Headliner USA Issue 2

ISSUE 02 / NOVEMBER 2020 HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET UK £3.95 / USA $6.95 / CANADA $7.95

SUPPORTING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

MAGAZINE / 02

The Light of Consciousness

GRIMES GAVIN ROSSDALE

LUKAS GRAHAM

KT TUNSTALL

BUSH FRONTMAN CHATS NEW ALBUM THE KINGDOM

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO HIT RECORD MAKER

LIVE STREAMING FROM L.A.’S WHISKY A GO G O

Destino, Ibiza with the d&b GSL System

N E X T X N O W

At home in the most demanding club applications, a d&b system brings market-leading software and hardware to every performance. Night after night, this easy-to-use audio toolkit helps bring dancefloors to life. And, as d&b works hand in hand with the industry on innovative, patented technologies, the boundaries of what’s possible evolve. So, in shaping what’s coming next, the now becomes even more exciting. More than a sound system.

See what’s possible at dbaudio.com/club

“Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind.”

— Mick Jagger

©2020 QSC, LLC. All rights reserved. QSC and the QSC logo are registered trademarks of QSC, LLC in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other countries. Play Out Loud is a trademark of QSC, LLC. Artist: Printz Board. Photo by Mikel Darling.

qsc.com

SUP P

IVE C EAT O CR

ING THE T R O

NITY MU M HEADLINER USA

02 We’ve pulled no punches this month with our cover star arguably being one of the biggest enigmas in music: the intensely progressive Grimes, who is continuing her crusade to transcend mediocrity on latest album Miss Anthropocene. Serving as her way of personifying the global warming crisis, Grimes believes it is her best work to date, as does the team here at Headliner. We discuss experimenting with sound design, the pertinent concepts that she explores through her music, and why the album has given her the most rewarding release of her career.

Also inside, Gavin Rossdale chats about how the latest Bush record came about, and staying busy during quarantine, while humble Danish superstar Lukas Graham - whose mega hit 7 Years has racked up three billion stream worldwide - explains how he uses his music to deliver messages of love and kindness.

In Nashville, we chat to a few country artists including the city’s ‘newest unsigned star’ Hailey Whitters about staying connected with her fans this year, and her latest album release, The Dream. Meanwhile, Canadian country star Tenille Townes reveals how she’s trying to stay positive in Music City; and Katie Pruitt discusses her passion for songwriting and performing live with her Fender Strat.

Out on the West Coast, L.A.-based composer Alexander Bornstein tells us how he approached the score for Netflix’s original animated series Transformers: War For Cybertron, while electronic music trio Cash Cash explain why 20 hours straight

in a studio with Nelly permanently changed the way they make music.

We speak to KT Tunstall about her recent live stream gig at Whisky a Go Go; and in the studio, Ian Kirkpatrick (Dua Lipa, Jason Derulo, Justin Bieber) and Tony Draper discuss their favorite kit and respective roads into the music biz, while ‘Evil’ Joe Barresi shares how he got his nickname and what it’s like working with Queens of the Stone Age and Tool.

On the East Coast, we go behind the brand with Ryan Kershaw of New York-based D’Angelico Guitars, who gives us the lowdown on the company’s rich history and latest product line.

And in our first US Spotlight Review section, we get to grips with Shure’s new SLX-D wireless system, SSL’s SiX desktop analog console, Oeksound’s invaluable plugin pairing: Soothe 2 and Spiff; and Peluso’s P-280 mic.

We hope you enjoy the isssue!

Colby Ramsey Group Editor, Headliner HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

18 / GAVIN ROSSDALE 12 / HAILEY WHITTERS 08 / CEDRICE

28 / THE MIDNIGHT

32 / SCORING THE SINNER

22 / LUKAS GRAHAM

46 / ALEXANDER B0RNSTEIN

40/ GRIMES

36 / VINI VICI

58 / D’ANGELICO GUITARS

64 / HARMONI KELLY

52 / CASH CASH

74 / TENILLE TOWNES 70 / KATIE PRUITT 94 / JACK GOODMAN

90 / d&b FANBLOCK 84 / DAVE RUPSCH 78 / IAN KIRKPATRICK

132 / KT TUNSTALL

128 / WILLA AMAI 100 / SPOTLIGHT REVIEWS

142/ COIN 154/ MT. JOY

136 / TONYDRAPER

146 / JOE BARRESI

The Voice Within

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CEDRICE WEBBER HEADLINER USA

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ASPIRING HEADLINER

After a lifelong identity struggle, Cedrice reveals how music helped her find the voice within.

“If I didn’t speak the native languages of my people, then what was my voice?” she asks.

Even when Cedrice talks, she sounds like a singer – which is somewhat ironic given that she didn’t even consider herself a “proper” singer when she was overheard humming to herself one fateful day at university.

While Cedrice’s multi-ethnic ambiguity prompted her identity struggle, it also led her to find her voice within music – later finding comfort in the fact that her bandmates would also tick ‘other’ in a generic survey question if asked to pick what best describes them.

A student that was sitting next to Cedrice asked if she was a singer.

Cedrice knew she could sing alright, but did she consider herself to be a singer? She didn’t read music well, and didn’t have much experience performing, so no, she didn’t think she would count herself as a singer.

Undeterred, the student (and her close friend to this day) asked her to sing an Alicia Keys song. Shortly after, she joined his band, and her life hasn’t been the same since.

“That was the catalyst of this next chapter of my life,” Cedrice recalls.

“There were no expectations. I just walked in and we started vibing.

There was so much chemistry, and I haven’t stopped gigging since the day I met them.”

Now living in San Diego, Cedrice was born and raised in West Los Angeles in a mostly AfricanAmerican neighborhood. Of African-American, Irish, German and Filipino descent, Cedrice is very open about developing an identity crisis: “It got to the point where everyone just started to ask me, ‘What are you?’”

She didn’t speak Tagalog, so she wasn’t Filipino enough. She wasn’t dark enough to be considered black, and she certainly didn’t look white.

“Music has definitely given me something to focus on,” she admits, adding that she is aware of the privilege that her lighter skin affords her.

“Yeah, just knowing what your privilege looks like being a light skinned, ethnically ambiguous, exotic looking woman, you know? If I didn’t have music, I’d be focusing on my image so much. I’m focusing on my expression, celebrating life and evaluating my past so that I can write my future.”

After conceding that she might be a bit of a singer, Cedrice continued to step out of her comfort zone and could be found at many an open mic night, or even performing at various farmers markets for the next few years.

“I was trying to get in where I fit in, and I wasn’t sure where that was.

You kind of throw yourself out there, put yourself on stage, make a fool of yourself and then figure out what works and what doesn’t. I started performing at farmer’s markets for six to eight hours a day with no pay – I would just get tips – and that’s where I really developed my crowd interaction skills, my performing skills and my vocal techniques. It’s the real hustle. A lot of people can turn into wallpaper music, where you’re just there to serve everybody, and no one’s really paying attention.”

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THIRD TIME LUCKY Cedrice appeared in season 18 of The Voice, filling the last spot on John Legend’s team and prompting an onslaught of “oh my Gods’’ from the astonished – if not somewhat envious – coach Kelly Clarkson with her smokey and seductive performance of Fever. Although this wasn’t Cedrice’s first attempt at getting those red chairs to turn, having auditioned for the show twice before.

“The third time that I auditioned, I had already sung at coffee shops, restaurants and casinos, so I had developed a little bit of my artistry.

I had an idea about the kind of musician and performer I wanted to be. And so when I went there, bald, [the first time she wore a wig; the second, a scarf] I was like, ‘hey world, I’m bald, and I don’t give a care!’ I think that really played a part as to why they accepted me. I mean, yeah, my voice was good, but they’re also looking for personality and a sense of self.”

I point out that Cedrice doesn’t seem the ruthless, competitive type, which surely must have made the show’s brutal sing-off rounds particularly challenging?

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CEDRICE WEBBER

The Voice Within

“With every performance, I just got more nervous and more insecure because I was going up against such phenomenal singers – but I knew my strengths,” she answers. “I knew that I was very unique and looked very expressive in my performances. So I knew that I was good, too! I’m competitive in board games, but when it comes to this kind of stuff, I’m just not competitive. I’m very ‘San Diego chill’ – and for me, there’s room for everybody. Everybody can win, that’s my attitude. So going into the competition reminded me that I need to be able to hold myself up whenever I feel insecure or whenever I feel like I’m really being put to the test.”

Cedrice describes her life after The Voice as like a bomb hitting her life, but then due to the worldwide pandemic, civil rights movement and wildfires in the U.S., says “the rings stopped abruptly.

“Suddenly you’re here in the stillness and the quiet and you just watch the dust settle. That’s kind of what my life is right now where I’m like, ‘okay, I need to just sit and think about all the things I did right over the last few years. I’ve been on the go for a while, so this is a time where I just need to really think about what my next move is, and take it to the next level of professionalism and seriousness.”

HEADLINER USA

ASPIRING HEADLINER

THE VOICE WITHIN Finding one’s voice as a songwriter is another identity struggle on its own, and Cedrice always knew that this would not change while she was singing other people’s music. It was time to find out what makes Cedrice, Cedrice. She needed to sing her own words. Various poets helped her find clarity around a theme of ethnic confusion, and the pursuit of knowing who she truly is made her realize that where she truly belongs, is to music.

God’s saying, ‘hey, I’m gonna offer you unconditional love’, and I’m saying, ‘okay, but maybe we could take it slow, I don’t know if I’m ready to get all that’. God says, ‘we can give it room to grow; we can give our relationship room to grow. But you don’t need to be alone. I’ll be right here. I’ll keep loving you; just let me know when you’re ready’.”

Cedrice used the lockdown period to take a step in that direction, releasing single Room To Grow, featuring Mark Pelli – a song about unconditional love, but perhaps not the type you’d expect:

Cedrice works closely with QSC, whose Play Out Loud ethos has really resonated with her: “It’s about having the audacity to do what it is that makes you feel like you can express yourself – whether that’s live music, or some sort of performance, or educating people - whatever it is,” she explains. “It’s about having the audacity to do it unapologetically.”

“This idea came to me when I was acting on Broadway in New York.

I was so lonely, so sad, and so homesick. I wanted to write something that gave me some sort of comfort.

You have this sunny San Diego girl in New York during the worst winter ever in history, and I was going through a romantic breakup. It was a lot. The song is a reflection of a conversation with God. The verses are kind of like a back and forth between me and God.

QSC recently debuted Cedrice’s Play Out Loud video, where she candidly discussed some of the obstacles she has faced in her life, and how music has guided her. During the video, Cedrice reveals a story that is particularly poignant: after a friend of hers suddenly passed away, she knew that she owed it to herself to see where music could take her, as it suddenly hit her that tomorrow is not promised:

“Figuring out who I am as a writer is essentially figuring out who I am now,” she says.

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“That situation definitely inspired me to be where I am right now,” she confirms. “My friend Ashley passed away, and she just had so much potential – and she was using it, but she was just at the beginning of it. She just graduated college from the same university that I was in. I could not help but look in the mirror after that and think, ‘we’re not invincible’. We all know that death is coming, but we’re always so surprised. I don’t want to look back and think, ‘I never did anything that I wanted to do’. To pursue a life that I would not be happy in didn’t make sense when my friend passed away, and that big realization definitely affected me a lot.”

Speaking from her experiences with struggling with a sense of identity, Cedrice knows that it’s important that artists stay true to who they really are and figure out what it is that they want to put out into the world: “I know it sounds so cliché, but it really is true! Figure out what it is that really embodies who you are, and share that. It’s very clear when an artist or a person is not being themself or really expressing their true story. Just be authentic, just be cool. Be yourself. You don’t gotta lie to kick it!”

SPONSORED BY

CEDRICEMUSIC.COM QSC.COM

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HAILEY WHITTERS

HEADLINER USA

EMERGING HEADLINER

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living THE dream

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Despite over a decade of hard work in Music City, country musician and singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters was only recently able to take a step back to reassess why she started this journey in the first place: to create music that she loves on her own terms. Here, “Nashville’s newest unsigned star” explains how she’s been staying connected with her fans throughout lockdown, and how things have finally come full circle on her latest album release, The Dream.

Like many recording artists and musicians, Hailey Whitters was hoping to be out on the road this year showcasing her latest record to the world.

When it became apparent that touring was out of the question, the probing, fearless songwriter from Iowa bounced back, something that she has become quite accustomed with over the course of her musical career.

“I’ve been doing a lot of co-writing, which is not necessarily what I planned on spending this year doing, but I’m just getting into the studio when I can to record new music, stay creative and stay positive,” says Whitters.

At the start of August, Whitters announced a new live in studio session series, which she kicked off with an intimate piano rendition of her song Dream, Girl from her latest album The Dream, released earlier this year.

“I really miss not being out on the road, and we just wanted to do it as a gift to fans so that they could experience the songs in that setting,” she explains. “We had a little bit of fun with the reinterpreted version of Dream, Girl - we stripped it back production-wise and brought the piano to the forefront, and in a way it really reinvented the song for me.

It just felt good to be playing music again, and to have that synergy of a live performance with your band.

“It’s a special song to me and one that I’ve always enjoyed playing live. The new live in studio version feels very vulnerable compared to the party girl anthem vibe of the original, so I think we were just really excited to get that one out first.”

It has been a long journey for Whitters, who has now been in Nashville for 13 years having spent many late nights writing songs and building friendships

on Music Row. The grind looked to have paid off however when she took home Rising Artist-Writer of the Year at this year’s AIMP Nashville Awards.

“It was just shock, gratitude and massive appreciation,” says Whitters when asked about her initial reaction to receiving the award. “To be recognized by your community of peers as a rising new artist - it just felt very special and very cool to be acknowledged for the work I’ve been doing.”

Whitters released her first album Black Sheep in 2015, but her passion for singing and songwriting had seen a spark many years before. Encouraged by her English teacher to pursue writing, she was a big fan of ‘90s girl bands like the Spice Girls and the Chicks, which served as some of her early musical inspirations.

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HAILEY WHITTERS

Living the Dream

“i just started knocking on doors, messaging club owners, and turning up asking them for shows.”

“I had a guidance counsellor in elementary school, and I asked him what I have to do to be a country artist,” Whitters recalls. “He told me that the Dixie Chicks write their own songs - something I didn’t actually know at the time - which kind of planted the seed. From there I got a guitar and quickly became a bedroom singer-songwriter, with big dreams about Nashville.”

Knowing she had to make the move as soon as possible, Whitters relocated to Nashville after graduating high school when she was 16, and everything changed completely.

“I was very naive to the industry, and I had no idea what it was about,” she admits. “I didn’t even know where to start, so I just started knocking on doors, messaging club owners, and turning up asking them for shows, which is when I quickly realized that Nashville is very much a co-writing community.”

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EMERGING HEADLINER

Whitters had soon built up a network of peers in the music industry, and it wasn’t long before she signed to Carnival Music, where she has now been writing for eight years.

“It’s been a grind, but I’ve written a few songs that have been recorded by other artists which is just wonderful - there’s no feeling like hearing someone else sing your song.

“I finally decided that I’m going to make a record of my own,” she continues. “I love writing, and so if anyone ever records a song of mine it’s still a huge, huge accomplishment to me, but I always want to be able to put out my own records too.”

Whitters admits that all those years of writing undoubtedly paid off, helping her to discover her voice and identity as an artist, as well as steering important decisions about which songs she wanted to put on the record.

Back in July, Whitters released the video for Janice At The Hotel Bar, a song which she co-wrote with huge Grammy-nominated country artist Lori McKenna, and another of her tracks that received a number of big accolades.

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However, this wasn’t the first time that the pair had worked together. In 2016, a chance meeting saw Whitters and McKenna collaborate to write Happy People, signalling the start of a fruitful songwriting relationship.

“Honestly, I think that really solidified some of the concept of the record for me. I love Lori and I do think we have a spiritual connection - I feel very lucky that I get to collaborate with her.”

“I have been a Lori McKenna fan since I first moved to town - I literally studied her records and just waited for the moment that I could get in a room with her,” she laments. “It finally happened in 2016. I flew up to Boston a day early because I was so nervous and just wanted to get settled in, and the next day I showed up at her house with an idea. She is absolutely everything that you think and hope Lori McKenna is - so warm and welcoming, and makes you feel like you deserve to be in the room.

Even with this strong support network around her, Whitters is no stranger to being self-sufficient in her work.

She released The Dream entirely independently earlier this year on her own label, Pigasus Records, a name inspired by one of her favorite authors, John Steinbeck.

“I was so lucky to have that first song that we wrote be recorded by Little Big Town. It was a really cool bucket list moment for me, and I did another few trips where I’d go up and write with her. On one of those last trips to Boston, we wrote Janice At The Hotel Bar and Living the Dream, among others, so that particular trip was so special and so fruitful because those two songs ended up being on my record.

“Releasing The Dream spurred a lot of things for me, especially in leading me to management,” she reveals. “I was having all of these label meetings, and was feeling really disappointed with some of the responses. I felt very uninspired walking out of them, and it just didn’t feel right to me because we believed in this record so much. That was the point when we were like, ‘we’re proud of what we’ve done, we could be doing a pretty good job, so let’s just keep riding this train and be independent.’”

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HAILEY WHITTERS

Living the Dream

It was decided that Big Loud Records / Songs & Daughters would lead and continue the promotion and marketing for The Dream: “I feel very lucky to have those folks behind this record,” Whitters adds.

After putting out the 12 songs that make up the album, and which chronicle her musical journey, Whitters is now eager to show fans the bucket list moments, incredible collaborations and unforgettable experiences that have resulted from the record’s release.

“It just feels like a full circle project - starting in a 10 year town feeling very broken, very bitter - and then the moment of seeing the way my whole life and career has

HEADLINER USA

changed because I made a record that I believe in. The fans receiving it and embracing it in the way they have has allowed me to go on and get to do some things that I honestly never dreamed of doing, so I’m excited to get to share this with them.”

HAILEYWHITTERS.COM

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For more information visit genelec.com/raw

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GAVIN ROSSDALE

Back to Basics

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back to basics

ARTIST

Despite the woes of lockdown, it’s been an eventful year thus far for US-based rock band Bush, who released their eighth studio album this July. We caught up with frontman Gavin Rossdale to find out how the latest record came about and what he’s been doing to keep busy.

Gavin Rossdale has had a truly incredible career with Bush, one of North America’s most commercially successful rock bands of the ‘90s who reformed in 2010 following an eightyear hiatus. The lead vocalist and rhythmic guitarist is as passionate as ever about his craft - something we recently learned while discussing the creative process behind some of the tracks on The Kingdom, the band’s latest record.

“I just love being in this band and it really defines everything that I do,” enthuses Rossdale. “There’s been a really good response to the new songs and I actually shot a video for one of them just before this whole pandemic went down.”

The video in question is for the epic sounding Flowers On A Grave, which as Rossdale reveals was written and recorded in exactly the same way as the band’s 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone: “I had this great studio where I wrote the theme songs for a few TV shows as well as three songs for Rihanna, but then it really became about writing the Bush record for me. I’d get my engineer in and pull all the instruments up, and then when the songs were together and the band was in, I’d usually start to get skeletons ready and begin experimenting with things. I’d just use that as a sort of base start point and it’s the same thing I used to do with the band back in the day,” he explains. “I’d sit in my room with a drum machine and a guitar and I’d

record myself, or I’d walk around Hyde Park playing the riffs on one cassette player and recording myself on another.”

What is curious however is that when he wrote Flowers On A Grave, Rossdale had just given up his recording studio due to the fact that he just wasn’t getting enough use out of it, not to mention it costing a small fortune to run. Instead, for this song he used an Alesis SR-16 drum machine.

“It’s actually the first song I’ve written in exactly the same way that I used to do everything for Sixteen Stone,” he admits. “Annoyingly, the new record is doing so well that now I’m going to be writing everything on that poxy little drum machine in my room!

The guitarist Chris came round and he played a couple of notes which I recorded on my voice recorder.

Then he left and I wrote and sang the verse, we went in the next day to record it, and that was it! It’s like we went from having this big studio with soft synths, amps, guitars, basses, percussion, a live room etc., to just sharing a guitar and using a little old drum machine.”

It almost seems fitting in a way that Rossdale’s creative process has come full circle, harnessing some nostalgic gear and techniques while maintaining his ability to get the job done with a fantastically reliable songwriting tool.

“With this record we went through the classic thing whereby we worked on it for a couple of months and delivered it to the label at Christmas, and BMG were like ‘Great, but can you give us two more songs?’

“After I sent them that, they suggested I work with a guy called Erik Ron, which I did and I’m so glad with the decision. He’s a great person and

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a phenomenal engineer with his own studio just around the corner from my house, and we’ll definitely do a lot more with him in the future because he’s just one of those people who really knows their stuff,” says Rossdale. “I did three sessions on my own and then one with Stone Temple Pilots. I also did four songs with Tyler Bates at his studio, and the rest of the album tracks I did at my place here in North Hollywood, so there was a bit of moving around here and there.”

Rossdale admits however that he likes the idea of having a bunch of songs and a producer, going into the studio in January and coming out with a record in March, “but it doesn’t seem to work like that anymore what with home studios and the rigours of touring where you have these windows where you have to get things done.

“I have this weird work ethic; when I come back from tour I’ll go straight into the studio the next day, because I find it a really relaxing place to be when you’ve just come back fresh off the road,” he says. “I love that I can play a show and then two days later be jamming out in the studio with myself, working out what I would’ve liked to get in the set or what I felt was missing from it. That’s what informs and inspires all the songs I’ve written, because now I mostly think it’s about focusing on the live thing. I don’t want to just do live music that doesn’t sound as good as records, but I have to start from a place where they can even contend with those big monster songs that we have.”

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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GAVIN ROSSDALE

Back to Basics

Speaking of monster songs, another hard-hitting number from the new album is Bullet Holes, which was written and recorded through a slightly different process. It began with Rossdale’s manager suggesting he work with Tyler Bates, a huge film, TV and video game composer based in Los Angeles who has worked extensively with Marilyn Manson: “We went for lunch a couple of times to work out what sort of vibe we were going for, and discussed this being something that we could potentially turn into film music.

We ended up spending some time in the studio and working on a few riffs, because I wanted to do a heavy record. We got on really well musically and as friends, and so I ended up doing four songs for the album with him.

“Every record has to stand on its own merit — it needs HEADLINER USA

to have heart and it needs to have integrity. There’s too many records in the world, but there are never too many great things,” laments Rossdale. “We’re always going for that, and the dream really is that someone who doesn’t know the band hears the new record and then discovers the back catalogue, and at the same time you want the people that know and love the band to be wowed by the new stuff.

“The record’s really vital because my life should’ve been settled and boring by now, but instead everything’s a bit upside down, and I’m living this very artistic, free life where I’m still seeing mad pain, mad challenges, loneliness, dislocation... I’m not an unhappy, depressed person but I find it ironic that at this point in my life I’m still just as deeply connected to my work, and it’s not disingenuous because I’m not living that idyllic lifestyle.”

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“i DO HAVE THIS SORT OF FANTASY THAT AFTER THIS TIME OF REFLECTION WHERE EVERYONE’S HAD THIS VICIOUSLY ABRUPT STOP TO THEIR LIVES, PEOPLE COME BACK WITH THE BEST PARTS OF THEMSELVES AND JUST BE BETTER TO EACH OTHER.”

So while Rossdale clearly remains headstrong throughout these turbulent times, it’s certainly interesting to learn how he has tweaked his creative process in line with the requirements of today’s industry. In fact, it almost sounds as if songwriting and performing is something the Bush frontman is physically incapable of stopping.

Despite this seemingly unquenchable thirst, everyone needs their downtime, and Rossdale goes on to tell us how he’s been filling his days during lockdown in the US:

from The Deer Hunter which I’ve always wanted to learn — to playing a Tool song. Studying other guitar players and learning how they do what they do means that the musical journey is infinite. I would say that as a songwriter, until you’ve written songs as good as The Beatles you’ve got a lot of headroom to keep pushing! I think it’s really healthy sometimes to accept that it’s okay to write things that aren’t good. It’s just about getting your head down, working hard and then eventually all roads lead to getting better.

“I’ve been doing some online shows, as well as learning some classical guitar through Skype lessons with my guitar teacher, in French no less!

It’s so strange to go from playing a John Williams guitar piece — Cavatina

“I do have this sort of fantasy that after this time of reflection where everyone’s had this viciously abrupt stop to their lives, people come back with the best parts of themselves and just be better to each other. It’ll be

a big win when everyone can rise up again and it’s going to be one massive global party for a while. I think music will celebrate that, but it’s going to be interesting to see how and when that’s going to happen.”

It’s great to hear that Rossdale is being as creative as ever these days, even making use of some old pieces of gear to create records for a new generation. Like many, he holds hope and positive energy for the time when music fans worldwide are finally able to hit the stages to see their favorite artists perform once again.

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LUKAS GRAHAM

HEADLINER USA

Share that Love

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SHARE THAT LOVE

LUKAS GRAHAM Danish singer-songwriter Lukas Graham’s mega-hit 7 Years has achieved three billion streams worldwide. However it’s not about the numbers for Lukas - he comes from remarkably humble beginnings, and remains unaffected by his fame and fortune, preferring to use his musical talent for delivering important messages of love and kindness to the masses, like in his recent single ft. G-Eazy, Share That Love.

Speaking to us from his bedroom in Copenhagen back in late August, Lukas Graham was on an emotional high; he had recently become a father for the second time around and his feel-good single Share That Love had just been released into the world.

“Right when we peaked on contagion levels here, we got a little daughter, so we had kind of been self quarantining for a while anyway,” he tells Headliner.

Lukas has made a big return to songwriting this year, and has been eager to get the creative juices flowing: “With me it’s very much lyrics first, and I’ve been having some really productive Skype sessions with all

kinds of people,” he says. “The last few bits of Share That Love were ironed out over the phone with a Scotsman called Dave Gibson, who’d I met with in L.A. pre-quarantine. The next moment, G-Eazy - who I spent some time with touring the 2016 Jingle Ball in the States - heard the track and wanted to feature.

“Once I heard his verse, I really liked where the song was going and decided to keep it. I still don’t know how he heard it, and that’s the funny part. I think the music industry kind of went into a panic, and maybe A&Rs and managers started sharing more music between each other than they normally would, so a guy like G heard a song from a guy like me, and it just worked.”

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LUKAS GRAHAM

Share that Love

It was particularly good timing for Lukas to release the track, with its soulful harmony and feel-good pop vibe, serving as a beacon of positivity against the backdrop of the current world situation.

“When I first heard the demo, it reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up, so that’s why we chose to shoot the video there,” he recalls. “It’s also kind of why I felt like this song had to come out now. It’s a cliche, and like The Beatles said, all you need is love - this message is the same and it’s really as simple as that.”

Despite being able to choose anywhere in the world to live, Lukas chose to return to his hometown to start a family. In the video for Share That Love, a mural is painted on the building where he used to make his pocket money as he cycles around greeting people from this very tightknit community, a nod to his modest and unassuming outlook on life and on music.

“We went back to my birthplace of Christiania, Copenhagen. It was squatted in 1971 and is an autonomous neighbourhood in the city, 34 acres with a population of about 700 people. The building

where that mural is painted in the video is just two streets away from where I live, and it’s a concert venue where I’ve seen the likes of The Fugees, Rage Against the Machine and the Red Hot Chili Peppers play live, so it’s a very special place to me.

“In fact, I used to work there as a teenager either at the bar or on the door,” he reveals. “Every Christmas we serve food for 1,500 people there - I’ve seen CEOs in Armani suits sit next to welfare recipients eating Christmas dinner because he was by himself in Copenhagen and his family was somewhere else. That’s a very, very magical thing to see.”

The track itself, along with Lukas Graham’s international hit 7 Years from 2015, was produced by Morten Ristorp, known professionally as “Rissi”, a Danish-born producer,

“the only numbers that actually matter to me is how close to 100% sold out a concert is.”

composer, songwriter and musician in his own right.

“I’ve known him since my first year of high school,” explains Lukas. “I only write lyrics and come up with melodies, and we just kind of do it as we go along. But really, he is the sound, and it’s nice that I don’t even have to call him and talk to him about things - he just knows our sound inside and out.”

Before signing to Warner in 2013, Lukas had already performed a lot of shows in Europe, but it was during his time in the US when his dreams really came true, selling out shows in L.A., New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis and many more big cities.

