Headliner USA Issue 21 by Headliner Magazine

SoundOn is TikTok’s all-in one platform for music creators

Paul Watson

Keith Watson

Rian Zoll-Kahn

Dan Gumble

Colby

Alice Gustafson

Marc Henshall Head of Digital

Grace Mcguigan Artist Relations Manager

Rae Gray Head of Design

Rick

Achieving longevity

It was a professional and indeed personal honor to conduct this month’s cover interview. As an avid Interpol fan since the release of their acclaimed debut album back in 2002, it was not only an incredibly enjoyable experience to speak at length with singer Paul Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler about the making of their second album Antics - celebrating its 20th anniversary this year - but also a fascinating one.

Unlike so many of their peers, who have since imploded or simply fizzled out, Interpol have remained a rock steady constant. Their presence on the global touring circuit has never wavered, while the release of seven studio albums to date, along with a raft of extra-curricular releases, is a none too shabby return.

As a long-term disciple of the band, I could have listened to the pair rattle off every minute detail of the rarest studio outtakes and been enthralled for days, yet their story is one that makes for essential reading for just about anyone in the industry. From artists to engineers and whether newcomers or long-established, there are always lessons to be learned from those who have achieved a longevity that spans decades.

The ability to remain focused and not lose sight of what you are trying to achieve is an asset which can be applied to just about any discipline, and Banks and Kessler are testament to that.

Elsewhere in this issue, it is Headliner’s pleasure to share the inside story behind its Dolby Atmos certified studio at The Pioneer Club in St. Albans. Set to champion a whole manner of communitybased, educational projects, as well as offer world class recording and mixing services to chart-topping artists, producers, and record labels, it represents a profound blending of heritage and innovation. A site of incredible musical history, the new studio represents a deep commitment to the future of the industry and the next generation of talent, while remaining true to its status as a community hub. It’s been a fabulous journey so far, and one that is only just beginning.

Dan Gumble Head of Content

By Dan Gumble

Alice Gustafson

By Dan Gumble

64 HOW MERGING TECHNOLOGIES IS POWERING ONE OF THAILAND’S PREMIER STUDIOS

70 MITSKI RAMPS UP LIVE PRODUCTION WITH L-ACOUSTICS

74 QUEEN OF POP

On the road with DiGiCo and Kylie

78 CODA AIRAY PERFORMS AT GERMAN OUTDOOR CONCERT SERIES

82 CELESTION & ORANGE

Over 50 years of partnership and innovation

88 TONY ANDERSON

The enduring influence of Augspurger Monitors

92 JBL 305P MK II

A modern classic in studio monitoring

96 GLP

Lighting Toni Braxton & Cedric The Entertainer

100 LECTROSONICS

Recording Actors on Actors

104 PRISM SOUND

Upgrading China’s YFY Dolby Atmos studio

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TO DUSK

Words by aDAM PR O ZT

GEISTE

Singer, songwriter, producer and seemingly half-elf (if the elf ears she occasionally wears on stage are anything to go by), Geiste is a French artist creating vital music that flits between fragile ethereal moments and huge, techno-inspired productions. A music project that was born in London and saw the release of huge, anthemic songs such as Ocean and Dither, she has relocated back to the South of France since the pandemic, which has birthed her new stunningly restrained EP, to dusk. She speaks to Headliner about writing ambient piano ballads for the first time, and why she almost decided to never release this new EP.

Geiste is one of those fascinating artists who readily confesses to being an introvert and is quietly spoken, but as soon as her feet touch a stage, she will bound about it with enormous energy. In that context, the juxtaposing extremes within her songs make a lot of sense. At the behest of her parents, she initially studied business in Paris, before relocating to London to intern at a record label and study for a Masters in music management.

It was while in London that Geiste was born. Not enjoying her business studies in Paris, attending techno raves inspired her to begin learning music production and Ableton Live, and it was then in the UK that the songs and project began taking shape. The debut EP, Utopia, was presented to the world in 2020.

“Young me was doing a lot of writing,” Geiste says via Zoom. She’s located between Nice and Marseilles, and more or less lives in the woods (further proof she is as close to a real-life elf as you’ll find). “I was creating stories and imaginary worlds in the garden. I had this hectic timetable of activities as a kid, like playing the violin, dancing and more. I tried a lot of different things, and eventually I fell in love with music, dancing and all of it.”

And while gardens and the woodland may appear a very natural habitat for her, Geiste did feel the pull of the city when it came time to study. “When I

finished school, I needed to discover something other than the woods. So I moved to Paris, which wasn’t the best time. I discovered the city, but also everything else. I didn’t feel like I was fitting in, I chose to do a business course because I didn’t know what to do. I was going dancing at techno clubs a lot, and that led me to discover Ableton and music production.”

