions for this project were pretty straightforward — remove the orchestral score without removing or damaging any of the dialogue, effects, or melodic vocals that accompanied the score. When sources share similar tonal qualities in addition to

overlapping harmonic and melodic content, the separation process becomes extremely difficult.

The most challenging part of West Side Story was separating multiple vocal lines from the orchestral score that were performed in unison.

To overcome this challenge, ADX provided at least two levels of separation. In areas where there was too much similarity in tonal and harmonic content to provide pristine separation, we supplied additional alternate versions that contained a small amount of the orchestral score content. This ensured that the vocal content sounded full and undamaged when played back with the live orchestra.”

RECONSTRUCTION

Once the orchestra had been dissociated from the master mix, the team at Chace Audio began working with the production team at the Hollywood Bowl to produce a final Vocal & Effects track for the premiere performances.

As Bob Heiber recalled, “We did a gazillion edits to comp the best vocal stem from the supplied extractions, often opting for bleed over lack of intelligibility due to digital artefacts.”

Through each performance, tweaks were made and the input of the house engineers was also incorporated. By the time the work premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in New York it was decided that more significant reworks were still required.

The much-massaged ProTools project now found itself in Sync Sound’s Digital Cinema, New York’s largest mix stage, where engineer Ken Hahn was joined by Eleonor Sandresky (Associate Producer) and Garth Sunderland (Senior Music Editor) from The Leonard Bernstein Office. Both had been deeply involved in the ‘film with live orchestra’ project from its inception.

Ken Hahn: “The track needed to be rebalanced — smoothed out. This was accomplished by good old fashioned manual gain manipulation; accomplished with a combination of automated processing in ProTools; using Waves SSL G-series EQ and limiter, for high and low pass filtering, equalisation and comp/limiting. I used a Waves W-43, for general purpose hiss and noise reduction, McDSP notch filters for hum and extraneous tones and various Izotope plug-ins for selective note and noise elimination. Since the track we were creating had to be mixed live with an orchestra in a concert hall, I felt that the original film mix was too dynamic, and would require the live mixer to ride the track more than what would be expected. Some parts were too low, some were hot, some too dull, some too bright. The combination of EQ/filter and automated dynamic control, supplemented by lots of manual gain riding, produced the results we were looking for.”

In addition to remixing, the presentation of the material also changed, with the amplification of the dialogue and effects separated from any in-house reinforcement of the orchestra. Mike Runice was also added to the touring production to ensure that there was always an engineer/ technician present with an intimate knowledge of the program.

AT 55

FEATURE

Bucking tradition, Les MisÊrables director Tom Hooper decided he wanted to capture all the vocal performances live for his movie rendition of the famous musical. Here’s how they achieved the impossible dream.

Interview: Alistair McGhee AT 56

Capturing a great performance is critical to a great recording. It’s the basics of recording craft. But in front of the camera, on a film set — surrounded by any number of crew and excess noise — is not the ideal environment for capturing any audio recording.

Whether musicals are your ‘thing’ or not, you have to admire the due diligence undertaken by the production crew of Les Misérables to capture the majority of vocal performances on-set.

For those not au fait with the regular practise of film sound you might be wondering what the big deal is. Well, the reason why great movies are immersive is because production crews go to great lengths to draw you into their make believe world. It starts with the story, dialogue, performance, with everything surrounding it carefully chosen to augment the narrative.

Including, if not especially, sound. But if you can imagine the filming context, you can spot the issue — or a hundred of them — in each scene. Behind that romantic moonlit monologue sequence might be artificial rain-induced white noise masking every whispered soliloquy, the loud hum of a generator providing power for the artificial moonlight, wind machines, 50 crew members shuffling their feet, and a director calling out intermittent instructions during the scene. With the seemingly insurmountable extraneous noises to overcome, most directors lose patience with capturing audio on location early in their career and opt for Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) instead.

Now while this provides a suitable way of overcoming technical difficulties for dialogue, it’s a little complicated with musicals. In essence, the meter and cue points are dictated by prerecorded music, and actors just lip-sync along, knowing they’ll have the exact same timing when they try to replace it with ADR. Turning what should be an emotive performance into a very long-form and extravagant video clip.

In bringing the musical to the big screen however, Les Misérables director, Tom Hooper, had the wild idea to record the music ‘after’, opting for a piano player to accompany the singers via ear bugs onset, and trained to follow the singer’s meter, allowing them to perform the songs with as much expression as possible.

While it didn’t help dear old Rusty Crowe, who’s TOFOG days haven’t primed his pump for musical theatre, it did leave room for some downright emotive performances from everyone else. The rest was up to the sound production crew to figure out how to capture it.

ALIVE ON FILM

Simon Hayes (Production Mixer): “The genesis of the project lies with Tom Hooper, the Director, and his desire to shoot Les Misérables live; he wanted to capture the original performances from his cast on the set without relying on the normal approach of pre-recording all the songs, and he didn’t want to do any ADR afterwards. For him, a live shoot offered a truth and energy that just wasn’t possible using traditional pre-records

and miming or re-recording performances in ADR. In our first meeting he said to me: ‘Simon, I know that technology has moved forward a long way in the last few years; I don’t know the details but I WANT YOU TO USE THAT TECHNOLOGY TO DELIVER A MUSICAL WHERE THE PERFORMANCES ARE SUNG LIVE BY THE CAST.’ That statement became

instrumental to the way the sound and music department planned our workflow.”

Gerard McCann (Supervising Music Editor): “The traditional approach is that the orchestration and the vocals are done first in the music studio. The music team works in isolation from the sound team weeks or months before filming — in some cases actors in the studio are singing alone, their performance to be edited in alongside other actors in the same scene.

“This is a process very, very different to a live stage show or the live direction of actors on set. So you really are talking about a radically different approach.

“IN THAT TRADITIONAL FORMAT, ALL OF THE SUNG MATERIAL HAS BEEN RECORDED BY THE TIME YOU COME TO SHOOTING. AT THAT POINT THE CAST COMES ON SET AND THEY LIP SYNC TO THEIR PRE-RECORDED PERFORMANCES, MUCH LIKE SHOOTING A POP VIDEO.

The music editor’s role on set in that scenario would be to play back the songs, and monitor the accuracy of the actors’ lip-sync.”

Hayes: “And that would have been the case for the whole of Les Mis had it been mimed, because there are only a handful of lines of straight dialogue in the entire film. Everything else is sung.”

McCann: “So as a director, that traditional workflow commits you to performances recorded ‘cold’ in the studio, perhaps months in advance, and that wasn’t what Tom Hooper wanted. He wanted to direct the film on set in the same way he would direct a dialogue-based drama, getting the best possible performances from the actors in the context of the scene and the emotional intensity of a live performance, interacting with their co-actors, rather than merely lip syncing to playback. However, the magnitude of difference of doing it live meant that early on in the project we did hear people outside of the production team say, “this is impossible” — THEY QUESTIONED HOW WE WOULD BE ABLE TO CAPTURE FREE-TIMED, LIVE VOCAL PERFORMANCES OF A SUFFICIENTLY HIGH STANDARD ON LOCATION, TAKE AFTER TAKE, BUT ALSO BE ABLE TO CONSTRUCT A MUSICALLY COHERENT EDIT IN POST AND ADD A LIVE ORCHESTRAL ACCOMPANIMENT TO IT LATER.”

Hayes: “To achieve a live musical recorded purely on boom microphones would have required single camera shooting. Of course, when Tom was planning the cinematography on the movie he had to be sure that if a ‘perfect take’ was performed we would have it in the can on various angles and sizes. He decided the only way to capture the perfect take live on location would be to shoot multiple cameras — we just couldn’t afford to miss it. That meant there would be lots of shots when we just couldn’t get the boom mics AT 57

close enough to capture the live vocals. And in turn that meant we would have to rely more heavily than usual on wireless systems using lavalier microphones.”

ON-SET DYNAMICS

Hayes: “There are three major obstacles to using such systems: radio performance in terms of range and quality, the absolute quality of the mics themselves, and the problems of fixing the mics physically in places that will deliver good sound, free from clothing rustle without visually impairing the shot.

“I had to tackle each of these problems in order to design a workflow that would reliably deliver audio of a quality that the music department in post could work with, and Tom was totally committed to and supportive of that process.

First we settled on Lectrosonics digital hybrid radio mics, and taking advantage of the temporary window of availability of channel 69 and 38 we were able, with careful frequency planning, to field 26 channels of radio without intermodulation issues and free from range and signal strength issues that used to plague the use of wireless on the set.

“One of my main aims was to deliver as natural a dynamic range as possible. We agreed that there would be no compressor/limiters used in the production sound recording chain, allowing the music department in post to use the full 24-bit dynamic range available to them, which again really helps with keeping performances sounding natural. The Lectrosonics were used at a low enough gain level that their limiters never cut in. That is very impressive because usually with film industry radio mics you need quite a lot of signal to noise to avoid hearing radio artefacts, and the way most companies achieve this is by using limiters on their radio mics, which allow them to keep the levels higher without hearing any distortion. Well, we tested the Lectros at lower gain levels and found they were capable of transmitting transparent, accurate vocals without ever touching their limiters.

“So there were no limiters in the mics, radio transmitters, mixers, or recorders on the set of Les Misérables. EVERY VOCAL WAS CAPTURED IN FULL DYNAMIC RANGE AND WITHOUT ANY EQ EITHER, which was another agreement between myself and the music department during planning. Full bandwidth vocals with no ‘on set’ EQ. Again, this is following Tom Hooper’s ethos that he wanted performances to sound natural and real.

“Secondly, we did a lot of sessions at Abbey Road comparing the sound from our location mics against the sort of quality studio mics that would be used in a traditional recording session for a musical. The boom microphones that we chose, that were employed by two of our boom operators at all times, were the digital Schoeps SuperCMITs. These microphones are very new and use DSP noise cancelling technology to reject off-axis background noise.

“Using the SuperCMIT requires boom ops of the very highest calibre because as soon as you lose AT 58

Trying to keep out of eyesight, even the lav mics had a wardrobe department.

a bit of accuracy the DSP will be rejecting your dialogue as ‘off axis’ sound, and so I really rely on the quality of my boom ops to deliver. My boom operators have been working with me since my first movie and I consider them the very best at what they do. We are a team and always work together.

every lavalier on the market to try and achieve studio quality vocals on the stage version of Mamma Mia!, they had finally arrived at DPA. This they considered to be the only microphone that could provide them with comparable quality to that achievable in a music studio.

“When the Schoeps were used on Les Misérables it became clear that if they were in an optimum position they could compete on a level playing field with the music studio mics at capturing high quality vocals.

“When judging different lavaliers up until that point, I had always considered the differences in sound to be a matter of taste rather than a clear cut situation of one brand being superior.

That was until I listened to a DPA up against the competition. In my opinion the DPA is simply better, more open sounding, less chesty, and it matches a boom mic more closely than any other lavalier I have heard. I did a demo of the DPAs at Abbey Road specifically for Les Misérables, and the engineers there, despite initial scepticism, were suitably impressed.

They felt they were getting approximately 60 percent of the quality offered by a Neumann U87, when I think they were expecting maybe 20 to 30 percent. CONSIDERING A U87 IS PLACED IN

“My third boom operator used a Neumann RSM 191 stereo mic at all times, set to record MS stereo, and his primary objective was to add width and balance to the choruses while the other two boom operators focused on the solos.

“We also used some ‘planted’ Schoeps MK41 hyper cardioid capsules, sometimes in the ceilings of carriages and other places that we needed something of high quality but with a low profile to hide.”

LAVALIER ATTITUDE

Hayes: “However, it was the notion of using lavaliers for large amounts of the singing that was controversial. I was confident the DPA 4071 personal mic was the right solution, having come across the DPAs while working on Mamma Mia!.

There was a song in the film that Meryl Streep wanted to record singing live, and in discussion with Benny Andersson and his longtime engineer Bernard Lohr they told me that having tried

THE OPTIMUM POSITION ON A STAND IN FRONT OF THE TALENT’S MOUTH AND THE DPAS WERE PLACED ON THE PERFORMER’S CHEST, I THINK THIS RESULT IS SUITABLY IMPRESSIVE. As

a bonus, these mics can handle very high SPL levels from vocals without the onset of harshness or hardness as they approach their maximum SPL, and at the other end of the scale they are also sensitive enough to faithfully reproduce the smallest ‘breathed’ vocal, such is their dynamic range.”

“Early on in discussions with Eve, she asked me if there were any ways her set design could help with Tom’s vision of a live musical. I commented that if we were recording live sound, we wanted reality; if they are in shot, the cobbles should be real cobbles, the oak door frames should be real oak door frames. But of course, that only holds for what the camera actually sees in shot; outside that we need to try and make the set and the crew disappear in sonic terms. A good example of this was our decision to put rubber shoes on all the horses’ hooves.

“In the scene where Éponine (Samantha Barks) is singing in the rain, first we worked with the special effects department to get the best possible rain that will show up on camera but not drown the mics or make too much noise when striking the set. Samantha was wearing two radios that were changed for every take — we didn’t want any failures due to moisture, or any degradation in the sound from drowning capsules.

For once, audio production on set that wasn’t miserably constrained, how ironic.

SPOT THAT MIC

Hayes: “And finally mic positioning... We had to have prime positioning for the mics, and that meant outside the costumes and on the solar plexus. With fantastic cooperation and collaboration from costume designer Paco Delgado and his amazing costume department, we were able to do this, getting our mics in prime positions and disguising their tiny plastic mounts with off-cuts of each costume material so the mics were in open air and never under fabric, but were disguised. In terms of visibility the mics wouldn’t be in shot on close ups, and with a bit of sleight of hand would be all but invisible in the wides — which just left the mid shots. There we relied on the ability to ‘paint’ them out in post production. So whereas at the end of a normal filming project the post production team sit down and have an ADR spotting session, for Les Mis they had a mic spotting session where it was identified which mics were visible and had to be painted out in post.”

McCann: “We were at the risk of committing the ‘ultimate folly’ on Les Mis. We were committed to the post production costs of painting out the mics, but if we got it wrong on set and had to shoot ADR as well, we would have incurred significant extra costs as well as potentially damaging the performances. That might have called into question the whole idea of doing the musical live.

And that was just one of the reasons why the ‘i’ word was bandied around a bit at the beginning of the project. Was what we were attempting ‘impossible’? On top of the issues of intrinsic noisiness of filming a production like this on the scale that we were attempting.

“What was really great was the sense of being one team, where everyone on the set recognised that what we were attempting required the buy-in of everyone in a much more cohesive way than is perhaps normal in film making.”

COVERED IN HORSE HAIR

Hayes: “Scale was one of the key questions. We didn’t actually have a sound stage big enough to stage the Paris street scenes. Tom asked me whether I would prefer to shoot the exterior Paris street scenes on location or on a sound stage, but with the long length of the scenes and Tom wanting to shoot them from start to finish without cutting, shooting exteriors was just not possible in Britain, with its aircraft noise. When we started the project the only interior stage big enough would have been the 007 stage at Pinewood, and the acoustics there are really problematic as it’s not a sound stage. The same would be true for any big warehouse space. But a new facility was being built at Pinewood — the Richard Attenborough Stage — which was absolutely vital to staging the big set pieces for Les Mis. The stage is about 30,000 square feet, and Eve Stewert, the designer, had used every inch of it.

“After every take the wet ones were placed on a carousel with a hair dryer to make sure we had plenty of dry spares. And then every piece of set that you can’t see, every roof top and every piece of floor out of shot, was covered with rubberised horse hair to deaden the rain hitting it, we had a truck load of horse hair delivered to Pinewood.

Then the camera had a horse hair roof to deaden the sound of water droplets striking the polythene cover.