“When we did the first United States tour it felt phenomenal, but then we came back and did our first full European tour,” he remembers.

“When I played in Dublin I had like 62 family members in the crowd, and playing in London when my auntie’s flew over and my cousin who lives in East London came out to the show that was just the peak for me. Kasper Schmeichel, the Danish soccer player came to Manchester and took us out to dinner, and that was also just incredible.”

Lukas’ track 7 Years was a worldwide phenomenon for some time and he has some extremely impressive accolades to show for it. It was the biggest selling single by a debut artist in 2016 and he received three Grammy nominations off the back of it. Seven Years has now racked up an incredible three billion streams across all streaming platforms.

“Sometimes I really need to forget all those numbers,“ admits Lukas. “The touring and promotional whirlwind post 7 Years was a bit too much. I didn’t have time to be creative,

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I didn’t have time to see my pregnant wife, I didn’t have time to see my mum, and I didn’t have time to be in the city that gives me the energy to write these songs and to go out into the world and be a performer and entertain people.

“The crazy times all catch up on you eventually,” he adds. “I haven’t been in one place this much for a decade. I think in terms of happiness levels, I had worked too much for too long. It’s weird though because when you’re working with music, you want to keep going because it’s so rewarding.

“Obviously there’s money and the luxury commodity living situation that comes with it, or the fact that I don’t have to drive a car because I have my bike, and if I need a car, I have a driver, but none of it really matters to me because I essentially grew up with nothing. I was happier back then than I’ve been for the majority of my adult life.”

They say it takes a rich man to tell you money isn’t everything, but the fact is, Lukas knew money wasn’t everything before he started his phenomenal musical journey, which is perhaps why he has chosen to return to his humble beginnings.

“Everybody else that I write songs with that came from the original team have all got green cards and permanent residencies in Los Angeles, and that’s where they work from now. They write songs for movies and other artists and produce beats for rappers and I find it amazing that they can keep up their creativity in the city of devils.”

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LUKAS GRAHAM

Share that Love

Meanwhile, Lukas’ 2018 album 3 (The Purple Album) has gone 18 times platinum across multiple continents, a figure that Lukas himself didn’t even seem aware of.

“The only numbers that actually matter to me is how close to 100% sold out a concert is, because that dictates the atmosphere and how good the show is,” he says. “A show for 500 people can be as great as a show for 5,000, as long as the venue fits.

“To me, 3 was the most perfect album we’ve made. Blue was really big and had all these massive songs. But 3 is like an art piece from start to finish telling the story and delivering it on a plate. I’m very proud of that work.

“There are some songs from the album that didn’t make it that I think we’re releasing on the next album, because they were so good. They just didn’t fit the story, and didn’t really belong in that ‘I’m becoming a dad’ album.’

Last year, Lukas decided to broaden

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his musical repertoire, becoming more open to the idea of doing features with other artists.

“I just decided that I want to do some big songs with other artists, and I wanted to expand my artistry, which has been the key to some of the stuff I’m doing now like Share That Love with G-Eazy. I’m featuring on an amazing song with American country singer Lauren Alaina, and I have a couple of songs with Wiz Khalifa that I’m really excited about. One of them is mine that I will be releasing later this year with a documentary, and I’ve also been doing stuff with some different DJs that I’m super psyched about.

“I’m really trying to branch out a little bit because I’m such a heavy artist in a sense,” he continues. “Even a light song like Share That Love - if you dive into the lyrics it starts telling a deeper story, and I feel like I need something a little lighter in my CV as well.

“I want to do all these features so I can keep writing deep ballads and more intricate songs, and get stuck

into some more rappy lyrics. I feel like I need to branch out a little and take up some space on some other genres.”

It’s clear that Lukas is ready to sing with other artists again, and not “just be the solo man,” as he says.

“It was very much a mantra for me to have three albums with no features, which I’ve done now. So now we have a couple of worldwide songs that have been played all over the place, it almost feels like I’m legitimized - I’m allowed to play for real now.”

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THE MIDNIGHT

Future Nostalgia

FUTURE NOSTALGIA

There is a Japanese term: Mono no aware. In short, it encapsulates the sad beauty of seeing time pass – the aching awareness of impermanence.

These are the days that we will return to one day in the future, only in memories.

For L.A.-based band, The Midnight, capturing the essence of a gentle wistfulness and a nostalgia for the past has taken the form of a body of work of modern-sounding synth wave music, which has seen the duo

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grow an online cult fascination to a legion of dedicated fans over the short space of a few years. And the ‘80s pastiche doesn’t just apply to their music: take a glance at their Instagram account and it’s all neon pinks and blues, retro fonts, classic arcade games, floppy discs, cassette tapes and old school Nintendos – basically it’s everything from your childhood bedroom.

Making up The Midnight are Tyler Lyle (a songwriter from the Deep South) and Tim McEwan (a producer from Denmark), who join Headliner on a call from their homes in Atlanta and L.A., respectively.

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The Midnight have got love for you if you were born in the ‘80s. But even if you weren’t, there’s more than enough nostalgia to go around.

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On the lockdown period, McEwan jokes that he has become even closer to his dog – “my best and only friend” – while both are in firm agreement that this year has been “a real bummer” given that they had a big tour cancelled, although they’ve used the time to hunker down and get creative by embracing their new long distance relationship, as well as finding the time go down some “modular synthesis rabbit holes”.

Meeting in L.A. on a co-writing session, the pair were put together by the people that ran their publishing companies. McEwan was under a publishing and production deal, while Lyle had been working as a professional songwriter for six years already – a period of his life that he fondly refers to as the “sadness and deprivation tour”. They’ve been working together ever since.

“After our meeting, I kept emailing Tyler and hounding him. I wouldn’t leave him alone, and he still still hasn’t got rid of me!” laughs McEwan, who explains that although he has an extensive background of producing and writing for other artists, he never hoped to be a touring artist himself: “When I met Tyler, we connected musically. We come from such different places, and yet he was familiar in many ways. It was a nice outlet to create this little sandbox that we could play in and feel creatively free to do all kinds of things. For me, it was an outlet to do all the things I couldn’t do when I was writing for top 40 radio.”

Their pastiche of ‘80s synth wave music is synonymous with their sound, which in part can be attributed to McEwan’s upbringing in the ‘80s, whereas Lyle used to call himself a “Nashville writer,” and is more inspired by pop music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, admitting that it was “a

stretch” to fit his songwriting style into this world of retro-sounding music.

The resurgence in ‘80s nostalgia has picked up with the speed of a modified DeLorean in the last few years, with high profile Netflix shows like Stranger Things, GLOW and Black Mirror (Bandersnatch, San Junipero), and blockbuster films like It proving to be a big hit with audiences – while artists like The Weeknd and Dua Lipa have fully embraced the synth and sax-driven sounds of everyone’s favorite mullet-sporting artists.

What The Midnight seem to have captured in their music is not a pastiche of the best bits of ‘80s music, but instead they seem to have bottled what we think the ‘80s sounded like – and by extension – what we think our childhood sounded like. Like a TV rerun of an ‘80s cinematic classic with a happy ending, there’s something familiar and comforting about what we think the ‘80s was like. (Bicycles!

Zoltar! Treasure maps!)

“Exactly,” agrees Lyle. “I think for millennial culture, it was what was on the radio when they were kids – when they were too young to really recognize what was going on. For me, there’s a sound of comfort and a womb-like consciousness to it. Our project is nostalgia, it’s not necessarily the ‘80s sound we’re trying to perfectly emulate. We’re more focused with the idea of time passing and how we orient ourselves to a past that used to be. This resurgence of ‘80s music gets you asking questions like ‘who were we? Where did we start?’ We’re trying to get back to our origins.”

McEwan is on the same page, and notes that the digital world that we now live in has a big part to play in harking back to a simpler, and to some – a more novel time: when phones were huge, cars were angular

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and video games were pixelated.

“Exactly!’ says McEwan. “In the last 10 years with the growth of social media, everything seems to be not quite as tactile. There’s something very tactile about having a cassette tape or a turntable, a vinyl, or a VHS player – there’s something that you can touch, hold and collect. I think that’s why analogue photography is having a huge resurgence: it’s not a file, it exists in the real world. I think we all need that to a certain extent, and the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s represent that time. I think even for people that weren’t born in the ‘80s, they kind of find themselves yearning for something. I think it speaks to almost a more lived in user experience, for lack of a better phrase. There was an optimism in the ‘80s that I think we sorely need at this time.”

“And not to get too literary, but Proust says: basically the only truth that exists is to return to a room that you haven’t been into in many years; that feeling that happens to you...there’s something powerful there. There’s something emotive in terms of that time-space difference with our past and our memories,” adds Lyle. “It seems like a path that could take a lifetime to explore. It’s the poignancy of having gone on the journey and then looking back from the end. It feels like a powerful, resonant place to create art from.”

“We’re creating art and entertainment and are trying to make you feel something,” McEwan agrees. “It’s about creating the feeling – synth wave isn’t really how the ‘80s sounded, it’s how we wish the ‘80s sounded, and it’s how we remember them sounding. There’s a separation there and I think that’s totally fine. It’s all about invoking a feeling.”

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THE MIDNIGHT

Future Nostalgia

monsters Following on from The Midnight’s 2018 album, Kids, their new album, Monsters explores teenage emotions through nostalgic touchstones, taking inspiration from everything from world music to Ecco the Dolphin.

McEwan can’t help but see the irony in the album’s artwork (designed before the pandemic), which would turn out to be a sight most people would likely come to be very familiar with over the lockdown period: “The artwork for the album is a bedroom, and it looks exactly like what would be a quarantine bedroom, where someone is basically living in there. [Headliner makes a mental note to put the pizza box into the recycling right after the interview].

The album is about themes like isolation, connection, being a teenager and trying to find out who you are. You’re basically exploring yourself through video games, music and your friends, and are hanging out in your bedroom instead of hanging out with your parents. So it was quite weird to step back and go, ‘whoa! We’re in the middle of a worldwide pandemic with people quarantining, and this looks exactly like my bedroom right now’. On a deeper level, maybe there was something that resonated with people once the album came out and people saw the artwork, because I think the visual side is a big component of this universe that we’ve created. I think it struck a nerve in that way.”

On Monsters, The Midnight deliberately didn’t want to be beholden to a strict ‘80s sound, so also took a lot of HEADLINER USA

inspiration from the ‘90s to give a sense of a larger sonic universe.

“I think there’s a tendency with all genres to be bubbled into this chamber of one specific genre, and I felt it was important for us to move forward and to have the ability to move freely,” McEwan points out.

The track Brooklyn is a particular favourite for both Lyle and McEwan. One of Lyle’s most personal tracks, he wrote it during a particularly unhappy time in New York: “I was living in this huge tower with glass walls, and at night you would see New York lit up like a chandelier,” he recalls.

“But it was a very lonely and searching time. I had just got married, and my wife and I were deeply unhappy in New York. That song was a question to the city itself as to whether the time there would be good or bad... whether we’d fall apart.”

Ironically for a band so steeped in nostalgia and with a fondness for the tactile buttons of the past, McEwan actually keeps it all in the box when it comes to production – no outboard or vintage gear in sight – although Lyle has started getting into modular synths recently.

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it functions like a glue on the drum bus; it gives a little bit of tape compression, brightens the sound a bit, and it gives some emphasis in the low end without making it muddy. I like the Manley VoxBox channel strip for the lead vocal, although my favorite thing about UAD plugins is the quality of the reverbs. I feel like they’re unparalleled because of the pure processing power you get. They just sound better!”

For any big, spaced out reverbs, it’s always got to be the UAD Lexicon 224 plugin: “It seems like you can have it go on forever and it never gets muddy or anything,” he enthuses. “I love a good, wide soundscape, so I find myself putting a lot of chorus and widener on a ton of stuff, which is a balance because if everything is widened out, then it all just feels like a mishmash. I tend to always put a little bit of widener, a tiny bit of chorus, or a tiny bit of spreader on Tyler’s voice to make it feel a little stereo. It just makes it fit nicely in the mix.”

Helping widen that sound further is the Dolby Atmos mix of Monsters, which McEwan was honored to be a part of: “We got all the stems individually and then we mixed it specifically for Dolby Atmos, which was such a cool experience to hear it being spread out in such an expansive way – compared to what you can do with stereo. It’s as expansive and wide as you can get with Dolby Atmos!”

In terms of what The Midnight are working on next, they’re keeping their cards pretty close to their chest – “we have secrets…” – although they can reveal that they’re already working on their next full length record.

“We always envisioned the Kids trilogy as a three-part, where Monsters was the second, so hopefully we’ll put together a new record,” reveals Lyle. “It takes time to write the whole record and to record it and all that, so we’ve got a big, big job ahead of us.”

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McEwan uses an Apollo Twin from Universal Audio as his sound card, and is also a massive advocate of UAD plugins when shaping a mix: “I always use UAD kit on my drum bus, especially when it’s a very ‘80s-sounding drum kit that has a lot of click in the kick and a lot of splashy snare. Songs like Prom Night, Dance With Somebody and Lost Boy – they all have that very ‘80s drum sound. For that, on my drum bus I used the Oxide Tape plugin – it’s my favorite and HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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RONIT KIRCHMAN

Scoring The Sinner

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Ronit Kirchman explains why concocting a palette of sonic nausea is key to keeping viewers feeling uneasy when watching The Sinner.

radar to score the first season of The Sinner – “the more you work, the more you work” – and she is thrilled with how the show has been received so far:

“Finding different flavors of sonic nausea is one of my jobs,” confesses Kirchman – a composer, music producer, songwriter, conductor, singer, and multi-instrumentalist whose most recent project saw her score season three of thrillermystery series, The Sinner.

“One of the cool things about the show is that I’m learning what it is about through doing it. It’s all about exploring aspects of the collective unconscious that relate to violence and crime. I remember after season one people were like, ‘Where could it go from here? The crime is resolved!’”

More of a whydunnit rather than a whodunnit, The Sinner was originally intended to run as an eight-part miniseries. Following the success of the first season, the Emmy and Golden Globenominated show was swiftly expanded into an anthology series, following detective Harry Ambrose as he investigates various atrocious murder cases and tries to analyze the reasons behind ordinary people committing heinous crimes.

Speaking to Headliner from her home in L.A., Kirchman explains that music has always felt like a native language to her. She began playing violin at the age of four, and trained with some of the world’s finest violinists.

“Music is like my mother tongue,” she says. “The more I’ve been able to study, the more I’ve been able to articulate that. I think that the affinity with music is definitely something that comes from within, and luckily I was encouraged to pursue it without a ton of pressure on the parental side. The selfeducation part of music is a lifelong activity for me; there’s such a rich world. It’s pretty infinite, so it’s never boring. I’ll never retire!”

Kirchman says that a series of small breaks combined to get her on the

The Sinner’s showrunner, Derek Simonds (a friend of Kirchman’s from university) asked her to read the script for season one to get a feel for the story, and then was asked to work on new compositions for the pilot that they could pull from and cut in while they were editing. Since there was going to be a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, the whole series suddenly needed a score.

“It’s great to start to simmer in the story that early, because you can let your imagination run free for a while,” she points out.

In terms of the process of writing the music for each episode, Kirchman likens it to “a ramp that increases in speed”, producing an episode’s worth of music every week in a round-the-clock endeavor.

“Once they’ve shot footage, I’m working to picture and to scene, and when the cut is close enough to final, we’ll sit down for a spotting session and discuss the ins and outs and then our points and comments,” she explains. “It’s a really important opportunity for me to hear from the showrunner, as sometimes things evolve as we work on it – like how they want to position a certain theme dramatically in the

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arc of the episode or season. With The Sinner, there is so much about nuance, relationships and subverted expectations, and things can change in a very finely calibrated way to create tension. Those discussions are really important because there are usually multiple options for how you can play a scene, so building that language and the dramatic attitude of the show is very collaborative, and on the composer side requires a lot of listening.”

Kirchman says that for each season, the palette for the instrumentation is renewed, while simultaneously retaining the continuity of the programme’s overall feel.

GOING DARK “In season three – electronically speaking – it becomes darker and edgier, and a little bit more into IBM territory. I was able to conduct a string ensemble that sounds like an intimate chamber ensemble.

It sounds really detailed and it contrasts with some of the electronic elements in a really interesting way.”

An unsuspecting signature sound emerges from the third season, highlighting the duality of relationships by juxtaposing live string players mixed against aggressive electronics: “In terms of the instrumentation, having a lot of ensembles really added to the dimensionality and the kinds of things that I wanted to do, HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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RONIT KIRCHMAN

Scoring The Sinner

like have this delicate lyricism that could morph into threat or menace. That string ensemble was a great expressive tool for that. On the electronic side, designing moments that felt reflective of that intensity, darkness and edginess was a lot of fun.”

The Sinner’s third installment follows detective Harry Ambrose as he begins a seemingly routine investigation of a tragic car accident in upstate New York, soon uncovering a hidden crime that pulls him into the most dangerous and disturbing case of his career.

“It’s a darker season,” she agrees. “In a lot of ways, it’s about the absence of love and what fills that void – which can be very destructive. Previous seasons have had elements that soften the blow, so it’s kind of unmitigated in certain ways. I think it’s a good thing that the show is able to go to dark places, because it’s coming from a desire to understand that despair. I definitely got to know the energy of the project, and this season it felt heavier and more intense.”

Kirchman’s score has a way of making the viewer feel uneasy, and even during the most seemingly mundane scenes the audience is braced for impact.

“That was definitely one of the goals! It’s challenging because when we started the show, part of the aesthetic concept was to have a fresh take on the genre. We wanted to inject something new so that people feel the

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thrills and some of the dark beauty of the world. So, from season one, making people feel uneasy in that way required reinventing the meta vocabulary of, ‘what makes people sit on edge?’ Once you’ve done a certain thing in season one, you can’t just trot it out again because then people are more used to it and then it doesn’t have that same effect. It’s a little bit of a drug, I guess!”

During one fraught episode, Ambrose choses to ignore police protocol and accompany [the suspect] Jamie into New York, whom (spoiler alert) we know is a murderer on the cusp of a breakdown – oh, and another murder.

“He’s been in pursuit of Jamie the whole night, and they’ve become intertwined in a new and disturbing way.

There are certain motifs and melodies that have been developing and mutating in relationship to this kind of criminal, sickly thread of activity with Jamie. I don’t want to use the word ‘sludge’ because that doesn’t sound very appealing,” she laughs. “But he’s entered the swamp of Jamie’s world and he’s starting to get engulfed by it.

Ambrose has acted in a way that’s not really by the book for a detective – it’s an unorthodox way of policing – and he’s kind of in danger of falling into the psychological abyss himself. That is a little bit nauseating for him.

There is a thread of nausea with Ambrose and with him confronting his abusive past, which is something that predates this this season.”

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father’s descent into succumbing to his violent impulses, and his impending psychological tailspin.

FRACTAL One of the key themes that generated cue material throughout the series is a piece called Fractal, which can be heard in different forms in the ending cues of many other pieces of music written for season three. It’s a longer theme that evolves slowly, so when it emerges in different places in the score – and in different keys or tempi or processing styles – it takes on different shades of functionality and tone.

“It’s a slow evolution, and this theme of loss and grief is revisited and reimagined at different places. We never get to hear the entire theme from start to finish, but it serves as the basis for a lot of cues. We hear it at the end of episode one in a cue called Slow Seath where Jamie leaves his friend to die, and it’s interesting because it’s paired with a stuttery and almost subliminal electronic dark groove.”

The Fractal cue can also be heard in a scene showing the birth of Jamie’s child, which is accompanied by Kirchman’s gloriously woozy score – perfectly underpinning the new

“This season really is a tragedy – it’s both a thriller and also about personal loss,” she elaborates. “In Jamie’s case, it’s the loss of himself and his understanding of who he is, which maybe he never really had.

He goes down this path of complete obliteration and he loses his identity.

The through line of the Fractal theme lets us express that overarching sadness in the context of more energetic elements. With The Sinner, there’s always a subtext that runs counter to what you would expect a moment to be about. There’s a very substantial vocabulary of dark sound cues and atmospheres that have been brewing. It’s an unusual but catalytic combination.”

Kirchman’s DAW of choice is Pro Tools, which she says helps her out in terms of her stem deliveries and any quick changes that need to be made based on last minute tweaks to The Sinner.

“Also just because I’m recording a lot of audio, I’m able to organize it and work with it in a very organized way.”

The Vienna Symphonic Library’s Vienna Ensemble Pro servers are another a key part of Kirchman’s workflow: “I have a very big palette, and it actually seems to be getting bigger and bigger...With the anthology and with the continuity for the show, you want the through line, so I found that there are aspects of the palette that I built from season one that I still want there, but then there’s a whole new bank of instruments, sounds and libraries that I want to add for the new season. There were certain cases where I needed to bring back a certain instrument into the palette that was used as a thread from a previous season. We had a cue that was never used in season two, and that scene became a perfect cue for a moment in season three. It’s great

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when you can find a forgotten or a lost cue – it’s like an orphan from season two found a home in season three, so we’re creating that continuity. Vienna Ensemble for the libraries is a hub for where the instruments live.”

In terms of sample libraries and virtual instruments, Kirchman is Spitfire Audio all the way: “They’re definitely well represented in my palette! For the orchestra I have the whole range of Vienna and Berlin orchestral tools and samples. It’s an amazing time for creative instruments.

There’s something about their libraries that resonate with certain things about my approach in which you want those instruments to sound really, really beautiful, of course, and then also have this interesting, fluid range where it sounds more like an organic kind of processing. That comes from listening to the instruments that have been sampled and thinking of where these instruments can go from there.

I find that a lot of their libraries have an organic design, including the way they’ve implemented some of the processing options.”

Following the success of series three, series four of The Sinner was quickly commissioned and is expected to debut on Netflix in 2021. Kirchman says the content of the score is very much “TBC” at the moment, but that she’s looking forward to the next chapter in the disturbing saga: “It’s very early in the process, and we can’t reveal too much about it until it’s time for the teaser trailer to drop. I’m sure that it’s going to be an exciting new season with unexpected shifts, because that’s the brand!”

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Handling the Truth

VINI VICI In 2020, Vini Vici came, they saw... they had their 2020 world tour cancelled. Although that has not affected their sense of humor or ability to connect with their fans.

Aviram Saharai explains the duo’s crusade to bring psytrance to the masses.

The Latin phrase “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (I came; I saw; I conquered) is one that resonated with friends Aviram Saharai and Matan Kadosh. The HEADLINER USA

phrase is attributed to Julius Caesar, who is said to have uttered the phrase to mark his victory in the field.

Adapting the phrase slightly, Saharai and Kadosh are better known as DJ/ production duo, Vini Vici, who took on the name to mark their very own conquest of the psychedelic trance genre.

Known as the fastest rising psytrance artists of their generation, the Afula natives have succeeded in propelling

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the genre to the forefront of the electronic music circuit through their energetic performances and unique productions. Both established producers in their own right, the pair united over their desire to rework old school sounds into modern day music.

Speaking to Headliner from Sao Paulo, Brazil, Saharai is chilling in his home studio, which he’s spent a lot of time in recently:

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“We’re normally doing around 200 shows a year, so it was a huge shock for us because our life is very intense normally,” he begins. “We usually live in airports, hotels and studios – everything in our life was very rushy.

To suddenly be at home for so much time is a bit weird, but I’m enjoying it.

I’m enjoying my wife, my family and my house. I constructed and built this house and I’ve barely been inside of it! So now I’m actually feeling the house. It’s a bit sad that we cannot tour and of course I miss it a lot, but I’m trying to look at the positive side and see the benefit of it.”

Missing that interaction with their fans, Vini Vici have been very

active on social media during the quarantine period, and have entertained the masses (albeit via their phones) with virtual gigs and some humorous remixes, along with the caption: ‘Too much studio time!”

For Saharai, it’s all about finding the positives about the situation, even if that does involve poking fun at themselves (although Headliner thinks what they’re calling their ‘2020 press kit photo’ is glorious).

“Thank you,” laughs Saharai. “We try to have fun and enjoy ourselves and to let tough moments pass more lightly. During the quarantine all you do is look at your phone, talk to your

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friends, and you see a lot of funny stuff. So we thought that it would be nice also, because we have all this free time. We’ve also done six or seven new tracks during lockdown, so we’re slowly releasing the tracks and finding good dates for them.”

Born in Israel, Saharai and Kadosh went to the same school and met through their shared love of music.

“We decided to do some music together, and that was it from that moment! It’s been 17 years – I’ve known my partner half of my life!” he realizes.

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VINI VICI

Handling the Truth

Forming in 2013, Matan and Aviram’s early work garnered the attention of a host of talent, including Armin van Buuren, whose edit of their track The Tribe and inclusion in the ASOT show for a fifth time well and truly cemented their position as ones to watch.

Their 2016 remix of Hilight Tribe – Free Tibet claimed the #2 spot on Beatport, marking the first ever psytrance track to enter into the Beatport Top 10 – a major moment for both Vini Vici and the psytrance movement.

“Psytrance is really big in Israel,” says Saharai. “Just like EDM music is very big in Holland. If you started to like electronic music in Israel, most likely as a kid, the first thing that you will listen to is psytrance. I used to listen to electronic music like The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy or Daft Punk – but there wasn’t a culture of electronic music like there was a culture of psytrance. I was introduced to it at the age of 14, and today I still love it.”

2017 was the year that saw Vini Vici pave their way to global stardom, with their mammoth track Great Spirit earning them international acclaim and legions of fans across the world. A catchy, lyrical hymn that fast became the most played track of Tomorrowland 2017, no festival in the world was complete without the chant of “Wakan Tanka, Hunkachila, Wohitika Oyate, Nagi Tanka, Tunkasila Akicita, Oyate” that year.

Dominating the airwaves and festival circuit alike, the gigs rolled in thick and fast for the duo. Performing at every major event across the world including Tomorrowland (Belgium), Electric Daisy Carnival (USA, China), ULTRA Worldwide (USA, Europe, South Africa), Sunburn Festival (India), Transmission (Worldwide), AMF (Netherlands) – you name it – Vini Vici have played it.

“We were very flattered and overwhelmed with the situation when we finally realized that psytrance was breaking through this glass ceiling HEADLINER USA

of commercial, electronic music,” he reflects.

“It was an incredible feeling, and actually, this kind of euphoria is still continuing. We are enjoying every second of it to see that a lot of people – even if they’re not from the psytrance culture – they know psytrance, they know Vini Vici, and they understand the sound of it. We hope to continue to deliver the message.”

Flying the flag for devotees of the genre across the world, Vini Vici were the first ever psytrance act to grace the main stages at Tomorrowland and ULTRA Music Festival (Miami), in addition to being the first psy act to perform at Lollapalooza.

“It’s incredible really,” he admits.

“We started very young, from a very small city in a small country, so it’s very flattering for us. I hope that our story can show other kids or young producers that dreams do come true.

It is possible – believe in your dreams and stuff can happen.”

Continuing their crusade to bring psytrance to the masses, Vini Vici set their sights on a record label of their own, and in 2018 Alteza Records was born. The crown jewel of the Israeli psytrance kings, the Alteza Records imprint has boasted a wealth of topclass releases from acts around the world, in addition to hosting their very own stage at Tomorrowland in 2019.

On creating the label, Saharai says it was less about freedom to create what they liked, but to nurture up and coming producers: “We’ve always had the freedom to do what we want. It’s more about providing a place for young producers to grow and to give them a little push.

We really believe in the artists that we have in our roster, and I believe that they will be very big.”

When creating a track, the duo used to work in the same studio until Saharai

moved to Brazil seven years ago, meaning they had to rethink how they collaborated – usually meeting every two months to work. Now, it’s all on Skype.

“It’s pretty nice, actually, because you have your own free time by yourself, so there’s no rush. We can hang up and I could continue working, and then after two hours, I call him and show him what I’ve done, and he does the same, and then we combine stuff.

It’s like you have two studios at the same time. It can actually shorten the process!”

Helping Vini Vici settle into their new long distance relationship are their respective pairs of Genelec 8341A monitors, allowing them to work

“I HOPE THAT OUR STORY CAN SHOW OTHER KIDS OR YOUNG PRODUCERS THAT DREAMS DO COME TRUE”

remotely and still collaborate.