Next came a very important education in the nature of the music industry when she moved to London and began interning at The Animal Farm record label. She describes how she loved working with artists and the music: “I didn’t feel ready to be a musician myself and I also learned the dark side of the music industry. So I eventually decided, Okay, I’m out. I’m going over to the other side to be a victim of the industry myself.” She laughs to confirm she’s joking, but there certainly seems to be an element of truth in there.

If there’s one thing Geiste is more grateful for when peeking behind the curtain of the music industry as a record label intern, it’s that she knew from the start that she would have to do most things herself.

“I knew there wouldn’t be any money coming in. I realized I’d be responsible for everything — costumes, videos, creating everything. I knew it would be up to me, or with the help of friends and those supporting my project.

But that’s amazing too, having the freedom to do everything you want as an independent artist. I think a lot of artists are waiting for someone to come and save them. So I’m really glad I found how empowering it is to create so much of my project myself or with friends.”

After several single releases, the debut Geiste EP arrived in 2020 in the form of Utopia. It followed in the footsteps of some very impressive and accomplished singles, including her first release Ocean. The anthemic and cinematic track also showcased how important the visual component of the Geiste project is, with a brilliant music video that sees her performing the track with crashing ocean waves around her. There was also the Imogen Heap-esque Dither, featuring a Geiste trademark in which she constructs a huge choir of vocal parts, juxtaposed against huge beats with an organic feel.

Of course, 2020 was a very tricky time to be putting new music out into the world, and Geiste sadly had to cancel a release show for Utopia at The Garage, one of London’s most iconic music venues. The upside, however, is the extra free time spent indoors meant she quickly wrote and released the follow-up only a year later, Retrogrades, in 2021 when she was back in France.

“THAT’S LIFE, BECOMING A NEW VERSION OF OURSELVES AND DESTROYING THE OLD ONE.”

“I remember I was writing in my journal and talking about the things that were making me sad at the time. It was just before lockdown. I listed five reasons as to why I was feeling that way. I knew that Retrogrades would be connected to the water sign, and each EP was linked to an element, with Retrogrades being water. I thought, ‘Okay, here are my five teardrops,’ and that’s how I created Retrogrades.”

2024 has been marked with two new Geiste singles so far, starting with to dusk. She speaks about how stripped-back these new songs are, with her trademark beats taking a backseat. That said, this song, while certainly more subtle than previous releases, still feels huge in scope, with the usual full choir of Geiste voicings, orchestral elements and tasteful electronic parts.

“I almost didn’t release this EP,” she confesses. “This project was finished and produced two years ago, and I held on to it, worried that the people who like my music wouldn’t get it. Then I realized how silly that was — if I made the song, why hide it?

“I’ve been trying to stick to a certain sound, still exploring its edges but also boxing myself into a specific genre that I don’t always want to be in. There have always been two extremes I’ve dealt with, both in my

personality and my work. Hiding this project because it doesn’t match my usual sound was a bit of a stupid idea, don’t you think?”

Next up was the promise, a song that leans even more heavily into this ballad direction Geiste has taken, with piano and strings more prominent. It features one of the more heartbreaking choruses we’ve heard from her yet.

“I think this might be my shortest song,” she says. “I wrote it and realized anything I added wouldn’t be necessary. In 2022, for some reason, all I could write were piano ballads, which I’d never written before. This EP is a story of loss, grief and finding yourself again after the end of a relationship. I always like to end with a bit of hope. But I wasn’t going through a breakup or heartbreak, it’s not based on a real love story. I think it came from moving back from London to France, where there’s no music scene and everything changed. I went from being a London girl, gigging twice a month, to living in the woods with no one around, staying with my grandma. It felt like the loss of the life I had.

“But every day I was going for walks along the coast with my dog and falling more and more in love with the nature around me, and realizing I

was becoming a completely different person to who I was in London. I think that’s life, becoming a new version of ourselves and destroying the old one.”

And regarding what the phrase Play Out Loud means to Geiste, she says: “I pictured that moment when you’re working on something with your headphones on, and then a friend comes into the room. You say ‘Here’s what I did,’ and you turn on the speakers to share it for the first time. It’s this thing you’ve created, your deepest feelings, your world, your emotions. And you’re just like, ‘This is what I did today’.”

The five-track to dusk EP lands on November 1. In the meantime, if this article has left you feeling an ethereal-woodland techno hole in your heart, you can rectify that immediately by listening to the Geiste back catalog while we await this new collection of ballads. Enjoy those ballads while they last, as she teases she’s already working on the big avant-garde pop productions again.

