Audio Media International April 2023

BRELAND ON RAP, COUNTRY & SHANIA TWAIN

YOLANDA BROWN ON LIVE AND STUDIO

UNIVERSAL AUDI0 CEO SPEAKS OUT

45 YEARS OF GENELEC

Siamäk Naghian on the past, present and future

4 EDITOR’S LETTER

The changing face of the recording studio

6 FRONT ROW

Marshall sold, Waves subscription u-turn and GearFest 2023

8 COVER FEATURE

A deep dive into Genelec history and plans for 2023

16 INTERVIEW: YOLANDA BROWN

YolanDa talks workflow, jazz and Sesame Street.

22 FEATURE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE STUDIO SPEAKER

Andy Jones take a look at what’s next for studios

26 INTERVIEW: BRELAND

Steve May catches up with Breland at Koko London

30 FEATURE: ABBEY ROAD EQUALISE

We report on a day tackling the industry issue of diversity

34 FEATURE: 60 YEARS OF UNIVERSAL AUDIO

As UA hits 60, we chat with CEO Bill Putnam Jr

40 INTERVIEW: PAUL WOMACK

From The Roots to Valerie Simpson

Contributor spotlight

ANDY JONES

Andy takes a look at the evolution of the studio speaker on p22.

BEX APRIL MAY

Bex chats with YolanDa Brown on p16 and reports from Abbey Road on p30.

SARAH JONES

Paul Womack talks hip hop production with Sarah on p40.

This issue is a studio special and what better way to kick things off than with a deep dive into Genelec as the brand hits 45? Elsewhere we’ve got a report from the Abbey Road Studios Equalise day, tackling industry diversity and a follow up chat with YolanDa Brown. The industry still has much work to do of course and we’re aware that while Audio Media International tries to address the balance in interviews, covers and writers, that’s not something that we see in the studio or live sectors as a whole. We hope to see 2023 as the year this begins to properly change and those percentages begin to swing towards the middle. If you’re doing something to address the balance, we’d love to hear about it. Paul Womack runs us through his studio and way of working on p40 and it’s a refreshing run through of dealing with the needs of a producer and the needs of an artist, a crucial part of the recording puzzle, beyond all the studio hardware you may have. As this issue was going to press, we joined Bernard Butler as he put the finishing touches to the debut album by The Clockworks (more next issue) and he made a good point about the future of studio technology “I’m creative and I always wonder why we stopped at two speakers before immersive. I get we have two ears but I’m into new experiences and immersive as a whole. How can you be a creative if you close doors?”. Enjoy the issue and remember that all of our previous issues are available for free at audiomediainternational.com.

Richard Melville richard@audiomediainternational.com

“We joined Bernard Butler as he put the finishing touches to the debut album by The Clockworks”

When London’s legendary RAK Studios responded to demand and went immersive, they wanted the most truthful monitors available. So they chose The Ones Smart Active Monitors, finding them unbeatable for neutrality, imaging, fatigue-free listening and consistent mix translation.

RAK now enjoys a flawlessly cohesive and scalable immersive system that’s also pinpoint accurate in level, distance and frequency response alignment, thanks to our GLM calibration software.

So, if you’re serious about going immersive – whatever your room size – explore our industry-leading solutions online. Visit www.genelec.com/immersive-hub

“Genelec have set the bar for immersive monitoring.”

Emma Townsend, RAK Studios

Marshall sold to Swedish Bluetooth speaker company Zound Industries

The sale also includes Marshall Live Agency and Marshall Records

Marshall has now become The Marshall Group, as Zound Industries takes over the brand. Zound Industries has been the licensee of Marshall consumer products such as headphones and home speakers since 2010, alongside house brand Urban Ears and Adidas audio products,

“Marking the next chapter of the decade long successful partnership, the announcement of the launch of Marshall Group brings together Milton Keynes-headquartered Marshall

Amplification and Stockholm-headquartered Zound Industries” said the official statement. “Under the terms of the deal, Zound Industries will acquire Marshall Amplification and the Marshall family will become the largest shareholder of the newly formed Marshall Group. The deal includes all of Marshall Amplification brands and subsidiaries, including Natal Drums, Marshall Records, and Marshall Live Agency”.The Marshall family will own a 24% stake. Initial press reaction has

been mixed with Music Radar suggesting it was ‘an end of an era’ and Guitar World saying it was “the end of family ownership”. Marshall made a £5.7m profit in 2021 and a statement says amp prodiction will remain between the current factories. Victoria Marshall added: “Having worked alongside my father during his later years, I know he would be excited at this direction and the potential to reach a larger worldwide audience with innovation and passion which he always had in spades.”

Jim Marshalll in 1992.

Photo: Rob Wyatt

Waves Audio in dramatic subscription u-turn

In the space of a week, Waves announced that it would become a subscription service called Waves Creative Access but then quickly reverted following criticism by users on social media. Using the subscription model, all plugins would be made available in the Ultimate bundle at $24.99 a month or $249 a year. Waves Audio issued this statement on behalf of Meir Shashoua, CTO and Co-Founder of Waves Audio “Over the past few days, many of you have expressed concerns about our decision to

discontinue perpetual plugin licenses and our move to an exclusive plugin subscription model. I would like to start by apologizing for the frustration we have caused many of you, our loyal customers. We understand that our move was sudden and disruptive, and did not sufficiently take into consideration your needs, wishes, and preferences. We are genuinely sorry for the distress it has caused. I would like you to know that we are committed to you, our users. We listened to your feedback, and we will continue to listen to you. Waves is a company filled with users and creators, just like you, and we are all as passionate about the products as you are. With this in mind, we will strive to find the way to make things right by you, and hopefully regain your trust”.

GearFest hits Tileyard

Tileyard and Sound On Sound have announced GearFest UK 2023, the music studio equipment show, at Tileyard London

July 15th and 16th 2023 will see the event return to Tileyard, with exhibitors showing off new product releases, delivering demonstrations and panel talks and attendees given the chance to get hands-on with the latest products.

Visitors can expect to see brands such as Ableton, Sontronics, Audient, Teenage Engineering, Neve, Genelec, Arturia, Eventide, Rupert Neve Designs, Bitwig, PMC, Kurzweil, Dynaudio, Origin Effects, Rode, Sonnox, Focal, RME, IsoAcoustics, Universal Audio, Moog, Vanguard Microphones, Spitfire Audio, Steinberg, Imperative Audio, ACS Custom, Eventide and many more.

The event gives visitors the chance to check out the very latest in pro audio technology, and attend panel talks with top engineers, producers, artists and industry leaders. And, visitors can also visit the TYX Dolby Atmos studio for an exclusive playback session to experience Atmos in a studio environment.

Tickets for this year’s two-day event are priced at £10 for the Saturday and £8 for the Sunday, with weekend tickets available for £12. More details can be found at gearfestuk.com.

“The Ultimate bundle was priced at $249 per year”

GENELEC AT 45 EVOLVING THE SCIENCE OF SOUND

Genelec is headquartered in Iisalmi, Finland. The town, in Northern Savonia, is a magnet for outdoors sports enthusiasts, and the kind of folk keen to explore nature. It’s surrounded by lakes and rivers which, at the time of our interview, are frozen over. “The ice is 50-60cm thick. It gets down to -7c at the moment,” Genelec CEO Siamäk Naghian confides, wearing a scarf in his office.

We’re talking over a conference call. Naghian’s office wall is covered in art, bright and colourful. A cursory glance might lead you to think they are outlandish concepts from his engineering team, but a closer look reveals they’re kids drawings.

“They’re by our colleague’s children,” smiles Naghian. “I think they’re beautiful.” He says that he hopes to exhibit the children’s handiwork in the Genelec factory.