“I’ve always loved Genelec monitors - and these 8341s have really improved my mixes. Monitors need to be real for me - they don’t need to make stuff sound 3D. I like them to tell me who I am, you know? I also have to be able to trust my speakers, and with Genelec, I get that absolute honesty and transparency.”

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The 8341s also enable Vini Vici to translate their mixes from the studio to the club, leaving them safe in the knowledge that they won’t get any nasty surprises when performing live.

“When I’ve worked with some other producers in the past who were using huge speakers, I’ve been really disappointed with the results; I love my Genelecs because they are true, and the sonics never lie.”

Genelec’s GLM [Loudspeaker Management] software is of course a key part of that, making it easy for creatives to optimize monitors for their rooms. Using GLM, Vini Vici have been able to produce much more reliable mixes that translate consistently, even when their acoustic environments are not ideal.

“Many young and upcoming producers don’t have the money to create an acoustically treated room.

It can be very expensive,” admits Sahari. “But GLM provides such a great shortcut to that - it allows you to get a space sounding true and professional, and it does all the tuning for you.”

Saharai particularly likes the fact that his monitors give him the ideal combination of ‘truth’ and ‘vibe’ – they are neutral, but not sterile, and are also bulletproof for dance music.

“You can really feel the bass when you pump up the volume,” he enthuses. “You get that club feeling, but it’s still very natural. The 8341s can handle every frequency – it’s crazy, actually. And I know that if it sounds good here, when I go to another place, it will sound good there too.”

VINIVICIMUSIC.COM GENELEC.COM

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GRIMES

The Light of Consciousness

HEADLINER USA

COVER STORY

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ORDS by W

AM PROTZ D A

THE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

GRIMES Creating a fictional goddess of climate change, releasing music begging artificial intelligence to enslave humanity, giving birth, and now two years into a relationship with a certain billionaire that perhaps puts her in good stead to become the first musician on Mars; this is an attempt to summarise the recent life and times of Claire Boucher, aka Grimes. Her Bowie-esque obsession with transcending mediocrity has manifested as five albums, most recently Miss Anthropocene earlier this year. Plus an eye-watering amount of visual art and directing of music videos. She’s so fiercely progressive as an artist, in fact, that there’s an argument for including her picture next to the word’s listing in the dictionary.

The Vancouver-born singersongwriter and producer began releasing music under the Grimes monicker on Myspace in 2007 (she chose the name because she liked the name of the music genre, without knowing what it was), leading to the independent release of her debut album, Geidi Primes in 2010. This record, and the follow up of the same year, Halifax, were both well-received in the blogosphere.

However, after extensive-touring, it was the release of the analogue synth-driven indie-pop album Visions

in 2012 that saw Grimes appearing on a number of significant ‘best of the year’ lists, and it would quickly become her breakout album.

Particularly thanks to the popularity of singles Oblivion and Genesis; self-directing both music videos, in the former Grimes looks decidedly out of place at a racing sports event in a stadium surrounded by topless men, while she dances to the song in her headphones and bright pink hair.

And in the latter, Grimes dances and sings along to the track in the back of a limousine, with an albino python around her shoulders.

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GRIMES

The Light of Consciousness

She would later reveal that, given a near-impossible three week deadline for the album, she blacked all her windows and worked obsessively with very little eating or sleeping, and some use of amphetamines to keep her going. 2015’s record number four, Art Angels, took Grimes to even greater heights, with NME naming it their album of the year. It spawned two singles, Flesh Without Blood, and the brilliantly-bonkers Kill V. Maim.

Despite the massive popularity and success of the brighter and pop-leaning LP, Grimes revealed a fascinating relationship with her older material when she was later quoted as saying Art Angels is “a piece of crap” and a “stain on my life.”

“I’ve always said what I mean,” Grimes says (she’s known to friends as ‘c’, not only because it’s the first letter of her name, but also because she likes the fact it’s a common denotation for the speed of light).

“Like, to a fault.” She’s speaking about the issue she’s had with being misrepresented in the media and having quotes taken out of context.

It’s sad that even authenticity has a

downside in this day and age.

Something of a cultural gatekeeper, she knows that some believe her name comes from Frank Grimes, a character from The Simpsons: “Frank Grimes is an iconic episode, and I retroactively don’t mind being accidentally named after it.”

Some of her other interests include watching UFC fights, anime (which can be seen in the cover art she always creates herself), and her musical tastes range from Post Malone and Mariah Carey, all the way to Aphex Twin and Tool.

After revisiting the incredibly intense process that went into the creation of Visions, Grimes reveals that “the album I’m making now is being created in a similarly dramatic fashion. I disagree with moderation.

Art is the distillation of humanity, emotions, time and consciousness. Art is pain. I’ve never made anything

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Thankfully, she’s on record as stating that Miss Anthropocene is her best work. It’s undoubtedly a body of work that carries on her now wellestablished tradition of releasing music that is incredibly difficult to define in words, with the genre-

fluidity seen in the drum and bass sounds of 4ÆM, the ethereal pop of Violence, and the heartbreaking electro-acoustic Delete Forever.

Prior to the release of this climate change concept album, Grimes had quickly gone from being known only to music aficionados to something of a celebrity when it was revealed she was dating billionaire inventor Elon Musk (the two had bonded via Twitter after a shared pun regarding Roko’s basilisk). Grimes and the Tesla/ SpaceX founder recently had their first child together.

“ART IS PAIN. I’VE NEVER MADE ANYTHING GOOD IN A MATURE AND SENSIBLE MANNER.”

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A SACRED THING Photographer credit: Mac Boucher & Neil Hansen

good in a mature and sensible manner.”

It certainly makes sense that she draws on such lofty concepts for the channelling that is her music, and yet she also displays some modesty when discussing her achievements.

“My songwriting has improved,” Grimes says. “Or devolved, depending on who you ask! My new music is way darker than Miss Anthropocene. That album feels so far in the past, it’s insane. The world has irreparably changed since I put out that album, as have I.” It seems that, like in the past, once any of Grimes’ albums are released and the umbilical cord is cut, she is immediately turning her thoughts to the next grouping of songs, and to speak or think of anything else is

almost tiresome for her. It may come across as a certain ruthlessness towards her older songs, but is also perhaps the way she remains so resolutely forward-thinking as a creator. Despite this, the conversation turns to the decision to make Miss Anthropocene the tale of an anthropomorphic goddess of climate change, and how it is Grimes’ own way of making global warming a more tangible and frightening thing in a world where many people still deny its existence.

“The light of consciousness is a sacred thing,” she says. “It may not exist anywhere else in the universe and is currently in peril. Climate crisis probably being the biggest risk at the moment. With Miss A I tried to make people angry about climate crisis, and other forms of violence and existential risk, by

anthropomorphizing them. Things are easier to conceptualize when they resemble a human. We’re biologically primed to respond to faces and people over abstract concepts.”

Regarding the brilliant Bollywood sampling on single 4ÆM, Grimes explains that “my step dad is Indian and always exposed me to a lot of Bollywood music. You can hear it in a lot of my work, I think. Some of my favorite artistic moments are when Bollywood gets psychedelic, surreal and avant garde. Like Satarangi Re from Dil De. “It always seemed so cool to me. I really wanted to pursue the ideas that the scene implanted in my mind. That hook from Deewani Mastani always stays with me and it seemed more respectful of the art form to sample and interpolate Bollywood.”

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GRIMES

The Light of Consciousness

DELETE FOREVER On Delete Forever, however, Grimes notably went much more strippedback than usual, with the song opening with an acoustic guitar. It’s a deeply melancholic track about the loss of her friend Lil Peep, who died following a drug overdose. “I typically try to make a different style on every song I start,” she says. “Sound design is my field of expertise so I tend to lean into it. With Delete Forever it just wasn’t working, so I kept it simple. It does seem accidentally metaphorical, HEADLINER USA

I suppose.” Regarding her recording banjo on the track, despite not really knowing how to play it, she says “instruments are cool. I don’t think one should be dissuaded by unfamiliarity.”

“SOUND DESIGN IS MY FIELD OF EXPERTISE SO I TEND TO LEAN INTO IT.”

Miss Anthropocene has given Grimes the most rewarding release of her career because “I’ve never put out an album that was successful upon release before. Usually it takes a lot of touring before people start listening.

“But despite the difficulties, like being pregnant, my manager’s sheer willpower pushed us over the edge. I really appreciate my team, and we’re very stoked about the situation.”

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Photographer credit: Mac Boucher & Neil Hansen

And despite these songs of human extinction and the superiority of artificial intelligence, one thing Grimes is nonetheless pleased with is the progression of feminism. A comparitively early critic of sexism within the music industry, she recognises that we’ve come along way since she became especially vocal about it in 2013.

“The times have certainly changed from when it was considered uncouth to discuss feminism,” she says with a laugh. “I think that’s a good thing.”

It’s mouth-watering to hear that a new album is being recorded, but you’d be a fool to attempt to speculate on what it might sound like, and what subject matter will be touched on. But knowing that she now somehow regards the ulta-futuristic Miss Anthropocene as old hat, it’s a fairly safe bet that album number six, her first since leaving label 4AD, will propel Grimes deeper into some far-flung future that only this astral musician is able to connect with.

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ALEXANDER BORNSTEIN

HEADLINER USA

Rage Against the Machines

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ALEXANDER BORNSTEIN A wise band once said, ‘when two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score’. For Alexander Bornstein, that isn’t exactly the case. The L.A.-based composer explains how he concocted the score for part one of new Netflix series, Transformers: War For Cybertron, and how he’s going to score them all.

When approached to compose the score for Netflix’s original animated series, Transformers: War For Cybertron, it was an immediate yes for Alexander Bornstein.

Released as part of a trilogy (the first installment being Siege), the series depicts the devastating civil war between the Autobots (lead by Optimus Prime) and the Decepticons (lead by Megatron). The Autobots and Decepticons ravage their planet in the Transformers universe’s origin story, and despite the decidedly merch-friendly main characters, this is no kids show – revolving around the grim final days of the war on the planet of Cybertron.

“Once they described their approach to it, which is a darker, grittier take on the whole origin of the Transformers, I couldn’t say yes fast enough,” says Bornstein. “It strikes a different tone than a lot of the other series. I think it does a good job of appealing to the more adult audience, but they have fun with some elements as well. I definitely agree that it’s a little darker and a little bit more intense than I think people are used to from the franchise.”

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ALEXANDER BORNSTEIN

Rage Against the Machines

Bornstein didn’t formally start studying music until he was around 20; before this he was focused on becoming a filmmaker – busying himself writing scripts and short films.

“I didn’t start playing piano when I was three years old, and I think there’s definitely an Olympian attitude that we have towards music sometimes, where if you’re not going to be amazing at it, why try it at all?

That kept me away from wanting to pursue it for a long time. But I came to this fork in the road where I had this opportunity to pivot. As soon as I realized I could try to become a composer or a musician, that was the end of it. I fell in love with it.”

After interning for a few different composers, Bornstein moved to L.A. and was lucky enough to get a position at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions, which helped him get a foothold in understanding the landscape of the industry of film and TV scoring.

“I can not put into appropriate words how effective on the job learning is – especially for something like composing for film and TV where there’s so many shifting requirements and demands; every project is different,” he stresses.

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Working closely with showrunner F. J. DeSanto, Bornstein considered the sonic theme for this darker take on the Transformers franchise. It quickly became clear that distinctive themes would need to be established for the Autobots, Decepticons, and for Cybertron itself.

“Right away I knew that we wanted it to have a very strong electronic synthesizer element to it, but I also wanted to augment that with orchestral elements and some solo instrumental textures as well,” he says. “It was a little bit of trial and error first, but we had the sound established for the series once those three themes were done.”

Autobots “There was a lot of pressure with this as it’s a very well known franchise,” Bornstein admits. “I can go to many places on the planet with a picture of Optimus Prime, and people will know who I’m talking about based on that picture, so I did feel a lot of that weight when I was getting started. About halfway through the first episode, I knew we had the sound, so I just needed to be able to react to what was going on and rely on this palette.”

The Autobots’ theme was composed with a heroic undertone, and is a melody that you might typically hear on a French horn.

“It’s backed up with a little more orchestra than you hear in the Decepticons theme,” Bornstein points out. “There’s a little bit more activity in terms of synth arpeggios.”

In Bornstein’s opinion, audio rate modulation capabilities still aren’t quite there with software, so his goto solution for raw, electronic sounds is to utilize Moog’s Minimoog Model D synthesizer, which he says can’t be beaten for classic, analog-sounding arpeggios. A sound he came up with was then recreated in u-he’s Diva plugin, which subsequently became the signature sound for the Autobots.

“I had done a version of the Autobot theme that I presented to F. J., and his main source of feedback was that he wanted a little bit more synth and a little bit more of an electronic feel,” he recalls. “I went back to the Model D and I came up with this really cool, aggressive bassline that jumped up an octave. It feels wide open and it’s just very analog – for lack of a better term!”

COMPOSER

Bornstein didn’t want to sample the sound on the Model D every time, as it was to be a signature sound throughout the show – he needed to be able to recall and use it whenever he needed. “u-he’s Diva is an amazing plugin in terms of emulating analog sounds, and specifically, they have a really great Model D emulation,” he explains. “Once I had come up with the sound on the Model D, I was able to reprogram it in Diva and have it available for any cue in the series by just clicking a mouse – and this is without losing any of the bite or the organic quality of the Model D.

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“It’s something that a lot of purists argue about in terms of software being able to emulate analogue synthesizers,” he considers. “I think all of u-he’s products, and specifically Diva and Repro-1 basically get you there. They’re the best software synths I’ve used – they’re extremely robust and flexible, with endless customization, and can truly sound analog when needed. It was really great to have that flexibility of what I created on the Model D in the computer so that I could call it up at any moment in time. It was one of F. J.’s favorite sounds in the series!”

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ALEXANDER BORNSTEIN

Rage Against the Machines

Decepticons

When approaching the Decepticons’ theme, Bornstein went in a more weighted and static direction, incorporating more drone synths and lower tones.

“I had a synth patch set up, so it’s a very open, filtered, sawtooth kind of sound, with a lot of weird sounds with some bitcrushing on it,” he says.

“It has this very tense, ugly kind of quality. With the pitch, the oscillator starts to go out of tune as I apply more pressure on the keyboard; the goal was creating this more unhinged, very aggressive sound for the Decepticons, and a little bit more stoic and heroic for the Autobots.”

It’s always more fun to play the bad guy, so surely composing scores is no exception?

“Exactly! It was neat to look at it from this very dark, angry kind of perspective, because the tone of the show gives us a little bit more backstory of the Decepticons. There’s nothing necessarily heroic about the theme, but I tried to make it exist in this grey zone of, ‘this could be the bad guy theme, or it could be the good guy having a really bad day’.

Trying to walk that line was the goal with the Decepticon theme, but it’s complemented by the opening, which is very clearly an aggressive, more villainous tone. I wanted to try and present both sides of that spectrum.”

Cybertron

To create the soundscape for Cybertron (the home-world of the Transformers), Bornstein created a synth-heavy score with orchestral elements highlighting the heavily HEADLINER USA

electronic vibe. Using overdub recording, he recorded stringed instrument solos to weave an organic music tapestry that was grand in scope, whilst anchored by character themes.

Moog’s Model D came to the rescue once again, which is where Bornstein experimented with a lot of ideas: “I used the Model D as an easel to get started,” he confirms. “In regards to Cybertron, that is probably the most electronic when you look at the other themes on the show, and that was a very intentional move because it’s an alien planet – it’s gargantuan in size and it’s all made of metal. It’s oddly uninviting – especially in the series – because it’s completely torn to shreds.”

Bornstein used the Model D to see what he could come up with in terms of basslines, arpeggios and electronic sounds, before bringing them into his sequencer in Steinberg’s Cubase, which he has been faithfully using since 2013.

“I love it!” he enthuses. “I remember when I started learning it, it was like the training wheels were coming off in terms of MIDI sequencing, and there were a lot of things that I noticed using a previous DAW that it could not, or would not do in terms of programming the automation. With mixing and in terms of allowing the least amount of distance between the ideas in my head and how it can be put into something that I can show other people, Cubase really just took a lot of those restrictions off. It was one of the rare times I’ve switched software and actually felt like I was trading up and not trading down.”

Bornstein has been sworn to secrecy on the details of the series’ future installments, although he can tell me

that he is already working on part two, named Earthrise.

“We made a very conscious decision that every chapter will have a sonic footprint,” he discloses. “The scope opens up a little bit more on chapter two with the music; it’s a little bit more orchestral with more emphasis on some of the solo instruments. We get to explore a little bit more of the Transformers universe, and it gets away from some of the militaristic stuff that goes on in Siege.”

Does Bornstein think his compositions reveal which tribe he sides with?

“I think so,” he answers. “I guess I sort of made a musical statement on where I fall in the whole thing, without realizing it. The show does make an effort to not just paint the Decepticons as mustache-twirling villains that are always the fly in the ointment. I think they do a good job of explaining a little bit more of their motivation, and the theme that I wrote for them tries to acknowledge that. It’s not just angry and aggressive all the time; there is a little bit more of a plaintive side to it. But at the same time, I did not write them any kind of tragically heroic theme. I think by the end of the siege it’s very clear that the Autobots are probably the people you want to be rooting for, and not the Decepticons – as it probably needs to be because that is the franchise,” he laughs.

ALEXANDERBORNSTEIN.COM MOOGMUSIC.COM STEINBERG.NET U-HE.COM

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Blood, Sweat & Three Years

VIEW by ER

CASH CASH Spending 20 hours straight in a studio with Nelly changed the way electronic music trio, Cash Cash record music, and not just because he wouldn’t let them write anything down...

Cash Cash’s inception as an electronic music trio can be traced back to Jean Paul (JP) and Alex Makhlouf’s parents’ basement.

Completing the trio is life-long friend Samuel Frisch, who together with the Makhlouf brothers grew up in northern New Jersey where they whiled away the hours recording in their basement studio.

Together, the three DJ/producers record, mix and master all of their

HEADLINER USA

music under the moniker Cash Cash, and have released four full-length albums and an array of EPs and singles, as well as churning out a steady stream of official remixes for artists such as Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, David Guetta and Hardwell.

“It’s been the three of us since day one,” opens JP. “Sam and I were in high school together and we recorded random demos on our old PC computer in our – I don’t even know what you would call it – it was barely a studio! It was the most makeshift thing you could possibly find, and we all learnt from trial and error.”

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“it was almost liKE A FORMULA: , GET 100% RESULTS.” After a few years at college, JP knew he wasn’t happy, and decided to quit to pursue music full time: “It felt like the most liberating thing ever,” he remembers. “I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. I just knew that if I left college, I’d be able to focus on music more. I knew it would skyrocket because I’d have all this time to work on it – and that’s literally what happened. Two months later, we got signed with a major record deal. It was like pure…I wouldn’t say luck; It was almost like a formula: focus on music, get 100% results.”

Their latest full length album Blood, Sweat & 3 Years, was Cash Cash’s way of bringing music listeners from all genres together under one roof. An ambitious and intense project that took 36 months to complete, the LP blends tear-jerking lyrics, expressive synths, thunderous basslines, and the group’s signature infectious melodies – not to mention a star-studded lineup of A-list guests including Nelly, Christina Perri, Bebe Rexha and Busta Rhymes.

There’s a good reason the album took 36 six months to finish: logistics.

“The biggest thing that makes it hard for us to put out albums left and right is that we’re not all home in one place for enough time. We play a lot of shows together, but most of the touring is done with me and Sam, and there’s only so much that Alex or one of us can do back home in the studio. Sam can finish ideas that we started or he can keep things moving in a direction, but ultimately, we all need to be home in the studio to make a final product.

“Another reason is when you’re working with so many different artists, there are a lot of moving parts as far as the artists themselves, their management, their publishers, or if you have other writers in the room – it takes a long time to get all the paperwork done to get everyone on board with everyone’s release cycles. So there’s always random holdups, on top of the fact that we are perfectionists and are always overthinking things. It’s something we’re getting used to, and we’re getting a little bit faster with the whole process.”

MUST BE THE MONEY Helping them shake up the way they record came from an unlikely source when they partnered with Nelly on dancehall-infused summer anthem, Millionaire.

“Working with Nelly was probably one of my favourite studio sessions ever,” JP confesses. “It was insane. I think we worked for about 20 hours straight until 5am. It was a combination of partying, eating, and just going crazy.

I didn’t even think we’re going to get anything done. The next day I was sorting all the vocal tracks like, ‘Oh my God, did we even get anything?’”

Partying aside, JP says the real pinchme moment came when the rap legend decided to add his signature “must-be-the-money” vocal stamp into the song: “I had the idea, and I was like, ‘dude, we should just do it. Let’s pay homage to it!’ He looked at me and didn’t say a word. I was like, ‘I think I just pissed

him off; I think he’s gonna leave the room!’ Then he started shaking his head, but for yes, and he said, ‘maybe champ, maybe…’ He was down, and he was great!”

Nelly did more than recite one of his most famous lines: he shifted the way Cash Cash recorded music from then on. The usually heads-down trio are used to doing everything by the book in a methodological way, and took the whole process extremely seriously.

“Sometimes we are a little too serious for our own good,” JP admits. “There wasn’t much laughing. But when we were with him, it changed things.

I remember I was trying to write down some lyrics and he grabbed my phone and said, ‘no writing lyrics down; if you ain’t gonna remember it, it ain’t good enough and it ain’t gonna stay in the song!’ I said, ‘I’m gonna forget what I wrote though’, and he said, ‘then you should forget it!’ He was pushing us in this other direction of loosening us the hell up, and that kind of stuck with us. Now we have more fun in the studio and we get more creative because of it.”

So no more writing down lyrics at all?

“Well...my memory’s not as good as his,” he says a little guiltily. “I do write things down still here and there, but we just make it less about looking at your phone and not second guessing things as much. At some point, you’ve got to have confidence in your own decision making. If you can’t have faith in yourself, then how can anyone else?”

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Blood, Sweat & Three Years

THE KIT The trio are pretty self-contained, and there is no need for them to outsource anything for any part of the production process.

“Everybody does a little bit of everything,” JP explains. “My brother does a lot of the keyboard writing and he’s great with chords, and I’m great with melody, vocals, editing and mixing and stuff like that. And Sam is a great producer who can do pretty much everything. We try to be as respectful as possible to one another when we’re conveying our ideas, but obviously that can get a little hard when two of us are brothers and we’re used to being very, very blunt with one another! We’re still friends, so I guess it hasn’t got that bad yet!”

Cash Cash are long-time Steinberg Cubase users, which JP says is the crucial piece of gear that links them all together: “We’ve been on Cubase since day one, literally. We tried a bunch of other things, and they just felt like work! I remember opening up Pro Tools for the first time and being like, ‘Oh my God, this just reminds me of school and Microsoft Word – bad vibes, bad vibes,” he laughs. “I was just like, ‘there’s got to be something else’. We found Cubase and we said, ‘this is the one’ - it was a match made in heaven, and it’s opened up the doors for everything.”

In terms of plugins, JP relies heavily on Waves. Some of his go-tos include the Waves SSL channel strips as well as the V-Comp and R-Comp compressors - but it’s the X-Hum and X-Click – designed to kill clicks and other like transients – that have been the real lifesavers for Cash Cash: “Our song Call You with MAGIC! was recorded together in an L.A. studio, but just as a demo. We planned to re-record the vocals but he ended up having vocal surgery so he couldn’t re-do them due to nodules on his vocal chords. We wanted to put the song out but there was this nasty hum in the vocal - I think it could have been a fan in the room, as the AC had this high pitch sound and it was driving us crazy. Anyway, we manged to get it out using those restoration [X-Hum and X-Click] Waves plugins. They literally saved the day.”

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JP describes Cash Cash as “diehard ADAM Audio” users, and they have been using the manufacturer’s studio monitors for 15 years.

“In our studio, it’s ADAM Audio always,” JP confirms. “There’s something you can’t put your finger on; they provide a really smooth sound and you can work on them for a long time without getting tired. They were initially known for being rock speakers, but we’re doing everything on them: rock, pop, and hip hop – so we always found that perception to be a little bit of BS..!”

Cash Cash started out on [ADAM Audio] S3A monitors, but between them have since upped their respective collections to include everything from the A5X, A7, and A8X. “When I first heard the S3As back in the day, I remember if felt like it was the first time I heard music properly,” JP remembers. “This was what music was supposed to sound like. For producers, your studio starts with speakers; there is only so much you can do if you’re not hearing it right. We’ve got a pair of the new S3H speakers, which is like a remake of the speaker we originally fell in love with. It’s been awesome having them in our studio. It’s opened up our third eye!”

Cash Cash aren’t fans of buying an album if it all sounds like one song – they get excited when they hear something untraditional.

“I think having diversity and variety on our album speaks to who we are as people,” says JP. “We’ve always been advocates of diversity – we work with artists from Asia, with black artists who work with white artists, Latino artists...

We don’t just do the same thing over and over again, and we want to show the young generation and young music listeners that diversity is a good thing and a way to bring people together.

“I mean, I remember one of my first cassettes was Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, and the next week I got Green Day’s Dookie. I remember listening to their cassettes back to back and just loving both. I wasn’t sitting there questioning if I’m allowed to listen to Snoop Dogg because I’m white, I was just enjoying the music. So when I finally had a platform to make my own music, I knew I wanted to mix all this stuff together and keep the variety.”

Although long since graduating from JP’s parents’ basement, Cash Cash couldn’t resist relocating to another one when choosing a location for their main studio – although they kept it in the family – this time setting up in Alex’s basement.

“We have a fully functional studio in the basement – it’s just not our parents’ basement anymore,” he laughs. “We had to put it in a basement just for nostalgic purposes!”

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RYAN KERSHAW

A Lasting Legacy: D’Angelico Guitars

A LASTING LEGACY: D’ANGELICO GUITARS

HEADLINER USA

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New York City-based guitar manufacturer D’Angelico Guitars has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1930s Manhattan.

We recently checked in with the company’s EVP of product development, Ryan Kershaw, to find out more about its latest product line, rapid growth over the last few years, and what it has been doing to keep musicians inspired in 2020.

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Despite an extremely challenging few months across the board for most, New York City has started on its long road to recovery.

Thankfully, playing musical instruments is one of the many ways that people have been trying to stay sane during these strange and stressful times, a factor that D’Angelico Guitars has grabbed by the horns in an endeavour to maintain its business.

It’s fair to say that understanding the company’s rich and storied history provides vital context as to how it operates today.

D’Angelico was started in the Lower East Side of NYC in 1932 by one man, the company’s namesake John D’Angelico. He built handmade archtop guitars throughout the jazz age right up until his passing in 1964. Often working alone, he built just over 1,100 instruments in total, including many coveted models considered to be some of the greatest of all time, crafted for the who’s who of the day.

Archtop guitars, with their cannonlike quality and big, robust bodies, were originally acoustic instruments designed to be heard over large swing or jazz bands, and it wasn’t until a number of years later when they became electrified.

The real roots of the brand were firmly ingrained within D’Angelico’s legendary luthiery skills, and after 1964 it changed hands a number of times, for a little while being sustained by D’Angelico’s most widely-known apprentice Jimmy D’Aquisto. It wasn’t a worldwide ubiquitous brand for quite some time however.

At the turn of the new millennium the D’Angelico name was acquired, and in 2011 saw a full relaunch, followed by expeditious growth and a complete product line reinvigoration.

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“John’s instruments have this undeniable magic to them,” says Ryan Kershaw, D’Angelico Guitars’ executive vice president of product development. “Back when John was gaining popularity a few years into his career, he was offered positions by some of the bigger brands during those days, and actually denied those opportunities. He was a very unique, interesting kind of character and somebody whose mastery we are super fortunate to have at the roots of what we do.”

a comfortable price point.

After its big comeback in 2011, the company decided to relaunch a number of John D’Angelico originals as resissues, particularly the EXL1 single cutaway archtop, which preceded a move into semi-hollows.

Meanwhile, the Excel Series, one of D’Angelico’s most long standing instruments, is heavily inspired by the vintage nature of the brand. Coming in both semi-hollow and acoustic variants just like the Premier Series, the Excel Series stays true to the company’s art deco New York roots with its traditional colorways and style.

“Those models have changed quite a bit spec-wise over the years, but they were the foundation of our relaunch and are still very much some of our most popular instruments,” Kershaw adds. “They have certainly stood the test of time.”

The years that followed saw the company establish a number of successful distribution partnerships in the US and international markets.