20YEARS OFANTICS

This year marks 20 years of Interpol’s second album Antics, a record which not only spawned some of the band’s best loved singles but cemented their status as one of the brightest lights to emerge from the early- ‘00s NYC indie rock explosion. Headliner sat down with frontman Paul Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler to take an in-depth look at life inside the band at that time, and why the album marked the end of an era for Interpol as we knew it…

Interpol have always stood awkwardly alongside their contemporaries. The early ‘00s NYC indie explosion that spawned them was a raucous, hot, sweaty mess of rock’n’roll excess. Though bearing their own sonic, musical, and aesthetic identities, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture et al were each possessed of an incendiary nature that threatened to blow up at any given moment.

Though very much part of the scene, Interpol were something different

entirely. In appearance, they bore greater resemblance to Kraftwerk than your average indie rock upstarts. The trio who remains to this daysinger Paul Banks, guitarist Daniel Kessler, and drummer Sam Fogarino – eschewed ripped jeans, leather jackets, skinny t-shirts, and Converse sneakers in favour of black threepiece suits and ties. Meanwhile, their talismanic bassist, Carlos D - who would leave the band in 2010resembled something of a cowboy vampire, often offsetting his jet-black attire with a black leather holster.

Their music, of course, was what truly set them apart. Where you could almost feel the sweat dripping off the walls when listening to early records from those aforementioned bands, the icy chill of Interpol’s acclaimed 2022 debut Turn On The Bright Lights - the glacial reverb of the guitars, the disembodied voice emanating from Banks’s mouth, the lithe metronomy of the rhythm section – shared more in common with the musical DNA of England’s North West than America’s East Coast.

“WE KNEW THERE WERE A LOT OF EYES WATCHING, LIKE, IS THIS A FLASH IN THE PAN?”

Despite the positive critical response with which Bright Lights was met, it was just one of many debut albums coming out of NYC at the time being pounced on by the music press on both sides of the Atlantic. It was arguably with its follow-up, Antics, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, that Interpol not only distanced themselves from what was becoming a much imitated and saturated scene but proved themselves to be more than a passing fad. The record felt like a natural progression from Bright Lights. There was a tangible sense of cohesion and maturity in the composition of this batch of songs, with splashes of synths and electronics warming the tone ever so slightly.

“I recall being very mindful of this idea of a sophomore slump, and aware that the follow up would be very important,” Banks tells Headliner, joining us from Berlin via Zoom. “We knew there were a lot of eyes watching, like, is this a flash in the pan? I wanted to make sure we left a strong impact with our second album to answer that question: we are here to stay. So, it was important to establish we were serious, and we knew we were just feeling really good with our creative flow.”

Kessler, who joins us via Zoom from Barcelona a few days later, describes a similar mentality within the band. Banks often comes across as measured and philosophical,

perhaps a touch more economical in his responses than his bandmate, who speaks a little faster and with a lightness that feels more conversational. Both are thoughtful and eloquent, speaking with genuine affection for the album and the regard in which it is still held.

“When we finished Bright Lights and released it, we didn’t know what to expect,” recalls Kessler. “We had been a band for five years before that and no one had paid much attention to us, and we didn’t have a huge following. But we hoped one day we would get the opportunity to make a record and then word-of-mouth started happening. The shows were getting busier, and at that moment I was very mindful of not overthinking what we do next.

“Back then there was always this talk of the sophomore slump and whether or not the attention we were getting would affect how we were writing. So, I wanted to keep writing in between tours for Bright Lights - when we finished a US tour we’d write, and then when we’d finish an overseas tour we’d write. We kept doing that so that we didn’t have time to overthink things. And it served us really well. By the end of touring Bright Lights we had a surplus of songs and a little bit of time to work on the remaining songs. We never stopped writing and that was really good for us. It meant we didn’t come off the back of Bright Lights with a blank slate and thinking, ‘well, now what do we do’?”

As for whether they felt any external expectations to replicate the success of their debut, Banks insists that the only pressure came from within the band itself, as they sought to capitalise on the creative momentum they had been building.

“Having a desire to go out and succeed is one thing but having what it takes to actually do it is another,” he says. “It was nothing to do with competition with other artists, it was much more that we had concocted this alchemy, which we felt was very strong. We were fortunate to be confident and mindful that we were really writing good shit together.

“There was some discussion from Carlos about taking a break after Bright Lights,” he continues. “But we had to say no and that we thought it was better to keep going - don’t let the party end just yet. Let’s get the first two out and then we can take a pause. I think that was the right call.”

Like Bright Lights, Antics was produced by Peter Katis (Death Cab For Cutie, Gang Of Youths, The National), who helped bring their increasingly polished sound to the fore. Tracks like Take You On A Cruise and Not Even Jail presented the band in all its elegance and dynamism, while singles Evil and Slow Hands would become instant classics that have endured to this day.