“The camera department were wearing black ‘bolton’ fabric ponchos over their wet weather gear to ‘soak up’ the sound of the water hitting them. The boom, which was actually the track used in the finished movie, would have a second boom operator shadowing it with a little roof on the end of his boom pole to shield the first boom operator’s mic from water droplets. The level of detail we were aiming at became possible due to a fantastic seven-man sound team.

“As soon as we didn’t see feet in shot, the sound team were carpeting the set and lifting that carpet as soon as a shot was finished, so that we were never holding up the shooting. We were deploying every trick in the book to keep the set as quiet as possible. WE HAD OTHER GROUND BREAKING TECHNIQUES TO ALLOW US TO RECORD LIVE SINGING ON SET, ONE OF THEM WAS ‘SILENT WIND’

which was the placement of the wind machines that move the performers’ hair and costumes to make it appear they’re outside. Wind on movie sets usually leads to ADR, but with careful planning with the special FX team we placed the wind machines outside the sound stage and piped in the wind through flexible air conditioning hoses so the mics would not pick up the electric motor noise of the fans at all, just the sound of air moving — which actually sounded like real wind, just air moving at a frequency higher than the human voice that could be removed in post without affecting the live recordings.”

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Simon Hayes with his on-set production rig, or shall we say, mobile studio.

MAN WITH A VAN

McCann: “The music department had a mobile setup in the back of a Luton van, which was our roving home on location. Here we had our live piano performing and three ProTools systems, operated by music editors Rob Houston, John Warhurst and myself. Roger Davison and Jennifer Whyte had the very unusual task of being ‘on set’ pianists, providing live accompaniment for the singing, which they followed on video monitors with a live feed of the vocals. Simon was able to route that live piano feed into earpieces worn by the actors who were then able to sing to live accompaniment.

Our ProTools systems had three roles: one was dedicated to playback for tracks that required a fixed tempo, like chorus material.

“For the larger crowd songs, we would record a rehearsal of the ensemble cast on set on the day, and use that as a playback for shooting, so that the crowd could follow along singing in the correct tempo, and the live singing was recorded

by Simon. This was to allow Tom maximum freedom to use as much of this sometimes rough, raw, but very real sounding live chorus as he chose, together with additional layers he might record later in post.

“A second machine was dedicated to recording the live vocal and piano mixes from Simon, and the third was used to turn around this recorded material almost instantly for playback. We might have been re-doing a section of a take and would want to play in the piano part that had been played live from a previous take, so keeping our established AT 60

tempo — or even working with a combination of live piano and piano from a previous take being played back from ProTools, where the pianist and playback were involved in a complex dance of ProTools and live accompaniment.

“It was hard work for crew and kit: our laptops often overheating at the end of a 15-hour filming day in the back of the van.”

Hayes: “It was vital to have the live accompaniment from the music department but with the amount of radio frequencies already deployed on the set, I knew I wouldn’t be able to use radio systems for the actor’s earpieces, that just wasn’t going to be possible.

“However, I had used battery-powered induction [or hearing] loops in Greece for Mamma Mia! so myself and my crew have extensive experience in the ‘black art’ of induction! We sourced the highest quality loop amps we could, and with a suitable range of power outputs to cover the set sizes we tried to deliver the best audio quality possible across a whole range of set ups and stages. WE USED UP TO 75 HIDDEN EARPIECES AT ONCE ON THE BIG CHORUS NUMBERS. THIS IS IN ADDITION TO A WIRELESS FEED OF THE MIXED PIANO AND VOCALS, A CLEAN PIANO FEED, AND THE USUAL CAMERA FEEDS AND BOOM TALKBACK FEEDS. All this

resulted in a significant amount of induction and wireless infrastructure that had to be rigged and ready to go at each location.”

STEP UP: THE MUSICAL

McCann: “The sound and music departments really had to work as a team and were often working from two hours before the general call

time to ensure that there was never a question of waiting around for sound. The whole team was signed up to Tom Hooper’s vision, and that made the whole project doable.”

Hayes: “The whole project was a true collaboration from the outset; the sound and music department had full support from Tom Hooper and producers Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan, and Debra Hayward. The finished product, which is 99% live sound recorded on the set, definitely delivers what we set out to achieve — which was to bring the audience as close to the pure emotions of the cast in the moment as possible. The live singing is a testament to what can be achieved when everyone on the set works together. It just would not have been possible without the help of each head of department from production designer to DOP, to costume designer to Special FX: every crew member adjusted their own workflow to help and encourage the capturing of live vocals. It was a fantastic piece of team work.

McCann: “I know that many people in the industry have been watching this ‘impossible’ project really closely, and I hope we’ve proven that not only is it possible, but actually preferable to do a musical this way — the benefits of live recording are there to be seen in the on screen performances. I think it might well change the way we do musicals from now on — Les Misérables is that significant a step.

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AT 61

FEATURE

SIMIAN TO THINK ABOUT Sound is a powerful device used to manipulate film and TV audiences. But when you’re shooting a documentary about great apes, surrounded by an army of cicadas, knee-deep in jungle mud, staying true to the source becomes a battle of ethics. We follow Craig Carter along this slippery path.

Story: Mark Davie

If you’ve seen David Attenborough’s Wolves of the Sea and wondered who played the role of the killer whale, I can tell you now, it was Craig Carter. While the onscreen whale might have stolen the show, flopping about like a talentless prima donna, the one doing all the legwork was Carter. He spent days splashing about in a pool — playing the audio equivalent of Andy Serkis to Gollum — to breathe life into the whale’s performance. Such is the life of a sound designer.

PICKING YOUR BATTLES

Craig Carter is a man constantly contemplating whether his ethics are sound. His job demands it. In 2012 he wrapped work on the biopic teledrama, Underground: The Julian Assange Story, about the young Aussie hacker who turned into the world’s informant. But before he accepted the role of Sound Designer, he did his research. Filling up the coffers is one thing, but when you’re taking part in dramatising the life of a controversial man, you want to know where you stand.

Craig Carter: “I am fascinated by the whole dilemma with Julian Assange and the fact that he’s taken it upon himself to reveal things that he has.

It’s arguable both ways about whether he has the right to do that. But on the other hand, we live in a society where information is very channelled to us, so we’ve got our own form of propaganda.

I think there always has to be another way of gaining knowledge. I think more and more people form opinions on things without really trying to find out anything about it. And they’re very likely to accept the first glossy report or the opinion that appears to be the most informed.”

It’s a conundrum for Carter, who knows only too well the power of sound in manipulating an audience. Even in drama, where flogging a cabbage can be mistaken for a punch to the head, you have to pick your battles.

Craig Carter: “Clearly music can turn somebody from a villain into a hero just by the type of music

AT 62

that you use. If the film is taking a certain line, you make an ethical decision at the beginning about whether you want to be involved in supporting that or not. I don’t think as a sound designer or as a composer you have that autonomy or independence to form your own opinion within the film, you’re either with it or you aren’t.”

NO APING ABOUT

Most recently, Carter left the dramatic world for the jungle. Spending 10 weeks in Africa, and five in Indonesia recording sound for a film about six species of great apes and their diminishing habitat. Ethically, it was more of a no-brainer on this project, with the intent being a balanced approach with more focus on asking the questions than finger-pointing.

Carter: “The six species we were studying — bonobos, chimpanzees, orang-utans, and eastern, western and mountain gorillas — are all threatened by different things. In the Congo, where we were filming the bonobos and gorillas, it’s mainly about hunting and Bushmen.

They’re inextricably bound up with the population pressure. You’re dealing with people that can’t get enough food that would previously have been quite legitimately hunting apes in the jungle — but the number of apes is so down.

“With orang-utans in places like Sumatra and Borneo it’s mainly about palm oil plantations bringing huge deforestation and loss of habitat.

And it’s all very well to be grand about this stuff, but the pressure is coming from here. They only grow this stuff because they can sell it and they’re poor. Let’s be honest, you couldn’t look at your child dying of starvation and then have some noble opinion overriding that saying, ‘We must preserve this.’ The only way forward is

having the people themselves see those primates as a resource as opposed to a source of food.

The climatologists and experts we worked with really suggest that’s it got to be less of a pressure, or they need to be sponsored to not do it. You can’t just take away an income, you’ve got to replace it with something.

“If we progress at the same rate it’s very likely there mightn’t be any orang-utans in the wild in about 20 years — they’ll all be in zoos or sanctuaries. But the film was more about the people that work with them and what’s destroying habitat so there’s a bit of a message there too.”

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU

Carter lost eight kilos, just in the Congo. Entering the habitat of some of the mountain gorillas required hiking to Buranga near the northern border of Rwanda, at an elevation of 6000 feet. And to get to Mundeka, they had to hike through about 10km of swamp. Thankfully he had guides to help carry his gear. Carter: “I was told that if you turn around and they’re not there or they drop their stuff and run, that’s what you do too. If you surprise elephants, they can get quite nasty and essentially they want to kill you.

A big part of Carter’s job is gathering environmental sounds, which usually means wandering off alone, out of earshot and generator noises. But as one German scientist warned him, ‘You can’t simply go out there. It will kill you.’ “All camps run generators so you are a bit restricted,” said Carter. “It wasn’t the sort of Eden I thought it might have been to go and record in.”

But proximity to sounds wasn’t always an issue.

Carter: “I had great privilege because when you’re near these animals — I sound like I’m being a bit ’70s here — it is a bit life-changing. We’re supposed to keep at least seven metres away because of their health, and you wear masks. But if they break the lines, the rules are off. I’ve had a female gorilla walk past and touch me on the back. They don’t realise what they can do to you either, they’re pretty gentle. I never felt intimidated around gorillas, though with the chimpanzees I did.

They’re more like us. They’re incredibly volatile. Orangutans are probably my favourite. They’re like philosophers and they’re all fairly different.”

THE RULES

Whether the subject matter is more or less controversial than a worldwide whistleblower, the ethical dilemmas of sound replacement and augmentation start to mount up in documentary shooting. Often, the environment won’t let you record a single clean sound, even when a female gorilla sits behind you munching, there’s likely thousands of cicadas clamouring for airtime on the same take. So what’s a sound designer to do?

AT 63

PACKING GEAR

“

You watch a caterpillar going up a leaf in a BBC doco and you can hear its feet! That’s just foley, it’s somebody making that sound

”

Craig Carter: “My job was to record them vocally, but you’re dealing with a whole lot of ambient noise, cicadas, insects, wind and anything else that’s there — they’re not quiet locations. And then I’d record ambience. But I was really gathering building blocks. I’m sound designing and cutting the soundtrack for it too, so that becomes my source material to rebuild the film.

“A lot of this will be refitting, grabbing behavioural sounds and working out where you can use them to match up. A lot of natural history films you watch, on the BBC for example, that sound’s not actually happening at the time it’s been shot, it’s refitted later. I did a film on killer whales once called Wolves of the Sea with David Attenborough. It was shot mute. Just say you’ve got a sea lion that’s giving birth, they’d try and record one and then I’d have to try and fit that to its actions. I’m essentially the whale in that film. I spent a long time in the pool being recorded watching the image and making noises and splashes. Because if you go down to a surf beach and try and record a splash it will just be white noise. Whereas you want a defined moment.

“The sounds are processed, changed or added to — like in any drama. It’s not unusual for me or for anybody to build up a sound with a whole lot of foreign sounds. Just say I was knocking something off the table, I might add explosions to give it frequency, to give it a push. But they’re disguised within the main sound. So I might be adding low frequency to what might be a very mid range sound. Then that one event is manipulated to wherever it’s meant to be in the room and what level is has to be played dramatically.

“There are a few tiny rules. Like we tend not to move dialogue around much because it gets pretty distracting, so it stays in the middle. But things like crowds move around you.

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Carter: “I was using two Sound Devices, digital 8-tracks, that you can really get 12 tracks on. It records to a hard drive and runs Compact Flash as a backup. I would at times link two of those together if I wanted to multi-track something. They’re amazing.

They came back so damaged because you’re dealing with gear that’s being thrown around in cargo, but still work. They’re really compact, quite powerful and they have a really great matrix that allows you to send anything anywhere. You can output timecode and you can mix in it.

“I was mainly using Sanken microphones, a mono cardioid CS1E for dialogue and a CSS5, which is an X/Y stereo mic that can be altered in pattern. I picked the Sanken CS1E mainly because it’s pretty robust, pretty clean, and it doesn’t have too much artificial EQ. On the flip side, it also doesn’t have great sound pressure characteristics, but if you handle it okay it seems pretty true. I was also using a DPA 5100 Mobile Surround mic because I really wanted to try and get a 6-track bed recording of the surrounds environment. For reach I used a really long Sennheiser interference tube microphone called an MKH70. I also had a DPA gun mic that could take a bit more sound pressure if I thought something was really going to go off. Some of these animals have enormous dynamic range. Chimps can be doing nothing and then scream — it’s just flat out distortion. I also took a whole bunch of Rode stuff as a backup. I had access to about 16 microphones all up.

“You really can’t take risks with gear because when you’re in a tropical environment like that, if the rain comes down, it comes down. It doesn’t just get a little bit wet, everything gets soaked.”

“What really interests me is working with sound that creates a mood, just like music does. Just say you and I are having a huge argument on the side of a highway somewhere. I might not want to hear anything but what you’re saying. So to me those cars are completely unimportant. Or it could be I was confused or distressed and I can’t hear a word you’re saying and all I can hear is the traffic.

“That’s a very basic example, but how sound is manipulated is about what it is doing in terms of the storyline and the emotion. Music is trying to tell you what to feel a lot of the time or to signal something like danger — with high frequency. The more interesting films use those tools well — sounds are crafted like a very basic form of music.”

PRIMATE INSTINCTS

Mark Davie: Massaging things in post is obviously a big part of sound design, but how do you capture the best results in the field?

CC: It’s all about mic placement when you’re on location.

It’s more about what a mic is excluding rather than what you’re recording. But you don’t want to back yourself into a corner where you get a signal that you can’t do anything with. It just requires that you be dedicated to try and always be thinking about extraneous noises.

You have to rely on headphones and assume that’s what your recorder is hearing. If you’re recording really loud sounds where you can’t tell if what you’re hearing is inside or outside the cans, then you’ve got to look at it dynamically on the recorder and just see if you’re getting a proper signal.

MD: What were the main sounds you were chasing in the jungle?

CC: I just hope that I can get enough of those calls to clean the actual vocal away from the sounds that I don’t want. I

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“

It wasn’t the sort of Eden I thought it might have been to go and record in

”

A NEW EVE OF MONITORING Carter recently updated his monitoring environment to an Eve Audio system comprising five 307 three-ways, with a sub to come when it’s available.

Eve Audio was founded by Roland Stenz, who was a co-founder of ADAM. So naturally, ribbon tweeters feature on all Eve designs.

“I’m very happy with them and the amount of headroom, they’re a bit more industrial strength and have much better bottom end than my previous setup. I don’t work with a lot of high frequency sounds, most of what I’m doing it trying to get definition in the bottom end, which can be a struggle.

They’re also punchy, which is a big requirement for a sound designer, as opposed to a more subtle sound if you were working on orchestral scores.

And I don’t have to drive them too hard to get that punch. They’re also quite defined, when I’m doing work where I have to split sounds out around the surrounds it’s easier to get the spatial relationships.

And they’re in an affordable bracket.”

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want to be able to manipulate that sound, and I’ll probably enhance it or add things. Not to falsify it but to try and give it body. I got really close, with orang-utans I would have got close enough to touch them. But they don’t vocalise a lot. So a lot of those movements will get made afterwards out of sounds that were there, or I’ll foley it, because you don’t have control over signal-to-noise. Say I’m getting really good movement, like it’s eating, but there are shitloads of cicadas all the way through it. You can’t use it because that sound is piercing, in both mid and high range. It’s a gathering process.

MD: What would you do to enhance it?