People seemed to have been waiting for the D’Angelico name to pop back up, with many responding well to the quality of its new instruments and overall presence at the NAMM Show.

By the time that Kershaw joined the company six years ago, it was ready to launch a significant amount of new products, including its Series lineup - a range that opened the door for D’Angelico to become an even bigger player in the industry.

The first in the lineup is the Premier Series, which Kershaw says was launched in an effort to test the market and see whether people who were buying perhaps their second, third or fourth guitar were interested in the D’Angelico name, and in a high quality semi-hollow at

“For a lot of people, D’Angelico was always like an unattainable Cadillac, and they would only ever acquire one if they reached the absolute pinnacle of whatever it is they do,” remarks Kershaw. “We knew that we had to focus on making high quality instruments that were still accessible and affordable to players of all talents and ages, and soon learned that there was quite a bit of interest at that level.”

“While their price point is higher, we realised that the Excel series is a really great place to have a lot of name brand incorporation on really high quality parts, and so we’ve got Seymour Duncan Custom Shop stuff, all Grover hardware, really nice tonewoods, rosewood and ebony on the finger boards, etc. - the list goes on,” explains Kershaw. “It’s more of a series for players who are perhaps touring musicians, or recording artists, or those seriously collecting instruments.”

The Deluxe Series on the other hand “originally came from us wanting to do some limited edition instruments, some more daring colours, and some more out-of-the-box stuff that maybe folks weren’t expecting from our line, which made for quite a splash,” he adds.

“I think we got a lot of eyeballs on us because it was clear that we were simultaneously looking in two directions; looking back at our brand history and really trying to do our name justice with reissues and with HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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A Lasting Legacy: D’Angelico Guitars

traditional products in the guitar market, but also looking forward in trying to grow and forge a new path for the brand.”

The Deluxe Series now hosts both D’Angelico’s most high-end solid bodies as well as all of its limited edition products.

All of these products can be found in the company’s rather spectacular looking showroom in the heart of Manhattan, “although it’s a humble little location in a way,” Kershaw describes. “From the street level you would have no idea that the showroom’s up there, so it’s a nice little gem that tends to surprise visitors when they come in.

“When I first went there for an interview I honestly had no idea what I was in for. The doors opened on the fourth floor, I saw the velvet curtains, the wooden walls lined with guitars, the leather couch, and thought ‘good lord, this is kind of a wild spot!’”

Despite its inability to exhibit at any kind of trade show this year or in the near future, D’Angelico is making HEADLINER USA

sure that it stays connected with its customers in an effective way.

“I think it makes us feel even better about how big we’ve gone on the trade shows in the past five years, because now all of a sudden we don’t have the ability to do that,” says Kershaw. “We’ve really tried to make connections with our audience, our artists and our customers in the most meaningful ways possible, which is very difficult to do through marketing efforts remotely. We’ve tried to issue challenges, we’ve done giveaways, as well as getting involved in a number of fundraiser opportunities.”

Luckily enough, D’Angelico has grown into a number of dealers who have been successful online, with a lot of its customers reaching for musical instruments during these demanding times. Rather fittingly, Kershaw describes it as “the apocalypse purchase”.

“I think that everyone knows that there’s a little bit to sacrifice this year, and so we’re just going to have to work a little harder to remotely foster those relationships and see what we

really want to do come the end of the year,” remarks Kershaw. “Even the NAMM show is still figuring out exactly what their virtual presence is - we’ve managed to get a fair bit of insight into that and we’re having regular meetings on all the things that we could incorporate. And with a company like ours that is very creativity focused, we’re running amok with a tonne of different ideas.

We’re still going to try to make it really special for everyone who’s involved with us.”

On the artist relations side, D’Angelico has also been trying to foster as much remote creativity as possible, with some of its artists involved in making sample packs and remote collaborations on backing tracks.

Luckily, the company has a great artist network and a deftly engaged fan base, “and so we’re just trying to keep that up simultaneously with new product launches and a virtual trade show presence,” says Kershaw. “It’s just been one of those times where we’ve found ourselves working really, really hard.”

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“THE DOORS OPENED ON THE FOURTH FLOOR, I SAW THE VELVET CURTAINS, THE WOODEN WALLS LINED WITH GUITARS AND THOUGHT ‘GOOD LORD, THIS IS KIND OF A WILD SPOT!’”

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Kershaw believes that there are two main factors that are really drawing customers to products at the moment.

firms Supro USA and Pigtronix, who between them manufacture amps, pedals and more.

“People are really excited and grateful that we are maintaining a high quality standard in the world of semi-hollows and archtops while still making them accessible, because it’s a very fine line to walk and one that’s quite difficult to balance,” he observes.

“We’ve known each other through connecting circles for a long time, and have always really respected their products,” reveals Kershaw.

“We’d already worked together on a lot of casual marketing collaborations, so our conversation about potentially acquiring them began at the end of 2019.

“The other bit of positive feedback we often receive is when people say they bought a guitar for only 2K but it plays like it’s 5K. When I see those comments I know we’ve done our job, because that’s exactly our aim - to make the most high quality instruments possible at an accessible price point, and which stand the test of time.”

Earlier this year, D’Angelico went one step further and announced its acquisition of fellow NYC-based

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“We were so excited at the potential of the move, so even when March came and everything changed, the decision was made pretty quickly to muscle through that period and really try to make things happen, because we knew that ultimately it was a fantastic opportunity.

“It was daunting and it was daring, but now that we’re seeing the wheels turning, and that we’re making moves, it was definitely the right thing

to do,” Kershaw concludes.

It is clear that through exercising its core values - respecting its history, understanding what the D’Angelico name means to the guitar world, and really doing that justice - has paid dividends.

“We really want to make sure that we’re providing somebody with something inspiring, as well as fostering strong connections and positivity.”

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Playing by Ear

PLAYING BY EAR

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HARMONI KELLEY What does a touring musician do when all gigs are cancelled? Bassist and vocalist Harmoni Kelley reveals how she’s keeping occupied this year, and why she wouldn’t be without JH Audio and Fender on stage.

Harmoni Kelley should be on tour with Kenny Chesney at the moment. Instead, she’s sipping a HEADLINER USA

coffee in her pajamas for a morning catch up with Headliner from her hometown in Austin. Usually splitting her time between Texas and Nashville (interspersed with numerous tour buses or planes), the usually nationallytouring bassist and vocalist is trying to keep busy.

“I don’t do well sitting still,” she says

warmly. “A lot of us want to be doing something. We can’t tour and we’re not going to be rehearsing, so I’ve got to do something – I can’t just sit here! So I’m trying to still be creative and learn new things. If I can come out of the other end of this having learned two or three new things, or learned a new skill, then that’s a win for me. That’s a great silver lining to the weirdness of this

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whole pandemic.”

Harmoni auditioned for Chesney in 2014, and has been touring with him steadily ever since. Since all touring has been cancelled, she has turned her attention to recording at home and has been tentatively dipping her toes into the world of music production. Chesney and his band have kept in contact throughout the year – in fact, her boss messaged the group a few days ago, remarking on where they should have been playing that night: “It’s funny to call him my boss, because he’s a friend at this point.

I’m sure it’s kind of driving him crazy to not be touring right now, because he loves it so much and he feeds so much off of that energy. I know it’s killing him to not actually be able to play and be out there on stage, because he’s so good at it. You don’t know how much you miss it until it’s taken away,” she sighs. “You really realise how big of a thing it is in your life.”

A self-taught musician, Harmoni picked up the bass guitar at age 17 and hasn’t looked back. With over two decades of experience both on the road and in the studio, she has mastered the art of playing by ear and understands the importance of being able to lay back, listen and play for the song: “I asked for a bass and an amp for Christmas when I was 17 and my parents maybe thought it was crazy,” she chuckles. “They said, ‘well that’s all we’re getting you, and even that is going to be tricky’. I remember going to the music store here in Austin with my dad, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore. We picked out a bass and an amp, and it stuck with me. I actually recently bought a Gretsch Catalina drum kit – I’m a rhythm section gal, for sure. And I’m self taught: I just sat down in front of the record player or the CD player

and started to play along. I never went to music school and I think I took one lesson from another bass player friend of mine here in Austin when I needed to learn how to play slap bass on a particular song. It just evolved from there,” she says modestly.

and do your own thing. And now we’re all forced into this new world where we have nothing but time. At that moment, no one really felt that creative. We have all this time in the world – we’re sitting at home in our studios surrounded by basses and amps – and nobody’s really creating.

I have to ask: what does a touring musician do when there are no live shows?

“I think that’s probably shifted, but at that time when it was all new and we were all trying to wrap our heads around what this meant, no one was really feeling that creative. Now, a lot of people are doing YouTube videos from home, some gear demo stuff and live stream gigs. We’re keeping that creative spark alive.”

“I have this group of bass players on a text thread – most of them live out in L.A.,” she answers brightly. “They’re more in the pop and rock touring world and play with P!nk and Gwen Stefani, so I’m kind of the lone country bass player in Austin. We decided to do these weekly Zoom calls to check in.

“We did one a few months ago and we were talking about when you’re on tour and are super busy, the one thing that you probably wish you had the most is time to just sit, be creative

During her time as a young musician in Austin, Harmoni worked her way up through the ranks and spent time both in the studio and on the road with local legends Fastball, James McMurtry, Slaid Cleaves and Bob Schneider, to name a few.

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Playing by Ear

“THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES WHEN I’VE THOUGHT, ‘I’M NOT REALLY COMFORTABLE PLAYING THIS LATIN FUNK STYLE, BUT I’M HERE AND I’M IN THE GIG, AND IM GOING TO DO IT AND I’M GOING TO FIGURE IT OUT’”

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ARTIST

Those years proved to be the most important in starting Harmoni down the path of honing in on her craft as a bass player and vocalist. She cut her teeth with bands of all musical genres from rock, pop, blues, funk, bluegrass, country and americana – which has allowed her to easily switch genres for her touring work.

“When I was in my 20s I was just getting going, so I said yes to all these different gigs. I didn’t think, ‘I don’t want to do that because it’s country,’ or ‘I don’t want to do that gig because it’s blues,’ – I was just hungry to play. So the style of music was sort of an afterthought – I was so happy to be on stage and to be playing.

There have been times when I’ve thought, ‘I’m not really comfortable playing this Latin funk style, but I’m here and I’m in the gig, and I’m going to do it and I’m going to figure it out’.

So that was really great for me, and I feel that could be beneficial for any player.”

Despite all her experience, Harmoni still feels she almost needs to pinch herself when she sees the size of the stadiums she is now accustomed to playing in: “I don’t know what I expected when I started playing bass!” she admits.

“That’s everybody’s dream as a musician – to be playing big stages.

I think that my first show with Kenny Chesney was at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. It’s crazy! You can be playing to 60,000 people. Until you’re up there doing it, you really don’t know what that feels like – the power of that many people that are so excited, and all the energy is going from them directly to you. It’s an overwhelming experience and it definitely took my breath away the first time that I was on stage, because you can’t prepare for that. It’s been a wild ride!”

For in-ear monitors, Harmoni likes the JH Audio Siren Series Roxanne customs, which she says lured her in with “the widest frequency range you’ll ever hear,” then seducing her with the first variable bass control IEM cable. Interestingly, before working with Chesney, Harmoni had never used in-ears before: “The first time I put a pair of those in, they were moulded to my ear,” she recalls. “Once I got used to that feeling of having everything just right there and at a lower volume, they’re awesome! I’m singing and playing bass, and there are seven of us on stage, so there’s a lot going on in the mix and it sounds perfect from ear to ear. There’s an art to that. There are different parts of the show where we’re all out there on this catwalk in the middle of the crowd,

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so without in-ears it would just be this cacophony of sound and this terrible soup of noise! If you ever take your in-ears out in the middle of a stadium out there, it feels like you’re just alone in the middle of an ocean because you can’t hear anything.

I can’t imagine doing any of those shows without my in-ears, and those Roxannes are awesome.”

Crucially, her custom Roxannes help her shape the sweet spot of her low end, especially as she uses a fivestring bass on tour with Chesney.

“There’s this low B string which I talked about with the front of house engineer, as we needed to negotiate it because it’s so low. You don’t want it to get lost in the mix and you don’t want it to be muddy – we still wanted that punch.

“One of the things that I have loved about those Roxannes is that I can still hear the bass. I know a lot of people have these little packs that they put on the back of their guitar strap that simulates the rumble of the bass a little bit, but I needed to be able to feel it and hear it and know that it was there – and it’s there. The last thing that I want to be thinking about when I’m out on stage is, ‘man, I can’t hear myself’. For me that’s not even a thing, which is just awesome.”

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Playing by Ear

Although she finds it hard to pick her favorite-ever bass, Harmoni is a big fan of Fender, and a few personal highlights include her five-string American Professional P-Bass, four-string American Standard Jazz Bass, four-string American Original 60’s P-Bass, and her four-string American Ultra Precision-Bass.

“I also have this 1972 P-Bass that I bought from a friend of mine here in Austin, but I don’t tour with it because I’m just so afraid that something is gonna happen to it!”

“I also love my Lake Placid blue P-Bass, and that’s become my go-to bass for my four-string gigs. I use the American Professional P-Basses on the road with Kenny, which I also love. I figured out what strings work for me, and that was a big one at the beginning because I love flatwound strings.”

Harmoni has never considered herself a roundwound person, but for that particular gig and with a five string P-Bass, she wanted to play for the song and for the music: “Exactly. I want to do what makes the most sense and work with my front of house engineer to make sure that I’m not getting lost in the mix. So I ended up with these D’Addario NYXL electric strings on those five-strings, and I love those! I got so used to playing flatwound, I didn’t know what it was going to be like for me to then play roundwound. But those strings are great – they’re bouncy, they feel good, and they maintain a really great tone from show to show. I’m not a huge fan of changing strings after every show, which I think makes my bass tech nervous,” she laughs.

“I just want to get it a little greasy, you know? Just leave along there for at least like a week or two. I think he’s so worried about me breaking a string!”

Admitting that while she doesn’t consider herself to be a “gear-head,” Harmoni knows what she likes when she hears it: “I’m so not technical! I’m totally fine to experiment with different strings and pickups; I know when I hear it. I wouldn’t be able to explain to you in words how to get there. I’m using my ears, which haven’t strayed me in the wrong direction yet. So I’m trusting them!”

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Great Expectations

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS

KATIE PRUITT Katie Pruitt’s timing couldn’t have been better when she dropped her debut album Expectations in February, just before the world went into lockdown. We recently caught up with the Nashville-based country songstress about her musical journey so far, her passion for songwriting and performing live, and her love of Fender guitars.

Hindsight can sometimes be a wonderful thing, and had she known about the turn that 2020 was about to take, the super talented Katie Pruitt probably would have released her debut album sooner.

“All things considered, I’m happy that it’s out in the world,” says Pruitt of the record. “I did get a couple weeks of promo in and got to do my release show before we realised the severity of the pandemic, and so I’m thankful because there’s a lot of artists who have released music this year who haven’t been able to do any of that stuff.”

While she is proud and happy with how the album turned out, she admits that it was very much a learning experience.

“On the second record I’ll probably do things differently, because you kind of just learn more every time

you do it,” she remarks. “I’ve been in a new creative space, and it’s actually been nice in a way to not be playing the record, because there’s a lot of songs that I’ve had for a few years before putting them out - playing them live and almost wearing myself out on them.

Having had a “nice little break” from playing her songs, Pruitt has used it as a chance to move on and focus on writing new material. Despite this fact, the main thing she has missed is playing live.

“I really miss that energy that you get from being on stage with a roomful of people,” she says. “It’s like a moment in time that you share with the audience and the band and it’s something that no live stream can ever replace - that unique feeling and emotion and energy that you get just from being there.”

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Great Expectations

chronological, following somewhat of a storytelling arc.

In high school, she no longer thought musical theatre was ‘cool’, and started listening to the likes of Nirvana, Radiohead and Dave Matthews Band.

“They were really big when I was in high school, which kind of pushed me onto guitar a little bit. I started practicing different chords and writing my own songs, as well as covering songs with friends either before or after school.

Many musicians have been adapting and finding their own ways to stay active, some through high quality live streams in a bid to share their music and connect with fans in a meaningful way while live shows remain on hold.

“I’ve been grateful for the times I’ve been able to get into the studio to record or still be there in person with my band without having an audience, although nothing ever replaces playing a live audience.”

At the time of interview, Pruitt was soon to pre-record a 60-minute set in Nashville with her band, and shoot it in 4K. “It’s the first time I’m going to do it at the quality I’ve been wanting to,” she reveals. “Up to now I’ve just been recording videos in my room and stuff like that, and trying to figure out how to do a show where people pay 10 bucks or 12 bucks to tune in to the live stream.”

Katie Pruitt’s mellow country music deals with many coming-of-age issues, and chronicles many of the heartfelt experiences throughout her life so far.

“All the songs on the record are things I’ve experienced, from a song like Grace Has A Gun, which is about HEADLINER USA

“i ALSO HAVE A FENDER DELUXE REVERB AMP, AND LISTENING TO A STRAT OR A JAZZMASTER THROUGH THAT IS JUST SUCH A GREAT SOUND.”

a real relationship - my first with a girl that turned out to be toxic,” she divulges. “Meanwhile, Loving Her is based off a conversation that I had with my dad around the time when I first started talking to my parents about being gay, and their response in telling me how it made them feel.

They didn’t understand it, to which I replied ‘people don’t like what they don’t understand’.

“I was soon introduced to Steven at Fender, because I think they might have come to one of my shows or something like that,” she recalls. “I came by their showroom and they were just really cool, and showed me just what I’d been looking for.”

The first electric guitar Pruitt ever owned was an off-white Mexican Stratocaster, a gift from her parents that she proudly displays on her wall, so she knew that she loved Fender models from the very beginning.

“The strat was the sound that I really wanted to go for, but I also wanted a Jazzmaster,” she explains. “That was kind of the next thing for me, as I thought it would compliment what I do really well, so they just hooked me up with this awesome Jazzmaster!

I just love the sound of Strats and Jazzmasters and the way that Fender guitars can cut over a band.

“It was a period of four years of me processing everything, like leaving my home in Georgia and coming to Nashville and having the freedom in the space to really be myself, and write about that. All of these songs kind of touch on that.”

“I also have a Fender Deluxe Reverb Amp, and listening to a Strat or a Jazzmaster through that is just such a great sound. It’s a specific sound that I was drawn to because I listened to a lot of John Mayer growing up, and I think that’s where I first kind of fell in love with that Strat sound.”

It was back in school performing musical theatre when Pruitt first started out singing, which perhaps explains why the record is

“On Expectations I used the Strat and then at the tail end of recording I used the Jazzmaster a little bit. Playing the Mexican Strat - the very first electric

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guitar I ever played - on that record is really cool for me, and feels very full circle.”

which for me has been spending more time with my girlfriend and my close friends.

Since she’s been doing so many demos and recordings at home, Pruitt has also recently had her eye on a Fender Baritone, which she feels would complete her sound.

“I bought a bike, and I’ve never owned a bike before.

We’ve got a lot of greenways in Nashville, so I’ve just been putting my headphones in and going on bike rides, which has been really great to help me process things and get a workout in at the same time!

“I just feel like they sound so good on recordings, and really give it that depth, but they still have this kind of mid range type tone that cuts,” she says. “It’s really cool - I’ve heard it on a lot of records and I can pick it out immediately. I need one of those so bad!”

When the pandemic first struck, it took some time for Pruitt to get into the creative spirit, and she needed to process the reality of not going on tour and all her plans for 2020 not happening, or at least not in the way that she envisioned them.

“I’ve been writing a hell of a lot recently, but there’s just so much going on, so really I’m writing for my own sanity at this point!”

KATIEPRUITT.COM FENDER.COM

“It’s kind of ironic, because my record’s called Expectations, and that’s the dangerous thing about expectations - things don’t always work out the way you plan them, and that’s okay.

“I think once I was able to process that things aren’t happening the way I thought they would, I was able to just take a step back and see some of the silver lining, HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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TENILLE TOWNES

Paying it Forward

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Canadian country music star, Tenille Townes’ musical journey was ignited when singing along to Shania Twain in the back of her parents’ car, leading her down a road of musical self discovery and paying it forward.

Spend a few minutes with Tenille Townes and it’s immediately clear that she doesn’t see, or hear, the world like everyone else. Maybe it comes through in how she learned to read by pouring over lyric sheets and liner notes, or how she discovered she loved to sing whilst belting out U2 and Shania Twain in the back of her parents’ car.

Selfless to the core, a humble Townes has helped raise over a million dollars for a charitable initiative she created – and all while still a teenager. Speaking to Headliner from her home in Nashville during lockdown, the usually touring singer admits that the current situation doesn’t quite feel real: “It’s been such a crazy time, and I’ve been walking every day,” she says of her lockdown habits. “That’s a big part of keeping my sanity. That always puts me in a good headspace, although with wanting to be outside and be moving – it’s such a weird contradiction to be still right now. So much of my life in the last two years has been spent on the road getting to do the thing I love: playing for people. So it’s definitely a drastic change to be standing still, but I’m doing my best to be thankful for the rest, and the ability to sleep more and recharge, listen to podcasts, records, plus I’m journaling, watching some fun TV shows and I’m reading more.

HEADLINER USA

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“I’m definitely grateful for all those things. It’s so easy to just be heavy hearted thinking about the world right now and all those people who are on the front line, and everybody who can’t work right now…” she trails off. “I’m doing as much as I can to try to send out as much love and positive vibes as I can, because it’s easy to slip into that dangerous place in our minds, I think.”

As with many creatives, Townes is encouraged by the sense of hope and unity that has developed during the pandemic, which has seen people extend a helping hand at a time, ironically, when human contact is forbidden: “Exactly,” she says. “The thing that brings me the most comfort right now is that we’re literally all going through this together. We can bond together and hopefully engage more; there are different ways to call people that you haven’t talked to in a long time.

We’re all working this out together, so that part’s pretty amazing.”

At just 15, Townes organized a fundraiser called Big Hearts For Big Kids, which benefited a youth shelter in her hometown. Since then it has become an annual event, which has raised over $1.5 million dollars.

Townes was inspired to start the initiative by a pamphlet her mother brought home one day.

“I am really thankful to have grown up in an incredible community who very much has this tendency to come together and really support the people in our town through a lot of different ways,” she says modestly.

“They made me believe that really, anything’s possible. We started this idea for this fundraiser to really show up for the kids in our community who were struggling with homelessness, addiction or family issues – or

whatever the reasons might be. It’s been life-changing watching people raise that amount of money and in the last 10 years seeing the way people have wrapped their arms around this youth shelter...it has completely changed my life and

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road doing the thing that I love to do.”

From a young age, Townes had an uncanny ability to get into the mindset of others as a way to find inspiration to write music, penning a song she wrote from the perspective of a daughter whose father is posted in the war in Afghanistan – a topic she learned about in school.

“To me, writing is very much – like any form of creativity – like a spiritual experience where I feel like I’m a vessel for what’s coming through me,” she explains.

shown me the possibilities that music has in bringing people together and what really can happen. It’s quite incredible to think of the power we all have when we do that.”

After she finished school, Townes continued this ethos by launching a tour called Play It Forward, where she spent 32 weeks on the road visiting 106 schools and playing music for over 35,000 students – in an effort to encourage leadership and inspire young people.

“That was a lot of fun,” she reflects.

“That was a project I put together.

Honestly, to convince my parents I was really serious about this whole new thing and to have a plan…” she laughs.

“It just completely blew me away hearing stories of kids in schools every day who were doing really great things to make our schools a better place. We got to hear those stories and recognize the students, and did a draw for a winner to get $10,000 to use in their school to continue that, so that’s the pay it forward spirit. It was amazing to get to meet all these incredible kids and to spend every day waking up on the

“To me, songwriting sometimes means putting yourself in other people’s shoes. I think that as an idea flows through you it is carried with the pieces of your personal identity in the way that you see a situation, so in that sense, my songs are very personal, but a lot of times my favourite place to write from is an observing perspective. I really enjoy telling stories. I think what I love about songs is that you hear a piece of your own story in a song and it makes you feel like you’re not the only person who’s felt that way before. That’s probably my favourite part about music.”

Townes’ music has always resonated with her fans – in particular her song Somebody’s Daughter, which was nominated for and won four awards at the 2019 Canadian Country Music Association Awards, including separate wins for single, songwriter and video of the year, while Townes scooped up Female Artist Of The Year.

Townes’ link between music and cars came full circle in this song, with the inspiration coming from a drive she took with her mom.

“She came to visit me in Nashville and we saw this young girl standing on the side of the interstate holding onto a cardboard sign, and we had this HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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TENILLE TOWNES

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Paying it Forward

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conversation just wondering what might have happened to her, or what her story was – you know, how many left turns in her life brought her to that moment. She made me think about the kids I’d seen and worked with at Sunrise House back at home. I just could not shake that look on the face, and so I brought the idea into a room with a couple friends of mine who are songwriting legends.

“The song was the beginning of this whole new era, and I was completely blown away by how many people listened out there,” she admits. “It was such a dream knowing that people were hearing the song and maybe seeing people standing on the side of the road a little bit differently, as that was something that I carried with me.

I’m super thankful to the CCMA for last year and the fact that people really heard it and believed in it; that means a lot to me.”

The song features on Townes’ Road to the Lemonade Stand EP, which features a collection of tracks she has been looking forward to putting out for a while.

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“I’m really excited to get to share more of what we’ve been working on,” she says. “A lot of these songs are in the same vein of the way I process how I feel about things, and what I see. A lot of the songs are stories, and some of them are ones I hope that make people dance and forget about their worries, and some I hope will meet them in the really hard things that they might be going through and remind them that they’re not alone in that.

“This collection of songs is just letting people show up and be who they are – this needed to feel like it could be a gathering place for it. It brings people together.”

Until Townes is able to perform live and tour again, at the moment she is focused on the simpler things: “I do my best to talk to the people I love and to see the sun shine. And some days I feel really good about that – sometimes I feel like maybe I just need more rest. I think there’s a pressure for creative people to write and be productive and to come up with something meaningful. And as

important as that desire is, I think on certain days that’s easier than others – and that’s okay. That’s what I’m trying to remind myself of anyway, but I’m still figuring out how long it takes. It’s good to remember that we’re all going through this together.”

TENILLETOWNES.COM

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

Order Among Chaos

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L.A.-based songwriter and record producer Ian Kirkpatrick has worked with some of the biggest names in pop, including Dua Lipa, Jason Derulo, Justin Bieber, and Britney Spears to name a few. He recently talked us through some of his recent collaborations, how he’s been delving deeper into production techniques, and why Steinberg’s Cubase will forever be his DAW of choice.

Having recently been in the studio with Lizzo and The Chainsmokers, Ian Kirkpatrick has managed to keep as busy as ever these last few months.

With the time left on his hands, he’s been taking a deeper dive into his craft, using it as a golden opportunity to research sound techniques and update his plugin knowledge, all while attempting to stay sane in the current climate.

Despite working with some of the most popular artists in music, Kirkpatrick admits that there’s no

specific process that he follows when it comes to collaborations, and simply finds that the best songs usually come out of long, in-depth conversations that often occur naturally.

The L.A. native has produced and written music for the likes of Dua Lipa, Jason Derulo, Selena Gomez, Nick Jones, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Pitbull, Katy Perry - the list goes on, although it’s safe to assume that these kinds of conversations didn’t occur quite as naturally when he first started his production and writing career.

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Order Among Chaos

“I started on drums and played in a bunch of bands in high school,” recalls Kirkpatrick. “One day a friend of mine introduced me to Aphex Twin and it was the first time I’d heard drum programming, and what you could do with a computer and music, and so I got myself a computer and started experimenting with composition. It started as a hobby and pretty much blossomed from there, essentially coming from the lack of control I had when I was a drummer - I always just wanted to control the sound more.”

Kirkpatrick’s work has always been based on strong collaborations that he has initiated and maintained over the course of his career. It wasn’t until 2008 when he started writing entire songs collaboratively with bands that he was producing, like those playing the Vans Warped Tour.

“Before that it was all experimental, and I was listening to a lot of intelligent dance music (IDM), manipulating samples, chopping up stuff, and mostly just playing with sounds and textures,” he explains. “I caught a break when I did a song called Blackout for this band Breathe Carolina, which charted on Top 40 and got me a bunch of writing sessions with people like Bonnie McKee, Jay Cash and Ross Golan.”