Of the picturesque surroundings, he adds: “It’s so close to forest and water; we have a lot of snow but there’s also a lot of light and sunshine. Before COVID I travelled a lot. Sometimes I would be in Beijing for a week or two, and while it was very nice to be with people, our partners and friends, I was really glad to come back to nature, to be in the middle of it. I’m really thankful for that.” The irony that Finland’s best known audio company operates in such a quiet, idyllic

environment isn’t lost on the CEO.

“Silence is actually a very essential part of sound,” he says, “especially when we talk about pure sound, because that is our reference. That is where everything starts, and the closer you get to that silence, the greater the purity of sound. Bandwidth is not about numbers, but how close you are to silence…”

AMI: 45 years is an impressive anniversary for the company. Over that period you’ve won multiple awards and your reach is global. You became Director of Research and Development at Genelec in the mid-noughties, and have been an audio pioneer for nearly 20 years. You’ve overseen plenty of changes - but what hasn’t changed at Genelec over the years?

Siamäk Naghian: That’s an excellent question, because not every change is positive! What has not changed from the beginning is the basic philosophy of the company, our passion for sound, our mission! If you look at how things evolve, there are some changes that are actually negative. You have to always take care of what keeps things evolving. You have to know yourself, who you want to be, and what you don’t want to be. For Genelec, there are things that have not changed and I hope that they will not change; we don’t

As Genelec celebrates its 45th anniversary, CEO Siamäk Naghian reflects on four decades of tumultuous change and development, the brand’s unwavering core values and the timeless beauty of silence. By Steve May.

need to make bad compromises for financial reasons, just to make somebody happy, because we are financially independent. At the same time, you have to listen to your customers, to your users. I have learned in an engineering way, that you need to listen to your environment. You listen to those signals, and then you make your own signal. There has to be some uniqueness about what you want to do to help your customers.

AMI: That said, technology has changed dramatically over the past forty years or so. The audio landscape today would be unrecognisable to the Genelec that launched in the late Seventies…

I have an S30 studio monitor in my office, it was our first product. If you open that model, it’s from a totally different world. Whereas The Ones (the brand’s current point source monitor family), have so much technology inside they’re getting closer to becoming a computer. Even at the time that I joined, we did not have any product with a single line of software code. Now that’s the opposite. There is no single product that doesn’t have software inside it. The majority of

the work that we do, in terms of research and development and product development, is about software algorithms - embedded software and signal processing, networking software, the user interface and different kinds of software.

AMI: The way creators are making music now has also fundamentally changed. How do you see the changing role of sound production in society?

If you look at music production, with the computer becoming the centre of everything, basically everybody now has the possibility to create music at home. So with a couple of monitor speakers, or headphones, audio software, an audio interface and the internet, you can produce music and you can distribute it. For a company like us, it’s very important that we’re involved in this process and contribute to its development.

AMI: Did this progression bring its own set of challenges?

If you look at manufacturing, society and the

Above: Genelec co-founder Ilpo Martikainen

Right: Aerial view of the Genelec factory

electronic industry right now, where we are globally, and where we were 30 years ago, the ecosystem has totally changed. In Finland, one of the biggest industries used to be electronics, mainly because of the mobile phone industry. But today you’ll have problems finding people who really know that industry, that have the knowledge and the competencies needed for that kind of thing. It is very exceptional that we have an electronic production line here in our factory, and sometimes it’s very difficult to find people who can give service to those lines, because that industry has, to a large extent, disappeared. On the other hand, if you look at our customer base, it has been growing drastically, and at the same time, there is a large variation of users, expectations and applications.

AMI: Obviously COVID accelerated the move to home-based music production, but did the speed of transition take you by surprise?

You are absolutely right, it was a development that we couldn’t have anticipated - but during the time before the COVID outbreak we had started having some kind of awareness.I have been travelling to China since the Nineties, where we have been working with TV and radio stations, music production and so on, first with a distributor before establishing our own operation in 2005, to focus on education, marketing, and distribution. Now we have a highly professional local team there. Before Covid there was some news that

there was some kind of unknown virus. Very quickly, I started to wonder what if this spreads globally? We started to plan for that. If this became a kind of global pandemic, how would we operate? We were preparing for a crisis, but a few months into the pandemic, we suddenly realised that lockdown had created a huge demand for our products. That was totally unexpected. The people in our industry, and community, had started to work from home and they needed good quality products. Will the situation ever return to where we were? I think that’s not limited to our community, that is a general question. I feel that these days it is very difficult to see your colleagues. I come in (to the office) almost every day because of production and people, but it has changed. I don’t expect that the work situation will return to something that resembles life before COVID. People are now moving between the home and studio. I think we are in a new situation. It’s an important development.

AMI: The rise of membership-based recording and creative hubs, like London’s Tileyard X complex, may well become the preferred recording solution to musicians, DJs and producers in the near future; a more causal, transitory hub. Could this be another new boom area for Genelec?

Absolutely! It’s a most interesting area. The whole point is that when people come together, what kind of dynamic will that create? I think that is very interesting. And there is another new background factor that has become very important, and that is cloud storage and networking. Basically you can move from one place to another and you can do your job without having to carry everything yourself. Your work, and the contents that you have, can follow you wherever you go. I think that this is a trend that will become bigger and bigger.

AMI: 45 years in, it seems there remains plenty of scope for innovation. What can we expect to see over the next 12 months?

In terms of new technology, we are planning to unveil something very interesting in May – at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference in Helsinki – so look out for that. But throughout the whole of this anniversary year we’ve organised the Genelec 45 World Tour. This is a global series of face-to-face, virtual and hybrid ‘Experience’ events where our customers can listen to, and learn about, our technology. Additionally we’re running the Genelec Harmony Tracks contest that invites anyone in the world to submit a piece of music using their own

Above: The iconic Ones

Top right:Aural ID in action

unique style, sound and culture, to help us celebrate – and to support our charity partners. We want this 45th year to celebrate truthful sound and the passion that powers it, with our customers right at the heart of the activities.

AMI: You recently released Aural ID, a personalised plugin for workstations. The DAW plugin creates a personalised HRTF profile, so that headphone wearers can enjoy a listening experience similar to a conventional loudspeaker soundstage. What more can you tell us about this project?

I think there will be a lot of development in this area. With Aural ID you can create a sense of externalisation while wearing headphones. The problem with headphones, even high quality models, is that sounds come from inside your head. You don’t have a sense of space, which is very, very important for sound (reproduction). This technology will actually take headphone listening to the next level, especially when it comes to immersive audio, which is another interesting trend that is happening very, very quickly in production.

Using very efficient computer modelling, we can come up with an HRTF which is totally personal, and the quality is on a par with what you would get based on the acoustically measured personal HRTF in the lab. That basically means that you can reproduce immersive audio in your headphones, with an experience much closer to an actual immersive loudspeaker system, and move seamlessly between them. I would say that the bridge between the reference audio monitoring system and headphone monitoring is one of the most exciting new areas for us. I’m 100 per cent sure that such headphone development is going to continue.

AMI: You must take great satisfaction that artists around the world put their faith in Genelec hardware and appreciate that what you’ve done is helping their creative process…

Well, I think now we are getting to the reason why I do this job! It’s essentially connected to what I said in the beginning of our interview: our mission is to help people fulfil their dreams as artists and producers. We are basically dealing with high technology and art. It is beautiful.

Ultimately this is the best recognition you can get, to know that people are using Genelec to create, to feel that they have made something special. What could be better? What could be more rewarding?

The bridge between the reference audio monitoring system and headphone monitoring is one of the most exciting new areas for us.

AMI: We notice you use recycled cabinets – given your locality and connection to the natural world, how does sustainability fit into your plans now and in the future and what do you think the industry could do to better meet targets?