CC: I would create a copy and harmonise it. If it’s a barking sound I might add some abrasive noise to one edge of the bark. By the time you clean up the recorded sound, it might be all soft and diffuse. Like a soft guitar chord, it’s almost like adding a plectrum or string noise to it to give it a real edge.

Then I might look for something to create a bit of body that’s not just mid frequency, and harmonise and add a bit of a rumble to it. So I’m giving these animals a presence. It takes a while to do, it’s a lot like creating a library.

MD: Do you just set a process for a particular sound and replicate that?

CC: Not with the same call, they’re like footsteps.

If you recorded two footsteps and alternated them as you walk across the room, you would sound like a cartoon. Every sound has a different shape. So within reason you create enough of a library that you can use. Sometimes you might even copy things like breathing sounds, because by that stage you know enough about the sound to get vocally close to it yourself. It’s not something you’d go to first, but I might add it occasionally. Because this is a doco I probably won’t go there, but if it was a drama I would. That said, you watch a caterpillar going up a leaf in a BBC doco and you can hear its feet! That’s just foley, it’s somebody making that sound.

MD: So it goes back to that question of ethics.

CC: There’s a certain amount of licence you can take. Who cares if I use the water sound from that splash or another one really? But I wouldn’t try and approximate vocalisations of animals — you probably couldn’t anyway. You would keep environmental sounds honest, but geographic sounds like somebody moving a rock or walking, they’re just sounds and they’re not terribly important. But you know, an albatross takes off into the sky and they put some beautiful piano piece to it. I’m pretty sure the bird doesn’t hear that and think, ‘Oh wow, a little arpeggio.’

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REGULARS

MAC NOTES Rounding up the latest iOS gadgetry Column: Anthony Garvin

As usual for gear heads, Christmas has come late in the form of January’s annual NAMM show, with the announcement of plenty of new gadgets to salivate over. Following on from my previous musings about the un-tapped potential of iOS for music production, here are some of the latest i-Developments in audio technology for your iOS device. iDRIVE

Apogee has just announced its new and updated One and Duet interfaces for Mac, which also include iOS drivers. It’s also developed iOS drivers for its more sophisticated Quartet interface, which means you can run any audio app (like Garageband) on your iPad with a selection of professional grade I/O. All that is required is Apple’s camera connection kit with the USB port. Check out Brad Watts’ review of the Quartet in this issue. www.apogeedigital.com

Similar products: RME’s Babyface and Fireface UCX, as well as offerings from Tascam, Focusrite, Alesis and Behringer iKEY

The new Novation Launchkey looks to be a very comprehensive MIDI controller, with various models between 25 to 61 keys, faders, knobs and Novation’s ‘Launchpad’ buttons — the latter now well known to Ableton users. Also available are the Launchpad and Launchkey apps, which interface an iPad with the Launchkey to respectively become a loop manipulation tool and synthesiser. www.novationmusic.com

Similar Products: Most Core MIDI-compatible keyboards will work with iOS, however, Akai’s straight to an iPad. iMIDI

Yamaha’s iUX-1 looks to be a very handy device, with which you can plug in any USB MIDI hardware (such as a keyboard or drum pads with a USB port) into an iOS device…

Strangely though, it features the 30-pin connector rather than the current and smaller Lightning connector. www.au.yamaha.com AT 72

Similar products: Yamaha’s iMX-1 is similar to the above but with MIDI connections, as is IK Multimedia’s iRig MIDI. iMIX SMALL

Behringer’s new iX16 looks like a small mixer the middle for an iPad, where knobs and faders would traditionally go. The iX16 becomes the I/O and the iPad does the summing and processing in the digital domain via software. with the ability to regularly update features and the unit either and you can freely roam around to EQ, adjust monitor sends and so forth wirelessly. www.behringer.com

Similar products: Mackie’s DL1608 and 806 iPad mixers. iMIX BIG

The X32 Rack is a 40-input, 25-bus digital mixer in a 3U rack — remotely controllable by iPad and iPhone. It’s a new model in Behringer’s X32 series mixing consoles, which has been one of Behringer’s best sellers in 2012. In this instance, the iPad has the potential to become a fantastic interface for mixing: the X32 rack is a sophisticated central unit covering the A/D, D/A and DSP, while the iPad wirelessly controls the unit with the freedom to move around anywhere in the venue. www.behringer.com

Similar products: Presonus’ StudioLive digital consoles feature iPad integration and they have just announced a new 32.4.2AI model. iRIG BOARD

IK Multimedia’s iRig BlueBoard wirelessly connects via Bluetooth to an iPhone or iPad (or Mac) and sends MIDI CC messages to any Core MIDI app. It features four very attractive blue-backlit footswitches, and two TRS sockets for expression pedals. A very interesting tool for anyone using their iOS device as a synth or effects processor. www.ikmultimedia.com

Similar products: StompBox is a wired stompbox for iOS, but is lacking sexy blue buttons.

iRIG HD

The iRig HD also from IK, is a 24-bit converter for inputting a guitar into an iOS device. The most obvious use here is with IK Multimedia’s Amplitube, but has potential with any effects processing app — like Moog’s Filtatron! www.ikmultimedia.com

Similar products: the original iRig is a much simpler device, relying on the device’s converter, whereas Apogee’s Jam is similar to the iRig HD. iSTOMP

Digitech’s iStomp is a stompbox pedal with an iPhone/iPad cable connection: using an iOS device and the Stomp Show app you can download one of the 47+ different e-pedals into the iStomp, unplug your iPhone, and away you go — new guitar sounds. The most recent addition is The Impossible Pedal, which “lets you play impossible guitar riffs that you would never think to play” by sequencing various pitch manipulations. www.digitech.com

Similar products: TC Electronic just released its Toneprint editor for enhanced customisation of its pedal line. And IK multimedia’s iRig Stomp is a similar concept with one key difference — the processing is done on the iOS device and reliant on the iPhone or iPad’s converters. iFLY

Akai’s on-going updates to the MPC family bring us this little red briefcase, inside which are the infamous 4 x 4 grey rubber pads, an iPad dock/holder and battery. Combine this with the iMPC app and you have a miniaturised Music Production Centre that is compatible with their desktop MPC Renaissance and Studio software. www.akaiprompc.com

Similar Products: Native Instruments’ iMaschine for iPhone is a useful beat making tool, which also allows exporting to its Maschine Desktop software.

Travel-Lite

800W active 2-Way fullrange cabinet

Scan the QR code with your smartphone for more information on the Dynacord D-Lite series.

D 8A The D8A is a very compact, light and mechanically highly robust 8“/1“ powered two-way plastic cabinet with an integrated 800W for a multitude of professional sound reinforcement applications.

It convinces with what are for its class very high sound pressure levels and outstanding audio characteristics.

With its extensive range of mounting accessories and unobtrusive, elegant styling, the D 8A can be used withinstallation applications. For the low- and high-frequency ranges, 2 x 200/400W /RMS/IHF-A are available.

The Line input is implemented as an XLR/jack combo socket. An XLR microphone input with a separate level control is also available. By means of the XLR Master Out socket, a mix of the Line and Mic input signals can be looped through to additional powered cabinets. For the use with active subwoofers, a switchable Lo ideal for the set-up of very compact active 3-way high powered systems in combination with powered subwoofers such as, for example, the PowerSub 112 or PowerSub 212.

For more information, visit: www.dynacord.com

www.dynacord.com AT 73

REGULARS

PC AUDIO Are you going to be carried along with the Windows 8 app avalanche, or hide for cover?

Column: Martin Walker

By the time you read this, the contents of the Windows 8 App Store (www. windows8appstore.com) is expected to have reached 50,000 apps, having debuted with about 10,000 in late October and built to over 35,000 by the start of January 2013. Compared to the over 700,000 apps available in Apple’s store this is still chicken feed, but around 500 new PC apps are added each day, and a significant proportion of them are free. However, whilst this is good for users, I can’t help thinking that we are sending out a message that free software is the way to go, and I do fear for smaller developers in the longer term when they attempt to make a living from their skills. Moreover, many of these apps are proving to be disappointing at best and a waste of time at worst — surely what Microsoft needs to attract more customers to its Windows Surface tablets running Windows 8 RT is quality and not quantity?

Microsoft originally predicted that it would sell 400 million Windows 8-powered devices by July 2013, but sales of its Surface RT tablets are still very disappointing thus far, with estimates of only around 1 million worldwide since launch.

They do have plenty of enthusiastic users, but far more perceive these tablets as too expensive, while the bundled software (such as Office 2013 RT) is somewhat limited compared with its standard Windows namesake, and users are also being forced to run Internet Explorer as their browser whether they want to or not, with no web plug-ins and limited Flash content only visible on Microsoft-approved websites. Since Windows RT will only run apps available from the official Windows Store, Microsoft also has a stranglehold on both software developers and hardware makers, which doesn’t exactly encourage OEM hardware manufacturers to market competing hardware devices that might force Surface RT prices down.

SURFACING SOON

The situation might start to change in February when Microsoft’s first Surface Pro tablets powered

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by an Intel Core 5 processor and running the full version of Windows 8 finally become available in the US and Canada, because these more upmarket models can also run the wealth of standard Windows software that’s available including such staples as Photoshop, Office, and of course Cubase, Reaper and a host of other ‘serious’ audio applications, making them more attractive to traditional PC owners. Availability in other parts of the world is yet to be announced, with Microsoft adopting a phased approach for the Surface Pro, with “additional markets to follow in the coming weeks and months.”

However, some people are already grumbling that the US pricing is too high, starting at US$899 for the 64GB version without a keyboard (available separately for around US$100). If you want a keyboard to accompany the Surface Pro’s 10-point multi-touch screen and pen input (and let’s face it, few users do any serious computing with a touchscreen), the final price of the Surface Pro is likely to be over US$1000, making it the most expensive tablet computer in the world, and also putting it in competition with quite a few PC Ultrabook models, as well as Apple’s already popular 11-inch MacBook Air. The public may be tempted by the new touchscreen experience provided by the Surface Pro, but it’s a tricky choice, since tablets (such as Apples’ extremely popular iPad) are still perceived as handy but relatively low-cost devices starting at around US$600, while Ultrabooks and the MacBook Air range are seen as high-end notebook computers.

The Surface Pro falls somewhere between the two. Mind you, this healthy competition may eventually force down Surface Pro pricing — we shall have to wait and see.

TAKE A NUMBER PLEASE

Meanwhile, sales of Windows 8 still seem to be in the doldrums. Some analysts claim that Windows 8 is partly to blame for a steady decline in the sales of PCs themselves, because its release was so closely focused on the new touchscreen features, but there were few touchscreen-capable

devices available at the time to take advantage of them. There does seem to be a shift away from personal computers to cheaper tablet formats by consumers, while businesses are extremely reluctant to take on Windows 8 because of the associated cost of touchscreen hardware to accompany it. According to Context (www. contextworld.com), in the first month after the Windows 8 release apparently just 8% of Windows licenses were sold to businesses, while a report by retail sales tracker NPD Group said Windows laptop sales themselves were down 24% compared with the same period in the previous year. Even more damning, Windows 8 accounted for 52% of all Windows-based PCs sold in the month following its release (in other words, 48% of people buying Windows-based PCs chose a different operating system such as Windows 7, as I did myself).

I can’t help thinking that there’s an underlying trend here — one that I first mentioned way back in AT69 — and that’s the demise of the PC upgrade bandwagon. Up until 2006 I’d found myself needing a major computer upgrade every two years to be able to run the latest audio software, and I’d also formulated a rule of thumb that during this upgrade my processing power needed to increase by at least 50% so that the expense was justified by a significant improvement in overall performance. However, in December 2006 I built myself a new dualcore PC that gave me a massive 300% increase in computing power, and only finally retired this a few months ago after six long years. This time I have a quad-core PC that gives me a further 600% increase in computing power.

I’m sure this mirrors a similar trend across the board, which would also explain the rise in the popularity of the tablet format. Put simply, most people simply don’t need faster computers than they already have!

Stav’s shortcuts to great sounds! “ WOW, what an amazing book. I've put a few of your

techniques to use with amazing results. Could you write a doctors note for my boss? He wonders why I'm late getting in and early leaving every day ... Recording is so much fun again!

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”

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the best book on recording I've ever read, and “I'veThisreadis asimply few over the last 20 years. ” Chris Putnam - Montclair, NJ USA

Get the book: www.mixingwithyourmind.com

AT 75

PREVIEW

ANTELOPE AUDIO

ORION32 The keepers at Antelope have crated and freighted their newborn fawn to the other side of the globe. Still developing, a pride of reviewers poised to pounce; the Orion32 is a rising star that’s hard to pin down.

Preview: Andrew Bencina

AT 76

In an age of non-disclosure agreements and media embargoes it’s unusual to find a new prototype floating around the AT office. Rarer still when you consider Antelope’s first venture into multichannel devices had travelled to our antipodean outpost from Sofia, Bulgaria.

Antelope has made its name in recent years developing a range of master clocks for studios and post production facilities. The alpha buck of the herd, the Isochrone 10M employs a ‘rubidium atomic reference generator’ promising 100,000 times the accuracy of crystal oscillators. Success in the audiophile reference DAC market followed and in the last 12 months their 384k Eclipse mastering AD/DA converter, master clock and monitor controller signalled a broadening of focus; pairing their now established technology with considered designs to tackle a range of recording and mastering requirements.

RUNT OF THE HERD

The Orion32 is the latest result of this expansion and signals a shift from the haute cuisine of the audiophile and mastering markets into the meat and potatoes of multitrack recording and audio installation. A 32-channel AD/DA converter, the Orion32 dwarves the channel capacity of earlier Antelope products yet is delivered in a single rack space chassis smaller than not only its stereo siblings but any comparable multichannel product on the market today. It is this size, or lack thereof, that makes the Orion32 such an exciting option for both installations requiring a high channel count, by combining a number of units, or simply a relatively large number of I/O in a portable form factor. Other 32-channel solutions will require double to quadruple the rack space and two to three times the investment. While not settled, the expected local price should be in the realm of $3000. This makes the Orion32 a real player for those considering a third-party solution with their next ProTools upgrade and offers to take a 128-channel installation from ceiling height rack tower into a single carry-on case.

The key to this slimming regime is the use of eight 25-pin D-Sub connections for all analogue I/O; taking up just over half of the rear panel.

In a touring installation, this can make life very easy with stock D-Sub cables available in various lengths and some patchbays offering pre-wired D-Sub termination. If you require a more flexible range of XLR and TRS connections there are some commercially available D-Sub break-outs, just be sure to have a few gender changers on hand as most of these are intended for use with a longer D-Sub cable in between.

The rest of the rump is neatly packed with optical MADI I/O, two channels of ADAT I/O, S/PDIF via coaxial RCA and a USB port. Each of these digital interfaces support sample rates up to 192k, with only MADI and USB offering the full complement at all rates. The ADAT ports do however support SMUX, so four channels of I/O are possible at 192k when used with compatible devices (eight channels at 96k, 16 channels at 48k). Two BNC word clock inputs (one for

Antelope’s high resolution 10M Atomic Clock), and four word clock outputs located at the left of the rear panel also make the Orion32 a viable master clock distribution option; using either the internal oven controlled quartz crystal (for increased stability at constant temperature) or an external clock source as master. Like many other Antelope products, the Orion32 employs its Acoustically Focused Clocking (AFC) technology — but more on this later. Finally, the IEC mains power connector supports a range of input voltages from approximately 95 to 245V and with a greenish power consumption of only 20W you’ll also be able to trim down some of your friendly supplier’s recent bill hikes.

The front of the Orion32 is positively stark by comparison with its ample hind. A simple matte silver finish certainly makes it blend in with other herds across the retail savannah.