Kirkpatrick admits that not much came out of those sessions because he wasn’t ready for it, but then in 2015 after the release of Jason Derulo’s hit Want To Want Me — which he co-wrote and produced — he landed another round of meetings and another opportunity to work with some prolific songwriters, an opportunity that this time he was ready for, and was not going to miss.

Kirkpatrick views his career as a gradual 13-year increase in activity, clearly punctuated by his popularity

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on the producers circuit and his ability to forge strong connections within the music industry.

“The industry is actually so small and has so many little cliques of people that you just always end up working in the same circles,” he remarks. “People like Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter - we came up together and they’re now my good friends. It can take a long time to find your people but when you find those you’re comfortable working with it becomes very natural when you get in a room to write a song with them.

“The first time around I couldn’t hang, but the second time around I did a lot better and maintained relationships with some of those writers to this day.

Me and Jay Cash have worked together a gajillion times and we’ve probably written 100 songs together, not all of them good, but all of those sessions were fun and great. When you know that good things can happen you keep working with these people.”

Kirkpatrick’s residency in L.A. is different to that of most in the industry, who often only migrate there to do music. Other than for college, he’s been in the City of Angels his whole life, something he has always viewed as somewhat of an advantage: “I didn’t exactly have to pick everything up and move somewhere to pursue music. I just happened to grow up in the city where a lot of music comes to you, and I was able to absorb its atmosphere.”

When it comes to his studio, Kirkpatrick runs a very limited setup, one that he has whittled down over the course of a decade. His new Mac Pro ‘cheese grater’ “is just kicking ass,” he laughs, while his lone rack of outboard gear contains a Shadow Hills Equinox for monitoring and summing, a couple of BA-1084 preamps, a Burl B2 Bomber “which is an exceptional converter,” a Culture Vulture “which is great for distortion,” and his newest tool: the Handsome Audio Zulu passive tape emulator.

“The Zulu is incredible - It gives you some cool tape saturation and while I haven’t learned how to get the best out of it yet, I’m on my way,” he says. “Besides that I have a MIDI keyboard and a trusty Shure SM7.

Dua Lipa did the vocals for a song called Pretty Please on the couch using that mic in two takes, and it sounded great. I didn’t bring out the big boy for the vocal and it just worked out fine.”

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IAN KIRKPATRICK

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Contrastingly, Kirkpatrick usually prefers to do everything in the box with Steinberg’s Cubase, because “it lets me work as fast as I can think.”

“I really only use what I need in the moment,” he adds. “If I don’t need it, I’ll clean it up and put it away because my brain is already scattered enough as it is. When there’s too much visual information I go a little bit crazy, so I have to keep it pretty minimal on the outside. Most of what I do is in the DAW itself, in Cubase.”

Kirkpatrick has seen many different versions of the DAW since he first picked up Cubase SX 3 upon leaving college in 2005. For him, it has and will always be a game changer.

“I was such a fanboy, and once I actually started talking to the people at Steinberg, I was so excited to do anything for them in terms of promotion, because I felt like I owed them so much. I think these days I even dream in Cubase!” he laughs.

For music producers, the DAW is often the tool which shapes the creative process, and a large part of Kirkpatrick’s creative process, he explains, is using randomness or chaos to find order.

“The way I search for samples within the MediaBay in Cubase, and how fast it is with the indexing is incredible,” he describes. “It has a way of searching that basically makes it possible for me to just pull in random shit and run the loops parallel to the song in real time, and kind of just explore what the possibilities are before I make a decision.

“That’s probably my favourite part about Cubase, but other than that, it’s great for MIDI and for time stretching and stuff. It literally feels like you’re playing God with audio sometimes because you can do anything you want.

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“Padshop is something I’ve also been playing with recently that’s blowing my mind,” he continues. “It’s like a granular synthesis tool that just chops up samples into little grains of audio - a lot of fun for creating random percussion and chords out of voices.

It’s like scientists in the laboratory throwing a bunch of shit together and it either explodes or it doesn’t.”

Kirkpatrick also mentions how vital oeksound plugins have been to his workflow, and how he’s been using them recently in a big way.

“I saw the Disclosure guys put Soothe, which is a dynamic resin suppressor, on their master bus and that also blew my mind. Then there’s Spiff which I’ve been using a lot lately - it’s like a multi-band transient designer that essentially does the same thing as Soothe but for transients.

“Say you have a loop and you don’t want the kick to hit as hard, you’re going to make the transients in the low mids less prominent than the highs,” he explains. “I’ve been using this Delta Mode in Spiff to focus on the transients only. It’s almost like a little gate, where I can take a loop, and all of a sudden only the drums plus every little bit of information that’s on the drums is going to stick around so you get these weird effects, and it’s insane.

Again, chaos to find order. Again, just throw a bunch of shit into it, and then see what happens!”

Since the barriers to entry for producing are lower than ever before, Kirkpatrick believes it is important to be experimental in his work in order to make him stand out from the crowd.

“Anyone can go download samples from Splice, but if you just did the minimum, everyone would sound pretty similar because everyone’s using the same samples and the same DAWs.

“That’s one of the reasons I really, really love using tools like Spiff, and the MediaBay in Cubase and Padshop etc.,” he adds. “Finding new random, weird experimental stuff to blend in with all the stuff that everyone else has is what I think can give your sound the edge, so I really try to focus a lot on that.”

In a bid to share his extensive experience and further build on his knowledge, Kirkpatrick has been hosting a number of online writing and production workshops using Cubase, offering him a good way of interacting with people throughout lockdown.

“It started during quarantine because I was losing my mind,” he laughs. “It’s become easier recently, just because people seem to love watching me be ridiculous!

“For me personally, I don’t take any joy in keeping anything a secret, and I’m certainly not precious about my techniques. People can see how I do something and can copy it exactly, but it’s like I’m just handing them the paintbrush - they can do whatever they want with it.

“I want to show people what a Don’t Start Now session looks like, or if they have questions about a vocal chop, I want to show them how simple it can be, even though it can often appear complicated,” he concludes. “People love it and I love that people love it because it gets me excited, and then I get all these nice messages from people that are so thankful that I’ve shown them a particular technique or how to best use a certain plugin or DAW - it’s a satisfying feeling.”

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DAVE RUPSCH

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DAVE RUPSCH Monitor engineer Dave Rupsch opens up about life on the road with Katy Perry and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, why it’s got to be a DiGiCo console at side stage, and how he came to be known as ‘Supa Dave’.

Monitor engineer Dave Rupsch has worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Katy Perry, My Chemical Romance, Megadeth, Panic! at the Disco, Prince, Sum 41 and Nick Jonas, to name a few.

“I’m just starting my 20th year, and I HEADLINER USA

had to update my resume recently,” remarks Rupsch. “I was like, ‘Holy cow!’ It all kind of stacks up after a while.”

Although the first eight years of his career saw him at the FOH position, these days Rupsch works as a monitor engineer.

“I look at a monitor engineer role as an honor,” he says. “It’s the audio version of a personal chef – somebody that is hired to look after all of the audio needs. You get

everything ready for them so when they show up to the venue, they can be handed a microphone and go out on stage and feel comfortable performing to their fans.”

On moving from FOH to monitors, Rupsch says his preference gradually changed as he gained more experience: “I started gravitating towards monitors and once I finally heard some in-ears I liked it was like, ‘Whoa!

Okay, I like this a lot more than trying

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to make a lot of speakers sound nice in an airplane hangar,” he laughs.

Although well known in monitoring engineering circles, people tend not to know Rupsch by his real name, instead referring to him as ‘Supa Dave’.

“It’s kind of funny; I’d never had a nickname in my life. When your name is Dave, you’ve got about a one in 14 chance of getting nicknamed Supa Dave anyway – it’s not that unheard of,” he insists. “I started working for the guy that hired me in my first job in music and he started calling me Supa Dave, and introduced me as that as a joke. Then everybody meeting me for the first time knew me as that – they don’t even know your last name.

Then the bands that came in knew me as Supa Dave, and some of those bands ended up taking me on tour.

Everybody I’d meet on tour would call me that. It gets to the point where you’d call an audio vendor back saying, ‘This is Dave Rupsch, I need to talk,’ and they’re like, ‘Who? Oh it’s Supa Dave! Hey, how are you?’” he laughs.

Rupsch had always wanted to tour with a heavy metal band, so when he was asked to tour with Megadeth, he jumped at the chance: “I knew every one of their songs, I was like, ‘show me the setlist, I know what’s going on!’”

He expected everything to be very loud on stage, but was pleasantly surprised with the band’s thorough and systematic sound check, starting with turning FOH and the wedges off and just listening to the drum kit, then bringing in the side-fills, then the subs, then adding the bass, turning on the cabinets on stage, and going from there to make sure that every source sounded balanced.

Photographer credit: Raph PH

“You’d have these little pockets all around the stage and I found that doing those little movements really made a difference in the overall stage sound. It complements the in-ears – the idea being that once all the monitoring and stage sounds good, all the cabinets and the amps are good. It’s nothing complicated or fancy, but taking these simple approaches really makes a nice difference in your end result. When it comes to sound reinforcement, we have all this technology, so you have to back up a little bit and just make a naked, bare room with backline sound balanced.”

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Having been with the band for just over a year and a half, Rupsch considers himself fairly new to the Red Hot Chili Peppers camp – and he’s loved every second of it.

“This is such an iconic band and they’ve been doing it since the late ‘80s, so it’s really been a lot of fun to go into something like that,” he enthuses. “To get a call to do a job like that…” he trails off. “Wow! This is a band that I went to see as a fan and as a ticket-buyer. When you really

see it up close, they’re greater than the sum of their parts. It’s just four guys and they have this really iconic sound.”

Rupsch says that the challenge with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ in-ears is making sure the sound doesn’t get ‘cluttered’ – he chooses to play with panning, phasing and mic placement to create a wide and balanced sound for the band.

“Once you get the feel for the band… there’s no secret magic, no reverbs, there’s nothing crazy,” he insists.

“Occasionally if there’s a long held out note or something, maybe I’ll sprinkle some delay in there just to make it fun for the vocal. When you listen to the albums, it’s nice punchy drums and some compression, so it’s just getting everything balanced and sitting together. It’s very fluid and I’m not prone to using snapshots on this – where I would be with other gigs – because things can change.

Especially a band like this that has a catalogue of hundreds of songs – everything is on the table every night, so they could pull out anything. You really want to keep it fluid and be able to move around and get the band to sit well together and hopefully, help them feel comfortable on stage.”

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DAVE RUPSCH

Filling In

Photographer credit: Laura Glass

Helping Rupsch navigate these onstage challenges are DiGiCo’s range of consoles, which he has been using for the last nine years – mostly alternating between the SD10, SD7 and the SD5.

“It’s a nice problem to have – just give me any of them and I can make it work,” he laughs. “Although with the layout of the SD5 and SD7, you’re sitting in first class with those things. They’re just something else.

I really don’t use any outboard gear – no plugins,” he points out.

“The DiGiCo is the centerpiece of everything that I do. I like to try and keep everything as simple as possible and try to keep as many things inside the box as I can, using all internal reverbs and dynamics.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have recently begun using JH Audio JH16v2 in-ears after deciding that they needed a change, which Rupsch is happy to report has been working really well for them. In terms of I/Os, Rupsch has a rack of 12 channels of in-ears which includes spares for everyone on stage.

“The Chili Peppers have a keyboard player that plays on about half of the songs, so we’ve got maybe 16 HEADLINER USA

Photographer credit: Stefan Brending

channels back there,” he explains.

“There’s eight stereo keyboards, and that’s another nice thing to really add some layers to a band like that.

I have some wedges on the stage there as well, but they’re really just there for spares or maybe if a guest just happens to come out. Josh, the guitarist, would use wedges when I started, but he was curious about in-ears, so we started to move him towards in-ears as well. He ended up liking it and we were able to bring those wedges down and eventually muting those to clean up the stage sound.

“We go 96k at monitors,” he continues. “I like to separate some of the monitoring on stage, so the only thing that would be coming to the side fills (L-Acoustics ARCS) would be the keyboards because they’re all stereo pairs and you get a really nice, wide image. The side fills are kicked way off to the side of the stages so you can move around the stage and hear all of the natural amp sounds as you’re walking around the stage, and then hear your keyboards coming away from the outside to help you harmonize and make the stage sound big and separated, especially if you do go to sing or are playing a solo. You don’t have stereo sources like keyboards

coming through a mono wedge or anything like that, in addition to trying to clutter up what you’re actually trying to monitor. So I try to do little clever things like that. If somebody wasn’t using in-ears, it sounds very natural and they can maintain a performance dynamic.”

Katy perry Rupsch has been working with Katy Perry since around 2008 after the success of her single, I Kissed a Girl.

He was asked to fill in at one of the (then) rising star’s shows on monitors, and he’s been doing it ever since.

“I think the running joke now is I’m still just filling in,” he laughs. “It’s been about 12 years now. It was my first step into doing pop music. I’d done a lot of pop, punk and rock and roll up to that point, so it was really fun – from an audio standpoint – to listen to these well-arranged pop songs. I can hear why a song is a hit; there’s a spot and a place for everything and all these textures and sounds. Plus, Katy is a hard worker – she puts in all the time and she deserves every bit of success that she has. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as she does; she has a great vision. That kind of work ethic is contagious.”

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Photographer credit: Samantha Sekula

“I’D DONE A LOT OF ROCK & ROLL UP TO THAT POINT, SO IT WAS REALLY FUN - FROM AN AUDIO STANDPOINT - TO LISTEN TO THESE really WELL-ARRANGED POP SONGS.” HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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Filling In

For a touring pop artist like Katy Perry, Rupsch is easily able to convert his console files and switch between a DiGiCo SD5, SD7 or SD10, depending on what is locally available. In terms of the desks’ screens and the ability to easily lay everything out, he prefers the SD3, although the SD5 and SD7 also contain some of his favourite functionality: “I really like the extended high resolution meter bridges on those,” he confirms. “For Katy, when we’re doing rehearsals and we’re adjusting key patches and track levels and all that stuff, you’re really getting down to, ‘Bring this patch up 2dB, or down 2bB here – you’re really massaging all of your sources. Those meters are great because I can tell our Pro Tools guy to bring it down a dB and a half. It’s really handy because you can give somebody a pretty accurate piece of information to go with.”

Naturally, going from Katy Perry to the Red Hot Chili Peppers required a different approach at monitors: “With the band, it’s really a three piece bandwidth: you have somebody singing, guitar, bass and drums, and somebody singing over the top of that. For monitoring, it was interesting going from something like Katy Perry where you’ve got sometimes eight or 10 people on stage with all kinds of keyboards, multiple guitars and tonnes of layers, and you go to something like the Chili Peppers, which is the opposite of that.

“Her band plays everything – if you were to mute any kind of playback stuff, there would be really no difference in what you’d hear. When you have the sounds you can’t replicate live, plus sonic and spatial enhancements, plus a band and then you have to consider monitoring as well, it’s tricky to blend a lot of these sources together because you don’t want to make it sound like karaoke HEADLINER USA

where there’s a band playing on top of some electronics.”

To effectively replicate these songs in a live environment, Rupsch worked with the musical directors and playback team, finding DiGiCo’s software updates to be invaluable: “A few years ago, DiGiCo made it so I could start rerouting groups back into input channels, and that was hugely beneficial for me and monitors because I like mixing a lot of subgroups,” he explains. “With an eight piece band like that and a lot of different input sources, it’s a great opportunity to use those groups and then implement multiband compression to really flatten out a lot of these tracks and make them easy to blend in with what the band is playing. Once I started playing with the multiband compression, I could really dig into this stuff and my track buss.

“Plus I’m not really losing any sound or any of the dynamics – it just remains like an omnipresent source in their mix that moves and breathes with the content that they’re playing.

On the DiGiCo I can have a whole bank for my show group where it’s all of my subgroups going into the console. I can mix all these people on one or two banks and route these groups back in.”

Rupsch says that all the music award shows use DiGiCo, making it easy for him to bring a preset file, even with just a channel.

“I’m able to say, ‘here’s her vocal channel and here’s the reverb presets’. So even before I get there I can send these presets that are all loaded in, and the soundtrack is done in no time. We’re not messing around trying to dial in reverbs or dynamics, so the local guys love it because soundcheck is done 20 minutes early.”

Rupsch says that his start in working in audio was like being “thrown into the fire,” and he admits that he actually started out on another brand of console before landing a gig where the band used a DiGiCo SD8.

“They said they had some multitracks, a file, and asked if I knew this console.

The answer was no, but I knew I’d figure it out! The next day I ended up going to a tech shop in Las Vegas to look at the SD8, and I started doing some playback and digging in and playing around with it. And in no time I was like, ‘Wow! This sounds really, really, good.’

“I gotta admit, the learning curve initially was steep at first, but you realise in hindsight that it was so versatile. It took me a second to figure out my workflow, and then I realized I can put anything where I want – like my fader banks – to make my workflow really, really effective in no time. That was when I really fell in love with those consoles, and I haven’t looked back since.”

Crucially, DiGiCo gives Rupsch 100% confidence during a live show: “When it gets to showtime, I don’t want to have to worry about anything getting weird,” he confirms. “I’ve auditioned and rehearsed everything via playback and I know everything is there. It’s just that calming of anxieties that can really help you produce a good show.”

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D&B FANBLOCK German audio technology company d&b audiotechnik recently announced a new partnership with leading theatrical and creative sound designer, Autograph, to co-develop and launch a stadium sound application, creating a live crowd atmosphere at empty sports events.

We recently discovered how the solution is being deployed to bring power and passion back to the game.

Over the last few months, sports have faced disengaged fans, lower viewer numbers, and anticlimactic games as the usual high atmosphere matches took place behind closed doors.

Organizations have taken action in some cases, with the NFL announcing last month that sound must be played during all games to combat the negative impact of quiet stands, and recreate some of the vital dynamic energy brought to the game by a noisy, responsive crowd.

Enter d&b Fanblock, the latest venture from d&b audiotechnik powered by

Autograph Stadium Sound.

Fanblock is designed to deliver a real-time controlled sound solution to venues without fans or with a reduced number of fans on location, using a d&b sound system precisely positioned within an arena or field.

This creates a multi-channel surround-sound system which, when combined with Autograph’s cutting-edge crowd atmosphere compositions and playback software, means stadiums are once again filled with the much-missed sound of fans.

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“Once the pandemic hit, and we knew that ‘normal’ life would not resume for some time, everyone at d&b was looking to innovate, think outside the box and provide new solutions for the industry,” says d&b senior director Robert Trebus. “The initial concept of Fanblock was realized when we noticed that viewership during sporting events had dropped and that players and fans alike were feeling the psychological events of silent stadiums.” d&b knew immediately that they could quickly and effectively come up with a solution to address this, and so Fanblock was born.

“At d&b we had the technology and the sound system, but we needed the creative part, the crowd atmosphere compositions, and Autograph were front of mind,” Trebus adds. “As one of the leading theatrical and creative sound designers out there, we knew that Autograph could help us to bring drama and an exciting atmosphere back into stadiums.”

Not only will players benefit from the pioneering technology from d&b and Autograph, fans at home will be able to experience the sounds of the stadium while games are broadcast live.

The basic audio content consists of non-team specific sounds including background ‘bed’ loops to provide a continual atmosphere within the stadium and a library of sound cues that can be triggered by operators in reaction to the action on the pitch.

The custom sound design package offers club-specific chants made possible through Autograph’s content partner, FanChants.

Designed and developed by long time theatrical and dramaturgy experts, Stadium Sound by Autograph creates a live crowd atmosphere at sports events that can be dynamically controlled in real-time to directly respond to the events of the game.

The system is operated live by engineers in the stadium in order to follow the energy levels and punctuate the dramatic moments as they happen.

“By partnering with Autograph, we’ve come up with a revolutionary new sound solution,” remarks Amnon Harman, CEO of d&b audiotechnik.

“No longer will sports teams hear the echo of empty stadiums and venues, instead with d&b Fanblock, they will once again hear the strength and passion of their fans while on the field.”

The new partnership with Autograph

appears to be a very natural, organic fit for d&b, which has been focusing on uniting the live and sports events industry and coming together in solidarity this year. One way it is doing so is by collaborating with partners and building on its strengths as a leader in audio technology.

“Autograph had already developed the Stadium Sound concept and was open to innovation, and immediately saw the potential in what we were trying to achieve,” explains Trebus.

“Not only that, but their 40 years of expertise and willingness to go above and beyond for each client makes them the perfect partner.

“It’s through working together as a community on initiatives such as Fanblock that we have truly seen the strength and resilience of our industry.”

Audio compositions are sent from an audio computer to the DS100 Signal Engine via a Dante interface, with two to three sound engineers using iPads to control the system live. d&b Fanblock then uses the matrix functions of the DS100 Signal Engine to distribute audio to the multichannel surround d&b loudspeaker system.

As the backbone of d&b Soundscape — the company’s immersive sound design toolkit — the DS100 Signal Engine enables further enhancement of d&b Fanblock through its En-Scene sound object positioning software.

Users can take advantage of objectbased signal management, allowing complex sound events to be moved dynamically around the stadium in real-time, and add additional subtlety and detail to the effect of Stadium Sound in response to the actions on the field. This approach allows the sound engineer to have spectator chants grow from one section before building out to fill the entire stadium.

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Fanblock saw its first deployment at the Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium in London, home to Queens Park Rangers.

The system is entirely scalable and according to d&b can be put in any size stadium or arena around the world.

Its first full-scale deployment was at the Championship games at The Kiyan Prince Foundation Stadium in London, with many more projects in the pipeline. d&b Fanblock powered by Autograph Stadium Sound not only helps to bring the sports industry back to life, it also provides a new business opportunity and revenue stream for d&b rental partners during a time of economic uncertainty.

“While we are facing an increasingly challenging time in the industry, here at d&b we continue to innovate and address the needs of the market,” comments Harman. “This introduction is yet another example of our dedication to continuous improvement and providing new opportunities for our partners and end-users alike.”

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JACK GOODMAN The Art of Flight

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When it comes to wireless, Jack Goodman gives the phrase “on air” a whole new meaning. The sound engineer explains how he captured the audio for a performance in a hot air balloon, and for a rapper who jumped out of a plane.

When sound engineer Jack Goodman was first approached about capturing the audio for rapper and singer Dominic Fike, who planned to jump out of a plane to reveal his new album What Could Possibly Go Wrong – he had to admit that he was sceptical: “I told them to keep their expectations pretty low as far as how long we’d be able to capture this kid falling,” he says, pointing out that once midskydive, there is no possible way to make any adjustments.

“I was told we would have one chance to get this, so I told the director that I would figure something out. My biggest concern was the wind impact on the mic; I was really worried about whether we’d be able to hear anything outside of the wind blowing against his chest.”

After discussing the shoot with the rental team at Trew Audio in L.A., it

was clear Fike would need a recorder on his body.

split recording mode prepared the team for this:

“It needed to hold onto time code once we’d jam-synced it,” he notes, adding that a compact solution would also be ideal. Recording broadcast WAV files to a MicroSD card at 24-bit/48kHz resolution, a Lectrosonics MTCR ticked all these boxes for Goodman:

“It records two tracks at once – one with 18dB less gain,” he explains.

“When Dominic jumped, I didn’t know how loud he would scream, or how loud the parachute would sound when it opened. I didn’t know what to expect, and we only had one chance.

So, between those two tracks, I knew that I’d have material that worked in post no matter what. That feature was essential for us being able to do this shoot at all.”

“The wireless was basically for everything except when he’s falling,” he clarifies. “For that, we needed to capture anything that he said as well as ambient sounds like the wind and the chute opening. Sound from a GoPro was not going to give us that vibe. We taped up Dominic with a Sanken COS-11D lav mic, which fed both the MTCR and his transmitter.”

There are no retakes on a skydive, and the situation is the opposite of having any control over one’s sonic environment, however the MTCR’s

The MTCR’s solid sync was also key: “I’m mainly a post mixer, so good time code is important. We jamsynced the MTCR, my Sound Devices 633, and cameras from a Betso Box – and the MTCR must have run three hours total. Lectrosonics recorders are more stable holding on to jammed time code than their major competitors.”

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JACK GOODMAN The Art of Flight

“WE ONLY HAD ONE TAKE, AND THE PRODUCTION WAS LIKE, ‘DON’T BLOW IT!’”

Goodman notes that ironically, once the parachute opened, it was actually eerily quiet: “My biggest concern was losing that mic for that part, or that it would move from its position and you would hear clothing rustling,” he explains. “When a parachute opens, you move kind of slow, so I knew that’s when he was going to be talking the most, so I used a lot of medical grade tape for that.”

The results exceeded Goodman’s expectations, and he was particularly surprised at the range: “In a good way!” he clarifies. “I heard him scream for about 30 yards, but the signal didn’t cut until over 100. It was perfect – I couldn’t have expected it to be better. Of course, all that audio was still going into the MTCR. I was surprised that nothing clipped. At any rate, I was able to assemble everything from his lav into this hyper-real moment.”

trippiest feelings ever because you step off and there’s nothing to step on to. You really feel that fall for the first 15 seconds, and then you reach terminal velocity where you’re going so fast that you don’t feel like you’re falling anymore…”

UP IN THE AIR Another recent assignment saw Goodman take to the skies again for a segment for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in which musical guest Trevor Daniel took off in a hot air balloon midperformance.

As with the skydive project, Goodman needed to capture audio before, after and during Daniel’s ascent – with no interruptions.

Goodman was on the jet during the event in order to closely monitor the sound, and on a whim, he decided to skydive out of the plane too:

“We only had one take, and the production was like, ‘don’t blow it!’

Not only did we want that audio for post, but we needed it for the monitors of the musicians on the ground, which included a string quartet. Midway through the song, Trevor gets in the balloon and goes up, up, up,” he recalls.

“Watching them all go out was pretty intense – you could hear the person in front of you fall and then whip away and you could see them go,” he recalls. “I checked all the audio was perfect, and I knew we weren’t going to do this again, so I asked the producers if I could jump out of the plane too.

It was intense! That was one of the

“It was ridiculous,” he laughs. “Plus it was tricky because the rapper needed to hear the string quartet on the ground, and the string quartet needed to hear him in the hot air balloon, so there would be a lot of cross communication with signals, and if the feed got lost on either end then it’d be out of sync. Also, we only had one or two chances for it to take

HEADLINER USA

off because if the wind is blowing the wrong direction, they just can’t use it. I learned a lot about hot air balloons…”

Adding more pressure was the fact that they would be flying above a large vineyard: “They were saying if they land on someone’s wine vineyard plants by mistake, they have to pay for every single wine bottle that could have been produced – at full market price.

One little mistake could turn into a $50,000 issue, so I was definitely nervous! But if you’re not nervous going into a job, I think something’s wrong.”

For the skydiving project, Goodman turned to the Lectrosonics MTCR miniature time code recorder to supplement his kit of UCR411a receivers, paired with legacy UM400a transmitters, whereas on The Tonight Show, seamless recording of Daniel’s performance was accomplished with an HMa plug-on transmitter and wideband Venue2 receiver.

“Our biggest concern was losing reception to that hot air balloon and then him not hearing us, and then them having to try and land this thing to take off again. There really wasn’t an option to do that, though: the producers were clear with it being one shot. So we doubled down on antennas.”

Goodman worked together with Sean Hokanson – one of the crew

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hiding in the basket as a backup, running a whole other receiver and recorder – and Joseph Fiorillo as an additional sound mixer. It turned out they didn’t need the backup: “Maybe it was our unobstructed line of sight, but I swear that balloon got over a mile away and the signal on the ground didn’t flinch,” he insists. “We even heard Trevor saying, ‘there’s no way they can hear us now, is there?’

The other two mixers and the playback engineer were stunned.”

Goodman is used to mixing television series for major networks, commercials for national and international broadcast and movies for theatrical distribution, although a couple of tricky on-location projects have helped him prepare for the more unusual jobs that crop up:

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two of these planes – they are 100 million dollars each.

I was sitting on the runway getting ready for it to take off, and I was just looking up thinking, ‘how loud is a jet?’

And it turns out, it’s the loudest thing you can record,” he laughs.

“It’s 130 dB SPL – it’s insane. It completely blew my mics out and everything I had was completely distorted and destroyed. But that was an experience and I learned a big lesson there: always check the sound pressure level of the object of recording because if it’s something like that, you’ve got to bring special mics.