“We were progressing as musicians having done almost two years of touring,” says Kessler of the band’s evolution. “The mindset when making Bright Lights was to make it sound like how it sounds to see us live, instead of trying to redefine those songs in some way. Antics sounds like that too, but there are more keyboards, and it just sounds like there’s a bit more experience under the belt.

And because it was written so quickly it has a cohesive feel. We were also working with Peter Katis again, as we felt really comfortable with him. We loved him as a human and we were already familiar with the way that he works.”

To mark the 20th anniversary of Antics, Interpol have been playing the album live in its entirety and in sequence. They’ve also been rifling through the vaults for old photographs and recordings from the time.

“It’s humbling and it puts into context the passing of time, as it doesn’t feel that long ago,” says Banks of how he has found this period of reflection. “One still remembers it vividly, but so much has come and gone since then. And revisiting those memories and doing something commemorative for a period of your life is a beautiful thing; it gives you an excuse to bring out those old photographs that transport you to memories you haven’t dusted off in a while. You think about mortality, and it really puts things into context.

“I often think about the idea that you only get one shot at this and how have you spent that time,” he continues. “One has a lot of creative ambitions in life, and you can only do so many things, but the fact that one of the things I’ve been able to achieve was a collaborative effort feels important. Going it alone is great and there are personal accomplishments, but the accomplishment of doing things collaboratively is time well

spent. So, looking back at those times feels heartening; that this band of weirdos could make four records together means a lot – that’s regarding the original lineup.”

Kessler shares similar sentiments to Banks when reflecting on life inside the band between 2002-2004, while also taking a moment to consider the wider context of the music scene at the time. Much hyped and mythologised since, the era has been the subject of much discussion over the past couple of years on account of Lizzy Goodman’s extensive written account of the time, Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 and the subsequent documentary film iteration Meet Me In The Bathroom

“It’s a bit of both,” Kessler replies when asked if the time was as vibrant and exciting as it may appear today when viewed through an historical lens. “The Strokes were the first New York band to ignite the global interest around what was going on in the city, and once there was this spotlight you could see The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio, The Rapture - all these great bands were doing something very original and cool and with an urgency. It’s easy to think we were all sharing guitars and rehearsal space, which is romantic, but the fact is we were all quite different. Maybe the urgency of the city was somewhere in the background for all of us to a degree. That’s something we may have had in common.

“It’s easy to lump it all together but it was very separate,” he continues. “It’s the nature of rock’n’roll to romanticise these things. But when I think about that time with a bit of distance, I can’t imagine something like that existing now, We didn’t know those other bands, The first time I even properly heard The Strokes was when I was looking in the back of The Village Voice or Time Out to see who’s coming to town. And I saw that this band was playing a residency at one of the clubs we sometimes played, and I was like, how is this local band able to do a weekly residency? It was so hard for us to even draw 20 people, so how were they able to sell out this thing? It was extremely exciting, and it was the beginning of

something actually emerging.

“It was also pre social media; it was of the moment and all of these bands were in the same city but didn’t really know about each other. Nowadays you would hear about them one way or another. And it would be harder for a band to have that time to develop. It was a really unique time. There were definitely a lot of great bands that emerged at the time and their music has aged extraordinarily well.”

The release of Antics , Banks and Kessler concur, would come to represent an end of an era for Interpol as the world knew it. Though the departure of bassist Carlos D would come six years and

two albums later, the band would go on to change record label and producer for their third record Our Love To Admire (2007), exhibiting a more expansive sound.

“There was a sense of not wanting to stay in the same place,” says Banks. “We wanted to see what happens if we shake it up. And I think our third album has aged well, it’s exciting and has a sleekness and a fuel injection. The label situation worked out less well, but the record was a good thing. So yes, it was an end of an era after Antics .”

“There were a lot of things happening,” Kessler recalls. “There was definitely the want to progress and evolve – more keyboards, new sounds. We didn’t want to do Antics part two. There were also things changing personally in our lives after touring so extensively for the first two albums.”

Two decades on, Interpol have now released seven studio albums and have been a constant on the international touring circuit. The bond that exists between Banks, Kessler, and Fogarino, it seems, is tighter today than ever, with the trio currently working on new material for album number eight.

“You can never take anything for granted,” Kessler considers deeply. “Maybe one day my creative well will be dry and I won’t be able to write new things that excite me. But the truth is I haven’t had that moment. And when we get together or we send ideas around it never feels like a chore. It’s not work; it’s a deep desire

that we’ve always had. And it’s still the same now. If that wasn’t there, we would take a big break, or we wouldn’t do it.