Yes, the use of recycled aluminium for our cabinets has been one of our most significant innovations, but it is not the only sustainability-related step that we have taken during the history of the company. From day one, sustainability has been a vital part of the company design and manufacturing philosophy. Decades ago, we defined that sustainability is equally important to us as sound quality and profitability. This principle is applied when choosing the material, across the operational process, and covers the lifetime of our products. The fact that even our first studio monitor, the S30 from 1978, is still widely in use, is something unique that is the result of such a principle. We think that although this was a visionary approach decades ago, it has now become rather imperative due to climate change. Together with the rest of the industry, we have to take bigger actions to minimise the footprint of what we do in order to save the planet for future generations. It is not about a choice taken by a few, but a ‘must do’ for all of us.

AMI: The lifespan of speakers is good of course, so do you feel it’s a battle of serving all systems via software that’s the key to being sustainable from a lifecycle point of view? It seems to be the biggest issue in smartphone tech, for example.

Especially for active monitor loudspeakers, to guarantee a long lifetime we have to really consider the choices we make during the design process. With active technology’s integrated electronics, we must carefully design the electronics as the core of the design to ensure longevity. At the same time, we need to keep our designs up-to-date with the development pace of the electronics industry, including digital technology. This also gives us the possibility of splitting the functionality of the entire system, which supports a long product lifetime by providing a robust platform onto which we can keep updating products via the software domain. While we think that software can help support the long lifetime of products in the future, we have to keep Design For Sustainability (DFS) as the foundation for the total design – including hardware and software – backed up by technical support to keep the products sustainable well into the future.

Above: The ‘raw’ case of Genelec speakers offers a new look for end users. Genelec’s use of recycled aluminium enclosures is just part of the company’s commitment to sustainability.

BAND JAM

Saxophonist and BPI chair YolanDa Brown OBE on storytelling through music and representing the UK music industry. By Bex April May.

YolanDa Brown OBE might just be the busiest woman in British music. On top of recording and touring her own music, the award-winning British saxophonist, composer, and Jazz FM broadcaster is an advocate for music education, championing philanthropic endeavours including the The Drake YolanDa Award, which supports emerging artists across the UK, and the YolanDa Brown Foundation, which supports music students, going on to be awarded the OBE in 2023 for services to music, music education and broadcasting.

Oh, and the younger members of your family will know her best from her CBeebies series, ”YolanDa’s Band Jam,” which she tours a live show with and also earned her a BAFTA nomination last year.

What links all of these endeavours, of course, is a passion for playing music, the UK’s industry, and a love for storytelling through music.

Now, she adds her prestigious role as chair of the British Phonographic Industry to the list, which she was appointed to in July 2022.

We caught up with YolanDa to talk about her unusual recording process, what it’s like to take video calls with Elmo, and the exclusive details on her next project…

AMI: AMI: Congratulations on the BPI appointment. Could you tell us a bit about how that came about and what that role looks like?

YolanDa Brown: Thank you very much! I’m chair of the BPI, so I’m strategizing alongside the board to make sure that the mission and objectives of the organisation are run well. It’s really great to be representing all of the British recorded music, and

also making sure that the relationship with the rest of the industry is strong, as well as looking out for the best interests of the artists and the labels.

AMI: You work on so many different projects. How would you describe your recording process?

It’s about making sure that I’m taking the listener on a journey. I like the idea of working across genres. Being a saxophonist and working in jazz, reggae, and soul, it’s about improvising and feeling free, but also bringing joy. I love making music that people want to move to, I’m always thinking about what it’s going to feel like live. Then, it’s about telling a story every time.

AMI: Tell us about your Tileyard studio…

I set up my Tileyard studio during lockdown. I’ve been there many times, and there’s such a hubbub and it’s such a hive of creativity. So, when it was time for me to open my own studio, I wanted to be at Tileyard. The reason for it was actually that Sesame Workshop, who make Sesame Street, asked me to be the Head of Music for a new animation on HBO Max called “Bea’s Block,” doing all the music and the underscore. Moving in during the middle of lockdown was strange because it was so quiet, but I love the idea of making music there, and the community, now it’s returned back to its glory. There are people in different nooks and crannies of Tileyard being so creative, and it’s infectious.

AMI: And all down to Sesame Street!

Exactly! It’s amazing. The wonderful thing about having that space is it’s available 24 hours, so once

I’d finished a day’s work for the animation, I could write for my own projects and build my own body of work, which I absolutely did - I work all hours I can there. I really love having that space and being creative.

AMI: What’s one of your favourite memories of Tileyard?

Every day is different. The main thing that I remember is bringing my team together in the studio, and that it never felt like a hard day. I also used to video call into the studio over in New York to record with characters and artists, too, so I think having a Zoom call with Elmo was definitely a highlight!

AMI: What’s your favourite piece of gear in the studio?

We have an amazing Roland electric drum kit in the studio which I absolutely love. Being able to be in that

space and get a sound like that was really helpful in our production.

AMI: Tell us about your saxophones of choice…

I play the tenor, alto and soprano saxophones as my regular touring set, so I tour with three saxophones all the time. I’ve got a wonderful case made by Wiseman London, in which I can carry all three in one, which is really handy for touring. I play Yamaha saxophones and I do love the tone of a black lacquer saxophone.

AMI: When you’re recording, how do you typically work, in workflow terms?

The main thing for me is to get the base of the music down. A lot of the time, I will focus on all of the rest of the instruments in the production first, so I know where the song is going and what I want from it, and then I will have a separate day where it’s just me in the studio, playing my bits on top, which is very different from how I approach music live.

AMI: If you could bring anyone into the studio to collaborate with, who would it be?

I’d love to work with Sting. Knowing that he has the experience of being in a band, being a producer, being an artist, but also being an instrumentalist, I think there’s a lot that can be garnered from the actual recording process. I’d then like to extend it and take that to the stage as well; it’d be really interesting.

AMI: What are you listening to at the moment?

A lot of K-Pop at the moment, because I’ve got two children, a nine-year-old and a three-year-old and we listen to absolutely everything. I have a radio show on Jazz FM as well, so I’m always listening to lots of new music and traditional old jazz and blues. Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Nubiyan Twist and PJ Morton.

AMI: From Brexit to the cost of living, there are a lot of factors which have impacted the live music scene in the UK. How do you feel about it in 2023?

I’m a glass-half-full kind of person. I always like to see the silver lining in things. As hard as it has been, I still don’t believe it’s going to be overtaken. There’s something fresh and emotional about it that you can’t get anywhere else. We recently sold out the Royal Festival Hall with the live tour of my children’s TV show, “YolanDa’s Band Jam”, and seeing a new generation discovering live music and that feeling of shouting and singing along live with other fans - I think we’re in safe hands.

AMI: How does playing live for kids compare to playing for adults?

I try not to demarcate the two, and I think adults can learn a lot from their children. When people go out,

“My fave gear? We have an amazing Roland electric drum kit in the studio which I absolutely love”

especially to a jazz-style place, they tend to think they should be sophisticated, to sit down and then clap at the end of the song. Actually, I always encourage the audience to do whatever your body naturally wants to do. That’s the whole point of me creating music live. I want to see what you’re reacting to, so don’t hold back. As soon as they hear that, they’re actually more like the kids!

AMI: Speaking of jazz, artists like Nubya Garcia, Ezra Collective and GoGo Penguin have had great success embracing jazz and the instruments associated with it. Why do you think the scene has become so popular lately?

It’s the fact that the artists are embracing what jazz has given us, which is the voice of improvisation and saying something in the music, but also bringing in grime, Afrobeat, and different mainstream genres, so we’re seeing a lovely cross-pollination which creates what is the UK jazz scene today. When you go to see Ezra Collective, it can even feel like a rave sometimes, and I think that keeps it alive.