“It takes those kinds of jobs where you’re just thrown in to figure out stuff like that. In some cases, you can’t research this stuff – you just have to be there and figure it out. So it was a failure, but it was cool!”

“I recorded an F-35 jet once,” he says. “It’s this crazy jet that the US military has about 40 of at Edwards Air Force Base, but this was for an air force that only had HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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JACK GOODMAN The Art of Flight

Happily, the two recent air-based projects were both complete successes, and Goodman is more than happy with the Lectrosonics gear used: “Both times, the results were like I was next to the talent hardlined directly into the recorder without even using RF. Everything worked so well – range, audio quality, time code, the split mode – that when the shoots were over, I just bought the gear.”

For Goodman, it’s all about durability: “Exactly! I’ve dropped these things more times than I can count – bad drops. In addition to throwing them out of planes, I’ve had them on dirt bikers and at muddy monster truck rallies in the rain.

“On one big shoot which will remain nameless, somebody HEADLINER USA

bumped into my audio cart and knocked the whole thing over. I had five UCR411a receivers just stacked there loose.

All of them hit the concrete – hard. And all of them still worked.

“Lectrosonics is really user friendly, especially in a ‘heated’ situation,” he adds. “I’m also always surprised by their relatively long signal range, even without antennas. I’ve had really good luck in the field and on documentaries with the Lectro systems due to how far they can travel.

Once I got into Lectro stuff, that just changed the game for me, so I’ve just stuck to it!”

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We put Shure’s new SLX-D wireless system to the test. Unlike its predecessor, it comes in two flavors: dual and single receiver; this makes it easier to build and rack up systems with larger channel counts with fewer ariels, twice as many channels per distribution unit, and smaller switches. Another eyebrow raiser is the price; these new units, while a little more than the range they now replace, are actually about the same price as the SLX range was when it was launched. So let’s dive in...

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First off, let’s break down this impressive system: I’ve got two SLX-D2 handheld mics (one with an SM58 capsule, one with a Beta 58 capsule), an SLX-D1 body pack, and two single SLX-D4 receiver units.

After unpacking and attaching the aerials and power supplies, I linked them together with short Ethernet cables to the back of my Cisco switch which forms part of my home and studio network. I could have just connected them to each other via the single Ethernet port on each unit, but I was interested to see if they would find each other through a switch without having to configure any IP addresses.

The switch is a level three with a couple of virtual networks, but I

have left a section which allows automatic connection between devices in similar ranges and the same subnet. Bearing in mind you can have up to 32 channels of SLX-D in one local system, a network switch is a must if you’re going to be setting these up in different locations.

After powering up, both units displayed the same thing: G:1 CH:1, so I picked the first unit and pressed the button that said ‘push’ on it. I was prompted to turn off any transmitters and set the unit up, including a full scan, just by holding down said button when prompted.

Shortly after, both units flickered for a couple of seconds and new frequencies were allocated to each receiver.

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The first receiver was then prompting me to sync a transmitter to the first channel, so I picked up a handheld, turned it on, and held the IR window up to the receiver.

Almost immediately the message ‘sync complete’ flashed up on the screen. Well that was easy! After switching on the second handheld and moving its IR window in front of the next receiver, I pressed the sync button on the second receiver – and job done. The whole process took less than three minutes, which is amazing, actually... I have more complicated DI boxes!

FEELS LIKE THE REAL THING Shure’s new SLX-D range sounds like an updated replacement for the SLX range which has been around now for 15 years - probably the most popular budget analogue radio mic ever - and with the move from analogue to digital, that’s exactly what this is. However, holding the handheld microphone tells you this is not just a simple upgrade. For starters, this unit looks and feels like it could belong to one of Shure’s top end ranges: the body is of a solid metal construction while the old plastic battery cover is now a machined piece of aluminium; the recessed controls are not likely to be accidentality turned off during the performance; and I had to use my fingernail ends to get into the menus, which is also good, as it affords a little ‘over-exuberant musician’ proofing.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Shure’s wireless systems is the interchangeable mic capsules, meaning you can pretty much put anyone’s favorite mic capsule on before you go out to a job. You’re also not restricted to the capsule options that this system ships with. I have a number of different high-end condenser mic capsules from DPA and Audio-Technica as well as Shure’s excellent KSM9, and all worked superbly on the SLX-D. I know you’re gonna say that all of the big radio mic manufacturers do this – true, but it was Shure who did it first.

Another feature that improves on the SLX-D’s

predecessor is channel count. Shure claims up to 32 simultaneous channels can be used within the available UHF bandwidth, and that is also the reason this system has stayed with UHF as opposed to utilizing the licencefree WiFi frequencies like so many other manufacturers’ budget systems which struggle to achieve drop-out free operation with channel counts anywhere near this capacity. At this point you should know that the SLX-D is not configurable from within Shure’s ‘wireless workbench software’, but I’d be shocked if potential users of the SLX-D could actually find a benefit in using [Shure’s] Wireless Workbench over the unit’s lightning fast onboard setup procedure. Really impressive.

This system is, of course, digital - and with all digital systems there is a certain amount of latency introduced by the ADA processing of the audio from the capsule through the transmitter and from the receiver back to the analogue outputs. Here, Shure claims a figure of 3.2ms, and while that represents listening to the resulting audio from a speaker less than 1.2m away from you, you also have to consider the additional latency of any other equipment in the signal path, such as a digital desk, for example. In this case, I was using an Allen & Heath SQ, which only has 0.7ms latency. I popped a set of my JH Audio JH16 IEMs in, and had a listen to my voice. Unpleasant though my voice is, it still wasn’t audibly possible to detect the resulting total sub 4ms latency within the system.

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BIG THINGS FROM A SMALL PACK The SLX-D1 is an impressive little pack, and nice and light. I managed to double its weight just by putting in the batteries!

Immediately, I could see a few guitarists who’d appreciate the benefits of a light oval-shaped plastic pack; for starters, this little device can clip onto your guitar strap and you wouldn’t even notice it was there. Now some might say that a plastic pack would be history the first time you drop it, and that it would’ve been far better to have made the pack out of metal and the mic casing out of plastic, but the interesting thing is, because it’s so light there is far less chance of it jumping off your belt or strap; and when I was clumsy enough to drop it, it simply bounced on my tiled floor, no damage whatsoever.

The other ergonomic feature which I think is a lovely touch is the elliptical shape. This is going to sit comfortably concealed behind clothing and in pockets or pouches without displaying any sharp angles and lines. Artists will forget they’re wearing this little pack, which is fantastic. Connection is via Shure’s standard TA4F 4-pin mini XLR with the added protection of a screw thread locking ring, something which is a must for maintaining a good connection between devices in an environment which is inherently prone to mishap – this is also a welcome upgrade from the SLX range.

Now the nights are really starting to draw in, but today is a good day and the sun is out, so I’m going to sit in the back yard with the SLX-D1 plugged into my [Fender] Strat and my bedroom studio taking a feed from the SLX-D4, which is less than 10m away from me, but is the other side of two brick and Yorkshire sandstone walls. Not exactly a distance test, but it still tells me that the carrier is strong enough to cope with immovable solid objects like stage sets and dressing room walls. However, when paired with a PSM1000 channel and my JH16 IEMs, I happily kick back with the sun in my face and strum away until my heart’s content. Even allowing for the additional latency of my Mac running UAD’s Console via my Apollo x8p interface with various plugins on the input chain, by my calculation, I was still looking at less than 5ms of latency. Less than the distance a stage wedge is when you’re HEADLINER USA

standing over it - or about the same as standing 1.6m in front of your 4x12 [cabinet]!

I’ve been used to setting up many wireless systems for guitar and other instruments over the years and most have been a compromise of convenience over quality, so it’s a relief to find a system that actually sounds good and doesn’t break the bank. With more and more budget digital systems utilizing WiFi networks to transmit what is claimed to be better quality audio, musicians are fooled into believing these suitable for mission-critical signals. Big mistake, I find; they seem to work in soundcheck, but fill a venue full of mobile phones and things quickly go downhill! The SLX-D, while requiring a licence and sharing a small proportion of its bandwidth with digital television, is a very nice-sounding system and, dare I say, not that dissimilar to plugging my guitar directly into the interface or my little combo amp, certainly more impressive than similar priced offerings from Shure’s competitors and, ironically, better than Shure’s own U4D and U1D combination I still have, which seems to noticeably squash the dynamics out of your playing in comparison.

Shure also sent me a TwinPlex omni lav microphone so I could further put the SLX-D1 pack to the test. This is a miniature mic aimed at competing with the likes of Sanken, DPA and the Countryman. It’s a mic I’ve no experience of but I also found the correct micro dot for my 4060s and I was again very impressed with the sound from the SLX-D and also the TwinPlex 47 mic which has a warmer low mid and a very transparent and natural response. Although slightly larger than the DPA, it is a dual-diaphragm design and is also waterproof. Switching between mic and line level was again very simple – via the large push button, scroll down to option four mic/line level and press twice then turn either way to select between mic and line level. When highlighted, press again and the option will save and return you to the main screen.

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DIGITAL WIRELESS “Great value for money from a professional quality digital radio system...“

24-bit audio “Crystal clear 24-bit audio with amazing headroom and lowest noise floor in its class...“

multiple channels

“Very easy setup and interface to achieve multiple channels of digital audio...”

MORE CHANNELS, FEWER BATTERIES It’s been the way of all things digital that as technology has advanced, quality has improved, and options have increased. Within the 44 MHz tuning bandwidth of the SLX-D you can now (local TV stations permitting) fit up to 32 channels of SLX-D into your radio system which is a massive increase on the old SLX system and a warning shot over the bow of the competition. What’s more, Shure has for the first time allowed you to equip this range with its own rechargeable battery system which - if you’re using such a large channel count - further helps you manage and keep all your transmitters ready for use.

The caddie charging system also provides a useful place to store your mic or pack when you have finished your presentation, speech, or performance; and I can see this system really taking off in schools, colleges, pubs and clubs up and down the land, Covid restrictions permitting!

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Solid State Logic is, of course, synonymous with large format studio desks of the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was estimated that during those two decades, more hit records were recorded through SSL consoles than all other studio desks combined – however, with the last 20 years seeing a sharp move from large console-based studios to ‘in the box’ workflows, how relevant is a small analog board from SSL in today’s modern digital and hybrid studio?

The SiX is one of a very cool batch of recently released analog SSL products aimed at the home and hybrid studio market, along with Fusion and the remarkably good value for money SSL2 and 2+ desktop interfaces.

Like the rest of the pack, SiX is a very aesthetically pleasing bit of kit and arrives in packaging which is more reminiscent of an Apple product in its presentation. The first thing that strikes me is how heavy this desk is; its substantial weight suggests a serious steel frame, even though the cheeks are clearly plastic. The next thing I notice is the 100mm faders – again, not something you’d expect on a small desk. The one thing you won’t find on this desk, however, is a USB or thunderbolt port because there’s no computer interface on this board - so let’s address that for a moment.

I believe the thinking here is correct: if you’re looking to expand your setup with more serious tools like this SSL console then you already have the interface of your choice. In my case, it’s the UAD Apollo x8p, and I’m not likely to want to lose the the large channel count, onboard DSP, and fabulous plugins. I would, however, consider the addition of a couple of SSL SuperAnalogue mic preamps together with access to SSL’s exceptionally good G-Bus compressor, albeit a simplified version. All for not much more than the G-Bus comp would cost you in a 500 Series module!

And talking of 500 Series modules, should you happen to have a rack with a couple of AP I550, Trident 80B, or even the amazing SSL 611EQ modules, you can make full use of the balanced inserts available via the rear

panel D-Sub connectors on the SiX and engage: the insert button is right next to the 8 LED level meter on each of the Super-Analogue mic channels.

Suddenly those cats at SSL seem far more cool than crazy, right?

Another thing which caught my eye and is uncommon on a small desk - is individual phantom power buttons underneath each of the mic XLRs. It’s always niggled me that on many small desks, if you turn on phantom power for one mic channel, it’s on all of them, whether you need it or not.

So far I’m impressed with this little board; it oozes build quality and thoughtful design, and I haven’t even turned it on yet.

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PLUGGED IN I had to spend a little time making up some new cables even though both my monitors have balanced XLR ins, but because of the need to swap stuff over quickly I’d been using the XLR on one and phono on the other - all dependent on whether I’m using my old ‘cheesegrater’ USB interface, or Mac Book Pro Thunderbolt interface.

I was looking forward to playing back both older projects from my Mac Book via my trusty Focusrite unit and some of the same stuff I’d transferred over to my Mac Book and the Apollo interface: now I’d be able to make direct comparisons of the same projects using different plugins, and quickly switch between them on the same set of speakers without

having to swap out any connectors.

Using Van Damme balanced studio grade cabling together with the SiX I suddenly felt like my little studio was taking a seriously professional turn.

Having plugged everything in, I turned the SiX on. By way of a simple listening test I have a bunch of high definition audio tracks available for the very purpose of testing stuff out and making comparisons. The interesting thing was that while inserting the SiX in the signal path between the Apollo and my monitors made no perceivable difference; the output from the Focusrite via the SiX to either set of speakers (I have ADAMs and Genelecs) actually

sounded noticeable better. It just goes to show how important everything in your signal path is - including cabling.

What was also very noticeable was how utterly silent the SiX is, and how much headroom there is in this mixer.

With lesser boards I would be way up towards clipping with my high definition files. Even returning on the stereo inputs with the trim driving the channel hard into the red (a catastrophe on most desks) actually sounded more like smooth saturation, and by no means unpleasant on the SiX.

WHAT ROUTE SHOULD YOU TAKE? The big question is what do you get for your investment? The SiX is so named for its six input channels that are assigned to faders: two mono and two stereo. There are actually a further three pairs of inputs available, giving a total of 12 (and the talkback mic input), but more about these options later. The two mono channels feature SSL’s Super-Analogue mic/ line preamps with individual phantom power, high pass and Hi-Z instrument instrument DI option. SSL describes Super-Analogue as bringing large console sonics and processing into a very compact design. And they’re not wrong.

At this point I could start quoting technical facts and figures showing how good these mic pres are, but to most musicians that doesn’t mean a lot so there’s a little test I do which came about from a project that myself and Headliner’s editor were working on a number of years back.

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We were in a little studio which had a Soundcraft Spirit 24-channel desk in it, and the following test you could not do before being swamped with hiss and noise: put a microphone as far away as possible (which in my case is at the bottom of a staircase on the floor below me in the far corner of my house); put your headphones on; turn up the gain and see whether you can hear yourself breathing. Not only could I hear my own breathing, but I could also hear a neighbor’s conversation down the street, and the sound of me tapping on my keyboard was uncomfortably loud. Quick tip: turn it down when the refuse collectors turn into the top of your road. These are exceptional mic pres.

Next to the gain pot there’s a one pot compressor which represents the threshold. The compression is gentle at 2:1 and the release time is fixed at around 300ms. The attack is programme-dependent but seems

to be fairly quick at around 10-30ms.

Makeup gain is automatic, and maintains the signal level through the mic pre. I love this little comp; it’s very subtle, and it’s not until you switch it in and out that you can tell it’s working beautifully transparent. This is perfect, gentle compression for recording as you want to reign in those peaks but at this stage don’t want to change the dynamic of the original performance.

Below the comp is a simple, effective EQ section - also with an in/bypass switch - with high and low shelving at 3.5kHz and 60Hz. A bell switch next to each pot changes the EQ to a cut or boost curve centred at 5kHz and 200Hz, respectively. This very musical EQ has its roots in the filter section of the SSL E-Series EQ; the two stereo channels feature a centred trim pot as opposed to the gain control, and at the top of each 100mm fader on all channels is the pan pot.

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SUPER ANALOGUE MIC PRES “Transparent and fabulously warm-sounding mic pres...”

“A control friendly version of the G-Series Bus Compressor with all the character of the original...”

“Super smooth 100mm faders with the performance and feel of a large format SSL console...”

g-bus comp

100mm faders

When it comes to routing there are a few options on the SiX. All six input channels feature a cue1 and cue2 stereo (aux) buss, all of which can be switched in or out.

The two preamp channels’ cue busses also have a pan pot above them so you can send them where you want during recording or mixdown. On the mono channels’ cue1 there is another button marked ‘alt’ which when lit takes signal from the insert return D-Subs channels five and six, giving you that additional input pair (channels 11 and 12) that I mentioned earlier. Also mentioned earlier, there are fully balanced inserts on the two SuperAnalogue channels which send and return via the D-Sub rear connectors should you need to insert your SSL 611 500 Series EQ modules. Finally, at the bottom of each channel strip is a Mute BusB button which re-routes audio from the master bus to bus B; and below that is the PFL which routes audio to the monitor output section and monitor LED meters.

You may also have noticed from the photos that there’s a third XLR input available for a control room talkback mic. This is a flexible option which could be used with a talkback gooseneck, but you could also use it as another creative input as it’s equipped with phantom power and the LMC button. This is SSL’s legendary Listen Mic Compressor. The idea behind this mic input/compressor combination was to introduce a severe amount of compression together with a large amount of makeup gain, the effect being that anyone in the control room, no matter how far away from the mic, would all be at a similar, clearly audible level. It has been rumored that it was the switching in and out of this mic while a drum track was being reviewed on headphones that led to the creation of gated reverb on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album, Gabriel III.

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MASTER OF THE HOUSE The master section has been very well thought out, and while SiX can act beautifully as a podcast (SiX has featured heavily on Headliner Radio) or small live event mixer for a couple of mics and playback, it has clearly been put together with the project studio at the fore. One feature I really love is the monitor facility which gives you a monitor output and an alternative monitor output at the touch of a button. Both these output facilities are in addition to the main recording and bus B recording outputs, and are without doubt inspired by SSL’s large studio console facilities. Nearly all good project studios have a dual speaker arrangement, even if it’s only referencing between two sets of different nearfields. The inclusion of a dim button as well as a mono and mute is also a very professional touch, and you can adjust the level of the dimmed audio signal from a pot in the monitor source section. The monitor source section also

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selects from the master bus, bus B, and external inputs one and two which also feature individual level controls on a pot.

The stereo cue buses feed the master foldback section pre-fader, however there is a post switch at the top of the master foldback section for each bus. You can also add external one and two returns into each bus as well as the talkback mic, which latches to allow you to send either one of the foldback buses to your DAW for recording. This gives you the flexibility to use the talkback mic as another creative tool. The two stereo foldback buses output on the insert send D-Sub (channels five through eight). The local headphone section gives you level, and selection of either foldback one or two - if neither are selected, the phones will duplicate the monitor audio bus.

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THE BUS COMPRESSOR The G-Series Bus Compressor is a little piece of audio folklore introduced on the 4000G consoles, but with its design evolved from the E-Series. This version [on the SiX] has all the characteristics of the G-series with a simplified and pre-selected set of parameters. The ratio is fixed at 4:1 while the two pots give you control over the threshold and gain makeup. There’s an LED display to show the amount of gain reduction being applied and an in/out button

to select the comp - and also to gain match and hear the dry verses compression effect. SSL states that the attack and release parameters have been predetermined to provide compression to the widest variety of mix content, and while the ratio is higher, the attack and release time seems slower than the comps on the Super-Analogue channels.

There is also a side chain first order high-pass filter at 50Hz to

help reduce the pumping effect on dance music. Now I have to say that losing control over a number of key features like attack, release, ratio and variable high-pass, can be slightly worrying in use; however, this lighter version of the G-Bus sounds every bit as complete [as the original] and brought into focus every piece of music and every project mix I put through it.

SUMMING UP A few years back, I became aware that certain DAWs were not very good at bouncing down tracks. Say, for example, you had programmed a largeish horn section and it started to overload your computer’s processing. The obvious thing was to bounce it down to an audio track and add it in as a new audio track.

However, the particular DAW I used at the time produced a bounce that was nothing close to the quality of the original audio I had been listening to. Even bouncing it down to a 32-bit float and re-importing it, converting it back to 24-bit, while much better, was still not the same.

I wasn’t the only one who had come to this conclusion, and a good friend of mine suggested I borrowed his Dangerous Music two-bus summing amp. Sadly, he kept taking it back, and because my old laptop needed

replacing at the time, and also because I discovered bouncing from one computer to another, it took my a while to get back to analogue summing. Now don’t get me wrong, this is not true for all DAWs, and I have subsequently learnt new ways to get around these issues - but analogue summing is an option, and a really good option. Depending on your interface, this is a reality with the SiX. You have the ability to take 12 inputs through the master Bus, including the G-Bus, and back out to your DAW. I appreciate there’s a little more planning and a fair few stereo jacks involved, and I’m also aware that some of your levels will need to be set from either your DAW or your interface’s control software, but I urge you to try it.

yet warm and musical sound is reminiscent of its older and larger cousins. While every section has components that are unique to this desk, the Super-Analogue mic pre/ line input and the G-Bus compressor are very similar in character to the originals but not quite the same.

They are such a pleasure to use and work with that other pieces of equipment you used to think were special no longer hold the same appeal. At the price point this desk is offered at - and bearing in mind you could spend half as much and get a desk with more features - I’m sure many would question the logic of this investment, but trust me when I tell you I am genuinely shocked that SSL has been able to supply this quality of product so affordably.

The SiX seems much larger than the sum of its parts; its rich, clean,

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Oeksound Soothe 2 & Spiff

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I’d heard of Oeksound’s Soothe plugin but had never actually got around to using it, so I’m heading into this review without any preconceptions about the company or its products. What I can tell you is Oeksound is a cool young brand which was launched in 2016 with their first and, until more recently, only product, Soothe.

Now there is Soothe 2 and Spiff. Isn’t it refreshing - if a little daunting - to see a plugin or in this case two plugins that are not based on or emulating an existing piece of analog or digital equipment? In other words, I might have to refer to a manual to find out how to use these two.

So let’s dive in and see what they do and how they can help you.

FROM LITTLE ACORNS Oeksound’s Soothe has taken on somewhat of a legendary status with engineer friends of mine immediately commenting on my ‘luck’ at being given the opportunity to review this plugin: “Where have you been for the last two years, Rick? I use this all the time!” one friend said to me.

“You’ll love Soothe, it’ll save you a ton of time and head scratching,” another said! So armed with the

knowledge that the first incarnation of Soothe was a big hit in a subdued way, I downloaded both the latest version, Soothe 2, as well as a plugin I know nothing about called Spiff and entered the licence codes into my iLok account.

I have a couple of friends who I collaborate with who I share song ideas and demos, which are just

that - ideas which have been quickly committed to computer in the case of one vocalist, via GarageBand with a Shure SM58; and in another, something similar.

This gave me a great place to start and see if I could smooth out what are in some cases excellent performances, just not great recordings.

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Oeksound Soothe 2 & Spiff

SMOOTHE OPERATOR First off, just a word about the interface, which in itself is very soothing. It’s like looking at the horizon where the sea meets the sky. I’m not joking, I felt immediately relaxed as if all my woes were about to dissipate into the ether.

Not relevant to the sound, I know, but a very effective and classy looking interface. And on second glance it looks like a cross between a parametric EQ and a compressor. But there is a twist... More on that shortly.

One of my tricks for hearing what plugins do before I actually apply them to any scenario is to pick a piece of music I know well and have a listen to what it does over a full frequency range. In this case I chose Steely Dans Jack of Speed and Marcus Miller’s La Villette. There’s a large dial on the left which says ‘Depth’ on it just below two check boxes that state ‘Soft’ or ‘Hard’ [algorithms] and give you the option of one or the other. Soft is very subtle - I think the depth was half way up

the first time I wound it in before I really noticed how it was affecting the audio. The hard setting on the other hand is less subtle and ranges from useful to crush the life out of!

spectrum, so having a graphical representation of the audio going through the plugin before you start to affect it can be very useful in guiding you where to look. In each of the four bands as well as the High and Low Cut options you have the ability to bypass them individually and collectively to give you a clearer visual picture of what’s going on; and a ‘listen’ icon allows you to hear what’s going on in each range.

extremely useful feature which allows you to hear what the processing is taking away. This is also great for highlighting and targeting those particular resonances that cause concern, discomfort, or both!

If you’re not familiar with Soothe like myself, a very good place to start playing is the user presets, giving you a bunch of options with which you can quickly get a feel for how Soothe works, sounds, and how it could come to your aid when particular issues become apparent.

FINE TUNING To really put this plugin to work you have to refer to the right side. This gives you four bands of control, not unlike a parametric EQ in reverse.

As you make adjustments to your band controls and move the curve upward, you increase the amount of processing or reduction of resonances within that frequency band, so it’s very easy to understand.

When you first play something through Soothe 2 there’s an instant graphical representation in the lower half of the screen - the sea, as I like to call it - which remains there even when you hit the bypass button at the bottom of the second column of controls, which provides latency-compensated and click-free operation in preference to the plugin on/off button at the top left.

Not all resonance is simple to find as it’s often made up of harmonics and overtones that could manifest themselves in various parts of the HEADLINER USA

Very useful as well is that the sea turns grey when in bypass mode; you might think I’m stating the obvious here but there are so many fine adjustments that can be made to solve whatever problem you are chasing which may be subtle and might not be constant, so it’s important to know at a glance whether Soothe 2 is processing or in bypass mode. You will find yourself regularly flipping bypass in and out to check your work! The delta button just above the bypass is also an

On the lower section of the left control panel is the sharpness, which controls how narrow or wide Soothe 2’s individual EQ cuts are; and selectivity, which reflects how rigidly it selects frequencies within the bands you have boosted for processing.

In the second column are controls for attack and release which are very useful for maintaining the attack of the original signal while then going to work on the resonance of, for example, a snare drum or a tom fill. I also found this useful on vocals for maintaining detail in articulation while using it on particular voices.

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FAR TOO USEFUL I found myself editing a podcast and immediately reaching for Soothe 2 to help solve a problem with a voice recorded over the telephone - and yes, it helped.

And so did Spiff, which we’ll get onto in a little while. Box ambience on an upright piano; room reflections on a home demo vocal; unusual injury-related resonance on an old classical guitar. Not all of these I’ve tried yet, but I keep remembering things I’ve done that I had trouble with at the time and wondering how much quicker my workflow might have been if I’d had Soothe 2 at my disposal. One very relevant fact to come out of this

review is how much processing I was taking off in favor of this plugin. On more than one occasion I turned off a standard compressor, a multiband compressor, a deesser and an EQ. Not all the time - but enough to make you think, certainly.

So Soothe 2 is a plugin you can almost load and leave with the minimal amount of faff, and it just works. Some problems take a little more solving, but I’d put Soothe 2 firmly at the top of my problem-solver category.

SPIFF Spiff on the other hand is described by Oeksound as a transient control tool: “Spiff analyzes the incoming signal and applies processing only on the parts of the signal that contain the transient information. This keeps the rest of the signal intact and free from side effects.”

So you could look at Spiff as both a creative tool and possibly a problem solver. Now there are other transient control and manipulation tools out there: Sonnox Oxford Evolution and Waves Smack Attack spring to mind. So how does Spiff stack up against the competition?

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“I THINK FOR THE FIRST TIME I WAS ACTUALLY LISTENING TO JUST TRANSIENT INFORMATION...”

control Spiff features a similar style of interface to Soothe 2, so it was pretty easy to start playing with the minute I opened it, and it was really good to see some familiar controls which make these Oeksound plugins so user friendly. The Delta button was the first thing I was drawn to and you can’t really get a better transient test than a straightforward drum track! I think possibly for the first time I was actually listening to just transient information. It has been my belief on occasion with some transient designers that I could just be listening to a very fast gate. Not in this case; the transients were clearly evident and audible, but in isolation.

In some cases it would be a little difficult to actually know what the source track was; it’s only when you switch out of Delta listening that you hear how it has faithfully captured just the transients.

Spiff also features a whole host of user presets. In many cases they just worked and saved me having to refer to the manual as the changes on the interface gave away exactly what the presets had set up. These are really well crafted and will save you a lot of time when you’re first familiarising yourself with what Spiff can do. In most cases these presets are a very good place to start, but as with all good tools, they are made to be used, so an overview is in order.

On the left hand side of the interface is a similarly laid out control panel to Soothe 2 which provides you with two buttons for the cut and boost modes. Below that is the HEADLINER USA

familiar depth control which allows you to decide how much of the processed signal you want to add or subtract.