Three white LEDs indicate the current clock source while a large central multifunction display contains both the current sample rate and metering for all I/O channels. At present the meter source can be changed from within the software control panel, as can the brightness of all front panel illumination, however these controls should also be available via some button combination from the front panel. The lack of on-display labelling and updating of the number of displayed meters (64 meter strips are shown, even when monitoring the stereo S/PDIF I/O) makes it difficult to know exactly what you’re looking at. Front panel control is limited to eight, barely visible but audible, silver buttons — and a slightly larger power button. At present all but the ambiguous ‘Antelope’ button have specific single functions (sample rate adjust and configuration preset selection) but I would like to see this change to expand standalone configuration in the future. I worry slightly that the omission of a continuous rotary encoder and perhaps one or two more multi-function buttons may limit further development in this direction but potential exists for satisfactory workarounds.

Thankfully, the Orion32’s core is an entirely programmable FPGA, so issues like these can be addressed as further user feedback is received. As an indication of this, I understand a zero-latency DSP mixer is already in the pipeline for a free future firmware update.

UTILITY BELT

While I think, for some, the size and price will be reason enough to purchase, for me it’s the flexibility of this device that offers greatest appeal. Branded as an AD/DA converter, the Orion32 is just so much more. As a converter it provides digital connection to three of the most common formats, so chances are there’ll always be something to plug it into. Even the custom USB 2.0 implementation supports Windows (ASIO), Mac and class compliant devices so while there’s currently no official Antelope support and control panel for the iPad, you will be able to access 24 channels from apps like Auria and Cubasis. Importantly, on Mac, the USB interface is also limited to 24 channels at 176.4k and 192k sample rates. On my Windows 7 tower I was able

“

While I think, for some, the size and price will be reason enough to purchase, for me it’s the flexibility of this device that offers greatest appeal

”

REFINED CONTROL The Orion is a pretty powerful device. And much of our criticism has been levelled at its lack of, or hidden control. But Antelope Founder Igor Levin, had this to say: “Due to the extreme flexibility of the device we felt that Orion needed a full page control surface that only a computer app can provide. I would hate to see customers having to scroll through six levels of nested menus on a tiny screen. This seems very inconvenient in the age of ultra-books and tablets.”

AT 77

to stably record 32 channels of audio at 192k via the USB ASIO driver with minimal latency.

On Windows, buffer settings for both the driver and USB streaming latency are provided via the software control panel settings dialog, allowing for an additional level of tweaking when the USB implementation of your machine is getting in the way. I did find it necessary to tweak these settings to achieve solid performance at lower buffer settings but was always able to find a combination that avoided dropouts without compromising headphone monitoring during a performance. Unfortunately, the omission of key features — like a headphone output, MIDI and basic stereo analogue I/O — do limit the use of the Orion32 as a standalone USB interface. These options, however, would probably be better suited to an Orion16 and the flexibility of having any USB interface far outweighs any shortcomings.

NEED TO KNOW

What’s great about the Orion32 is that if you have any concerns about the drivers from Antelope you can pair the converter with any other MADI (or ADAT, or S/PDIF) interface and benefit from the years of experience and additional DSP routing and mixing that a company like RME currently offers. I tested the Orion32 as both a MADI and ADAT converter with RME PCI-E cards and it worked exactly as you’d expect. But wait there’s still more! The software control panel provides a simple to use channel routing matrix for directing any input to any output. It’s simply a case of dragging from one input channel on the grid to another output channel and they’re linked. In reality I didn’t find the interface all that instinctive. The use of identical colours for the input and output

PRICE $3299 CONTACT Audio Chocolate (03) 9813 5877 audiochocolate.com.au antelopeaudio.com

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PROS 32 channels of analogue I/O in 1RU Support for MADI, ADAT and S/PDIF to 192k Custom USB interface (Win, OSX, Class compliant) Flexible routing between all digital formats

squares, rather than different shades, did become confusing at times and thinking of your software outputs as USB inputs and vice versa took a little getting used to. Improvements can still be made here with group selection and dragging for multichannel configuration, offline preset saving and loading (five configuration presets can be saved in the unit and recalled from the front panel buttons), preset access during USB sync mode, and perhaps a selection of commonly used routings for speedier setup. During some experimentation, I managed to create a feedback loop when my DAW’s input monitoring was enabled; which was certainly undesirable. Even with these teething issues, the ability to take the MADI output from a digital console and route it via USB to your laptop means that with the Orion32, capturing that live performance is now simpler than ever. The flexibility of these internal connections make the Orion32 an AD/ DA converter, USB 2.0 audio interface, digital format converter, and master clock controller all at the same time. If you weren’t interested already this utility must surely add a further notch or two onto the Orion32’s belt.

HOW’S IT BLEAT?

While clocking is a critical issue for studios either running a number of digital devices or involved in AV synchronisation, its use to generate sonic improvements in slaved devices has always been a contentious one. This is not the right forum for an extended discussion but if you’re interested I’d recommend seeking out a number of the detailed technical discussions available online. In the simplest possible terms, the science tells us that due to a number of factors (cable distortion, poorly designed slave circuits in

CONS Control Panel is simple but not always instinctive Feature omissions limit development as standalone interface Limited front panel configuration

many converters...), external clocking almost always produces higher levels of distortion and noise in the clocked converter than when internally synced. What we also know is that often this degradation makes things sound better.

What I like about Antelope’s founder and head designer, Igor Levin, is that he acknowledges this truth. In a blog discussing the proprietary Acoustically Focused Clocking (AFC) technology Levin emphasises that the design of AFC was determined not to, “Affect the mathematical specs, but to affect the sound.” This may sound obvious, but it’s actually a critical distinction and differs quite considerably from the prevailing spec-focused spiel. The Orion32 converters are shaped significantly by their internal AFC implementation and I like the way they sound.

They compared favourably to other converters I had in the studio and for the convenience of their high channel count and small form factor I’d be happy to use them everyday.

It’s always great to be introduced to new products and new developers. Especially when they seem to be paying attention to how we’re all working.

The Antelope Orion32 is a fine AD/DA converter with unique characteristics that I’m sure will give it an immediate place in many installations.

There’s room for improvement in some areas but thankfully many of these fixes can be made via updates to the internal firmware. It’s a tough market out there but I’m sure Orion’s flexibility will allow this young buck to survive and mature in its own time.

SUMMARY In branding the Orion32 as an AD/DA converter, Antelope has vastly undersold the flexibility of its first multichannel device. Yes, it converts 32 channels of analogue audio to and from MADI, ADAT and S/PDIF; but it also operates as a USB interface for Windows, Mac and class compliant devices; a digital format converter for routing between all of these connections; and, its ample word clock terminals and proprietary AFC technology make it a viable master clock solution. All this in a single rack unit chassis. As a standalone interface there is still room for improvement but thankfully the programmable FPGA core accommodates this and new features are already on the way.

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AT 79

REVIEW

500 SERIES EQ SHOOTOUT Review: Greg Walker

As with AT’s previous 500 series compressor shootout, this article does not pretend to be in any way comprehensive. The following modules are all available in Australia from established distributors and represent a small cross-section of what’s available out there in the rapidly expanding universe of 500 series gear.

When testing and evaluating these EQs I’ve been looking at key factors such as sound quality, flexibility, ergonomics and power. So let’s see what’s in the lunchbox today….

CHANDLER LITTLE DEVIL EQUALISER

The Little Devil EQ sports a devilish red faceplate and offers a 12kHz set high frequency band, a two-position low frequency band (110Hz or 60Hz) as well as two swept mid bands with stepped frequency controls and a 3-position high pass filter. Additional features are high/low Q switches on the mid bands and a true bypass switch for A/B-ing effected and uneffected signal paths. In the devil-may-care style of these units, all gain controls go to a notional ±6dB. The trademark Chandler sound is noticeable right from the get-go with the Little Devil EQ. There is a noticeable presence boost and forwardness to the sound as soon as the EQ is switched in, even when all EQ bands are approximately set to zero (there are no centre detents). The high and low bands are based on classic Baxandall shelving designs and have a nice quality to them; the highs are sweet and clear and the lows are thick and powerful. The inductorbased midrange bands also sound good to my

AT 80

ears and the high/low Q switch gives a handy choice of more pointed or smooth EQ curves.

The high-mid is particularly good for adding attitude and clarity to vocals and guitars around the 1-2kHz range while the low-mid band can really add weight to guitars, drums and vocals.

Like most 500 series EQs, the Little Devil pretty much begs you to explore tone-shaping boosts rather than ‘surgical’ or corrective cuts and has a great ability to breathe life and zest into formerly unspectacular sounds. The high-pass filter is a very useful addition here too and can whisk away unwanted low frequency stodge in a very musical way. While I liked the tone of this unit I wasn’t especially blown away by it as an all-round studio tool as I found the choices of the stepped midrange frequencies a bit unwieldy at times and the limitations of the two set frequencies in the low band made finding the sweet spot on drums or bass very difficult in some contexts. The lowest available step in the midrange being 220Hz, there is also a bit of a gap in the bottom end where a bit of control would have been nice. Minor gripes aside though, the Little Devil does sound pretty sweet and is capable of great tones on the right sources. As an aside it also sounds great when driven hard at the input.

Price: $1585 Recommended but not quite the magic bullet.

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

RADIAL Q3 COIL EQ

Radial has a habit of making new and useful audio tools, and with the Q3 they’ve taken a refreshingly different approach to the challenge of designing a 500 Series EQ. The Q3 is a fairly unassuming module decked out in somewhat daggy chocolate brown with three stepped pots labelled High Boost, Mid Cut and Low Boost, a gain control and two push button switches — one that engages a high-pass filter below 100Hz and a full bypass. If you figured this was a very basic set of tone controls however, you’d be wrong. Each band of the EQ has a bypass step and 11 other steps that select from a wide variety of different EQ curves and frequencies. For instance, on the High Boost band Step 1 is a +3dB shelving boost that lifts everything above 1kHz, whereas Step 6 is a +9dB bell curve boost centred around 7kHz and Step 9 is a +5dB shelf with a notch at 8kHz. A small toggle switch below each stepped control further boosts the gain and Q of the curve selected (handy for identifying the right setting and for more pronounced effects). The manual is worth poring over as it gives pictorial and technical information on all of these EQ curves in each of the Q3’s three bands, but it is also fun to just play with the switches on a source sound until something takes your fancy. Between the outer boosting bands, the midrange cut band and the bass filter, complex EQ curves are quickly created and it’s a bit of an understatement to say there is no shortage of choice. A staggering 12,000 plus combinations are available from this simple setup.

In use the Q3 is a fascinating beast. It definitely encourages a tweaking and listening mentality and some of the settings really do add personality and mojo to the right source. On kick drum and snare the Q3 can add weight and presence while it’s a bit of a Pandora’s box for guitar and bass tones (in a good way). One of my favourite applications for the Q3 was on vocals where the interplay of the three bands allowed for some really striking vocal tone sculpting in both subtle and more extreme contexts. Having the extra boost from the toggle switches allows for more play and sometimes it’s hard to make up your mind between equally valid settings. Other times I wished I could slide things around a little frequency- or gain-wise and this of course is something the Q3 does not do. I did find the cut-only midrange band a little frustrating when I was looking to tame a particular frequency and couldn’t really find it among the available options, but that’s probably nit-picking to some degree. This is the kind of box that’s either going to kick serious goals or not be particularly useful, depending on the individual source. When it works, the Q3 is a brilliant little equalizer that gives you some really nice sounding options, and I tip my hat to Radial for giving us something a little different to the usual fare.

Price: $799 An unusual approach that offers scads of tone-shaping options.

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

LINDELL PEX 500 EQ

Lindell is a new company that has made a bit of a splash with its attractive modules and aggressive pricing policy. Based in Poland, the company’s offering here is the quite svelte looking PEX 500, another contemporary take on the famous passive Pultec designs of yore. The faceplate is nicely laid out with continuously variable high and low band boost and cut controls as well as a centre control for the overall width of the EQ curves. Curiously, while the low frequencies can be both boosted and cut at 30Hz, 60Hz and 100Hz à la the Pultec topology, the high frequency boost and cut have different selectable frequencies: 6kHz, 10kHz or 16kHz for boosting and 10 kHz, 15kHz or 20kHz for cutting. This opens up some interesting frequency shaping options, though I did miss the 20kHz boost of some other Pultec-inspired units. Up to 15dB of boost is available via an all discrete passive design featuring inductors and the 990 amplifier. A green backlit switch comes to life when the EQ is engaged and my general first impressions of the Lindell PEX 500 were of a nicely made unit with a bit of style about it.

Firing up the PEX 500, I was immediately aware of a gain increase of something like 3-4dB upon activating the EQ circuit even with all controls on zero. This made A/Bing the unprocessed source a little tricky but I was impressed by the Lindell’s sound overall. While it’s not a real Pultec (they have valves for starters) it does add a bit of spice

to many sources. On kick drum a bit of push/pull boosting and cutting at either 30Hz or 60Hz did wonders for some slightly lifeless kit recordings while the high frequency boost at 6kHz or 10kHz brought snares to life in a very pleasing manner.

I felt the boost at 16kHz was a little shy (certainly compared to a Pultec) but it did add some polish and sheen to cymbals and brighter acoustic instruments. On vocals the PEX 500 didn’t perhaps quite suit the vocalists I was working with who had very midrange voices, but again I did appreciate the higher boost frequencies.

Every one of the EQs we’ve looked at has some drawback or other, and with the PEX 500 it’s the obvious lack of a midrange band. There were a few times I really felt that lack, but with the help of some other outboard or digital EQ to work the midrange area, the Lindell EQ offers both sweetening and grunt at the extremes of the frequency range.

Price: $359 A limited but sonically pleasing offering at a very competitive price.

Federal Audio: www.federalaudio.com.au

JDK AUDIO V14

JDK Audio’s contender is the V14, a tasteful dark khaki module with four bands of fully sweepable EQ and a single backlit switch for activating or bypassing the circuit. Like parent-company API’s modules, the V14 utilises dual concentric pots with the smaller inner core controlling EQ frequencies and the outer ring dealing out gain addition and subtraction. The two mid bands are bell curves with overlapping frequencies while the low and high frequency bands are shelving only and range from 30Hz all the way up to 20kHz. In use I found the dual concentric pots somewhat irritating. For some reason I intuitively felt like the larger ring should control frequency as it is closer to the markings, and I found myself consistently twiddling the wrong knob. Of course this is something prospective buyers would get used to but, more critically, I found that unless careful finger control was used, both knobs could easily move when addressing either one of them. This meant that frequency identification via heavy boosts would sometimes have to be repeated which was, frankly, a pain in the arse.

I’m surprised more thought hasn’t gone into the ergonomics of this unit because it would only take a small design tweak of the outer knobs and a bit of a tighter feel on the pots to get rid of this problem and the V14 actually sounds pretty good. The high frequency band has a nice airy quality up above 10kHz and can bring plenty of presence and sizzle to the 6-10kHz range too. The midrange curves are fairly broad, and without any Q control they are somewhat limited, however, they also produced a range of useful and musical results on anything from individual drum tracks to vocals and strummed acoustic guitars and basses. Down below, the bottom end on the V14 is nice and robust and does wonders for thin bass and drum tracks. On the mix bus the V14 was good for subtle tone shaping and

I thought it particularly shone on vocals where the gentle control of the midrange plus the air up high made it a useful tool indeed.

Price: $776 Good sounding unit suffers from poor ergonomics.

Legacy Audio: 0438 703 762 or sales@legacyaudio.com.au

JLM PEQ500

The PEQ500 sports the classy black looks of the JLM line and is a two-band EQ that also tips its hat firmly in the Pultec direction. The design is discrete and fully passive with two proprietary JLM 99V opamps and a huge output transformer taking pride of place on the main circuit board.