“Also, from a personal level, being in a band is an incredible opportunity and experiment in human communication, in patience, respect, and how you express something or listen to an idea. And if you are in a band for a while you should get better at that. It’s not just making records. You’re sailors together. You’re traveling together, you’re constantly in hotel lobbies. To have found these people who have enriched your life is such a treat. As time goes on you really appreciate it and understand that these are lifelong relationships. There are very few things, unless you’re in a band, that can approximate it. I’m just so thankful I found these people.”

Banks speaks similarly on the matter.

“I think it has to do with a likeness of mind and kindredship of spirit between the three of us,” he says.

“We are still creatively motivated and inspired, but along the way we also didn’t discover some other passion that took us off this path.

“I think we’ve all discovered and cultivated new passions but none that have usurped this idea that we want to create and perform together. That shared work ethic and vision is one of the things that differentiates you from bands that implode or disassemble over time.

“There is still that creative chemistry and this personality element where the people don’t fall by the wayside with substances or they don’t just say, ‘Fuck it, and go and live on a farm’. Which is a very valid alternate pursuit,” he smiles, “but none of us have decided to do that yet.”

Words by ALICEGUST A F NOS

OFFAIAH LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCO

Unlike most Brits at this time of year, EDM DJ and producer OFFAIAH is suffering from the heat and humidity. That’s because for the last 12 years, he’s called Tampa, Florida his home, but his unaffected accent (dropped Ts and all) is an immediate giveaway that he’s a Londoner at heart.

“Yeah, good old East London,” he smiles, noting that his accent is hanging in there despite being in the US for over a decade. “I’ve got three kids and they always make fun of me because I say words – in their eyes – weird like, water, but they’re like, what’s WO-ta?”.

In between touring the world, OFFAIAH (real name Michael Woods) shares that he makes sure to visit his family and friends in East London a few times a year, and never misses an opportunity to get his fish and chips fix while back in his homeland. “You can’t get decent fish and chips

out here! I go to my local cafe in Hackney and get good old fish and chips, I’ll pop into M&S and grab some donuts, or we go to a country pub and find a good Sunday roast, so that scratches that itch. I do miss the food in the UK. In the 12 years I’ve been here, I haven’t seen one curry house. It could be a little niche market to start,” he grins.

British food and weather chat out of the way, the conversation moves to music. It’s been over 20 years since OFFAIAH started making tunes, and eight years since he released his Charlie Puth-sampled debut single, Trouble, which reached no.1 in the BBC Radio 1 dance chart, was made a Future Dance Anthem by Danny Howard, and gained support from Pete Tong and Annie Mac. He followed up in 2017 with Run and Run This Town in quick succession. Private Show was the first release from OFFAIAH’s own label, AllFire, taking

the producer into new sonic territory. Having recovered from a helicopter crash in 2017, OFFAIAH returned in full force in 2018, and has been releasing music prolifically since, these days boasting some 2.2 million monthly Spotify listeners.

Recent single, Loco, was also released on AllFire, which he shares was founded to keep control of Private Show in 2020. “I didn’t want to sign the rights away,” he explains. “I’ve been in the industry long enough to know how most of it works, so I wanted to give it a go to see if I could do it myself. And Loco is doing really well. We’ve got three or four more in the pipeline so far and I’m actively looking for more records to sign. So we’ll just see where it goes.”

Irresistibly hypnotic, Loco features Twan and Cole-Man, who OFFAIAH says ended up collaborating on the song after he put the feelers out

for demos to be sent his way. “They sent me the track and it was about 70% done for what it is now, and I thought, ‘Okay, this record’s really good’. I was going to release it with just their name – I wasn’t going to get involved,” he notes, “and I started tweaking it a little bit as to what I think would make it go down better in the clubs, and by the time I did my thing, we collectively said, ‘Why don’t I just get on the record and we’ll make it a collaboration?’ So that’s the way it started out and the way it evolved. I jumped in, did my OFFAIAH thing, and it is how you hear it today.”

Loco’s production started around the vocal, which is where OFFAIAH usually starts when creating a track. “Then I work from the drop backwards. This one started off with the vocal, how it was going to drop, and I was working out the groove to build it all up in the first place.

“WHEN I GO BACK TO THOSE FIRST PRODUCTIONS I MADE, I CRINGE.”

I just grab a coffee, sit down and get jamming. I like to run, so I listen to a playlist or music, and that will get me in the zone. I’ll come into the studio with all the ideas baked into my head and then lo and behold, something will pop out that I like.”

When it comes to production workflow, OFFAIAH shares that he doesn’t have a set way of approaching a track each time. “One of the first collabs I did was with Example,” he recalls. “He came to my studio back in the day in London, and we worked on Changed the Way You Kiss Me together. I played him a load of stuff that I’d been working on and he played me some of his stuff, so we didn’t actually even work on the track together. We were just playing each other’s music to each other to find out where we were, musically. We were together for about three or four hours, then he left. I worked on the track that night and sent it to him, and within 24 hours Changed the Way You Kiss Me was done. It was quite a cool collaboration in the way it all came together; it was one of those ‘meant to be’ tracks. It was number one in the UK charts for two weeks and globally I think it’s triple platinum right now.”