AMI: What other jazz artists are you excited by at the moment?

Nubiyan Twist, definitely, Yazz Ahmed, and Jelly Cleaver, who is doing really great things. CHERISE, who is an amazing vocalist who is really expressing that there’s room for keeping true to it as well. And of course, Blue Lab Beats are doing fantastic work.

AMI: If you could only choose one: tape, vinyl, CDs or streaming?

Vinyl. I love how vinyl sounds. On my last album, we mastered for vinyl, and the sound quality was so much better. You just think, ‘Oh my goodness!’ This is a way of listening from the past, but the quality that people were getting was actually better than streaming. And the experience of putting it on the turntable - you can’t beat that.

AMI: Between recording and writing books and going on tour and chairing the BPI and working with charity, you’ve got so much going on all the time. What upcoming project are you most excited about right now?

Being the BPI chair has been fantastic, and that includes the Brits and Mercury Prize, so I’m really getting my teeth into what that looks like next year. I’m also still touring the Band Jam and my next album. But, one thing that I haven’t told anyone is that I’m opening a restaurant and music venue. It’ll be in London, in Islington, and it will be called Soul Mama. It’s always lovely having a space that people can come to and enjoy music, and it’s nice to also create that platform physically for musicians to have. It won’t be far off. I haven’t told anyone about it yet - so that’s an exclusive!

THE EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION OF THE STUDIO SPEAKER

Andy Jones looks at the latest self-calibrating monitors and software and discovers that your speakers will never be the same again…

It used to be that you’d get one set of monitors for your mixing and mastering, you’d get to know them and they’d be your studio partners for life. You’d pay a fortune for them and it was a well known rule that the flatter their frequency response, the better – honest was the best policy. How things have changed: nowadays the humble studio monitor has evolved far beyond those electricallyinduced plates that vibrate air particles. In real terms its price has fallen and as for its frequency response – well that’s up to you!

Just in the last decade the speaker itself has changed beyond recognition. Or if it hasn’t, it can do. Speakers can adapt to your room, they can make themselves ‘better’, or even turn themselves into other speakers. Sometimes you don’t even have to rely on one pair, as they can be several pairs! And the best part is that you don’t (always) have to spend four- or five-figure sums on them. Speakers have come of age. And they are about the only item in the world that seems to get getting better in terms of value for money. All hail the studio monitor. If it doesn’t save the world from economic ruin, it will save your mixes as well as your bank balance.

So what happened?

A mere decade ago I was advising that when it came to studio monitors, to allocate at least 40% (or more!) of your studio budget to getting a great set of monitors. These were (and still are) the most important piece of the signal chain. You could, I would say, spend a fortune on preamps, microphones, interfaces, cables and other studio gear, but if you listen to the end results through a pair of Coke cans, it will all be wasted.

While this point is still valid – speakers *are* the most important part of your signal chain – somewhere in the last decade, things changed in terms of cost versus technology. Expertise in acoustic design reached something of a peak, just when DSP technology advanced in speed and lowered in cost and the end result is that you can now get very decent studio monitors for *whisper* three figures.

And as the costs have fallen, so the technological innovations have risen and your speakers no longer just sit there passively doing their ‘thing’. Now they are intelligent! We’re not really talking ‘artificial intelligence’, thank goodness, although speakers do now seem to have minds of their own. Instead we’re talking about phrases like ‘self calibration’, ‘self adjusting’, or

When is a studio monitor not a studio monitor? When it attempts to be a different studio monitor, that’s when!

‘frequency analysis’, all now commonplace terms when it comes to buying studio monitors.

Smart stuff

I first experienced self calibrating monitors through Genelec’s SAM (Smart Active Monitor) about five years ago and it’s an almost industry standard process that has led the way in speaker technology. Using the company’s GLM (Genelec Loudspeaker Manager) software, you connect your speakers up (in this case we were trialling The Ones SAM 8331 and 8341) along with a measuring microphone via a network connector. Within the software you ‘place’ your speakers left and right with a subwoofer if you have one (shown above). Back in the real world, place the supplied microphone in front of the speakers in a central ‘listening’ position at head height.

Once you have entered your room dimensions you can start the speaker calibration test, a surprisingly easy process. After five seconds the speakers spit out a series of sweeps and peeps. By analysing what they get back from the microphone, they can tell how well (or in my case how badly) the room you have them placed in is performing. The microphone picks up the reflections and works out the room specs in terms of frequency peaks and troughs. The speakers use this data and then ‘self adjust’ their DSP-driven filter responses, accounting for how your room affects the overall response. If you have peaks in the bass region, for example, the speakers counter this by notching the filters down in those regions. You can get a detailed frequency response curve of your room (top right). The red line is the actual response of the room and you can see the peaks; the blue is the counter filter action made by the GLM process and the resulting green line is the flat response result.

In practice, the mic measurement calibration is a beautiful process and one that is quite easy to wrap your head around: you end up mixing with a flatter frequency response – that green ‘target’ line – so your mixes should translate better to other playback systems; it’s as simple as that.

Of course you could argue that the process is really just papering over the real problem which is the acoustic issues in your room, but for those of us not interested (or able) to make the necessary acoustic adjustments to solve the problem, it’s a great alternative. And for those who do want to take it further and sort out their issues, Genelec can supply a detailed break down of your room acoustic via a GRADE (Genelec Room

Acoustic Data Evaluation) report. We’ll be putting that through its paces in a review of the latest Genelec monitors soon.

Getting cheaper

The complete high-end Genelec GLM and SAM speaker set up does cost – the better part of four grand including the optional GLM kit. But in the last couple of years, not only has the technology trickled down to more affordable ‘prosumer’ speakers by the likes of KRK and IK Multimedia, the whole concept of speaker modelling – if that’s what we should call it – has explodes sideways, outwards and downwards.

IK Multimedia’s excellent (for their price and size) iLoud MTM monitors were the first affordable speakers that I came across that attempted the speaker self-calibration thing. At around €400 per speaker it is a crazy price to pay for such black magic.

In this case that magic is IK’s VRM (Volumetric Response Modeling) technology which creates a 3D snapshot of your room via the ARC system software and measuring microphone.

I recently tried the system out on IK’s more recent and more expensive iLoud Precision 6 monitors (£999 each) and was

“I first experienced self calibrating monitors through Genelec’s SAM about five years ago and it’s an almost industry standard process that has led the way in speaker technology”

impressed, not least because they identified similar issues with my room as the Genelecs had (yes I rather lazily still haven’t sorted the same room issues out!). It’s a similarly smooth process with impressive results. The Precisions are fantastic speakers anyway, but the ARC system is truly the acoustic icing on the cake.

Even more recently I tried out a very similar self-calibration system with KRK’s GoAux 4 speakers – and if you haven’t tried them, these portable speakers need to be heard to be believed – and they give you a similar room correction vibe for just £400 for the pair which is pretty incredible given the technology involved. Like I say, this once high-end self correction technology is now easily within reach for all of us so there really are no excuses for poor mixing and translation to other playback systems.

Beyond calibration

Proper speakers, then, have grown up in the last few years or, should we say, they’ve become better speakers. They are now

not what you might call static speakers but more unconventional monitors that can move and adjust depending on where you place them. And some can even act like two different monitors, developing what you might call split speaker personalities, certainly a case in point with Fluid Audio’s latest release.