The low band features 12 stepped frequencies ranging from 10Hz to 300Hz and smaller boost and cut controls that, when both dialled in, create a bump and notch effect. The high band has 12 stepped frequencies ranging from 1kHz to 25kHz, boost and cut controls and an additional Q control that can be pushed in to change the bell curve to a high shelf (Q controls the shape of the shelf ’s rise/fall). Two small toggle switches at the top of the unit engage hard bypass and a high frequency filter which shelves off frequencies above 20kHz, 10kHz or 5kHz à la the original Pultec design.

From the get-go I found this EQ a real pleasure to use. The JLM is a little more expensive than most of the other EQs reviewed here but the quality on offer is undeniable. There is an effortless power in this module that really allows you to carve sounds in a creative way. The bottom end is big and rich while the highs are airy and sweet and the addition of the top end Q control, shelving option and filtering brings a lot of flexibility to what is always a critical area. On kick drum and bass the super low frequencies such as 30Hz and 40Hz are surprisingly useable and deliver a mighty wallop. On snares I found a gentle addition of 60Hz or 80Hz added satisfying weight to the sound while it was easy to voice the amount of rattle and sizzle in the treble area with the frequencies from 8kHz upwards. Adding 25kHz to cymbals and overheads was also a very gratifying tonal experience. The PEQ500 also delivered great results on guitars and vocals.

Again the one drawback of the Pultec-based design is the lack of control of the true midrange area. Having said that, the options up to 300Hz and down to 1kHz do extend the traditional topology of the Pultec approach and definitely gives the unit some extra flexibility. Adding sheen and weight to sources is this module’s bread and butter and it does it in a satisfyingly powerful, rich and musical manner.

Price: $995 A great sounding combination of power and flexibility.

JLM Audio: (07) 3891 2244 or sales@jlmaudio.com

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REVIEW

MACKIE DL1608 IPAD MIXER Not just another add-on iPad mixer app, Mackie’s DL1608 is the next step to ‘fully’ digital live mixing.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Mark Davie

PRICE $1299 (expect to pay) CONTACT CMI: (03) 9315 2244 or sales@cmi.com.au

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PROS Up to 10 iPads with fullfeatured wireless control

CONS No stereo channel grouping (yet)

Many more features than a similar size analogue desk

No digital trim controls

Simple for beginners to mix themselves

Effects limited by DSP availability

The idea of what a live console should be, is changing. The kitchen sink approach to the digital ‘revolution’ has manifested entirely new forms, and completely different ways of functioning. But when the kitchen sink is reduced to the size of a sexy, slate, flat wash basin, the decision of what to throw in becomes harder. Do you go with the comeliest features or revert to the tried and true stalwart functions of live mixing?

The question is especially pertinent for devices like Mackie’s 16-channel DL1608. Because while the iPad has typically been a significant add-on feature that allows wireless mixing and setup of most digital consoles, the DL1608 was the first to rely completely on it. Packing an entire mix

SUMMARY The Mackie DL1608 is the first step towards ‘fully’ digital live mixing. While making some interesting trade-offs in the new age of digital mixers vs accepted analogue essentials, it is simple to mix on and easy enough to let beginners handle their own monitor mix.

engine into a glorified e-reader and still have it be useful as a working, stable device for live work is a big ask — and potentially, a revolutionary idea.

The DL1608 is essentially a 16-in, 8-out (6 aux on balanced TRS, stereo main output on XLR) live AD/DA converter for all generations of the iPad. While its dock connector is the traditional 30-pin connector, you can use an adaptor to accommodate the new lighting connector, and by unscrewing the base plate you can even squeeze in an original iPad. And while the DL1608 is what you’re actually purchasing, it’s really just a hub for the iPad. The fact that you can slide the iPad into the unit is a mere formality, the real magic happens when you unchain it.

The real guts of the machine is in Mackie’s Master Fader software, downloadable from the Apple app store for free. It turns what is essentially a dumb device into a digital mixer, with virtual faders, virtual EQs, virtually everything you need to mix a small live show — wirelessly.

felt he had a better balance than usual, though the vocalists tended towards a ‘more of me’ approach. It got to the extent where all they had in their mix were the three vocal channels and no instruments. Wondering why they were sounding a little pitchy, I took a look and added some keyboard and bass back into the mix to give them a foundation. Overall though, I was surprised to find that everyone was fairly restrained as far as levels were concerned, and favoured turning other instruments down to achieve a balance, which certainly helped the FOH mix. So for a beginner’s usability test, it seemed to be a win.

EFFECT OF PROCESSING

Back onboard, each channel has a four-band EQ, with switchable bell or shelf functions in the low and high bands, with ±15dB of boost or cut. There’s also a 12dB/octave high pass filter that can cut off up to 700Hz. The compressor

“ ”

DOWN THE WIRELESS ROUTE

There is one caveat with going wireless though — it’s BYO router. While the DL1608 has an ethernet port on the rear, it doesn’t serve as a wireless router by itself. Nonetheless, setting up a wireless network was pretty painless, and as long as you light them up in the right sequence — router first, DL1608 second — all should be fine. The range of the iPad was pretty impressive, I couldn’t get it to drop out anywhere in an auditorium that can seat 400 on a domestic wireless N router. If you do lose connection, which sometimes happens if you let the iPad lock, a quick reboot of the iPad’s wireless settings usually fixes it. And while you’re trying to rectify the issue the DL1608 just keeps trucking along where you left it. If you really get stuck you can obviously just slide the iPad back into its dock and everything will reconnect in a jiff.

If you have multiple iPads running (up to 10), you can lock them out of your main mix via the Settings page. You can limit access to one or all of your outputs, input or output DSP, muting, soloing, channel IDs, presets and snapshots.

And if you’ve got a particularly fiddly musician, you can assign a four-digit lock code to prevent them unlocking any settings. So by leaving each musician’s relevant aux and output DSP open they can adjust their own levels, and tweak the response of their wedge or IEM without messing anything else up.

Potentially this could be a great alternative to some of the established personal monitoring systems, so I decided to try it out mixing a local young band and see how they got on with the new technology.

For the test I patched in the DL1608 and let them have a play on multiple iPads, with mixed results. While one technically-minded youngster (the bass player, would you believe?) had a ball and quickly had his own foldback balanced, the vocalists struggled a little. The bass player enjoyed the ability to hear more of himself, and

The real magic happens when you unchain it

and gate have the same controls and GUI you would find on any standard DAW compressor, and at the top of the display is a readout of the adjustments you’re making, so you can set parameters with precision.

The DL1608 is also furnished with a stereo reverb and delay. The effects have sends on each channel as well as faders dedicated to the returns that are adjustable for each of the six auxes as well as the main outs if you only want a wet mix in FOH. there are a bunch of really usable presets for each, with the tape delays performing very musically. Though I found the longer reverb tails to be a little artificial, and when there was too much of a build up of material, the delay also struggled. It seemed more to do with the limitations of the DSP processing than the algorithms themselves though.

We’re pretty spoilt for choice in the DAW environment these days, and it’s easy to look over the fact that not too long ago we all would have gone ga-ga over a budget-friendly live console with EQ and dynamics on each channel, as well as two onboard effects units. The DL1608 definitely packs a lot of punch into a small format.

TOUCH & FEEL

Overall the touch side of things is well implemented. Swiping never really gets you into trouble because the canvas is quite large, and once you select the EQ panel, you can either swipe up for dynamics, down for effects, or either side for the next channel.

While you have to recall a default preset to flatten the graphic EQs, which are across all the outputs, you can double tap any of the 31 bands as a quick way to zero them. And the Draw function lets you sculpt in broad EQ strokes with ease. Though you’d want to be wary of accidentally grabbing a resonant area and boosting it 12dB. The screen only shows up to eight channels at a time, and you can’t define a ‘sticky’ channel to remain present at all times, which is the common downfall of digital mixers. So if you want a finger on your vocal, you’ll have to find it.

CHOOSE YOUR POISON

There are some interesting trade-offs across the board; for instance, there are no set stereo channels and you can’t gang two channels as a stereo pair, it means that adjusting EQ or levels on a stereo keyboard or DJ setup for instance would require changing each channel’s setting individually. On the other hand, Mackie has incorporated a snapshot feature that lets you save 20 snapshots in each of the 19 customisable ‘shows’. So while you lose things that are bog standard on the average Mackie analogue mixer, you gain powerful features you never would have known you needed 10 years ago.

The Master Fader app also has a dedicated stereo channel for playback from within the iPad. It’s great to be able to run audio straight out of iTunes, Dropbox, or the like, and have it appear within Master Fader. One thing to watch out for though is the lack of a gain control on that particular channel, combined with the fact that it solos exclusively PFL. So if you want to solo and preview that mastered track playing in iTunes, you’ll want to dip your headphone level a bit or risk losing your ears for a while.

There is a Mackie DL1608 forum dedicated to feature requests, where the channel linking/ grouping feature (which also asks for DCAs or something similar) was first requested in July 2012. It’s amassed over 700 votes since, ranking second in the ‘charts’, and is still without a resolution or mention of an impending one.

One area where Mackie has been listening though is in the development of an iPhone, iPod Touch app, which will bring some of the iPad app features to more people on stage, however, it wasn’t available at the time of print. Unfortunately, one oversight that looks permanent is that the DL1608 doesn’t appear to be a class compliant USB device, so you can’t use it to record 16 channels onto your iPad. Otherwise it would have been a real killer.

All in all, it’s a handy device that multiplies in usability the more iDevices you have hooked up. While virtual faders may not replace the real thing on the big stage yet, you only have to look at DAWs to see the writing on the tablet for smaller installations, and the millions of gigging musicians.

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REVIEW

HERITAGE AUDIO PREAMP AND COMPRESSOR MODULES Heritage Audio has trodden the path of Neve recreation with careful footsteps, then taken a few custom liberties to mash-up some modules of its own. Sacrilege or progress?

Review: Michael Carpenter

Neve. It’s just a word, but among audio engineering types across the world it means so much. Our creative minds recall a generation of classic hits, while we look at our Neve-less racks and somehow perceive ourselves as ‘less worthy’.

We wonder if these iconic pieces of audio magic hold the secret — the key to us understanding something that will raise our work to a higher plane. But the rarified air of the Neve owner hasn’t been an easily affordable path for the semi pro, or even the pro user. In the meantime, audio catalogues and forums are littered with discussions about bonafide ‘Neve clones’, and how you can truly experience this magic for only a fraction of what either a new or classic Neve module can be fetched for. Unfortunately, magic isn’t easy to manufacture, and the search through these various clones continues to reveal mixed results.

NEED TO KNOW

There’s a new player having a run at this clone market, and they’re serious. Heritage Audio, based in Spain, has entered the market with an incredibly simple, yet well thought out concept. It

PRICE Modules from around $2200+GST Frames from around $1400 CONTACT Soundtown: (08) 9227 5371 or sales@soundtown.com.au AT 84

appears to be twofold. Firstly; make recreations of the original units as closely as possible to how they were originally made, with as many of the original parts as can be sourced, and the same build quality and aesthetic, resulting in a product which should operate in an authentic way. And secondly; to take the knowledge behind these designs and reimagine hybrids and newly formatted versions of some of the iconic components from Neve history.

Both of these concepts have been attempted before with a variety of success, so when first presented with some review units, and as I started my research, I learned a lot about how serious Heritage Audio are about making their brand the predominant name in Neve recreations.

STRETCHING ON THE RACK

The first thing to really strike me in my research was that Heritage Audio were uncompromisingly respectful of the need for all modules to maintain the integrity of their internal design. This isn’t a stretch for the classic 80 series module form — regularly seen with modules re-racked in new

PROS Great sounding replicas of the original Neves

CONS Still a substantial investment

That incredibly effective 1073 EQ gets more control

Compressor not immediately intuitive

Well thought out design mash-ups of different units Realistically priced

Racked console preamps means metering is left out

custom enclosures, as well as in the classic 80 series console form. This was a great concept, and smart marketing, as it means that these modules can slot easily into repair situations for existing Neve consoles, or act as potential upgrades — more on that later. But the real revelation was the 500 series module. People have been trying to cram the Neve mojo into a 500 series frame for ages, with the universal consensus being, while good and certainly usable, they are missing something. Heritage Audio’s 500 series modules span three whole slots in a frame. It’s a serious commitment to one preamp, but it’s the only way Heritage could fit the necessary internal components without compromise. As well as being a convincing stamp of integrity, it also opened up the viability of these modules to those sold on, or already using the 500 series ‘lunchbox’ style and size. Clever thinking Heritage.

For this review however, I was sent a lovely 80 series, Frame 8, complete with a hefty power supply, ‘fader’ knobs, phantom power, and rear

SUMMARY The sound and feel of the legendary name in as authentically designed and constructed packages as one can achieve today. The modules are priced effectively for those ready to make a serious investment in their audio collection, but the real kicker are the ‘improvements’ and hybrids made from the original designs.

patching. I was sent two of the 1073 modules, one of the 8173 modules and one of the 2264E compressor modules. They were simple to install in the rack and get to work on.

CALLING NUMBERS 1073, 6673 & 8173

Numbers. As a novice, I was always mesmerised by these numbers. Experienced engineers uttered these and many other numbers with such authority — like the language only working in the field could teach you. As we learn our craft, every once in a while — once our ears and brains have become discerning enough — we unlock the secrets of these numbers, like a sonic rite of passage. And for years the 1073 has been hanging over my head. When I first used one, I felt I got an insight into this magic. Subsequently, using a few clones confused me, as they felt good — great even. But not amazing. So I was particularly keen to compare and contrast both the preamp and EQ sections of the Heritage Audio 1073. Over a period of a few weeks, I tested these modules on a wide variety of source material. It universally felt and sounded great on everything from kick drum, snare and acoustic guitar, through to DI’d electric bass, piano and lead vocals. While initially running blind with no VU meter (which I’ve become used to), I soon found it easy to find the gain’s sweet spot. On the snare — once the gain was set — I was reminded of how powerful the 1073 EQ is. It was easy to dial in or out exactly what I needed to remove some boxy low mids, add some snap to the high mids and some air to the tops. And it felt like I was applying significantly less of each — powerful stuff. I had similar results on all subsequent trials. The sound is big and full, but somehow leaner, particularly around the low mids, than anything they were compared to. Even with the EQ bypassed, the sound of the preamp was lovely and open, gutsy and flattering. As you pushed the gain it got as muscular as you would hope, whilst still sounding full and even. It was an appealing and exciting sound that lived up to the legend.

The 8173 module is a new hybrid conceived by the Heritage team. According to them the original 1081 “became the most flexible equaliser ever in a mixing console.” But it was generally considered a poor cousin to the 1073 because of the Class AB output stage. This module is the best of both worlds — the 1073 preamp and high and low shelving, with the 1081’s dual band midrange EQ. It also adds three high shelving frequencies, introducing even more flexibility. In practice, this did become my favourite module for overdubs, mainly because the EQ was so good. On a mono kit mic it was easy to enhance the low-end weight and midrange detail of the kit. As with the 1081’s design, the 8173 still has a second mid-band left to make a cut at any nasty spots along the frequency spectrum. I loved this on acoustic guitars too, and found it easy to get rid of a variety of boxy frequencies in different guitars while adding the right amount of sparkle depending on your production aesthetic. And the

A GOOD HERITAGE Despite it being the very busy Christmas period — when I’m sure Peter Rodriguez, head engineer at Heritage, would rather tuck into a turkey than some interview questions — he was gracious enough to answer a few about the Heritage Audio designs.

AT: How close to the originals are these units in your eyes?

Peter Rodriguez: It’s been a meticulous five-year research period needed. All the original suppliers have been sourced (when still alive!) or very near equivalents have been used. This means original transformers from St Ives Carnhill [though it’s hotly debated which Neve modules Carnhill originally made transformers for — Ed], switches, transistors, even original wire supplier (Canford) in the UK. All our metalwork is made in the UK using old British standards, and PCBs are made as they were made 40 years ago. There has been no ‘money’ decision when sourcing the parts.