When it comes to the sound selection for Loco, he shares that he sifted through catalogs and libraries of sounds in order to work out what worked, and what didn’t. “You can have a sound that you think sounds really good by itself, and then you put it into the mix and it won’t sound as good as you hoped,” he explains. “And conversely, you can have a sound that sounds pretty terrible, you drop it into a mix and it sounds really good. It’s such a weird thing. It’s all experimentation at the end of the day.”

When it comes to a piece of studio kit that proved essential to shaping the sound of Loco, Plugin Allicance’s Shadow Hills compressor is up there –known for its ability to tame the most unruly and chaotic transients with flawless control – and OFFAIAH has been a long time Genelec user.

“It gives a solid, weighty kind of feel,” he says of his go-to plugin. “So I threw that on there – just a touch – you never overdo these things, so just a touch to give it a little analogue feel. The studio kit that I really do cherish is my Genelec speakers, because they give me a really good, flat bass frequency response sound, so I know exactly how it’s going to sound in

the clubs and on the radio before it’s actually done. I’ve had these for quite a while, and before that I was using a different set of monitors that had a very different sound! In hindsight, [the mixes that I made on them] sound like they’re missing something in that mid-to-top end range. When I got the Genelecs, my sound definitely took a major step up; they’re really good. So, I’m on the Genelecs when I’m mixing and mastering.

“The main element of the tracks that I make is the bass; it’s all in the bottom end,” he stresses. “I have a Genelec 7078A active subwoofer, which definitely brings out that low end –you can hear everything as clear as a bell. The monitors are so flat too – they translate to pretty much any kind of speed you can imagine,” he says of feeling confident that tracks he makes in the studio will translate well to a live DJ setting. “Whether it’s a festival or a club or radio, you get the best of everything because it’s such a flat response. Anyone who’s got a studio, or anyone producing music could definitely do a lot worse than getting a pair of Genelecs!”

As a producer that has been making music for over 20 years, he shares that he can hear a difference in his production style when compared to his earlier tracks. “I think my mixes are a bit cleaner now,” he considers. “When I go back to those first early productions I made, I cringe because I think, ‘Oh, God, I could have turned the kick up 1dB, or turn the hi hats down’. It’s a bit more fine tuned now. In terms of the actual creative process, I think it’s pretty much the same, to be fair, where I just sit down and start playing and whatever comes out, comes out.”

OFFAIAH’s single Warrior achieved a number one ranking in the UK Club Chart and entered the top 40 at number 19 in 2000. As proud as he is of this early single, he can’t help but hear it now with a more attuned ear: “That was the track that really got me started, and when I listen to that track now, it’s so muddy and the production is awful,” he admits. “I think, ‘What the hell was I doing?’ However, obviously the track still struck a chord, because that got me so many fans.

There’s people now that come up to me and say, ‘Warrior – we love it!’ There are real hardcore fans of that record, but when I go back and listen to it, it sounds – to me – really terrible. But, if I could go back and change that, would I? I don’t know, because there’s something in there that you can’t really describe. It has that quality. I could obviously go back and make it sound really well mastered and really polished, but then it might lose something. I think from that standpoint, just leave things the way they were made, because that was a moment in time. I put my energies into looking forward and doing something for the future.”

INSTA: @OFFAIAH GENELEC.COM

Photograph Credit: Hannah Gray Hall

TEENAGE DREAMS

JAKE KOHN

He might be 15, but his voice is 46 and works on a tow boat on the Mississippi River. For Appalachia native and rising talent Jake Kohn, this is not an unusual comment to spot under his YouTube and Instagram videos. Another fan points out that his voice is what a resume means when they say they want someone aged 18-22 with 30 years of work experience. No, he isn’t aging faster than a US president – it’s

country star Kohn’s mature, raspy baritone and lyrics that hint at a pain far beyond his years that has people in disbelief that he’s under 18. In this Emerging Headliner interview powered by JBL, one of Virginia’s most talked-about musical prodigies explains how a 17 year old is killing it in a genre of music usually reserved for middle-aged songs about drink, heartbreak and divorce.

“Oh yeah, I’ve seen those,” laughs a laidback Kohn (who’s 16 at the time of interview) about comments pertaining to his age . “Those are great. I just laugh; they’re funny.”