I recently tested the company’s Image 2 monitors that can turn themselves into the kinds of NS10 or Auratone style mid-range monitors you would have A-Bd your mixes on back in the good old days. Remember the old adage: ‘if you can make your mix sound good on these speakers, it will sound good anywhere’? The thinking with the new Image 2s is that you don’t need to AB with two sets of different monitors as these can act like two sets of monitors! And it’s impressive stuff. Hitting a footswitch sets up ‘Mixcube Mode’ and the Image 2s then switch to a mid-range mode where the mid driver becomes the main playback vehicle, with the low and high drivers effectively disabled. This allows you to focus on and tweak your mid range in more detail, hopefully resulting in a better mix overall. At £3600 for a pair of Image 2s, they are not exactly cheap, but you could look at them as two sets of speakers for the (high) price of one.

Going even further down the modelling route, Fluid Audio have also partnered with Sonarworks with the company’s SoundID Reference software integrated into Image 2s, effectively acting like Genelec and IK’s analysis software so that the Image 2s can auto-calibrate to your room. Sound ID takes the concept up a step or two, though. Not only does it use a similar microphone/calibration system to the ARC and GLM applications, but it also comes with built-in models for several famous headphones, so if you mix on a supported set, the software will automatically adjust the playback to be a flat response when you use them, resulting in better mix translation elsewhere. Again, clever stuff and because you are mixing using headphones, the room doesn’t play a part so more headphone models can be added and the software future proofed. The software can also simulate other playback speaker types –laptop, in ear headphones, car or smartphone speakers, for example – so you can check how your mix will translate on other systems with ease.

The future

There’s no doubt that with its powerful and flexible selfcalibrating software, the studio monitor has become an adaptable beast for mixing in the 21st century. In a way it’s had to; people mix everywhere – on the move, in hotel rooms and so on – and not just in recording studios any more. But with self-calibration technology within reach of us all – and more importantly being shipped with speakers costing just three figures – and software like SoundID able to emulate just about any setup, the future of monitoring and mixing will, literally, never be the same again. Your future studio monitor will be whatever you want it to be, wherever you decide to place it.

“I tried out a self-calibration system with KRK’s GoAux 4 – these portable speakers need to be heard to be believed”

BRELAND LIVE

"I can rap, but I’m a singer first" insists cross-genre Country sensation

One of the hottest young stars on the Country scene, Breland, is in the UK to co-host the C2C festival at the O2 arenaand he’s got a beef.

“I was seeing a lot of chatter in the press over in the States about ‘Breland Country rapper, Country Rap, Country Trap!’” he says. “I can rap, I have a lot of fun with the vocals, but hey, I’m a singer!’ People don’t realise I can sing, I’m a singer first!”

He launches into ‘For What it’s worth’, and his vocal is as sweet as molasses. “I wanted a song that showcased the vocal,” he says. Job done.

We’re in Koko’s Private Member’s Club, where Breland is performing at an industry showcase in the run up to Country to Country. He’s flanked by Christian Crawford on guitar and Harley deWinter on box drum.

“London is easily my favourite place to perform in the world,” says the singer. “We’ve played here twice - once for C2C, and then for a little run with (American country singer-songwriter) Russell Dickerson.”

He tells the small but appreciative crowd that the opportunity to co-host C2C this year with Bob Harris was “obviously a no-brainer. I’m really pumped!”

As well as opening the festival, he’s bringing his Breland & Friends show to the Indigo O2 as one of / the official afterparty for C2C.

Y’see, Breland has momentum. The cross-genre artist has just launched his first album, Cross Country (Atlantic Records), featuring a distinctive blend of country, pop, hip hop, and gospel. His breakout single, ‘My Truck’, went platinum, and he’s touched gold twice with ‘Throw It Back’ featuring Keith Urban and ‘Beers On Me’ with Dierks Bentley. Industry accolades cast his way include Amazon Music Breakout Artist, and Spotify’s Hot Country Artists To Watch 2022.

He segues into ‘Natural’, a slice of effervescent country pop with a familiar riff. It samples ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman’ by Shania Twain.

“I didn’t really think she would approve the interpolation, because she historically doesn’t do that,” he says. “Not only did she approve of it, she enjoyed the song so much she invited us out on tour with her. A pretty crazy opportunity!”

In addition to supporting Shania Twain on her forthcoming tour, he’s also touring with Walker Hayes.

“One of my favourite things to do as an artist is to collaborate with other acts,” he says. “I also have this uncanny habit of writing songs with soon to be sober artists…”

The trio break into ‘Told you I could drink’, co-written with Charles Kelley, and recorded with country music trio Lady A, one of this year’s C2C headliners. Kelley makes no secret of his struggles with alcohol. Back in August 2022, Lady A postponed their Request Line Tour tour so that he could focus on his sobriety.

The short Koko set continues with current single ‘What it’s Worth’ and ‘Good For You’, co-written with Tyler Braden, who joins him on stage to duet. Braden is also in town to perform at the festival.

“The last time I came out here, we didn’t have an album out. We did the afterparty at C2C last year and that set was 45 minutes, at the time that was tough as we only had 10 songs! Now we have a project out, and it’s like we only get 45 minutes?”

Given Breland has just landed from the US, he’s on remarkably good form. “I feel like a good 97 per cent right now. We were in Florida two days ago, and flew in on the Red Eye. I was like, I’ll be fine, I’ll sleep on the flight, I’ll be in London, and I’ll have an amazing day. Only I didn’t sleep on the flight at all and I then proceeded to sleep through 16 of the last 22 hours. I was knocked out. But the benefit is I feel totally vocally healthy.

“I just feel like showing off right now!”

“The set includes current single ‘What it’s Worth’, co-written with Tyler Braden, who joins him on stage to duet”

We are entering a new era where production teams are increasingly concerned about weight loading and coverage.

Five years ago, a 49kg box would have been fantastic, but now we are looking at 27kg for WPS, which is incredible really for a big sounding system with a lot of grunt.

Martin Connolly Capital Sound, UK

The crystal-clear reproduction together with the even coverage were the deciding factors in our purchase.

We are happy with our choice and can proudly say that we are part of the #MartinAudioFamily.

Gert-Jan Gomes

DSL, Netherlands

WPM has been amazing for us and this led us to invest in the bigger WPS system that also ticks the rider boxes.

Chris Bogg dBS Solutions, UK

Wavefront Precision systems deliver signature sound with class leading consistency, coverage and control, while also proving excellent value.

EQUALISING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Abbey Road Studios opens its doors to the next generation of creatives for International Women’s Day 2023. By Bex April May.

This International Women’s Day 2023, Abbey Road Studios opened its legendary doors for its fourth Equalise event, hosting a free day of masterclasses showcasing music as a credible career path for women, with discussions around working in the industry, film scoring and music creation all designed to empower the next generation of creatives.

Insights came from some of the industry’s most established and exciting rising female talent, including YolanDa Brown OBE, award-winning composer Jocelyn Pook, DJ Club Fitness and more taking to the stage to inspire women aspiring to take their rightful seat at the table.

Born out of the studio’s ambition to have more women working in music production, the discussion is especially pressing, given that less than 5% of producers and engineers are women, while a recent study by Spotify found that over the past decade, only 12.7% of songwriters are female.

So, in 2023, how can we combat the lack of female representation behind the scenes in music… and what still needs to change for the up and coming next wave of artists?

Speaking on the panel at the hugely popular event, producer, rapper and singer, Kay Young said, “For me coming up, I didn’t see women in music, as producers… if we come together to create our own spaces, that’s a start in bringing up the next generation.”

At the same time, singer- songwriter and producer Sans Soucis highlighted the importance of education and guidance to the future of female representation. “Coaching is really important. I was lucky enough to be coached by two organisations, the Abram Wilson Foundation and I Love Live on my creative journey,” they added. “I do think that minorities in societies are limited in what they can offer because of the structure of our society. So we need to be extra

prepared and have a set of tools to face these kinds of situations that other people might not be facing… it’s all about having that support from someone who can validate your existence better than the system itself.”