AT: Why did you invest the time and effort to bring your modules to market?

preamp acted just as the 1073 above — open, lean and gutsy, depending on how it was pushed.

Though we didn’t receive one for review, the same concept applies for the 6673 module, which combines the 1073 preamp and EQ with an extra mid band as found in the iconic yet somewhat mythical 1066 module. If that’s not enough, the 1073 mid band frequency has been expanded to have three extra frequency choices, further widening its versatility.

MAKING UP GAINS IN A 2264

This module is based on the original 2264A Compressor/Limiter, but with “shorter recovery times and more precise control.” It is also designed with a Class A amplifier, as opposed to the AB of the original, making it an ‘enhanced’ 2264. It contains both a compressor and limiter circuit, all packed into a design that, while a little fiddly to adjust initially, proved itself to be extremely effective and versatile. For those of us used to the simplified operation of some of the more famous compressors, the 2264E will take a little getting used to. However, it didn’t take too long to get used to the range of recovery time options on both the compressor and limiter. It sounded beautifully musical on acoustic guitars, providing plenty of punch and oomph to some quite lumpy performances. On bass it coloured the instruments favourably and levelled out the signal effectively. Pushed hard on lead vocals, it really shone, sitting a particularly dynamic vocalist into the track well. The vocalist commented that it felt, “great to sing into.” But I had the most fun sculpting the sound of our ‘fun mic’ on the drums, which in this case was a Shure 55 ‘Elvis Mic’ in front of the snare side of the kit, employing both the compressor and limiter to the signal. I found it really easy to get the track pumping and grinding with the groove of the performance, and the limiter was extremely effective in stylising the grit

PR: Our modules bring back the legendary sound and feel to the contemporary pro and semipro studio of the 21st century. I myself have been engineering and producing major label work for over 15 years. The improvements we’ve made to the classics are exactly my ‘wish list’. A Class A 1081, a 4-band 1073 with the wonderful mid band of the 1066, a class A 2264 — I’ve always dreamed about having those at hand!

AT: Will you be offering any other modules in this 500-series, three-unit wide format?

PR: Yes, we will be expanding our 500 series.

That’s what the semi-pro/hobbyist market is asking for. Also, we will be offering 19-inch standalone equivalents of our best selling modules. And, why not a console?

AT: Who would Heritage Audio consider to be their target market?

PR: Well… MAP of our 1073 is $2200. Keeping in mind a serviced vintage 1073 is $4000-4500, that’s probably half! We’ve sold 1073/500 to ‘bedroom musicians’ and full featured Frames to big facilities worldwide. We have a wide market, not as wide as others but definitely wide.

applied. It was a truly beautiful, versatile tool in this situation, and after the initial learning curve, became simple to operate.

GETTING THE REAL DEAL

It was a great experience to have these units in my studio for the time I did, and I was sad to see them go. But did it make me consider what would be a major investment in equipment for our studio?

Well, Heritage Audio is trying hard to make the transition as cost effective and simple as possible.

While the modules are a bit cheaper than the ‘real deal’ or some of the other more celebrated copies, they’re still a big investment — so Heritage has been clever in offering the 500 and 80 series frames and module sizes, as well as offering the dual rack space options (their Rack 2 frame). So if you did want to dip your toe in, you could stuff a pre and a compressor into the Rack 2 and have a pretty formidable, relatively portable channel strip. Or for those looking more long term, you can dive into the beautifully made Frame 8, and collect modules as you go.

I’m not sure I really have any criticisms that are valid. I guess if I was to build up a Frame 8, I’d probably integrate some switchable VU meters, as getting your head around the gain structure of the units was a little tricky. And the compressor wasn’t as immediately intuitive as some would be used to. But these are small quibbles, more than compensated by the great direct communication I had with Peter Rodriguez, the company’s head engineer (see interview above) and the local distributor, Soundtown. Plus the company has plans to further expand their line, further enhancing the traditional Neve-esque product line into new and exciting territory. It’s a very exciting range of gear, and one that I’m looking forward to investigating and investing in further.

AT 85

REVIEW

RAW OR DAW The front panel USB slot is for plugging in flash drives or portable hard drives for recording to, while the firewire and a USB connection on the rear enables the ICE-16 to act as a line level audio interface for your DAW of choice.

SYNCING ICE

UNBALANCED INS

The Sync In and Out, on a mini DIN 8-pin cable, is expected to come online with a firmware update in February. It will carry transport control data and also word clock sync, so wav files in each recording are lined up and synchronised between multiple ICEs.

The 16 unbalanced line level inputs are on TS sockets, along with 16 unbalanced outputs on RCAs. This basic set of I/O is perfect for pairing the unit with the direct outputs of a mixing console, which is the device’s primary function.

ALLEN & HEATH ICE

16-CHANNEL RECORDER & INTERFACE In the face of live recording, where the slip of a finger can ruin an entire recording, Allen & Heath’s ICE 16 recorder is cold as ice, and just the right price.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Matthew Dever

PRICE $1595

PROS Well built, well priced

CONS Unbalanced inputs

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

Couldn’t be easier to use

Many USB flash drives won’t be up to task

AT 86

Simple but useful metering Built-in monitoring

Can’t record less than 16 channels to save disc space

SUMMARY The ICE 16 is a no frills 16-channel workhorse for live recording from a console’s direct outs. Faultless in testing, and priced so most people can look past the lack of balanced I/O. With an impending sync option you’ll be able to gang multiple units and turn a workhorse into a powerhouse.

For many years, my portable multi-tracks have really pulled their weight; relentlessly recording hours upon hours of audio in all kinds of adverse environments, all without skipping a beat. I had never thought of replacing them until a couple of months ago when I saw an ad for the ICE-16; a sleek 1RU 16-track recorder with its own monitoring system. When I saw the price, I was even more interested!

The ICE-16 is dead simple; it records 16 line inputs to a USB stick, and not a whole lot more (or less for that matter). The simplicity of the device allows for quick setup and operation, it is quite literally a case of plugging it in and pushing record. The unit feels built to last, everything is solid and there is enough weight to instil confidence in the build, but not enough to be cumbersome.

UNBALANCED I/O

Around the back you will find the all-important 16 line level inputs on unbalanced TS sockets, along with 16 unbalanced outputs on RCAs. This basic set of I/O is perfect for pairing the unit with the direct outputs of a mixing console, which is the device’s primary function. While the connections are unbalanced, it’s been designed that way to keep the costs down and work in close proximity to the source. In testing, it was never an issue. In addition to the analogue audio I/O, you will find a firewire and a USB connection that enables the ICE-16 to act as a line level audio interface for your DAW of choice.

The last connection around the back is a Sync In and Out, which will eventually allow multiple units to record together in standalone mode; unfortunately this feature was not fully implemented at the time of testing, and is expected to come online with a firmware update in February. It’s connected via a mini DIN 8-pin cable available through electronic component stockists. According to A&H, “the sync connection will carry transport control data and also word clock sync, so wav files in each recording are lined up and synchronised. You can’t sync the unit from an external word clock using this connector, it’s just for linking multiple ICE’s together.” Assuming this feature functions as intended, it will become a powerful modular recording system allowing owners of multiple units to build racks depending on the number of channels needed for each job.

The front panel contains a USB slot, transport controls, a small display screen, and the monitoring section. Everything here is selfexplanatory, with the exception of a few actions that are controlled by different combinations of the transport buttons, such as sample rate selection, and formatting USB drives, but they are easy to remember.

ALL ARMED

The simplicity of the unit does come at a price though, and in this case the price is gigabytes.

The recorder will record every channel, every time, no matter what. This means that you will get 93 minutes of 16-bit 44.1k wave files onto an

The ICE units in action at a Mia Dyson concert. It’s a lot of channels in a small rack.

8GB flash drive, whether you are using all, one, or none of the 16 inputs. It would be great to be able to arm each track individually, but I can certainly see why Allen & Heath left this option out; it would complicate the unit both physically and operationally, and no doubt drive the price up.

The positive aspect of this ‘all channels armed’ operation is that you can start a recording in no time at all. I was running low on USB space at my test gig, and rather than having the recording stop during a song, I decided to change the drive between songs. I had already formatted my fresh USB drive on the ICE-16, so I was hoping that the changeover would be quick, fingers crossed!

I was able to stop recording, remove the USB, attach the fresh USB, and begin recording again in less than five seconds! I was really impressed by that.

SPEEDY MEDIA

The unit does tend to be picky about the USB storage that you use. The ICE-16 tests the speed of the media, and depending on the results the recorder automatically switches between 16- and 24-bit, or it won’t work at all if the drive is too slow. Not a single one from the handful of flash drives that I already owned worked with the ICE16; the data transfer rates were too low. I had to take a trip to an electronics store to buy the best flash drives they had, and even these would only work at 16-bit. The unit seems to prefer recording to bus powered hard disks, as it happily recorded to all of my portable hard drives at 24-bit/48k.

That’s the sample rate limit when connected to external thumb or hard drives, but it extends to 96k when used as an audio interface.

PEAKS IN PRACTISE

Fortunately I was able to take the test unit into the field while I had it, recording a live show for Mia Dyson that took up all of the 16 channels. In practice, the unit performed flawlessly and was a breeze to get up and running. The monitoring section on the front panel is a nice touch; it allows you to solo one or multiple channels and listen via the on-board headphone amplifier, which had more than enough grunt to drive my hungry 80Ω headphones.

Another detail that I really appreciate is the calibration of the peak light, which tends to light up very slightly below where the signal begins to distort. This seems like a tiny detail, however, on a few occasions recently I have used equipment where the peak light would come on at a level where clipping had already begun; which is simply unusable in a live situation.

CRASH TEST

With a live recorder, I always like to know what happens when the device loses power while recording, so I tested just that. Upon loading the USB from the ‘crashed’ recorder into my computer, everything looked normal; the wav files were all there, and the files had size, however, they were unreadable in all of the software I tried.

This is because the recorder didn’t get a chance to write the file header, which is a necessary part of a wav file. Without the header, they are essentially PCM files, so I changed the file extensions to .pcm and used an application from the Mac App Store called ‘Aiff From PCM’ that was able to salvage the files. Success!

FACE UP

Being able to use the ICE-16 as an audio interface is a handy extra. I tested this with ProTools 10 on my MacBook Pro, and it couldn’t be easier to set up. Simply connect the device with firewire, and select the ICE-16 as the Playback Engine within ProTools, no installation or drivers necessary!

This is a little different with PC, but everything is laid out in the instruction manual, and looks simple enough.

Something that would really get me excited is if the unit could record to the computer and to the USB drive at the same time for an instant backup, but alas this is not possible.

Overall, the ICE-16 is a solid, simple, and capable multi-track recorder aimed directly at the live sound lovers among us. In this price range, the only comparable devices that come to mind are older second hand digital multi-tracks, but none of these are 1RU and they certainly aren’t as savvy with regard to file transfer and computer connectivity. Well done Allen & Heath!

AT 87

REVIEW

WAVES ELEMENT

Rather than producing yet another flavourless kitchen-sink subtractive synth, Waves has actually limited the options in Element to create a real instrument.

Review: Robert Clark

It’s probably fair to say that the release of Waves’ Element synth plug-in has been met with a bit of cynicism in the marketplace. And understandably so: the shelves are flooded with virtual subtractive synths at the moment.

Products such as the LennarDigital’s Sylenth 1, Native Instruments’ Massive, u-he’s Diva and Ace offerings and Arturia’s V Collection, to name just a few, are all out there competing for our attention (well, our dollars), so why would Waves bother? It’s a good question, but I think there is a legitimate answer and I wouldn’t write the Element off straightaway.

THE RATIONALE

NEED TO KNOW

The 20 year-old plug-in empire proudly lists Yoad Nevo (of Air, Goldfrapp and Pet Shop Boys fame)

PRICE $99 CONTACT Sound & Music: (03) 9555 8081 or www.sound-music.com

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PROS WYSIWYG interface promotes quick creativity Automate easily, including the sequencer ‘Virtual Voltage’ analogue simulation has depth

as the developer-in-chief of the Element, which goes a long way in explaining its architecture. The features are clearly designed by a guy who does a lot of producing and knows what counts at the end of the day. This is a soft-synth that brings the most essential components to the foreground, makes them highly responsive, and dispenses with everything else. There aren’t any buried menus, quirky extras or pop-out modules. It’s all right in front of you and if you can’t see it, well it ain’t there.

THE OSCILLATORS

So perhaps it’s no surprise that you only have two oscillators to play with. This may be too few for some, but Nevo probably didn’t want the clutter, or to have to hide more oscillators underneath

CONS Limited choices not for the experimental crowd

a toggle menu like some other virtual synths.

What it may lack in extra oscillators, it makes up in powerful controls. Waves have chosen what to include and where to place them quite carefully it seems. The pulse width modulator is a good example. Not all of its competitors have this option so easily accessible, but when you play with the Element’s PWM dial located directly underneath the waveform options, you realise just how useful it is. It’s so quick and easy to get rich variation in the texture of your square wave tone, which is extremely handy when you’re trying to find the right sound for a lead or bass line. And on that note: sine, frequency and phase modulation are all available to tweak right alongside the oscillators; no need to fiddle around under the hood there either.

SUMMARY Waves’ Element software synth puts the basics at your fingertips, creating a wellthought-out visual path for any audio inspiration. Though it won’t have experimental enthusiasts gagging over its feature-set, it’s a handy production-ready synth.

In terms of its sound, Waves didn’t seek to model this virtual instrument on any legacy hardware. What they have done is use their trademark ‘Virtual Voltage’ technology to simulate the analogue process itself. There are so many variables at play when it comes to comparing the sound of synths — virtual or otherwise — so making comparisons is a bit redundant, but I can say that, in my experience, the quality of tone is impressive in that there is a nice depth, an evenness across the spectrum and a genuinely ‘analoguelike’ responsiveness to manipulation.

EFFECTS AND EQ

Sound-designers of a more experimental bent may baulk at the fact that you can’t choose the colour of your noise (white only) or the waveform of your sub oscillator (triangle only). Similarly, the effects options are just your traditional ones — namely chorus, reverb, distortion and crusher — and they only offer a single, nonnegotiable ‘type’. However, the effects they produce are certainly dynamic and rich. There’s also a delay parameter that offers a choice in rhythm (independently left and/or right), mix and feedback.

The EQ is limited to four bands with a high pass and low pass filter situated underneath. I never felt short-changed by this, though.

The filters in the EQ are so responsive that you really feel like you’re getting an authentic answer to every inquisitive tweak of the dial.

MODULATION

You have eight sends within the Modulation Matrix to play with, where you can route your signal from, or to, any of the four variable LFOs, or anywhere else within the synth. You also have a third, assignable envelope you can insert into your signal chain via the matrix. And that’s the extent of your modulation options — nothing special. Something else you can assign in the matrix, though, is the step arpeggiator/sequencer, which is located in a strip at the bottom of the synth. Again, there is nothing revolutionary or unexpected here, but it’s well laid out and intuitive to use. While it certainly appears basic, every option you do have in the sequencer is there for a good reason and is instantly useful. Take the ‘swing’ paddle below the ‘gate’ and ‘step’ controls for instance. Making it so prominent and accessible means I’m more likely to use it, and as just a small hint of swing can turn a run-of-the-mill riff or bass line into something that feels ‘alive,’ that seems like a smart move — and very useful for someone in the music-writing zone.

DAW INTEGRATION

I would expect the Element to easily and effectively work within my DAW, given Waves’ history/reputation, and I wasn’t disappointed.