Again, I really like the visual representation of which mode you’re in: blue for cut and pink for boost. Sensitivity controls whether Spiff processes just louder transients or if the sensitivity is increased - softer transients as well. Increasing the Decay extends the time a cut or boost is evident and can extend to even duplicating the original source signal, so I found it easier to use while the delta button was active.

Sharpness adjusts the bandwidth of the cuts and boosts applied to the signal, while Decay Lf/Hf at 12 o’clock gives both high and low transients the same decay time, but turned to the left, extends the low end decay and reduces the height end decay, and vice versa.

In the second column - similar to Soothe 2 - there’s the stereo mode mid/side as well as left right option, stereo link 0-100% and balance 0-100%/0-100% all very useful for placing instruments in a mix both in terms of distance and direction. And I think that is where Spiff really proves its worth as what would be my go-to transient design tool.

With this amount of control at your fingertips, it’s far easier to use a tool that quickly places an instrument on your soundstage in an immediate three dimensional fashion.

While EQing distance by reducing the brightness is one way, it sounds far more natural and transparent as the transients are the sounds that die first over distance.

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Just Another Step Closer We all know how important transient information is to the perception of distance, so with my new found power to move the drum kit from behind the band to in front of them, I set about putting various instruments in different places - and this is where the fun really started.

By cutting the attack on a guitarist’s finger picking style I managed to banish him to the hallway (he was still in the band, just not in the room!)

Next I tried a little trick on a grand piano which with a little transient

cut managed to upend it and make it sound like the upright against the wall. Then, courtesy of Spitfire Audio’s BBC Symphony Orchestra, I was able to take a front row seat just in front of the violins.

It’s the combination of well laid out and intuitive controls that make Spiff a great manipulator of transients, and a plugin you have to try. I spent a couple of hours on a mix I had always found to be a little too busy, and very quickly I was able to place particular instrumentation

in such a way that it came to life again. Nothing was lost and nothing was sacrificed, just a clear musical arrangement with everything occupying its rightful place and most of it without the aid of reverbs or delays.

I was even able to let the vocalist walk along the front of the stage while the tenor sax took another step closer for his solo. Thank you, Spiff.

ANOTHER PROBLEM SOLVED I said earlier that while Soothe 2 was more of a problem-solver and Spiff the creative tool, it just so happens that I was editing a podcast the other day which had a particularly aggressive telephone conversation which had a kind of robotic transient on it which I’d initially tried Soothe 2 on. While that had helped a fair bit to make it less painful to sit through for the length of the podcast, it just suddenly struck me that a transient tool might be a better bet. So not only did Spiff work a treat, it took just a couple of minutes to set up and not only was it less aggressive, it was clearer and more legible. So I take back what I said earlier; Oeksound’s Soothe 2 and Spiff fall into both categories: problem- solvers and creative tools. These are beautifully crafted plugins that represent good value for money and are both exceptional tools for the tasks they are intended.

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REVIEW

Peluso P-280

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After years as a vintage mic repairer, and with some components becoming harder to find, John Peluso set about finding alternative ways to give his customers the vintage sounds they loved. We put one of his finest offerings to date - the Peluso P-280 - to the test at Headliner HQ.

Peluso as a mic manufacturer has been around for some time now and has built its reputation on capturing the essence and sonic qualities of various legendary microphones: from Neumann to Telefunken and AKG. While keeping the legacy of now discontinued but highly sought after models alive, they are perhaps taking over from where the R&D departments of the aforementioned manufacturers left off. In other words, they are not making copies but looking for new component level ways to recreate all that was special and much loved about those vintage legends.

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It’s lovely to see a man with a passion for what he has done to keep great vintage microphones in service - and even better when you consider that these products are painstakingly designed, built and assembled by hand in what looks very much like a small cottage industry. Every Peluso mic has been passed through the hands of the man himself, and that’s a rare occurrence in this day and age.

More recently, Peluso brought out a couple of designs based on their own preferences and ideas: firstly, the PS-1, a highend handheld Large Diaphragm Condenser (LDC) aimed at live work; and more recently the P-280, a LDC vacuum tube studio microphone.

It’s the more recent P-280 which arrived at our studio just in time for second lockdown, beautifully presented in a sturdy wooden box within a flight case complete with power supply, five-metre 8-pin mic cable, shock mount, and direct mount.

The P-280 features the same tube and FET gain stage as Peluso’s P-28 which is inspired by the likes of the Neumann KM54 and similar, but featuring a smaller 34mm diaphragm.

So with no specific emulation in mind and no single product to compare it to, how does this mic stack up against the alternatives; and does it represent good value for money?

Today it is possible to buy great microphones with a vintage vibe or characteristic within a whole range of budgets, so that is our starting point. The P-280 retails for around $1,800 (£1,600) and of course within that price range is a multitude of alternatives. In the same way that digital technology has put the power to create back in the hands of musicians, the competition that has built amongst microphone designers and manufacturers has also produced a massive push toward better quality and lower prices. And over the last few years, I’ve found myself selling off a

Neumann or two to fund a number of mics I had never previously heard of, simply because I liked the sound.

First Impressions The P-280 is a beautifully packaged microphone which looks and feels every bit a vintage classic; with its dark finish it has a bit of a Sony C100 and Manley reference vibe going on. It’s not often you see a high end studio LDC in black, but that hasn’t stopped it looking every inch attractive and classy. There’s often a slight disparity between various condensers, but while gaining this mic up you become immediately aware of its incredibly low noise floor. I don’t own a tube mic this quiet – in fact, I’m not sure I own a mic with a lower noise floor, period.

It’s always difficult to be completely objective when you’re being performer and engineer, which is why I prefer to use other people’s musicianship and performances for equipment reviews and stick to wearing my engineering cap. So we set up a series of recordings to see exactly what this mic is capable of, running it through a Merging Anubis .

sound as a pound So let’s start with the vocal. I often favor performance over technical perfection, but I think with the flexibility of a good mic like the P-280 you can get both. One little test that I love to check a LDC for is the transition from cardioid to wide cardioid and possibly on to omni if you absolutely have to. This is especially useful for animated performers, and so long as you’re not working in an odd shaped, odd-sounding room, can be perfect for increasing the pickup area and negating the proximity effect, that way maintaining a consistent-sounding vocal even though the performer might be constantly on the move. This can really help put young performers at ease if they’re new to recording.

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Having five variation of patterns from omni through wide cardioid to cardioid gives you a lot of flexibility in tailoring the EQ, proximity effect, and possible air movement to give you the result you’re looking for - and the P-280 doesn’t disappoint.

The mic produces a really transparent and accurate recording. Cardioid certainly produced the best results and for a close, in your face smooth crooning style male vocal at around six to eight inches, it’s very impressive.

For a more dynamic vocal - to avoid the plosives - you would have to go back a couple more inches, but staying on axis still produces a really full and detailed up front image.

But even on cardioid there was a good consistent field of pickup that allowed for a reasonably animated performance. The recordings had clean, clear midrange detail with all the warmth and depth you could want in the low mid to keep the voice close.

The top end was detailed without being too bright, and although with plenty of presence, it didn’t bite or become sibilant.

Between the team, we have a number of acoustic guitars, and this is the instrument that got the most attention.

I have a beaten up old classical guitar which also got a dusting down normally not the easiest instrument to record – and even that sounded pretty good, and gave me an excuse to treat it to a new set of strings. It’s the tube stage again adding that little magic and keeping those low mids smooth and musical, even moving the sound hole closer to the mic was surprisingly bearable and not unpleasant. The P-280 effortlessly coped, and faithfully took all the low resonance in its stride.

Headliner’s editor had been busy in the time he’d spent with the P-280 before it got to me, and recorded a piece which he’d set up a couple of cameras on; this video shows you how forgiving pointing the mic towards the sound hole can be, and how rich the lows remained alone with how detailed and transparent this recording is.

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The upright bass is another instrument that has proved difficult to record in the past, depending on playing style.

There was a little bit of moving the mic around before I was satisfied, and I opened the pattern up again to a wide cardioid setting so I could keep it within two feet of the instrument. This worked wonderfully well for slap-type rockabilly and flowing jazz passages.

It sounded really full and closer miked than it actually was. If only I could find and use the bow!

An interesting experiment - and something I found more by accident than design - was using the figure of eight on a saxophone in front of the bedroom mirrored wardrobe in an attempt to hit more of the right notes (and not to upset my wife and children with my poor playing). The result was quite unusual in so far as it sounded like a saxophone being played badly by someone standing in front of a reflective surface! The figure of eight just seemed to give a more accurate perception of distance whereas the omni setting just became a mess of reflections and space with less focus on the instrument.

REAL POWER I’ve had issues with modern switchmode PSUs on more than one occasion. It may seem like I’m being overly anal about the quality of my audio, but I have found that certain HEADLINER USA

high end (and many not so high end) DI boxes introducing RF and other noise into my audio because of the phantom power supplied by a number of live digital desks. Easy fix, turn the phantom power off and use batteries.

Sadly, this unwanted RF and power supply modulation from switch-mode PSUs can also affect microphones, so it’s imperative that your studio condenser has a dedicated high quality Linear Toroidal Transformer at the heart of its power source. And this is exactly what we find in the Peluso power supply, which I believe is the common denominator in all of Peluso’s Vacuum Tube LDCs. This is most definitely a quality power supply and is a major part of this microphone’s great sound: its smooth airy transient response, rich open bass, detailed midrange, and incredibly low noise floor (I may have mentioned this once or twice..!), and of course its remarkably smooth control over the multi-pattern response.

Conclusion I quickly warmed to this mic, which is impressive, as I didn’t have it for long. It kind of reminded me of a Neumann M149 in terms of its versatility and its generally forgiving nature. It just seemed to sound good on anything, and equally faithfully bad on anything that wasn’t good, like my sax playing! The cardioid pattern opened out in a generous

way but maintained a lot of control and rejection until you got close to the full omni setting, and likewise the hyper and super cardioid settings really gave you some great off-axis rejection without destroying the audio quality, should you stray.

During my time with this mic, on more than one occasion I thought I heard an old 1960s U67 I once owned. This is a great-sounding mic with vintage style response, and even though I have a number of alternatives, I still found this inspirational - as Headliner’s editor did, coming up with a new piece of music as a result of his section of this review. I, however, now have a very strong desire to spend money... and a need to go and find out what other hidden gems are lurking in the Peluso range.

PELUSOMICROPHONELAB.COM

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Beauty and the Beast

REVEAL

120 SENNHEISER MD 445 & 435

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SPOTLIGHT

With live events out of action for the foreseeable future, many performers are stowing their instruments and audio gear ready for the moment when they can get back out on the road. Some manufacturers however, including Sennheiser, have used this time to create even more powerful audio tools, in anticipation of when artists need to be heard loud and clear on stage once again.

When a stage is incredibly loud, and the instruments seem to acoustically close in on the vocalist, it can present a significantly challenging audio environment. Enter Sennheiser’s two brand new dynamic stage microphones: the MD 445 and MD 435.

sources and an extremely high level of feedback resistance. Its highrejection means that vocalists can assert their presence even in the loudest of environments, a feature highly suited to the likes of alternative rock duo and longtime Sennheiser users, Blood Red Shoes.

The MD 445 is a large-diaphragm model that combines a direct, headon sound with a tight supercardioid pickup pattern, providing maximum isolation from other on-stage sound

“The MD 445 is the most powerful microphone in our MD range,” says Kai Lange, senior product manager at Sennheiser. “If its sister model, the MD 435, is the beauty, the MD 445

certainly is the beast. It effortlessly cuts through loud stage sound and establishes an audibly greater proximity to the vocals. Its direct, high-resolution sound gives vocals a totally new richness, intensity and assertiveness.”

The acoustics of the MD 445 have been tailored to modern stage setups with B stages and runways in front of the PA, while its core contains a newly developed voice coil made of lightweight aluminum-copper.

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SENNHEISER MD 445 & 435

Its fast transient response is designed to ensure a very detailed, nuanced and transparent sound that is complemented by rich midrange and bass, as well as being acoustically close, intimate and open, irrespective of how loud the instrument soundscape may be.

Due to its supercardioid design, the MD 445 also has some serious gain before feedback. Dynamics are wide at 146 dB(A) and the microphone can handle sound pressure levels of up to 163 dB/1 kHz. It’s no use however if these high quality acoustics are not adequately protected from damage, and built to withstand touring life when it finally resumes. The MD 445 has a metal

HEADLINER USA

Beauty and the Beast

casing and a shock-mounted capsule to protect it from structure-borne noise, while a hum compensating coil protects the microphone against electromagnetic interference.

Equally suited for high-end live sound and broadcast productions, the MD 435 brings the sound of Sennheiser’s famed MD 9235 capsule to a wired vocal microphone for the first time, making it extremely tolerant of sound hitting the capsule at different angles.

Designed to add presence, sparkle and pleasant detail to every voice, the MD 435’s lightweight aluminumcopper voice coil allows for a fast transient response, resulting in a detailed and transparent sound, particularly in the high frequencies.

“With the MD 435, even soft voices will effortlessly assert themselves,” adds Lange. “Singers will not only cut through the mix, their voices will also retain that natural quality and detail that the MD 9235 is so famous for.”

The large-diaphragm microphone features very wide dynamics of 146 dB(A) and can handle sound pressure levels of up to 163 dB/1 kHz, while its cardioid pickup pattern features a very pleasant proximity effect, reproducing vocals clearly and confidently even in loud live settings.

As with the MD 445, its mechanical design makes it more than ready for

SPOTLIGHT

life on tour, while its metal casing and shock-mounted capsule protect it from structure-borne noise. A humcompensating coil also protects the microphone against electromagnetic interference.

For use with Sennheiser’s wireless transmitters, the capsule of the MD 445 is also available as the MM 445 microphone head. Equally, the capsule

of the MD 435 is also available as the MM 435 microphone head, benefitting from an improved production process and soon to replace the existing MD 9235 capsule.

Fitted with Sennheiser’s standard capsule interface, the MM 445 and MM 435 can both be used with Sennheiser wireless series ranging from the Evolution Wireless G4 and

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2000 series to Digital 6000 and Digital 9000, demonstrating their versatility.

The MD 445 microphone and MM 445 microphone head, along with the MD 435 microphone and MM 435 microphone head are available now, retailing at $499 (MAP) each.

SENNHEISER.COM

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

KORG OPSIX, NAUTILUS & SQ-64

Triple Threat

REVEAL

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HEADLINER USA

RAMSEY

Korg has revealed a trio of exciting new products for musicians who are looking to revolutionize how they create sound: The Opsix altered FM synthesizer represents a faithful reimagination of classic digital synthesis; NAUTILUS is a new music workstation with all the dazzling sounds you need in a streamlined synth with a KRONOS pedigree; and the SQ-64 is a powerful and compact Polyphonic Step Sequencer...

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KORG OPSIX, NAUTILUS & SQ-64

SPOTLIGHT

Opsix, the first new product in this impressive lineup, asks musicians to rethink everything they know about FM synthesis.

Much like Korg did when bringing wave-sequencing back in a more powerful, musical, and immediately accessible way with wavestate, the same approach has been taken for Opsix with FM sound generation, resulting in an incredibly flexible and unique synth.

The Opsix is an “altered” sixoperator FM synthesizer. Although the instrument has a six-operator sound structure like classic FM synthesizers, the Opsix doesn’t just reproduce their sounds - it totally reimagines them.

any information. Users can now edit without getting lost, thanks to the combination of six graphical parameters on the large OLED display at the center, and the rotary encoders.

Operator modes on the Opsix lets users create sounds using modulation other than FM, offering a much wider range of sound creation with the ability to combine the five operator modes (FM, ring modulation, filter, filter FM, and wavefolder) and select from a wide range of waveforms.

The knobs and sliders with twocolored LEDs lets users quickly and clearly see the relationship between operators, whose roles change with each algorithm. This allows direct changes to be made to the pitch and volume for carriers, and to the brightness of the sound or the strength of the harmonics for the modulators.

In contrast to FM, the Filter section follows the creation of sounds by providing analog synthesizerlike subtractive synthesis, while the Opsix also offers up to three simultaneous high-definition effects with 30 types available: from standard effects like a compressor, EQ, chorus, flanger, phaser and stereo delay, to distinctive effects like rotary speakers, grain shifters and more. As well as shimmering reverbs, the effects are designed to add a new dimension to the already impressive sounds.

Meanwhile, full editing is made possible with the Date Entry knobs without minimizing or summarizing

With the onboard polyphonic note sequencer, users can record up to six notes per step, and edit the

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velocity, gate time and playback timing for each note. This lets users create long phrases or make subtle shifts in timing to emulate strums or drum rolls, something that’s not possible on a typical 16-step sequencer.

With its extremely accessible operator mixer and flexible sound engine that goes well beyond traditional FM, Opsix is designed to widen the potential of digital synthesizers to their utmost.

Korg has designed Opsix as an instrument for players of all generations: modern in every way, or getting back to the basics while offering a glimpse of the future.

Whether you’re new to synths, looking for a completely unique addition to your sound palate, or an original FM purist, Korg suggests that Opsix will deliver on all expectations and more.

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KORG OPSIX, NAUTILUS & SQ-64

This brings us nicely on to NAUTILUS, an instrument that further pushes the boundaries of what a performance synth and workstation is capable of.

Korg has spent years refining its digital, analog, processing, and hardware technologies and delivering them in a way that helps the musician connect with their instrument. NAUTILUS is the result.

With the power of nine engines to drive a new approach to sounds, plentiful sampling, audio recording, effects, and processing power, this synth is said to deliver more to explore sonically with the workflow to get users there faster than ever.

The enhanced SGX-2 piano sound generator offers delicate expressiveness to capture all the nuances of the acoustic piano, and features the most piano libraries ever put into one product: with 12-step velocity-switched sound, string resonance, and more. The EP-1 electric piano sound generator realistically reproduces seven different famous electric piano HEADLINER USA

Triple Threat

sounds, while the CX-3 engine covers the distinct sound of classic tonewheel organs.

Add to that MOD-7 VPM/FM synthesis, the PolysixEX and MS20EX for analog modeling, and the STR-1 for physical modeling, and you essentially have an engine for any type of sound you’re looking for. Used together in Program or Combination mode, these distinctive engines create completely new timbres.

The six RT (real-time) knobs at the top left of the panel give users direct control over changes to the PROG and COMBI sounds. A variety of functions are assigned to each knob for making changes to sounds, such as the filter cutoff and effect depth, the gate time, tempo and swing of the arpeggiator or drum track, the type of snare drum and more.

The set list mode meanwhile demonstrates the power of NAUTILUS in live performance settings. In this mode, the TouchView display can host 16 color-coded touch-screen buttons; each one can instantly call up the

appropriate Preset, Combination or Sequence regardless of mode.

The NAUTILUS will be available in three different guises. The keyboard on the 88-key model uses a fourstage real weighted hammer action made in Japan, called the RH-3, while the 73-key model features a muchrequested light-touch synth keyboard from C to C, as with the 61-key model.

The 88-key model is fitted with luxurious wooden side panels, and the 73-key and 61-key models feature a completely new design with curves that rise from the bottom of the unit to the sides, patterned after the NAUTILUS’ namesakes: the Nautilus submarine and the cephalopod mollusk.

The third and final offering in this lineup is the SQ-64, an incredibly powerful and compact Polyphonic Step Sequencer with hands-on intuitive controls and deep editing options to give users all the flexibility and sequencing power needed for their musical projects.

SPOTLIGHT

With its 64 step pad Matrix, crystal clear OLED display, sturdy and elegant aluminum body, a wealth of connections and a variety of modes and features, the SQ-64 is designed to provide total and seamless control over all your instruments so you can focus on the music.

Despite its compact size, the SQ-64 has incredibly versatile connectivity, with MIDI IN (x1) and OUT (x2), micro USB type B, Sync IN & OUT, three Melody tracks each with Modulation, Pitch and Gate outputs and a Drum track with eight individual trigger outputs for controlling analog synths, Eurorack and drum machines.

As the name would suggest, the SQ64 has 64 LED-lit Step button pads that not only let users see the whole picture at once, but also allow for super fast editing with its encoder

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knobs and dedicated mode buttons designed to simplify and speed up workflow. The 64-pad Matrix can also be used as a keyboard, allowing for several layouts to be used for maximum flexibility.

All three of these new offerings from Korg also come with a range of music software from Izotope including “Ozone Elements”, which lets users not only create songs but also master them using AI, “Skoove” which will help improve keyboard playing skills, “Reason Lite” DAW software, as well as software synths from Korg and other brands.

Opsix will be available in December 2020, while NAUTILUS and the SQ-64 will be available early 2021.

KORG.COM

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WILLA AMAI

The Stories We Sing

RVIEW by TE

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WILLA AMAI

LBY RAM CO

THE STORIES WE SING

IN

Photographer credit: Amanda Demme

At just 16-years-old, singer-songwriter Willa Amai has already proved herself to be an artist of great talent and character. Taken under the wing of the esteemed Linda Perry, the L.A. native charmed audiences with her stripped-back cover of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and has won acclaim for her rendition of Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again, which she recorded with Dolly herself. Willa is currently in the studio with Perry working on her forthcoming full-length debut album, a project which she believes will shape her musical identity…

“Music has always been a huge part of my life, and has always been so alluring to me, even when I was too young to comprehend why,” begins Willa Amai, who has been writing and singing songs since she can remember.

“Even in my preschool report cards, my teacher said that during recess I would walk around the playground and sing songs of my own creation. These days it serves as an outlet for my anxiety, and it’s my way of really expressing myself.”

HEADLINER USA

ARTIST

Perhaps Amai’s biggest fan and musical advocate is Linda Perry, an extraordinary songwriter, musician, producer and the lead singer of 4 Non Blondes.

me a lot about people and how to convey certain emotions, as well as showing me through her experience how impactful taking the listener into consideration can be.

The pair first met almost exactly four years ago when Amai was just 12 and a half years old: “It was really just supposed to be her giving me advice on, in all honesty, a very cut-throat industry,” she recalls. “I played her a third of a song, and she got very quiet, and then she said to come back in two months with five songs.

“I still write the melody and the words at the same time on the piano - that stuff hasn’t changed - but I think it’s more my thought process around the fact that I’m not only thinking about myself, I’m trying to think about how the words would make someone else feel, and so I think that has really made my songs mature in a way that they wouldn’t have done on their own.”

“When I did that and I played them for her, she started crying and said we have to record these, and so that’s sort of where it all started. Since then, the craziest, most incredible series of events have gone down, and I’ve been so incredibly lucky to work with such a nurturing, kind and hard working person like Linda.”

Having someone so musically well-established and respected as a mentor is something that Amai certainly doesn’t take for granted.

“For someone with that work ethic to take me under their wing has been incredible,” she says. “Not only as a musician, but also just as a person - she has taught me so much about working, how to express myself emotionally and how to balance everything going on in my life.

I’m so grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to work with her so far.”

Through working with Linda Perry, it goes without saying that Amai’s creative process has evolved and matured since the days of singing her own songs in the playground.

“I think that you have to know a lot about people to write good music, because I think what people really want is to hear themselves and hear their own stories in songs,” she remarks. “Linda has taught

Soon after Amai first became connected with Linda Perry, she recorded a stripped back, heartfelt cover of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger that appeared on a QuickBooks commercial, and has now racked up over six million views online.

“It was definitely a challenge to try to make an electronic song feel emotional, and it was so different to anything else I had ever done,” she remembers. “I think it was really important as an experience and actually really helped me in writing music later on.”

Around the same time, Amai recorded and released Scars, a song which featured on the soundtrack for Served Like A Girl.

The documentary tells the story of five female veterans who have endured unimaginable trauma in service, who create a shared sisterhood to help the rising number of homeless female veterans.

“Linda was working on the soundtrack for that documentary with all of these incredible, inspiring people - Lizzo and P!nk and Gwen Stefani - and so she just sent me the movie to see if it inspired something in me,” recalls Amai. “10 minutes in I knew that I had to write something for it. It really touched something

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very deep within me and so writing a song for it was the quickest thing I’ve ever written.

“Linda sent it to the director and she loved it, so I had the privilege of being on that soundtrack. It was one of the first things I ever did and so to share that space with all those incredible people was just insane.”

Speaking of inspirational women, Amai also sang a rendition of Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again, which she recorded with Dolly herself and appeared on the Dumplin’ soundtrack. It’s quite astounding to think that at such a young age, her voice is able to keep up with that of the Queen of Country.

“I was so terrified to work with her because I mean, she’s a household name and she’s done so much,” says Amai. “I was scared that I was going to disrespect the song in some way, but when we sang it together, she was putting her arms around me and nurturing me, comforting me - telling me we’re not that different. She was just so kind.

“I met her a couple of times after that, like at the premiere for Dumplin’. She had me come stand with her for the red carpet walk, and all the photographers were yelling at her to get the girl out of the photo, but she just took my hand and walked away all smug. She is absolutely amazing.”

This year, Amai released a soulful cover of What’s Up?, a ‘90s rock anthem that was originally recorded by her mentor Linda Perry.

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The Stories We Sing

“I don’t think I would have been able to do it had Linda not cultivated the right sort of environment from the get go,” she says. “Creativity is her biggest passion, and I think it’s at the centre of everything she does. It was easy to do, just because I know Linda, and I think I got to know her as best as I could through covering that song because I knew that she would support me in it.

thought that I was this rebellious spirit that would one day be set free, but the truth is I’m not - I’m a square and I like to learn and I like school and so as I came to accept that I was not a free-spirited rebel, I wrote this song sort of imagining how I would feel if that’s what I ended up becoming.”

“There are certain songs in an artist’s life that really define them. I think this song was really important to Linda and so covering it and having a close relationship with it is sort of what brought a level of friendship between us that we hadn’t yet established in our journey together. Not only was it musically important for me to do, but I also think Linda and I are closer because of it.”

With the album almost finished, and with such an eclectic array of musical achievements already under her belt, Amai says she is excited to show the world her style and to establish that emotional connection that she wants people to have with her music: “I think that this album for me is really the defining factor in terms of my style as a songwriter, and I think it’s really what’s going to shape my identity in the music industry.”

Meanwhile, Amai recently released Unorganized Crime, the first track from her upcoming debut album due to be released in early 2021 and one that holds particular significance for her.

She admits that juggling school with her musical aspirations has sometimes been challenging, yet at the same time has helped a lot in providing another outlet for her stress and anxiety.

“It’s a song that’s in memoriam of who I used to think that I would be when I was little,” she reveals. “I kind of

“I love to learn, and at times it’s hard to balance school and music, but I think if I didn’t have it, my mental health

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“I LOVE TO LEARN, AND AT TIMES IT’S HARD TO BALANCE SCHOOL AND MUSIC, BUT I THINK IF I DIDN’T HAVE IT, MY MENTAL HEALTH WOULD BE WORSE OFF FOR IT.”

would be worse off for it,” she says.

“I’m lucky enough to have been surrounded by people who are doing their best to help me balance them, like my mom and Linda and everyone who has helped with the album. They

all understand that I want to go to college and I like to learn and I have high expectations for myself in school.

“I’ve gotten really, really lucky with the support system around me because

they have been really trying their best to make it as easy as possible for me, which I really am so incredibly grateful for.”

WILLAAMAI.COM

HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

Rogue Raving

IEW by A RV

KT TUNSTALL When it comes to performing, there’s nothing like the real thing.

KT Tunstall reveals the details of her very recent live stream gig at the world famous Whisky a Go Go venue.

The last time Headliner spoke to KT Tunstall at the beginning of lockdown, she was enjoying taking her daily designated walk, holding regular ‘KT raves’ on Instagram, was finally getting eight hours’ sleep a night, and was about to move into a new studio.

HEADLINER USA

“Was it really April?” she asks. “It feels like I only talked to you last week!

I think we’re all experiencing time travel during lockdown. Well, I’m getting less sleep, I’m talking to you from my studio, and my last KT rave was at Halloween. I kept it up the whole time, but I just can’t do it every week anymore!”

Although KT hasn’t quit raving completely – it’s just that next time she feels like waving her hands in the air like she just doesn’t care, her

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fans will find that kind of content on her Patreon account – a platform that lets creators earn a monthly income by giving their fans access to exclusive content.

“I think it’s absolutely the future for musicians and any new artists out there,” she asserts, excitedly steamrollering into the benefits of the platform.