One of the biggest barriers to break down, the musicians discussed, comes in the form of fighting the outdated idea that women aren’t as suited to technical roles than their male counterparts, through educating everyone in the industry on language and attitudes.

“It’s about breaking the very historial idea that men are better than women with technology - it’s utter myth,” lays out sound engineer and producer Sarah

Below: Bellah Mae performs at Equalise

Meyz, “Unfortunately, women can be looked down on, especially in more technical jobs, but you can be whoever you want to be, independent of your gender. We also need to educate men about language and how to address things to communicate better.”

Adds Sans Soucis, “It’s a vocabulary; it’s education. The biggest challenges for me have been the patriarchy, language, intention, and just trying to be brave. We always need to put that extra bravery badge on our chest to enter the room and I think that needs to be acknowledged.”

That’s because the work doesn’t stop at getting more female representation behind the scenes. Once women are in the studio, the reality is that women are tasked with proving their skills more strictly than men. In this regard, confidence is key.

“You have to understand who you are as a producer and bring your skills to the table,” says Meyz, “It’s like Rihanna said, fake it ‘til you make it.”

“Advocating for yourself is a huge thing,” agreed Canadian DJ Club Fitness, “If you think, ‘I really believe in myself and I really want to do this,’ sometimes you’ll have these full circle moments that make you realise that trusting yourself is a big, important thing.”

With that in mind, aspiring female musicians should trust in their abilities to start creating now,

without waiting for software or permission. “You don’t actually need many things to create. Sometimes you might think you need a mixer or a plugin for whatever reason, but then you realise that you have all the elements that you need. Creativity is born within what you have at the time,” says the DJ, “Make sure you’re nurturing that activity of creating with what you have and that will always serve you.”

However, the onus of addressing the balance of female roles behind the scenes is not just on women - it’s an issue for the industry to reset, and things are improving, albeit slowly.

“In the last five years, I think there’s been a more concerted effort to diversify lineups in dance music,” says Club Fitness. However, this also leads to box ticking, which can be detrimental to those making their way in music, she warns, “Something I see a lot of personally is that people will want to book me because they have a clause in their contract that they want to hire a black woman on their lineup. When I get requests like that, I just say no: don’t ever grab an opportunity if it doesn’t make sense to you personally, because that is betraying your own creativity and who you are fundamentally as an artist.”

In film, a 2019 study by The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that an

Top (clockwise): Olivia EdwardsAllen,host Sunta Templeton, Jocelyn Pook

enormous 94% of all box office film scores were composed by men.

British composer Natalie Holt is one of the few women composers to be scoring in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with her music for the Disney+ series, Loki, and the first woman to ever score a live-action Star Wars project, as the composer for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series on the streamer. In her experience, this dearth is down to money, “At that top level of studio film, you’re talking millions and millions of pounds of investment, and the studios want a safe pair of hands. So at the moment, those safe pairs of hands are people who have been around for a certain number of years and in a slightly different time.”

With a new generation of female composers and music producers coming into the industry, we can be optimistic of a future, more equal landscape, she explains, “Hopefully, going forward, those safe pairs of hands who will be trusted will be more equalised.”

Jocelyn Pook, multi-award winning composer of the score from Eyes Wide Shut, among many other film, TV and theatre projects, has noticed a change. “It always surprises me how low the figures are of women composers,” adding, for example, “I would say it’s so different now from when I was younger… there’s usually quite a strong female presence now in

different categories at the Ivors Composer Awards.”

Ultimately, everyone’s journey into the music industry is different - and we should embrace it, said the Equalise speakers. Reflecting on her own career so far, Meyz said, “There are a thousand different ways you can learn and create your own path. There’s no straight line. What works for some people might not work for you, and that’s totally cool.”

Likewise, speaking to Audio Media International at the event, award-winning saxophonist and recentlyappointed chair of the BPI, YolanDa Brown OBE, explained, “Everybody’s journey is different and everyone’s unique.”

She added, “One thing I’m hearing a lot about is the idea of imposter syndrome. But actually, we should all just be proud of our uniqueness and bring that to the table every day.”

Discover more on Abbey Road Studios’ initiatives to drive balance in the music industry at abbeyroad. com/equalise.

“Jocelyn Pook, has noticed a change. “It always surprises me how low the figures are of women composers”

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

By Mark Sparrow.

Universal Audio’s CEO Bill Putnam Jr recalls 60 years leading the music production business.

UNIVERSE

Few technology companies can hold on to market leadership for one or two decades, let alone create a solid reputation that’s lasted for more than 60 years. However, that’s exactly what CEO Bill Putnam Jr. and Universal Audio Inc have managed to do by producing some of the music industry’s best-loved recording technology. Universal Audio has an incredible heritage. We wanted to know more about how the company was established and managed to build such an iconic reputation within the music production industry.

Universal Audio (UA) was founded by audio recording pioneer Bill Putnam Sr in 1958. The company was resurrected in 1999 by Putnam’s sons, Bill and Jim, after their father’s death. Over the years, the company built an enviable reputation with pro recording engineers and producers. UA equipment has become synonymous with quality, innovation and craftsmanship.

For the past 60 years – minus a 15-year hiatus between the death of Bill Putnam Sr. and his sons’

refounding of the brand – UA has moved from manufacturing classic 1950s-era tube-driven mixing consoles. Those consoles were used to record legends like Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra – to 1960s-era audio compressors that shaped the sound of bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. These days, the company makes modern computer audio interfaces, digital effects pedals and plug-in software used on recordings by Adele, Lizzo, Doja Cat and many other A-list artists.

“It’s really exciting to design equipment that’s used as part of a great musician’s palette, knowing that the gear we build helps inspire their art,” says Bill Putnam Jr. “As someone who inherited my dad’s love of both music and technology, I have a wonderful supporting role in helping artists create sounds they love. But I’ve also had rockstars hurl microphones at me from the stage when that wasn’t the case… it’s all part of the fun.”

Headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, with offices in Boulder, Colorado and Amsterdam, Universal Audio now employs more than 250 musicians, engineers and audio professionals who

deliver a growing range of audio and music products to a customer base that includes Grammy-winning producers, professional and aspiring musicians, home studio owners, bedroom beatmakers… in fact, audio content creators of all types.

The shortest history of the “modern” UA is that Putnam Jr. refounded the company in 1999 as a side project while studying digital signal processing at Stanford University. The goal of the side project was to faithfully recreate some of his dad’s classic audio gear from the 1960s. The project led Putnam Jr. and his colleagues down a rabbit hole of DSP and algorithmic modeling.

By the time Putnam and his group had finished their first hardware prototype (a version of the classic LA-2A audio compressor), they already had the blueprint for recreating the fabled rich, warm analog sounds with software.

Fast forward to 2023, and UA now has more than a million users of its music hardware, including Apollo and Volt computer audio interfaces, UAFX guitar effects pedals and UA microphones. The brand also

Top: Ray Charles and Brian Wilson with 610 consoles

Above: Group shot taken at Putnam’s home

Right: Bill Putnam Jr with Bill Putnam Sr portrait

has a booming audio software plug-in business and a popular new subscription service called UAD Spark. With the democratization of the music recording business over the past 25 years, there’s been a move from expensive professional recording studios to smaller home and bedroom studios. UA’s products have filled that niche, delivering sonic quality that was arguably only available when using large recording consoles, tape machines and racks of fancy esoteric gear. For the future, UA is looking to move beyond music recording by turning its attention to the burgeoning market for audio content creators, helping them deliver studio-quality sound to their podcasts, TikToks and YouTube videos.