Indeed, he’s been called an old soul as much as his given name. His talent has been described with such phrases as “once in a lifetime” and “lightning in a bottle.” But don’t let his baby face fool you: when his voice fills the room, it becomes clear why he signed to Lockeland Springs/Atlantic Records at such a young age. He may be going viral these days, but he’s still a regular teenager. As soon as we wrap up this interview he leaves to play a festival, and makes it back in time for prom.

“I just sleep a lot and hang out with folks I don’t see very often,” he says in a strong southern drawl when asked what he does in his spare time, adding that his friends have got used to his growing popularity in the music world. “I’ve always been doing music. I’ve been doing this for five or six years, so everybody’s used to it. Now everybody’s over it,” he laughs. “I’m not that interesting.

I kind of just do music. I’m lame,” he shrugs. “It’s like a full-time job now that I’m out of school.”

Born in Winchester, Virginia (home of Patsy Cline), Kohn is no stranger to country music. While he doesn’t come from a musical background, he grew up listening to legends like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash with his father, Erick. At 11 years old, he was gifted a guitar from his great-grandmother. He taught himself to play chords from a poster on his wall. His mentor, Buddy Dunlap, would allow him to come and play at his barn, teaching him some tricks of the trade along the way. “Growing up, my dad listened to a lot of those artists,” he nods, “and I took that on just inherently because I was always exposed to it. It was always something that sounded good to me and is what I listened to the most. These days, I listen to all kinds of stuff, like different playlists and all genres. I don’t limit myself. But I mostly listen to country. There’s no competition.”

Kohn says he penned his first “good” song at 12 years old. “I have plenty more bad songs than good

ones, that I promise,” he insists, downplaying his talent. “I do set high standards for myself when it comes to songwriting, because if I don’t like it, then I don’t want anyone else to like it either.”

It was through posting his music on YouTube that his (now) manager, Ashley Wells, found a performance of that very song, and with her help, he began traveling outside of Virginia for shows. With the support of his mother, Maria, Kohn began playing live gigs at places he otherwise (still) isn’t old enough to get into. He soon began receiving encouragement from local artists such as Logan Moore from Low Water Bridge Band, and at 15, he had developed a following and was being approached by industry professionals. “It was really foreign,” he says of navigating an adult world as a child. “But I adapted to it pretty well because my parents were always with me. So I wasn’t being deviant,” he grins.

“I’M JUST A HISTORY NERD, BASICALLY. BUT COUNTRY MUSIC HISTORY WAS MY BIGGEST OBSESSION.”

It’s not surprising fans draw comparisons to artists like Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin when they hear his raw, throaty voice, but perhaps the more inexplicable characteristic of Kohn’s music is his songwriting, which tell stories of the trials and tribulations of a full life. One of his biggest influences is Justin Townes Earle, and Kohn continues to draw inspiration from his music and guitar style.

Kohn doesn’t give much away during the interview, but it’s when asked about songwriting that conversation flows most freely: “Growing up, when I was super young I was listening to really old music, and that didn’t stop there. I’m just a history nerd, basically. But country music history was my biggest obsession, which is weird. I’ve always been this strange kid that writes and doesn’t do anything else.”

On what – as a teenager who writes about what appears to be more mature emotions – inspires his songs exactly, he says: “It really depends on where I am when I get the inspiration to write something. I’ll write on paper, I’ll write with a computer, I’ll write on my phone – it doesn’t matter. It’s just where I am at that moment. A lot of

the time, I’ll get inspired by being in a particular place, like a different region or a new state. Every place has a different feeling. That’s how I go about it. However, I try to convey emotion in my songs and that’s basically where I tell stories – through the lyrics. Whatever emotions I can feed into that is how I gather inspiration for songs.”

These days, Kohn regularly goes viral on TikTok and YouTube, amassing 10M+ views across both platforms. In 2023, a video of him performing his song, Frostbite went viral and racked up over 1.2M views on YouTube. Later that year his powerful live rendition of the song performed during his Grand Ole Opry debut filled the storied theater with his robust, soulful voice and elicited a standing ovation.

“There wasn’t really time to even react,” he says about the viral video. “It was basically a light switch moment. We went in high gear when that video came out. All of [the videos] had done pretty well up until then, but it took off, and then the next video that I did was even more. You know, when I wrote the song….” he trails off, changing tact: “A lot of people think that I write a lot of personal things, but I’ve always just

been this storyteller, and it takes on meaning for a lot of people. It’s cool to see the emotion conveyed in the song resonate with people.”

His songwriting may not be autobiographical, but it paints an accurate picture of the struggles and hardships many Americans face, particularly those in Appalachia. Recent single, Dreams, is no exception, and is another testament to Kohn’s ability to capture a listeners’ attention with soul-stirring lyricism. On perhaps his most earnest song yet, Kohn embraces a striking vulnerability that has resonated deeply with fans decades older than he. Kohn shares that the comments about Dreams have been “overwhelming”, with fans letting him know how much it means to them. “The people that connected with that song are very big fans of that song,” he nods. “I feel like, that’s just the hill that they’ll die on, you know?” he laughs. “A lot of people take on personal meanings that help deal with their hardships, day to day,” he adds, more seriously.