MIDI control worked very well. Creating automation envelopes in my Logic session for any of the Element’s parameters, including each of the 16 steps in the sequencer, was surprisingly easy. They’re all listed in a drop-down menu in automation mode, which is supposed to be the case for many plug-ins but really isn’t. So that impressed me. Right clicking on any of the dials or buttons within the Element interface also gives you the option to MIDI ‘learn’ so you can assign them to your own controllers, and this worked without a glitch as well.

THE VERDICT

So why did Waves bother? I think because they could make a quality product that does actually stand out — believe it or not. Its niche is that it’s an instrument that does a few things really, really well. So when you’re creating you can be efficient and effective with your tweaks instead of getting bogged down and losing your flow.

Of course, if you’re a passionate synth programmer who loves to innovate and experiment, I wouldn’t go for the Element; you’ll be frustrated with the lack of options. But for those who like to get in the zone of creating music without fiddling too much, or if you’re new to subtractive synthesis and want somewhere to start, I’d certainly take a look at it.

AT 89

REVIEW Apogee. The company’s been doing a darn good job for a bloody long time.

Since 1985 in fact. Apogee Electronics was kicked off by Australia’s own Bruce Jackson (R.I.P.), Christof Heidelberger, and the then Soundcraft USA president, Betty Bennett.

The company made its name with its anti aliasing filters which put the company streets ahead of the competition in the field of digital audio conversion. At the time, digital audio was still in its infancy, and Apogee came to the rescue, capturing audio digitally without the harsh and brittle aspects encountered in competing systems. In the early 1990s I recall heading to a nearby studio to use the AD-1000 converters (20-bit) to transfer some jazz recordings from 1/4-inch tape to DAT for mastering and compiling to CD. My lowly Digidesign converters simply weren’t up to the task, but the Apogees tackled the job with aplomb, capturing all that magnetic tape goodness and corralling it onto such a despicable medium as 16-bit digital audio tape. Apogee gear has been executing fabulous conversion tricks such as this for 28 years now. Like I was saying; not a bad effort.

APOGEE QUARTET AUDIO INTERFACE

Apogee raises the bar with an extremely competent audio interface not only for your Mac, but for your iThing too!

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Brad Watts

PRICE $1449 incl GST CONTACT Sound Distribution: (02) 8007 3327 or info@sounddistribution. com.au

AT 90

PROS Works with iOS Works with OS X Superfluous sound.

CONS OLEDs are a bit dim.

No digital output. iOS cable not supplied.

In more recent years, the company has filtered its technology (see what I did there?) to both professional conversion equipment and audio gear aimed at the prosumer/ enthusiast gang — in other words; the gear has become cheaper (and better). Along the way we’ve seen the professional Symphony system become a mainstay for many studios and composers, and ‘bedroom’ systems such as the Apogee Ensemble become revered interface choices. Apogee knows many would appreciate its brand of audio digitalisation sitting in their racks, and came to the party with affordable units such as the Apogee One and Duet — both aimed at the hobbyist, yet still offering pristine audio capture and reproduction. Joining this happy throng, and slightly upmarket from the aforementioned ‘hobbyist’ audio interfaces, is the Apogee Quartet. But enough of the background, let’s see where the Apogee Quartet fits into the recording scheme.

APOGEE OF YOUR ‘i’

Sporting the same aesthetic witnessed with the Ensemble, Duet 2, and One, the Apogee Quartet is designed to look fabulous sitting beside your Apple computer, be it MacBook, iMac, or Mac Pro (and iPad for that matter — but I’ll get to this news shortly). This may seem a little odd at first, until you realise

SUMMARY Apogee’s Quartet adds more inputs to its desktop interface line, and opens its doors to the entire Apple family. It looks and sounds like the rest of the Apogee family — great — and gives you portability without enduring breakout cables.

Apogee designs audio interfaces strictly for the Apple computer market — to run Apogee gear you need an Apple computer. It’s as simple as that. So what’s the iPad news I speak of? Well, in the spirit of innovation Apogee is known for, the Quartet is its first professional style audio interface to function in cahoots with your iPad, or indeed, iPhone. It’s even been given the MFI tick of approval (Made For i-Stuff), which means, unlike most other interfaces, it will also charge your iOS device, and enable software control of the hardware via the Apogee Maestro app.

So far the Quartet will run with iOS applications such as GarageBand, the somewhat incredible Auria, MultiTrack or any Core Audio compliant application. Apparently all that’s required is the iOS DAW application and a Lightning to 30-pin adaptor if you’re using more recent Lightning endowed iOS devices. After a degree of research and head scratching, I realised the cable required was not included with the Quartet I had for review. Unfortunate, as I really wanted to give the unit a try on my iPad mini, and even rushed out to get a 30-pin to Lightning adaptor (paying the extortionate OTC price for it as well I might add). I tried various gender changers and cable adaptor doo-dats, all to no avail. Existing Quartet owners will need to contact their local Apogee distributor for the 30-pin to mini USB ‘iOS cable’, which, I’m told, should be available in about six weeks time — along with the Apogee Maestro app for iOS. That said, compatibility with iOS devices is reasonably broad, and includes all Lighting style models, along with the iPod touch (4th generation), iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPad (3rd generation), iPad 2 and original iPad. All memory configurations get a guernsey.

CONNECT ME UP

Getting back to the Quartet unit, Apogee has continued with its bulletproof build ethic, using a solid steel enclosure with all connectors firmly bolted into the rear panel. These include four combo XLR/jack inputs to the unit’s microphone preamps/line inputs, with a further eight inputs possible via the two ADAT optical inputs — two are provided for SMUX functionality for up to 96k recordings (you can record at up to 192k via the analogue inputs).

There’s also a wordclock output, mini USB 2.0 for connecting to the host machine be that an iOS device or Mac, and a standard USB port for MIDI. Outputs are all analogue, which is a mild disappointment — an S/PDIF or optical output would have been nice. As it stands the only way for audio to escape the Quartet is via the six jack outputs, which can be configured in a few ways; either as a six-channel surround set, as separate feeds to headphone or stage monitoring, or as three sets of outputs to multiple pairs of speakers.

ALUMINIUM FLASHING

Control of the I/O is via the top panel which sports rather flashy OLED displays and a single, large aluminium knob. Above the knob are three buttons for instigating any of the three sets of stereo outputs, and to the left are four buttons for selecting any of the four mic preamps/line inputs. The displays do look very nice, and provide input and output level meters, headphone levels, etc. My only niggle is they are perhaps a little dull — they’re difficult to read under bright lighting. Integration with OS X is positively seamless — of course you’ll need an Intel-based Mac. As for the sound quality there is nothing to complain about at all.

Apogee wrote much of the book on ‘musical’ sounding A/D and D/A conversion and the Quartet upholds this tradition. With A/D conversion offering a dynamic range of 114dB (A-weighted) and D/A providing an extremely healthy 123dB of dynamic range, the Quartet’s vital statistics are certainly worthy of the ‘professional’ tag. In a nutshell, this could be the nerve centre of a very capable recording system when combined with extra ADAT connected I/O, or indeed, piggybacked with an Apogee Duet or One device. Use it with your desktop machine at home, and take it on the road with your iPad or iPhone. With its stunning innovation, and superb recording and reproduction attributes, the Quartet is worthy of your immediate inspection. Well done Apogee.

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AT 91

REVIEW

AFTERTOUCH To the right of the touchscreen further tactile navigation controls include increment/decrement buttons, a data-wheel, numeric keypad and sequencer transport controls. Dedicated buttons appear for Combi/Program/Sequence selection and there’s also a dedicated knob for sequence and arpeggiator tempo. Below the tempo knob is a tap-tempo button for quick ad-hoc sync.

KROME HARDWARE To the rear we find left and right output jacks, MIDI in and out, damper pedal input along with assignable switch and pedal jacks.

SWIPE LEFT To the left of the touchscreen are dedicated buttons for effects, arpeggiator, drum track instigation, media housekeeping (utilising the rear mounted SD card port), and global parameters. Following further to the left are four realtime control potentiometers (also known as knobs). These knobs access three separate modes of operation. In ‘Tone’ mode they alter filter cutoff, resonance, the filter envelope generator time and release. ‘User’ mode lets you assign any parameter you like to each of the four knobs, and in ‘Arp’ mode, the knobs alter arpeggiator gate, velocity, swing, and step length.

KORG KROME WORKSTATION

Korg introduced the planet to the workstation concept and continues to develop the concept. When it comes to workstations, more is definitely more.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Brad Watts

PRICE $1299 (61-note) $1499 (73-note) $1999 (88-note) CONTACT CMI: (03) 9315 2244 or sales@cmi.com.au

AT 92

PROS

CONS

Excellent value

A single sound generation system

All the bread and butter you can eat Light as a feather Staggeringly good piano

No aftertouch

SUMMARY The next generation Korg workstation is worth its weight, considering you get over 100kg of M1 processing power in a 7kg keyboard. It inherits its talents from the Korg Kronos, but light enough to gig with.

I’m surprised there’s still a market for the music workstation. The concept has been kicking around since Korg let loose the M1 way back in 1988 (ahh... what a year that was).

Being part of the computer and DAW demographic I figured the big three synth manufacturers would have moved on also.

However, I’d neglected to consider the swarms of gigging musicians across the globe who require as many sounds as they can get their mitts on, along with sequencing capabilities, crammed into the lightest unit they can carry.

For this demographic the Korg Krome is quite likely to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Sporting trickle-down technology from Korg’s behemoth Kronos workstation, and weighing in at a mere 7.2kg for the semi-weighted 61-note model (the unit I have here for review), 8.2kg for the 73-note model, and 14.7kg for the 88-note unit offering Korg’s Natural Weighted Hammer Action keyboard, the Krome can be easily tucked under your wing while you head to the next wine bar, wedding, birthday or bar mitzvah.

Just for your reference, the 61-note Korg M1 weighed 13.5kg — and offered a paltry 16 notes of polyphony — the Krome will extend to 120 simultaneous notes. To look at this in a slightly different light, you’d need around 100 kilograms of M1 workstations to create the same amount of noise.

Whether you find it relevant or not, it’s interesting to note how far the technology has moved forward over the years; less weight, more notes, and astoundingly more affordable.

Way back in 1988, the M1 would set the aspiring electronic instrumentalist back $3699 in Australia, whereas the 61-note Krome will cost you a mere $1299 — utter peanuts by comparison. The 73- and 88-note models cost $1499 and $1999 respectively.

TOUCH & CONTROL

Fiscal comparisons aside, let’s have a gander at what the Krome has on offer. To start with, Korg has been in the touchscreen game long before the phone manufacturers got in on the act. The Krome features a seven-inch colour touchscreen providing access to the inner workings of the workstation. Altering everything, from program selection through to arpeggiations, and editing of programs and ‘Multis’ (Korg-speak for program combinations spread across the keyboard). It’s clearly laid out and simple to navigate.

On the interconnection side there’s an SD card slot for saving program and sequence data, and a USB port for communication with computers using both the free standalone editing software or editing and playback plug-in. Both allow complete control over the keyboard. The software supplied by Korg functions with Windows XP

and up and OS X 10.5.8 and up. In the case of Apple machines, Korg stipulates an Intel-based Mac and OS X 10.5.8 as a minimum requirement, however, the software also installs and functions perfectly on superseded Power PC-based Macs.

The software quickly synchronises with the data held within the Krome whether via the standalone software or the plug-in. Korg is pretty clever when it comes to instrument plug-ins. The Krome version instigates as an audio instrument and all MIDI communication is via the Krome’s dedicated USB connection. It’s a no-brainer to pull up the plug-in and the Krome behaves as though it were a virtual instrument. My only gripe regarding the software is the size of the onscreen information — it’s incredibly small — on a high resolution screen you may find yourself reaching for a magnifying glass.

“

Way back in 1988, the M1 would set the aspiring electronic instrumentalist back $3699 in Australia, whereas the 61-note Krome will cost you a mere $1299

IVORY PALETTE

”

As for the keyboard, Korg has done a nice job with the ivories. The semi-weighted design has a fair degree of ‘clack’ to it, delivering far more response than your typical ‘synth action’ keyboard. The only downfall is the lack of aftertouch, but this would have added to the cost considerably. What seems odd is why Korg didn’t add aftertouch to the 88-note piano-style keyboard version of the Krome. All that said, the keyboard is incredibly responsive to velocity and responds to the lightest touch.

The Krome’s sound palette is as vast as you could require for a gigging machine, with around 4GB of ROM for storage of waveforms. The highlight of the repertoire is the grand piano. Korg hasn’t pulled any punches here and supplied a grand piano waveform set without the aid of looping and obscure enveloping tricks. Consequently you get the full enchilada with the grand — complete piano notes from beginning to end. This will no

doubt be a major drawcard for the gigging keys player (I’ll avoid the term ‘pianist’).

Along with the 4GB of waveforms is RAM for housing 640 factory sounds and a further 128 locations for users’ creations. There are 288 factory Combi patches, with room for 224 of your own. Alongside are 32 preloaded drumkits with 16 spare memory locations for user defined kits, along with 256 General MIDI 2 sounds and nine General MIDI drumkits. Overall there’s enough slots in there to keep most acts on the road.

As mentioned, the sound palette is enormous, with countless keyboards, organs, clavinets, strings, brass out the wazoo, guitars, basses. The job lot is there at your disposal. If synthesis is your game there are tons of analogue and digital emulations including various retro recreations from Korg machines from the past such as the DW8000, MS2000, Wavestation style patches as well as the venerable M1. When editing your synthesque sounds you can choose from batches of waveforms named after the classics synths they were inspired by. Take for instance MX12, A2600, Pro5, SH, JP and so forth. I just wish the patches were catalogued more accurately into each of the six banks. For example; Bank One for keyboards, Bank Two for stringed instruments, Bank Three for synthetic patches etc.

STRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Of course, the Krome wouldn’t be a workstation without a sequencing system. Here Korg has included enough grunt to corral 210,000 MIDI events within 128 songs utilising up to 16 MIDI tracks. There’s even a cue-list function for 20 cue-lists with 99 steps in each. Combined with the 480ppqn resolution and you’ll find the Krome will handle anything the professional MIDI– ist can throw at it. If that’s not enough room then you could always utilise the SD card for additional sequencing extravaganzas.

Continuing along the ‘all singing and dancing’ theme, the Krome includes five stereo insert effects, two master effects, and a global effect.

With 193 effect styles and EQ for each of the 16 sequencer tracks you’ll have no trouble keeping the front of house full, and the pub even fuller.

So who’s the Krome for? I can’t see the Krome being a synth you’d turn to for that breakaway sound in your next electronica excursion. It’s obviously aimed at the gigging guy. The piano man with a stack of MIDI files or the piano player looking for a great piano sound that doesn’t weigh in like a Wurly. Even studios looking for a range of meat and potatoes sounds for filling in the gaps when needs require. The bottom line here is the Krome is exceedingly great value. The sounds are great, it’s a true workhorse, and it won’t send your credit card scurrying. Another winner from Korg.

AT 93

REVIEW

MIKTEK CV4 TUBE MICROPHONE

Miktek’s multi-national CV4 tube condenser has arrived in Australia, and it’s got a nice zing to it.

Review: Greg Walker

The large diaphragm tube condenser market is pretty crowded these days so it’s an ambitious company that embarks on this well-trodden road with a new offering. Apart from the asking price, the main points of difference between many of the current crop are in their design (classic or modern), their voicing, versatility and of course their mode of manufacture and country of origin. Miktek has a somewhat unique claim in this last instance, being hand built in Asia from local, US and European components and then tested and packaged in Nashville, Tennessee.