“I’m excited about our growth trajectory, which involves broadening our ecosystem and becoming a much bigger part of the creative process for our customers. We’re not the company that will go do a ‘me too’ product at a lower price. We work to solve new problems for our customers and to deliver inspiring quality, no matter where our customers are in their journey,” says Putnam Jr.

interfaces,

UA’s early software success depended mainly on its ability to emulate expensive, hard-to-find analog recording gear and effects with greater sonic authenticity than ever before. Today, after two decades of emulating classic audio equipment, UA has more than 140 software titles in its UAD plug-in library, renowned for their authenticity. UA has recently leveraged this software know-how into new product categories, such as its UAFX guitar effects line. It is now recognized as one of the best emulations of classic guitar amps ever placed into a stompbox.

“The passion our customers have for their creative tools makes music technology such a unique industry,” says Putnam Jr. “You need to understand musicians

“UA audio

digital effects pedals and plug-ins are used on recordings by Adele, Lizzo and Doja Cat”

to thrill and delight them. At UA, we’re obsessed with the nuances of audio. We go to great lengths that few others can or will because we know this may be the thing that inspires a musician or engineer to create something unique.”

True to its 1958 roots, UA continues to manufacture classic analog equipment and microphones that Putnam Sr was famed for. This classic gear is made at UA Custom Shop in Santa Cruz, California.

“The analog gear we build at our Custom Shop is handmade and highly crafted, some made with old stock vacuum tubes. Analog hardware has a unique sonic fingerprint that musicians still crave,” says Putnam Jr. “We do a great job of capturing that sound in our software plug-ins, but there’s still a creative immediacy with physical knobs and a romance with glowing tubes that may inspire a performance. We know one size doesn’t fit all for creativity; there’s room for all different types of equipment.”

Bill Putnam Sr. was a famed engineer and producer for artists including Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and dozens more. He was also a natural entrepreneur who started multiple audio product companies during his long career. The equipment these companies built remains

widely used decades after their introduction, including the LA-2A and 1176 audio compressors and the 610 tube recording console. The 610 console, in particular, stands as one of the most beloved designs in audio history and has been used to record everyone from Sinatra to the Beach Boys and Van Halen. These products stemmed more from Putnam Sr’s sense of pragmatism rather than a deliberate strategy.

“Back in the 1950s, when my father started the business, there wasn’t an industry around selling recording equipment. It was all equipment you had to scavenge from radio, broadcast, or telephones. It has to be adapted for the studio,” says Putnam Jr. “And my father realized that if he needed a mixer or compressor specifically for music production, then there must be a lot of other people that do, too. So, he just started making his own equipment and began selling it.

“Recording technology fascinated my father, but at the end of the day, it was just a tool to get to a musical performance. The thing he liked to do more

than anything was to go see jazz and big bands,” recalls Putnam Jr. “He always said musicians were his favorite people. His love of the technology rubbed off on me first, but it was the music, at the end of the day, that was everything to him.”

Growing up around his father’s entrepreneurial spirit and technical know-how fueled Putnam Jr’s passion for electronics from an early age. But it wasn’t a direct path toward refounding Universal Audio. Initially, his appreciation for music took a backseat to his dreams of becoming an electrical engineer until he took a break from college to travel around the country following the Grateful Dead.

“That experience was a huge lesson on how big of an impact music can have on all levels personally, culturally, and technologically. It was at one of those shows that I realized that I wanted to be a part of music technology. And from that moment on, I was laser-focused on learning what I needed to do, specifically to manipulate audio in the digital domain, which allowed me to bridge my technical passion with that of my father from decades before.

“I realized when we restarted UA that we had an obligation to craftsmanship, to do my dad proud. I accepted his Lifetime Achievement Grammy after he’d died, but I never thought I’d personally accept another Grammy. Fast forward a few years and the “modern” Universal Audio was awarded a Technical Achievement Grammy in 2009.

“To have that come around full circle, to see my father’s work honored, and then be acknowledged for the work we’re doing now is amazing. Like, we did it right. We’re doing it right.”

“Recording technology fascinated my father, but at the end of the day, it was just a tool to get to a musical performance”

Our new generation of active reference near and mid-field monitors and subs take monitoring to the next level. They deliver a forensic level of detail that allows you to work faster, without fatigue and with complete confidence, knowing that your finished mix will translate technically and emotionally anywhere.

Every cutting-edge element of their new ground up design has been created for the highest possible resolution with the lowest possible colouration, so they are packed with innovation such as all-new drivers, sophisticated DSP & Class-D amps, and our latest ATL™ bass-loading and Laminair™ air flow technologies. With digital connectivity and configurable via the inspired SOUNDALIGN network interface, these scalable solutions can grow with you with the option of active subs to create one of PMC’s unique XBD systems for extended bass and dynamics.

Whether you’re recording, mixing, or mastering in stereo or the latest immersive formats, with our monitors you’ll know why we are regarded as the absolute reference and guarantee the best possible results.

CHALLENGING CONVENTION

Paul

aul Womack has always done things his own way.

PGrowing up in a musical family, his passion for music led him to sneak into clubs as a teenager to perform in his uncle’s reggae band. After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 2003, Womack eschewed the traditional apprentice path, fast-tracking straight to opening his own studio.

In 2007, he moved to New York, securing a gig at Right Track studios and building a list of blockbuster credits spanning hip hop, gospel, and R&B. Today, he runs The Greenhouse Recording Co. in Brooklyn, where he provides recording, mixing, and mastering services for both indie and major label artists.

With a discography showcasing projects with Wiz Khalifa, The Roots, Open Mike Eagle, The Alchemist, L’Orange, Ella Mae Flossie, Donnie McClurkin, and Valerie Simpson, Womack has made a name for himself as a top producer in both mainstream and independent urban music.

An educator and advocate in the pro audio community, he is a former governor of the Audio Engineering Society and a member of the Recording

Academy, and lectures at conferences and schools across the country.

But Womack is most in his element when things get weird. One of the leading sonic architects of Art Rap, along with other forms of alternative hip hop, he’s collaborated with the genre’s most original thinkers and creators, from ELUCID to billy woods; and released two albums of his own.

We sat down with Womack to find out how he harnesses technology to fuel experimentation and empowers artists to be their most authentic selves and create with confidence.

AMI: You recently built a new studio in Brooklyn?

Yes. I’m in a very nice part of Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens. About a year and a half ago, I moved in here when I was re-emerging from the pandemic. I’m part of a bigger facility, which is nice because what I realized I missed when we were all in quarantine was the bumping into people in the lobby of a studio. That’s something I missed from the Right Track days, just being around a lot of different music. The place I’m in

Producer/engineer

“Willie Green” Womack shapes the sounds of the most original thinkers in alternative hip-hop. Learn how his focus on authenticity—and willingness to take risks—has made him a standout in the genre.

By Sarah Jones.

now is called Brooklyn Recording Paradise. It’s two rooms: my room in the front, and then a tracking room in the back where I’ll record bands.

AMI: You’re a Cubase guy. Do you have a hybrid set up?

I am hybrid. I’ve got a lot of really nice plug-ins, but there’s something about turning knobs and making something happen; it feels good and it sounds good to me still. I would say I’m mostly in the box, but I’ve got a Neve summing mixer. Then, my favorite thing: I’m running into the Handsome Audio Zulu. It’s this passive tape emulator; you don’t even plug it in. It’s just circuitry and you can just push it, and it sounds amazing. That’s most of my mix bus. I mix with a lot of distortion, so I like to be able to run out to weird, funky boxes or old compressors here and there. I’m trying to mix for sound and character more than being super surgical.

AMI: Do you have go-to vocal chains?