“If you’re – understandably – worried about your future, it’s a great way

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to connect with your fans: people pay a subscription and they get a certain amount of things from you per month. But the really important thing is that you have direct contact with your fans. At this time where we just feel so disconnected, we’re really missing that…” she searches for the word, “medicine of going to a gig at the end of a hard week. It’s been fantastic and it’s a community that I’ve really appreciated. So that’s where the raves live now. It’s not the end of raves, but it’s going to be rogue raves. Maybe they’re coming, but they’re just going to pop out of nowhere.”

Headliner actually saw KT perform at London’s SSE Arena supporting Hall & Oates just last summer, although admittedly now, that seems like a lifetime ago.

“I know!” she agrees. “Me and my full girl band would sneak into the photo pit and just be losing it dancing to them, and they loved having a bunch of babes dancing!”

That reminds her: “At one point, John Oates threw me a guitar pick, and I honestly didn’t move my hand, and it landed in my hand! How did he do that? This was at Wembley! The next time I saw him I said, ‘John, you know that time when we were dancing in front of you at Wembley, and you threw me a guitar pick? It landed in my hand.’ He went [she adopts a cool, knowing tone], ‘I know’.

I felt like Courteney Cox and Brian Springsteen!”

Immediately realizing her mistake, she howls with laughter: “Oh my God, I just said Brian Springsteen! I am now losing my mind.”

It’s been a long week, I offer. “Yeah, that has lasted about nine months!

That is beyond anything I’ve ever said before,” she cackles.

After agreeing that Brian must be Bruce’s cousin (an electrician in New Jersey that likes playing the banjo, suggests KT), she shares that she has used the lockdown period to find new ways to perform her material.

“Touring is not an option right now, and that was taking up probably 90% of my time, and it was also 90% of my income. So it’s been a really important time to assess my situation.

I never really want my situation to be that reliant on touring, so it’s not all been bad. It’s been a really interesting fork in the road of going, ‘right: what do you want to do? How do I curate my day to try and make different things happen?’”

KT has managed to do a handful of ‘in-person’ gigs (remember them?) since live events were more or less cancelled everywhere – which has forced venues to get creative in order to meet social distance guidelines.

One recent gig saw KT perform in the carpark of the Pasea Hotel

on Huntington Beach – the hotel’s balconies acting as private theatre boxes for the audience.

“People booked the rooms and came out on their balcony to watch my gig, so it was a vertical audience! The sun was going down over the sea and the beach in the background was gorgeous. But it’s just not the same. I think the thing that weighed on me after doing in-person shows was that putting on a show is really just breaking through the ceiling of emotion with people and giving them that euphoric experience of being at a show, being connected, watching music, and not thinking of anything else. I think it’s just a bit too hard to forget about everything right now.”

Despite this, KT recently embarked on a live stream gig at the world famous L.A. music venue, Whisky A Go Go, on November 7. Opening up in the ‘60s, the iconic venue is in the rock and roll hall of fame, and was

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Rogue Raving

the launch pad for acts including The Doors, No Doubt, System of a Down, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, KISS, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC and Mötley Crüe.

The pay-per-view concert was part of a series of live streamed gigs taking place without an audience, and featured live comments from viewers which KT was able to interact with in real time.

“Just think about the amount of artists that would not exist if it wasn’t for the Whisky a Go Go. There are these types of venues everywhere – like in Scotland, for me, it was King Tut’s,” she reminisces.

“That’s where Oasis got signed. The Whisky is for sure one of those hallowed grounds that are the starter gun of incredible careers with unbelievable longevity. You’re fed by that when you’re in that building because the history is in the walls. I have played there before and playing there again was fantastic - just me and a drummer, a proper rock and roll show! The really cool thing about this show and the thing that we miss with streaming performances is, do you feel like you’re really there, or do you feel like you’re watching TV? So I had a screen at my feet where I was reading people’s comments in real time and interacting with everybody watching the show. Basically, you could heckle me from the front row during the show!”

We hope for KT’s sake that she used a large font?

“Yeah, I’m definitely grateful for laser eye surgery with this idea,” she laughs. “If you want to shout at a show like this, do it in Caps Lock and I’ll know you’re really shouting at me! [laughs]” On a serious note, KT says that she’s only doing a select number of shows: “It’s been really important to me that when I do these things, they are proper, special experiences for people that sound good, look great and offer something special. I knew this was going to be it.”

KTTUNSTALL.COM

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AVAILABLE ON APPLE MUSIC AND SPOTIFY LISTEN NOW

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TONY DRAPER

Mixing it Up

MIXING IT UP

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Revered writer, producer, and mix and mastering engineer Tony Draper has been based out of Liverpool’s legendary Parr Street Studios for the past decade, and has just started tracking there again post-lockdown.

Here he discusses his road into the music business, his many musical hats, and his love of Neve equipment.

RVIEW b y TE N LBY RA CO M

TONY DRAPER

PRODUCER

“It’s been such a weird time, but I’ve actually been incredibly lucky because so much of my work is mixing and I’ve got a decent setup at home,” replies Tony Draper when asked about how he’s been getting on recently.

“It hasn’t really affected me that much,” he adds. “All my tracking sessions disappeared for a little while and the studios that I would normally use closed down for three or four months, which was strange.”

The studios in question are the historic Grammy-winning Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, where Draper has been based for around 10 years, and a Runcorn-based facility called Analogue Baby, where he has been back doing some mixing and overdubbing.

Coming from a very musical family, Tony Draper always had a bit of a knack for the craft, and as soon as he could read he was doing piano lessons.

“I originally wanted to be a classical piano player, but it quickly became apparent that I didn’t quite have the talent or the motivation to practice for 3,000 hours a day or whatever it is you have to do,” he laughs. “I was also never a particularly great songwriter, but in my mid teens I thought it’d be nice to be able to record some songs, and so I bought a little Audio-Technica mic and Mackie Spike interface knowing nothing about anything.”

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music streaming out of every place you walked past,” he recalls. “It really felt like a hub for musicians, and by chance I ended up meeting a guy called Phil Hartley who ran Highfield Street Studios.

“Unfortunately it’s gone now, but it had a big old Neve AMEK 2520, and as soon as I saw it I thought I have to spend as much time as I can there. He let me assist him for a couple of years while I was studying, and it was quite the education!

From there, Draper cut his teeth with Logic and discovered that he had Draper recalls how this was the first a love for tweaking with sounds, time he had really heard a console eventually being contacted by some musician friends who asked if he could have its own sound. record them.

“I remember plugging microphones in and listening to them back directly Realising this was his calling, Draper off the console through the mic amps went and did a BTEC in Music and thinking, it just sounds classic, like Technology followed by a Sound a record. I thought it must just be Phil’s Technology at LIPA, which is when magic fingers, but as he started to let he got his first feel of the music city me use the studio for myself during Liverpool - often described as the downtime, I realized it was “Nashville of the UK”. the console.

“When I first moved there, there was

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TONY DRAPER

Mixing it Up

“The way it bends and saturates and has its certain frequency characteristics and slew rates and everything else - the console had real character and that was a massive lightbulb moment for me.”

Parr Street Studios, where Draper has spent most of his working career, holds a historical significance which - similarly to the famed Abbey Road - is second to none. Over the years it has welcomed the likes of Black Sabbath, Diana Ross, Moby, Coldplay, Take That, The Beautiful South, and many more big names through its doors, which are sadly set to close for good very soon due to the building being demolished to make way for residential flats.

Draper got started at Parr Street during his final academic year at LIPA. Chris Taylor, the studio manager, had just taken it on at the time, and was also doing some lecturing at the highly regarded music institution where Draper was studying.

“Parr Street has got this kind of feel to it which is totally unique,” says Draper. “There are bits of it that are a bit tatty and worn, but it’s just magic, like there’s something in the air there.

“As a facility, I’m not sure we’ll see the likes of it again, outside of either private investment or outside of London. It had a huge acoustically designed control room and 650 sq-ft live room. It really is a proper playground with an amazing vintage mic collection, a grand piano and a great backline, so I’ve really had no reason to go anywhere else over the last 10 years - it’s an astonishing place to work.

“It should be made very clear that while it’s closing, it’s not because the studio is failing,” affirms Draper. “In fact it’s going from strength to strength - we’ve had Blossoms in recently to record their third album and all of their recorded output was done there. It’s just because the building quite simply wasn’t owned by us. We had the studio’s business within the walls along with bars and office

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space, but the owners decided that it was worth more as flats - we didn’t really have a choice about it unfortunately.”

The current understanding is that Parr Street is going to be allowed to remain open until the end of the year, yet plans are already being drawn up for the next studio, “which I’d say is looking phenomenally good,” Draper teases.

“The biggest shame is that I don’t think the 48-channel Neve VR Legend console is going to be coming with us, as it’s always been owned by the building owner and not the studio.”

“I did a tracking day with Kelis there, and there’s lots of modern stuff going on, but it will certainly be remembered for the big names - Elbow, Stereophonics, early 2000s, late ‘90s era stuff. Echo & the Bunnymen still come in from time to time and a lot of those guys actually first met at Parr Street.

“One of my personal highlights is having Justin Bieber in a couple of years ago. He only came in to do vocal tracking for a day, but I sat and worked for eight days with his producer Josh Goodwin, and learned a huge amount just chatting to him and seeing how he mixes and puts projects together.”

His experiences at Parr Street and beyond have seen Draper get involved in a number of high level productions on large format Neve consoles, and he believes there’s something quite special about sitting in front of one of their desks.

It was that first time at Highfield Street 12 or so years ago that he realised this was the sound he’d been seeking for so long.

“Throughout LIPA, they have a whole bunch of Neve preamps and they’ve recently bought a Neve Genesys,” he explains. “And in this new studio that I’ve been involved with building for the last eight, nearly nine years now called Analogue Baby - we opted for a Neve 88RS console.

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140 TONY DRAPER

Mixing it Up

“So that’s what I’m moving into tracking on more now, and mixing in analogue. We’ve got 16 1073 Scheps modules and 12 1081 remote mic amps from the console, so it’s a very, very Neve-centric studio. It’s quite important to my workflow to have at least some important elements of Neve circuitry for sure.

“The automation system on the 88RS is just awesome. The ability to automate the short faders, as well as the long and EQ ins and inserts, is really, really cool. The console at Analogue Baby doesn’t actually have any mic amps in it - instead it has 120 line inputs for mix down because the studio is predominantly equipped for film score mixing. It’s 5.1 ATC monitoring from the ground up and all of our preamps are outboard, so we’re essentially using it as a large format mixing facility, although I’m using it as a more of a traditional stereo rock and roll studio.

“For those who are doing high end film scores and prefer to work in the analogue domain, traditionally their

HEADLINER USA

only options have been AIR or Abbey Road. Now there’s a studio in the north that can do what those studios can do. We can do the rock and roll stuff, pop sessions, writing sessions, and full Hollywood film scores.”

In terms of his creative process, if somebody brings Draper a lyric or a concept, then he can pick up the ball and run with it, yet it wasn’t until a few years into his career as a recording and mix engineer that he started to feel comfortable enough to do so.

“I think ‘variety is the spice of life’ has never been more true, especially when you’ve got to spend 16 hours a day in a recording studio with people, so from that perspective

I count myself very, very lucky,” he concludes. “It’s rock one day, then perhaps it might be a straight ahead pop record the next.

“I just finished mixing a few weeks ago an alternative Nordic pop band called Kalandra, and they are phenomenally good - very ethereal, almost Kate Bush or Björk-esque in places, so I’m really lucky that I get to do stuff all over the spectrum.”

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COIN

Escaping Dreamland

HEADLINER USA

by

ADAMP R

TZ O

COIN

TERVIEW IN

ESCAPING DREAMLAND

ARTIST

Coin’s Chase Lawrence explains how taking a step back and enjoying the moment shaped the band’s third album.

“These are dark, strange times. But I’m enjoying being with my family and I’m as good as can be.”

So says Chase Lawrence of Nashville’s indie pop-rockers Coin.

He is, of course, referring to the global pandemic we’ve all been living through. And while there has been undeniable darkness to the unprecedented situation, I learn from Lawrence that he and his two bandmates have never worked harder on their music in their lives, revealing a personal silver lining.

Lawrence’s vocals and synths are completed by drummer Ryan Winnen and guitarist/vocalist Joe Memmel. The band managed to put pen to paper with Columbia Records very early in their career, with their 2016 breakthrough single, Talk Too Much following on quickly.

They dropped their third album, Dreamland in February of this year.

The band had just started touring the record before the quarantine hit

the United States and forced them to postpone their remaining dates.

I mention that Dreamland has proven to be a fitting title for the surreal times in which it was released.

“We definitely would have spent less time on tour production rehearsals if we had foreseen all this,” Lawrence says with a laugh. “But I often hear people say a third album is such an important album, so we really had our wheels turning over this one.

We’ve worked with some amazing producers in the past. But I kind of realized that everyone is throwing darts blindfolded – nobody really knows what they’re doing. For the most part, everyone is just guessing and following their taste. So it was freeing for us to step back and say, ‘let’s make this album more internally’, only work with a few collaborators, and say what we really want to say.”

While Coin’s 2020 tour got cut very short, ironically a big inspiration point for Dreamland was the burnout from relentless touring in the past.

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Lawrence explains. “Asia, to the UK, and the States twice. I only came home for Christmas. And once home, I found out my cousin got married and my sister had moved out. A friend of the family was standing there with a baby she’d apparently had. I was saying to my girlfriend, ‘I had no idea about any of this!’ And an older gentleman overheard the conversation and chimed in, ‘son, you must be living in dreamland!’ It was so sobering.

And I never saw that man again! He disappeared like an angel into the light.

“Then a few days later, I was on a flight and a lady next to me was reading a pamphlet called ‘Dreamland’. I started pondering, and wondering what this word meant to me that kept coming up, or if it was just a coincidence. But I just had the realization I was spending so much time above myself. It’s something we can all be guilty of, especially with social media.

Wondering what the next step up the ladder is, forgetting there’s a nice view all around us. Forgetting the moment we’re in right now.”

“We were touring so much in 2018,” HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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One of the lead songs on the LP is titled Crash My Car, and Lawrence shares an anecdote about the sheer determination of Coin’s fans to get to their shows.

“I had a fan approach me at a show, a girl who’d been to see us a few times,” he says. “We were in Mississippi that night, and she’d come all the way from Arkansas, which is like an eight-hour drive! She told me she’d been in an accident on the way there and showed me a picture of her car – it was near-totalled! She was all shaken up. But she explained that she wanted to be where her friends were, where her favourite music was. That was such a powerful moment for me.

To hear that she valued her friends and music more than probably the most expensive thing she owned. It ended

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up shaping a lot of the album too.”

With fans willing to go through that to make Coin’s shows on time, I think it’s safe to say you might as well undertake the less arduous process of double-clicking on Coin’s music on your preferred streaming platform, and be transported to a dreamland of your own.

THISISCOIN.COM

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JOE BARRESI

Hear no Evil

IN

JOEBARRESI Joe Barresi has produced, engineered and mixed some of the most important hard rock, metal and punk bands out there. He tells Headliner how he got the nickname ‘Evil,’ and how working with bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Tool has been a musical education.

Joe Barresi is renowned for working with the heaviest of heavy metal HEADLINER USA

bands, including Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot. His inspiration? The Partridge Family.

“I don’t think they’d ever play the same stage together,” he laughs, speaking to Headliner from his home in Valley Village, California, where he’s hanging out with his dog. Also known by his nickname ‘Evil’ – although he

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says I can just call him Joe – he was given the name while working on a Judas Priest record.

“I used to be Smiling Joe but now I’m Evil Joe. It actually came from Scott Travis, who was in Racer X before Judas Priest. The guys in Racer X were friends with a guy who did these prank phone calls, and one of his characters was Evil Joe. Racer X did

PRODUCER

a song called Evil Joe and they put the actual prank phone call on one of their albums, and I worked on a Raging Speedhorn record and they put it on one of their records.

“Then Tool opened up Coachella and played the prank phone call in front of 60,000 people. It was just kind of funny, and since I was Joe, I became Evil Joe.” Learning to play the guitar when he was seven, Barresi went on to play in local bands in and around his home.

He’d always liked music, and fondly remembers his grandmother’s AM radio, placed proudly on the top of her mantlepiece.

“I started watching The Partridge Family, and I just thought it was kind of cool – it was a very family oriented show,” he recalls. “There is a point in your life when you try to figure out what you are going to do, so I played in bands to try to get better.

“At some point, it became almost therapeutic in a way, but also, I could focus. I would practice up to 10 hours a day just trying to get better and learning stuff – you never know what it’s gonna lead to.”

Despite the intense guitar practicing sessions, things changed for Barresi when he helped a friend take some gear into a studio, which he realized

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was “way cooler” than actually being in a band.

“I didn’t have to deal with flaky musicians and singers and all the drama that goes with being in a band anymore! It was actually kind of cool just to be creative in a different way, but still involving music.”

Barresi studied classical guitar – “mainly because I loved Randy Rhoads” – and music theory at the University of South Florida before graduating from the University of Miami, where he also studied piano and music engineering. During this time, he began recording and developing local bands in Miami.

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I could see that there was so much classical influence in some of Uli Roth’s playing – he was one of my favorite guitar players because of that neoclassical kind of thing,” he explains.

“Classical music to me is just filled with beautiful melodies, so going to school studying music theory was just to try to figure out what exactly the harmonies were. I was actually a fairly decent classical guitar player because I could play rock guitar ahead of time. All the guys that were actual classical guitar players would always marvel at my hands, and I’d be like, ‘you guys should listen to more Uli Roth!’”

After graduating from college, Barresi moved to Los Angeles and began working his way up the ladder by working at numerous local studios – a move that helped him gain an understanding of the different consoles, rooms and clientele at the various studios. His first big break came when he engineered a demo for producer Garth ‘GGGarth’ Richardson.

“This was pre Rage Against the Machine Garth,” he points out. “We enjoyed working together and then the next record would come along and Garth would have a little extra money and pay me some extra cash to help do the record, and that turned into a couple years’ worth of work. What I wanted to do was not be a runner in the typical way: just going to get food for two years before I was actually allowed to touch the microphone. So I took some classes on how to use an SSL and the guy who ran USC’s music department hired me to work in his studio. I realized the importance of HEADLINER USA

different clients, different studios and different gear.”

Barresi ended up working as a freelance assistant at four different studios, where he mastered different consoles and saw a few projects all the way through.

engineer,” he remembers. “So that was a tough, tough challenge because I would get called to be the engineer on a record and I would turn it down; it could be an amazing amount of money. I didn’t think anybody looked at who engineered a record anyway – they all looked at who produced it and

“Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t,” he admits. “But it was beneficial to my career for sure.”

Barresi went on to mix tracks for Monster Magnet, Fair to Midland, Hole, Veruca Salt, Weezer, Rancid, Bauhaus, Anthrax, Skunk Anansie and Alpha Galates, eventually gaining enough experience and insight to start producing records. On going from engineering to producing, Barresi noticed that the producer seemed to get most of the recognition for a finished product: “With engineering you usually get paid a daily rate and that’s a steady job if you’re working with a producer who’s working a lot, or if you’re in favor at that point. You get hired quite a bit.

Producing is a whole different beast – it’s almost like wearing three hats, and you have to split less money across more work. But it was more creative to me. I’ve never really worked on a tonne of stuff that I hated. And if I did, I just would leave and say I’m not the person for this job.”

Terry Davies’ engineer gave Barresi a piece of advice that has stuck with him: “He told me that to be a producer, you have to stop engineering, because you just keep getting hired to be the

“I WAS LIKE ‘OKAY, LET’S DO IT. I DON’T CARE HOW MUCH MONEY WE HAVE. LET’S JUST DO IT.’ SO THAT’S HOW IT STARTED.”

who mixed it. Really it’s the engineer that sets the bed for the sound of the album, but everybody looked at the mixer as being the person who saved the album. Really it was the engineer who made it sound great back then.”

Barresi hit a turning point when he produced the debut album by Queens of the Stone Age who, at the time, did not have a record deal. The self-titled album garnered attention from the press, and the band soon landed a deal with Interscope Records.

“They weren’t called Queens of the Stone Age yet,” he notes. “They were just trying to get a record deal. Josh sent me a cassette tape and said, ‘I’m trying to make a record with this band I’ve got; are you interested?’ I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do it. I don’t care how much money we have. Let’s just do it’. So that’s how that started. It was the first

PRODUCER

time he actually sang as the lead singer, so it was definitely a challenge because he was just finding his way and there was no real bass player in the band yet. It was just total guerilla-style in Palm Springs at a studio called Monkey. It was challenging, but it was brutally honest music and it sounded so different. People pay attention when things don’t sound the same.”

Barresi then engineered and mixed the Tool album 10,000 Days, a job he received after a recommendation from Buzz Osborne of The Melvins, and has enjoyed a working relationship with the band ever since – most recently mixing the 2019 album Fear Inoculum.

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Days, and it was definitely challenging because musically they’re on a whole different level than my brain can think,” he laughs.

“There were times where I just flat out had to ask Adam, ‘just what exactly is going on in this passage?’ And he would say, ‘I’m playing seven over Justin playing nine, and Dan’s playing 13 …’ I was just like, ‘wow – how are you even keeping straight with that?’ Then he would explain how it turned back around, so it was definitely a musical education! That’s the beauty of working with those guys – they want it to be the best it is, which in turn makes me want to make it the best it can be for them as well.”

“I love Tool! I love the dirtiness of the first couple records and I love the clarity and the punch of the later two records that they did prior to me. I tried to marry the two things together – I wanted it to sound like Stinkfist with a dirtier undertow. That was the idea in my brain for 10,000 HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET

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LeT IT ROCK Barresi estimates that approximately 90% of all the guitar tracking on every one of his records use Celestion.

“A crucial part of making records is knowing what your tools do,” he asserts. “Every guitar player’s dream growing up is to own a Marshall stack, and my first ever one had Celestion Greenback 25s in it. Those are the most amazing-sounding speakers, especially for playing solos. At some point I bought a Fender amp, but I didn’t really like the way it broke up so I sold the speakers out of that cabinet – which I regret to this day!”

Barresi then moved onto Vintage 30s: “I started listening to different flavors of speakers, and then later on in life I started working with bands that drop tune and I ended up using cabinets with Vintage 30s, which are great for detuned guitars. Then I realized I wanted super fast rhythms to sound tighter, so I got into 75W Celestions, and that became my favorite speaker for rhythm for a long time.

“Being able to listen to the way a head reacts to a cabinet with different impedances is a whole different beast,” he adds. “I don’t even know how many cabinets I have with Celestions right now – probably 12! There’s not many other speakers out there that I love. For anything rock and roll, it’s Celestion.”

If a band veers more towards what Barresi would class as ‘old school’ rock, he tends to favor the older Greenbacks: “If a band is doing a lot of drop tune stuff, it’s definitely a combo of Vintage 30s in the 75W speakers,” he clarifies. “I have some Creamback 65s that came as a recommendation from a friend. I was told that they sound like 25s but are a little more modern and don’t blow, and they can handle a little more volume, which is great because I have my own studio and I don’t really have the volume police telling me to turn stuff down! I like to drive the amps hard and get the power section to really work. I do have a Wizard cabinet with some 65W Creambacks in it, but at some point I might try the 75W, although I just can’t keep buying cabinets to put speakers in them – I’ll need another building,” he laughs.

Despite the pandemic, Barresi has actually been “crazy busy,” working in his remote studio in Pasadena with a few different bands, although the social distance element has been an adjustment: “The weirdest part about it for me is having a mask on, because in the studio it’s all about vibe, really. Being able to see somebody’s emotion via facial expressions or to get a sense of their emotional state is really easy without a mask on, but with a mask on you never know if somebody’s smiling, happy, sad, frowning or whatever. Plus I can’t really jump up and down in my seat and go, ‘Yeah! That was awesome!’ I have a mask on too so you can’t really see if I’m smiling or laughing…”

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Panic Attacks and Touring Burnout

VIEW by ER

PANIC ATTACKS AND TOURING BURNOUT

MT. JOY

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PR AM OTZ AD

IN T

154 MT. JOY

ARTIST

Matt Quinn of Mt.Joy explains how musically replicating a panic attack made it onto their latest album, and why being open about mental health is so important.

“We don’t see ourselves as artists that have to fit into some huge earning machine,” says Matt Quinn of indie five-piece, Mt.Joy. “We’re just a band with a very loyal fanbase, so if we’d held this new album back, we’d only be holding it back from them.”

Singer and guitarist Quinn is referring to some of the more mainstream acts keeping music under locks until the lockdown ends in order to maximize the financial gain when touring and merchandising potential goes back to normal. But this would not be in keeping with the ethos of Mt.Joy. And especially with the impossibility of predicting when that might be.

With new album Rearrange Us out now, Mt.Joy would love nothing more than to be out there performing.

“Of course we want to be touring,” Quinn says. “That’s such a huge part of the music. But I think it’s pretty clear that here in the US, we’re doing a terrible job of controlling the virus! So instead of trying to predict anything, we just decided to try and figure out what the new normal is and release this music.”

Achieving instant success with their debut single, Astrovan, in 2016, Los Angeles-based Mt.Joy built on their breakthrough with a number of singles leading up to their self-titled debut album in 2018.

“Me and Sam (Cooper) were both working in law,” Quinn says. “I was working a day job in a legal department, and Sam was a fullyfledged lawyer. He was not loving it at all, and I knew I wanted to write

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songs. When we put Astrovan online, it kind of went viral and was an instant success – I dropped out of law school and quit my job!”

In terms of keeping calmer, for Quinn it’s been a case of trying to be as present as he can, and appreciating the things in his life that are working.

One of the singles from Rearrange Us is the song Acrobats, which seeks to lyrically and musically speak to the unpleasant experience of having a panic attack, something Quinn has experienced first hand.

“Whereas before, it was the conundrum of somehow trying to be a prolific writer while being constantly on tour. Maybe this will even turn out to be a great period of art, as people sit more with their emotions. That’s certainly been my experience as everything has slowed down.”

“Like many bands after their first bit of success, we were thrown into touring very hard, saying yes to almost everything, and that constant ‘where is the second album?’” he says. “With very little time to actually sit down and write anything.

“The panic attack in question, I couldn’t say exactly what precipitated it, but I’m sure it was work and musicrelated. When Sam showed me some of the guitar parts for the song, it did kind of remind me of going through that particular moment. [laughs] The idea for us was to create this swirling effect – because, in those attacks, there’s a rush of anxiety, blood, and of course panic. It kind of captures you. We were trying to portray that frenzy in the music. Sometimes you can calm it down with techniques such as noting things in the room, but sometimes you just have to ride it out.”

Mental health is a huge (and brave) topic explored in the lyrics of Mt.Joy, with Quinn being an outspoken advocate of the subject.

“For some people this has been a big time of anxiety,” he says. “But I know other people who’ve found it relieving. I think often people are anxious about what’s coming or preparing for the worst; so it’s almost been calmer being in the storm itself.

I’ve personally been less anxious of late.”

I put to Quinn that one of the reasons it’s so brilliant for people like himself to publicize their mental health struggles is to burst the illusion that being successful in the music industry brings everlasting happiness.

Especially when living in a society that seems to tell us we can only be happy once we have our dream job, finances and relationships.

“Writing music and touring is a dream job for me, for sure,” he says. “But we’re just like everyone else at the end of the day. The rigors of having to work so hard and travel a lot can trigger preexisting mental health problems.

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Panic Attacks and Touring Burnout

“And when you’re expected to be enjoying this dream job 100 percent of the time, you can end up stuffing the problems down so as not to seem ungrateful. So I have to explain to people: just because I’ve played some shows that I’ve always dreamed of playing, that doesn’t change my anxiety disorder!

“The outreach and counseling is still very necessary for me. These intangible problems don’t get fixed by any career or financial successes, but through the outreach and through friendships.”

Things get increasingly deep as we discuss the inherent problems in the music industry at present: over-touring can cause a lot of burnout and physical and mental issues for musicians.

“The system of making money from music is kind of broken right now,” he says. “Touring is the only answer HEADLINER USA

for a lot of people. It puts a lot of pressure on artists. The foundation needs to be looked at, but a way of making money outside of touring needs to be looked at.”

With all that said, the music of Mt.Joy is nonetheless riotously fun to listen to, with second album Rearrange Us being no exception, and ready for your listening on all platforms now.

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