SUPPLY & DEMAND

The CV4 is not a clone of any classic tube microphone but out of the box I liked the cut of its jib. The large silver grille houses the proprietary Miktek MK9 1-inch dual diaphragm capsule and the long matte nickel body is separated from the capsule by a little black rubber collar which lends the mic a stylish, dare I say, clerical air. The classic microphone it most resembles physically is undoubtedly the AKG C12, but unlike that very collectible classic the CV4 offers nine polar patterns from a compact power supply. The high-voltage circuit incorporates an AMI T7 transformer and NOS Telefunken EF800 tube. The CV4 comes in a sweet little cherrywood box within a professional looking flight case along with a serious suspension mount, 7-pin XLR cable, PSU and manual as well as an individual frequency response graph of each mic. So off the bat I was impressed by the hardware and build quality as well as the look of the CV4.

ZING

NEED TO KNOW

Soon, I was away with the CV4 and it got a lot of use on a variety of sources as I beavered away at a TV scoring job. My first impressions of the Miktek sound were favourable. I really liked it on my voice and it did a good job on a bunch of acoustic sources like guitars and percussion.

PRICE $1599 CONTACT Federal Audio: www.federalaudio.com.au

PROS Affordable, stylish full-size tube condenser

CONS Bright voicing won’t suit some other sources

Multiple polar patterns

No pad or rumble filter

Relatively bright voicing good on many sources including vocals

Length of cable from PSU to mic isn’t as generous as some

Nicely packaged with good accessories

AT 94

It struck me as by no means a dull mic, lending a detailed zinginess to most sounds it captured.

Looking at the frequency response chart backed up what I was hearing, with a gentle rise showing between 1kHz and 4kHz followed by a slight dip around the sibilant 6-7kHz frequencies before rising again strongly around the 10kHz region.

I should qualify this though by saying that the CV4’s top end is quite sweet and much more useful than the brittle top end of some cheaper condensers I have tried.

Further down the scale the mic is pretty flat and has a tight, accurate midrange and bottom end. I found the Miktek a little scratchy on violin and cello but it really hit the sweet spot with electric guitars where I got beautiful crisp realisations of my Fender amps with great tonal balance and plenty of chime. Another great application for this mic is as a drum overhead.

I found a number of really good positions for it with the polar pattern tuned to a wider cardioid, which captured nice articulation across the kit while also gathering up some room ambience.

Coming back to vocals, the CV4 did a great job capturing a female vocalist — again plenty of airy highs without anything too nasty, and good body in the midrange.

SILVER SURFER

I think the Miktek CV4 is a mic that will divide opinion. High-end purists will shake their heads at the multi-national approach to microphone manufacture and the pronounced upper frequency response. The counter argument to this, of course, is that the CV4 doesn’t cost four grand and require velvet gloves to handle.

While the mic is bright it does sound good and, truth be told, I’ve seen those same high end purists many a time adding bucketloads of top end EQ to the sound of their expensive vintage mics. While it’s good to have dark mics in your cupboard, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the odd brighter one too, and for the money I reckon the Miktek CV4 is well worth checking out for yourself. I certainly missed it when it left the studio and I particularly enjoyed singing through it. If you’re in the market for a mid-priced tube condenser that covers quite a few bases there’s a new face in the crowd and your decision just got that little bit harder.

SUMMARY The CV4 is a well-presented hybrid style tube LDC that has a sweet and forward top end. It is particularly suited to vocal, guitar and drum applications where its presence and tube character do their best work.

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 95

REVIEW With their new F-series, Adam has added yet another layer to their pro-audio pile, and in doing so has given the inquisitive yet fiscally prudent musical minds of today one more in a long list of entry-level options. If this all seems a little familiar, it’s probably because it has been only two years since Adam brought ‘the more affordable’ AX series to market.

Where the AX series was intended for, and has indeed become a staple of, the studio, The F-series is better suited to control bedrooms, mobile installs, edit bays or just next to the computer or TV for gaming. As a result, each F model comes in at only 60% the price of its corresponding AX antecedent.

The active monitor range comprises the F5, F7 and SubF — there’ll be no prizes for cracking this code. Unfortunately, for this review I had to do without the 8-inch, 110W PWM amplified sub. A real shame, as I’m sure for many the combination of nearfield and subwoofer would deliver the greatest bang for your buck. Adam certainly recommends it “wherever deeper and more powerful bass response is required.”

The F5 features a 5-inch, 25W mid driver with carbon fibre/paper cone and a 25mm voice coil while, unsurprisingly, the F7 features a 7-inch, 60W driver with 37mm voice coil. Both midwoofers have the general appearance of space age upholstery, as if some senile squillionaire had insisted on installing a chesterfield sofa in the back seat of his Bugatti Veyron.

ADAM’S RIBBON

ADAM F-SERIES ACTIVE NEARFIELD MONITORS When you’re finding your feet in an over-crowded class of entry-level monitors, there’s nothing worse than having to live up to the A-grade reputation of an older sibling. For Adam’s latest offspring, early reports are in! So does F stand for Fabulous or Fail?

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Andrew Bencina

PRICE F5 - $799(pair) F7 - $1099(pair) SubF - $XX (not reviewed)

PROS The Adam signature at yet another more affordable price point

CONTACT Federal Audio www.federalaudio.com.au

ART tweeter exposes the top end

Ample low-end somewhat compromises balance and consistency

Sensible power conservation mode

Lacks the depth and definition of richer rivals

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CONS Rear controls difficult to calibrate between pairs

The highs are reproduced in both models by a newly designed revision of the X-ART tweeter, designated simply the ART (Accelerating Ribbon Technology). For those of you who’ve been living in a cave in Tora Bora, the ribbon tweeter may as well be Adam’s fingerprint; appearing in all of its designs. The tweeter employs a pleated ribbon which pushes the air in and out of its folds as the spaces between them expand and contract in response to the audio signal. Sort of like an accordion. According to Adam, this design produces flawless transient reproduction. The F-series tweeter has only 3/4 the surface area of the AX design and slightly less efficiency but we’re assured performance has been maintained.

The drivers are bi-amped by a pair of continuous output Class AB power amps optimised for their associated drivers.

The magnetically-shielded cabinets employ a front ported design, with a flattened bell-shaped vent, the approximate width of the mid-driver.

Although not as marked as the AX models, the edges of the baffle are bevelled to reduce edge diffraction. While the F5 is slightly larger that the A5X, the F7 is significantly smaller than its

SUMMARY It’s always a challenge to balance performance against price. Adam’s F-series is definitely positioned to attract beginners, but they’re also a fine alternative for B-rooms, edit suites, and surround installations. An affordable iteration of their trademark ribbon tweeter unveils the upper frequencies but a broader balance feels somewhat compromised by the modern propensity for fat bottom. Rear panel options are ample yet limited due to some economical choices and a variance in mid-range voicing between the F5 and F7 makes the choice between them as much about your musical focus as the available space or budget. A finding of fair for some fresh frugal fixtures.

counterpart. At 6.8 and 9kg respectively they’re also solid without feeling heavy. On the rear panels both models share an identical layout.

A fused IEC input to the switch-mode power supply, with voltage selector, power switch, TRS/ XLR combo connector for balanced audio input and RCA for unbalanced. Both inputs have the same sensitivity but the RCA will override the combo input when connected. A volume pot (-∞ to +6dB, with a detent at 0dB) and smaller centre-detented trim pots are provided for High (5kHz, ±6dB @20kHz) and Low (300Hz, ±6dB @100Hz) shelving filters while a switchable 80Hz high-pass filter is included; primarily for use when pairing with the SubF. Handily, two metric M6 (6mm) mounting threads have been provided for stand or wall mounting. Both models feature signal sensing circuitry and a standby power-saving mode which activates approximately 20 minutes after the last signal has been detected. On restart they take a few seconds to switch back on so don’t keep turning up that master fader. Built-in thermal protection will also mute the outputs if the back panel temperatures exceed unsafe limits. While they certainly get warm and feature no external heat sink, I tested both sets throughout most of Melbourne’s recent scorchers, in a studio sans air-con, and never had any issues.

AURAL EXAM

After a period of run in, I was initially struck by the top-end of both the F5 and F7. Switching between my usual setup (Quested VS2108, Yamaha NS10M/Crown DC300A, Avantone MixCube/Crown D150A) and the Adams felt like I’d engaged a boosted high frequency shelf.

Not in a harsh, edgy way and not like pulling a blanket off the speakers but somewhere in between. This was clearly my first experience of the ART of Adam. It actually took me a few days to adjust. What at first felt extreme settled to feel detailed and revealing. Vocal sibilance felt as if it was being highlighted and by the end of the test period I was valuing their representation of the breathy detail on instruments like soprano saxophone. Despite this, I wouldn’t necessarily describe them as being open sounding. They had detail, but mixes with real depth sounded flat by comparison with the far more expensive Questeds and the further you tried to hear into the spaces the blurrier things became. Frankly, at their price point this is hardly surprising.

Both the F5 and F7 also suffered from a modern nearfield condition that seems to plague many designs and has been noted in these pages by a number of reviewers. While even the 5-inch model produced remarkably deep low end content with reasonable accuracy the overall effect was to destabilise the picture, disconnecting the bottom from the mid-range. I far preferred both with their 80Hz HPF engaged, I only wished a second position had been included at 50 or 45Hz. Experiments in different environments and with different mounting positions using a 48dB/octave filter cutting the source below 45Hz all showed significant improvements.

The F5 and F7 do exhibit some key differences. While the F7 is obviously capable of greater bass extension and therefore just sounds bigger, it was also able to better cope with the demands of larger and less dynamic mixes. In many ways I preferred the performance of the F5 on sparse acoustic material but as layers were added things quickly became less defined.

If you’re making heavy rock or banging hip hop you’ll likely feel the F7 to be your only choice. The two however differ in their upper midrange voicing and I found myself vacillating in my preference depending on the source material. Neither however gave me the midrange articulation I was chasing when listening to the electric guitars on something like Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

The rear panel controls do allow for some tailoring to your own environment and preferences but in general I was comfortable with these settings left flat. I would have preferred a more restrained ±3dB on all filters using calibrated switches rather than the undetented pots to ensure that matched settings could be ensured between multiple units. The same went for the volume pots which I left at their notched mid point.

When you consider what some of us (by which of course I mean me) have spent on real-world reference monitors over the years (Yamaha NS-10M, Auratone etc), the current crop of entry-level active monitors are exceptionally good value. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that with value does come compromise. If required, I could work happily with a pair of the F7s, even with their shortcomings; but with a $1099 price tag only $150 below that of the A5X, I’d be inclined to either haggle or spend that little bit extra.

Especially when you factor in the additional three years of warranty (five years in total) offered with the AX series. On the other hand, the F5 more closely fits the prosumer brief and I can definitely see it being a viable solution to any number of installation requirements. F may only stand for fair, but for most that will be perfectly fine!

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LAST WORD with

DAVE SMITH

I had a background in music and technology. I played in bands at college and I had a degree at UC Berkeley, in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Synthesizers started showing up in music stores around that time and I bought a MiniMoog in 1972.

Whether it’s helming his own company or designing for others, Dave Smith is responsible for some of the most legendary synths ever made. Dave Smith championed the launch of MIDI 30 years ago — for which he recently was awarded a Grammy. Now he’s enjoying a renaissance with his boutique range of Dave Smith Instruments, with the likes of the Tempest drum machine and Prophet 12 super-synth.

Pictured is a bearded Dave Smith at Winter NAMM 1983 belting out a chord on the Roland Jupiter 6 for the launch of MIDI.

I built accessories for the MiniMoog because I couldn’t afford the official accessories. I started selling some of them, which led to starting my own company, Sequential Circuits, in 1974.

At NAMM 1983 we introduced MIDI. There wasn’t any grand ceremony or announcement. The guys from Roland carried a Jupiter 6 over to our stand; we plugged in some MIDI leads, sparked them up and it worked. A few people were watching. That was the world launch of MIDI. Low key, you might say.

Sequential Circuits was just something I did at night and the weekends. My day job was working with microprocessors in what was to become Silicon Valley. Using a microprocessor in a synth and a new set of integrated circuits for the synth functions — an oscillator, a filter, etc — I realised I could make what turned out to be the Prophet 5, ie. a fully programmable, polyphonic instrument. That was a pretty big leap at the time.

MIDI has stuck as a protocol because initially we had a good chunk of the market. We figured that customers of the other synth manufacturers would drag them onto the playing field. Which they did. Within three years there was 100% participation. Also, we kept MIDI simple; it was free — you didn’t have to pay for a license; and the specs were simple enough that anyone could implement it.

In 1977 I quit my job to make the Prophet 5 happen.

Yamaha came in and bought Sequential Circuits in 1987. They had the company for about a year; didn’t know what to do with it and closed it down.

The first chips I used were from Solid State Music, which is no longer around. But they had issues with reliability and supply.

After about 1000 units I changed the design to use the Curtis parts. So the majority of the Prophets used the Curtis chip.

Some people talk about the Curtis chip with hushed tones. It’s worth remembering that back then everyone had roughly the same design aims — a four-pole filter, for example — and the hardware imposed a character. The sound just came out that way.

Previously, it was almost impossible to take analogue synths on the road because they were always out of tune. One of the Prophet 5 innovations: it was the first synth to have a computer-controlled calibration procedure. I won’t say the Prophet’s tuning was perfect — the tuning drifted as it got hot — but at least it could be done.

It was completely crazy. When we announced the Prophet 5 we only had a few people in the company, and demand was overwhelming from the very start. It took us a couple of years to work through the backlog. And a lot of the people who initially wanted it were famous musicians, who would phone, yelling at us ’cos they couldn’t get one immediately: “Do you know who I am?!

You really need to get me one immediately!” “Well, yeah, but we can’t. We’re a small company and we’re trying to build them as fast as we can.” Crazy, stressful but fun times.

The Prophet 5 was the first instrument that had a microprocessor in it. In a few years everyone was doing it. When you put a microprocessor into an instrument, it’s fairly easy for it to communicate with other microprocessors. Roland, Yamaha, Oberheim, Korg… we all came to the same realisation. And we also realised that for the industry to grow we would need a common language, so our synthesisers and sequencers could talk to each other.

MIDI wasn’t one person’s idea. The industry was small and we all knew each other. But I got aggressively into it. I delivered a paper at an AES conference to get it on the agenda, and I organised a meeting at NAMM 1981, inviting all the keyboard manufacturers along. They all came, but it became apparent that most of the

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companies probably weren’t going to get involved. But five of us — Roland, Yamaha, Korg, Kawai and Sequential — decided we would make it happen regardless.

When Yamaha took us over I went to Japan and gave them a two-page document of possible new products. One was similar to a Prophet VS but with digital oscillators and two FM oscillators.

I also talked them through the idea of wave sequencing. The Yamaha engineers told me my ideas weren’t possible — they couldn’t be made.

A year or so later Yamaha came out with products that seemed remarkably like what I’d pitched to them — that came as a surprise. They even patented wave sequencing!

By that stage I was heading up ‘Korg R&D’ in San Jose with Sequential people — which is still going, with some of the same people — developing the Wavestation.

In the ’90s I worked on a software synthesiser. By 1997 we’d released Reality, the world’s first pro software synth.

I’d always enjoyed playing my instruments, but I realised I just wasn’t playing Reality. You needed one hand on a mouse, fiddling with a drop-down menu… I just wasn’t into it. Not long after, I started Dave Smith Instruments.

The main idea was to get back to hardware. I wanted to create unique, usable instruments, using analogue circuitry mixed with digital. I design instruments that people connect with.

Guitarists will not only decide whether they play a Strat or a Les Paul, they’ll decide which Strat, built by who and in which factory and what year. How the instrument feels to them is important. It’s the same with synths. You need to relate to the instrument, and it should be just as playable in 20 years as it is today.

I don’t like to play favourites, but there’s no question the [recently released] Prophet 12 is the best synth I’ve ever designed.

The best part of being an instrument designer is seeing people use your products — hearing them used in famous recordings and seeing them used in concerts. I still get a huge kick out of it.

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