I use the Softube Console 1 a lot. I use that on all my channels, and that’s the hub, in conjunction with Cubase. I’m usually using one of their channel strips for compression, EQ, and saturation. I’ve got a couple other things lying around that I like: I’ve got this really cool USB-controlled analog compressor from WesAudio called the Rhea, it’s a vari-vu design. I’ve been trying to use fewer plug-ins. I’ve got a lot of stuff that I like, but once I start getting chains that are six, seven plug-ins long, I’m like, “Am I just undoing the things that I did three plug-ins ago?” I’m trying to make conscious decisions and really mold the shape of sounds, rather than, like I said, getting too surgical, because I can get really lost in notching frequencies, but I’m not really being musical at that point.

AMI: How do you approach leveraging technology as a creative tool?

I’ve always been a technology nerd, but I want it to be seamless. When technology gets in the way, that’s when it gets really frustrating to me. There’s nothing worse than being in the middle of a great mix and then some plug-in glitches or something like that and you’re spending an hour trying to figure out why it crashed.

I was born in the ‘80s so I have a relatively healthy fear of artificial intelligence, but the idea of technology being able to anticipate what I want and make it easier to facilitate is really exciting to me. I love all the modeled old vintage compressors, but what really excites me are plug-ins that are doing something brand new that nobody has done yet.

I find that kind of stuff really exciting because I don’t want to make the same music that everybody else makes. That’s what their music is for. You can listen to them. If you’re listening to something I’m doing, from an artistic standpoint, I want it to be something unique. From a work standpoint, if you want that sound, you have to hire Willie Green. That keeps the phone ringing and that part is important, too.

AMI: I want to ask you about collaborating with artists. One of my favorite quotes of yours is, “No one likes apologetic music.”

Yeah. If you don’t love your song, why should I? If you don’t believe, why should I?

AMI: That calls for artists to be vulnerable. How do you gain their trust and get them out of their comfort zone to create something with conviction?

A big part of it is patience. The scariest place in the world is in front of the vocal mic, getting ready to sing or rap or perform something that you wrote from the heart for the first time. In the studio, I’m the first one to hear that, and so I need to take care of people when they’re in this position. Whether it’s a very emotional singer or the hardest rapper, somewhere in there, there’s a person about to perform something for the first time, and you have to make space for that and approach it like you care.

“The scariest place in the world is in front of the vocal mic, getting ready to sing or rap something that you wrote from the heart for the first time”

If I care, they’ll care more. Things like, I ask them about the song. I had a client and we were getting ready to record and I said, “All right, so what’s the song about?” He said, “Nobody has ever asked me that before in the studio.” I was like, “Damn.” That felt like such a sad statement. You come in to record these songs, they’re probably personal, and nobody ever asked you about them.

AMI: That can also feel transactional.

It feels transactional, and yeah, I do this for a job, but I don’t do it for the money, if that makes sense. I like to make good music. I like to make music that matters to somebody. A lot of vocal production is just therapy, listening to people. If I’m engineering, I’m just trying to make space for people to perform. If I’m producing the vocal, I’m sitting down and saying, “Let’s talk about the song. Let’s talk about where you were mentally when you wrote it, because we need to get back there.” There have been times when it’s painful for people, but when they’re done, they always thank me for taking care of them through that whole difficult situation.

AMI: You bring a range of perspectives as a co-writer, producer, and engineer. Do you take a holistic approach when you’re collaborating with artists, or do you shift roles?

I really try to check in with what they want. So many artists now are doing a lot of their own production, whether it’s making their own beats or recording themselves at home. I’ve never been the kind of producer or engineer who’s like, “I need to do

everything or you can’t work with me.”

I’m going to give my opinion. I make bold choices when I work, especially when I mix, but I always check in. If the client doesn’t like it, it’s “All right, I guess we’re not doing that thing today.” The more label money that’s involved, the more people are involved, the more opinions there are, and really, it’s the artist’s control that gets squeezed. So I’ll give my opinions, but I want the artist to have control over how their stuff sounds.

AMI: When you work with big label projects, do you walk a line between stretching yourself creatively versus having the label over your shoulder?

I don’t do as much major label stuff. The major label stuff I’ve done has been cool, but I don’t feel the license to be able to experiment because of the amount of people involved. It’s like, “All right, record this clean vocal, send that thing in, and call it a day. Let’s not play too many games here.” What’s great about working with indie labels, especially with Backwoodz, is, they come to me and they know, “Okay, Green’s going to do what he’s going to do.” I always take the client’s input, but I’ve got free rein.

With indie clients, when you hire me, one of the things I want to ask up front is, “What of my music

“I make bold choices when I work, especially when I mix, but I always check in. If the client doesn’t like it, it’s “All right, I guess we’re not doing that today”

have you heard? Are you familiar with how I work?” and make sure that we’re all on the same page. If you want just a clean pop thing, I can do that. I can tone it down, but generally with Backwoodz releases, I have more free rein, and that’s where I prefer to be. I listen to more indie music than I do mainstream, so I make the music that I would be listening to anyway.

AMI: Tell me about your Press Play exhibition at New York’s Massey Klein Gallery, in which you “sampled” paintings and textiles from the gallery and created an album of sonic interpretations of each work.

I enjoy museums, and I like art; I’m really into landscapes in particular. When I mix, I always think visually, think spatially, and I like big, bold, very deep mixes—just like the landscape paintings that I like, like the Hudson River School, these very Americana, very big, epic scenes. That’s what I like my mixes to sound like. Then I had the idea of, “How can I put them together?”

I’ve sampled a million records, so if I knew that if there’s software that can turn images to sound, I can sample them. I worked with these images, and some good friends of mine had a gallery and they were really open to the idea of sampling their paintings. I had free rein, so I just dove in and developed the process as I went.

Gallery patrons listened to recordings stationed next to each work. It was interesting to listen and also look at the paintings, and it made people look at the paintings for longer. If you listen to a three-minute song and stare at something, you realize how long three minutes is.

It’s actually a really long time, but you’re there in front of the painting, tethered by the headphone cord, so you’re looking deeper at the painting, you’re getting more details. And some of those details might have been what inspired some of the writing, because as I was making the beats, I would have an image of the painting up.

AMI: It’s interesting in that it invites this deeper engagement with a piece of visual art which is, I think, what we’re always trying to do with music.

Yeah, I work on a lot of pretty complex music, with lyrics where you really are supposed to catch all of the words. There’s nothing wrong with party anthems, but there’s a time and place for everything. The time and place for the music that I make are when you’re ready to sit down and really try to hear everything that’s in there. Go back and there’s more in there.

AMI: Are you embracing machine learning and AI in other ways?

I’m trying to more. In some ways, as a tool, yes, especially when it comes to noise reduction. I get all kinds of crazy sounds and samples and vocals recorded in all kinds of weird places. Machine learning in that way, as far as restoration, has been super helpful with RX 10 and SpectraLayers, and those kinds of tools.

From a creative standpoint, I haven’t dug in too much. Using AI to write yourself a song, I think, is a real corny way to use that kind of technology. But using it to create a cool sound that I could then chop up and sample and turn into something else, that sounds more interesting to me.

Look, computers can do all kinds of things, but there’s a point where artistic intent matters. If a human creates something, and does it on purpose, and that intent elicits feeling in another person, then that’s art. I don’t think it’s so bad if you enjoy AI art. I follow AI art accounts on Instagram. I’m very sorry to all my painter friends, but I like it, so I follow it. I like your stuff, too. It’s a thin line between technology and humanity in the art world, but at the end of the day, doesn’t it come down to, well, do I like the thing or not?

AMI: It sounds like throughout your career you’ve taken risks and just gone for it, and that’s worked out for you. What would you tell the younger version of you?

I would tell younger me to be more confident in the chances, and appreciate the ride and enjoy the moment. When I get going with something, I’m fretting about doing it wrong, so a lot of times I want it to be over, because at least that way it’s done and I didn’t screw it up. But I’m not enjoying any of the actual doing the thing that I like. That’s not a good way to approach things. Be confident and enjoy things, and just generally just be happier.

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