On what inspired the song, he answers matter of factly: “That exact emotion: Hardship and struggling with being lost in life.” Kohn shares that he was advised not to release this particular track: “I was told time and time again that this song shouldn’t be released. It’s too long for public consumption. It’s hard to follow. It’s not my best writing. One thing I’m going to do is stay true to who I am. I’ve never written a song trying to write a hit, and I’m not going to release them based on that either. It’s powerful to me that something I wrote could have a significant impact on people I don’t know. That’s the reason I do this, so this song is already successful to me. The amount of comments and messages I’ve received asking me to release this song is unreal. It may not be a hit, but if it resonates with one of you, it’s a success to me.

Photograph Credit: Hannah Gray Hall

“That song was our biggest social media moment,” he continues. “I think it was almost 10 million on TikTok. Out of everything we posted, people were begging for that song to be released. I just didn’t see why they were trying to release other songs and were not focusing on that song at that moment, so that’s what I decided to do.”

On what he hopes for in his career, if he could aim for the highest highs, Kohn keeps it down to earth: “I just want to continue to be able to do what I do and enjoy it. That’s all I know. That’s all I really want.”

And on his growing fandom and if he’s been star struck yet when mixing in different circles, he says: “I’ve met a lot of people that I’ll freak out about, like people that I’ve been fans of for years. But I don’t think I’ve really met anybody that’s super…” he trails off, thinking. “I mean, I’ve obviously got crazy comments – Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit,” he concedes with a smile. “Yeah, Fred Durst follows me. That’s cool. I love that. That’s probably my favorite.”

Kohn boasts over 95,000 monthly Spotify listeners, and that’s having released just four singles. With fans keen to hear a lengthier body of work, is there any more music

planned? “Oh yeah,” he shares cagily. “We’ve been recording. There will definitely be an album coming eventually… in the future. It’ll be this year,” he reveals when pushed on how far into the future that could be.

When songwriting inspiration strikes and he’s at home, Kohn can record demos on his home studio setup, which includes an AKG P220 microphone, K240 MKII headphones, a pair of JBL 305P MKII powered studio monitors and a Soundcraft Notepad-8FX eight-channel mixer. “The monitors were so easy to set up,” he notes, “and once I got them to work it was so much simpler than anything else I tried to do before. I do a lot of demos and send them off from home, so I don’t have to do them far away.”

Meanwhile, his AKG mic is key when it comes to capturing his distinctive, raspy vocals: “The way it sounds is pretty great; I don’t think I’ve had a microphone that’s that clear and that loud. I’m not good with sound,” he admits, “so it’s great that it’s really easy to use because I’m not good with that stuff! It’s really clear and loud. That’s the thing: it doesn’t just muffle, and the AKG headphones sound great.”

Country music is experiencing

something of a music renaissance in mainstream charts of late, helped by artists like Post Malone, Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé. Kohn may be considered something of a one-to-watch in terms of bringing country music to Gen-Z, but he admits he’s mostly oblivious to mainstream music and charts, having always been more interested in what came before.

“I have nothing to do with mainstream music,” he admits, almost guiltily, before leaving the interview to travel to his gig. “I don’t think I consider myself necessarily mainstream either. I’ve never been a fan of anything mainstream. I’ve always been an obsessed person, going back in time. Even in modern music, I’ve listened to the alternative. I guess that’s just the way my brain was wired.”

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Headliner has achieved Dolby Atmos certification at its brand new recording studio located at The Pioneer Club in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, which is set to champion a whole manner of community-based, educational projects, as well as offer world class recording and mixing services to chart-topping artists, producers, and record labels.

Situated just 20 minutes outside of London, the studio resides on the same site as The Pioneer Club, a grassroots live music venue and cultural community hub. Originally launched as a charity back in 1941 for young evacuees during WWII, The Pioneer took to its current site in 1961, quickly becoming a melting pot for local musical talent with legendary ‘60s rock bands The Zombies and Argent performing at the venue. It is also the site of the UK’s oldest indoor skate park and has gone on to become a regular gigging spot for local rock luminaries Enter Shikari, as well as hosting early gigs by the likes of Gallows, Bring Me The Horizon, and many others.

While rightly proud of its heritage, the space was in urgent need of a makeover to ensure its reputation endured not only as a monument to the past, but as a beacon for the future. As such, Headliner Spaces was launched last year - a Joint Venture with Headliner and the aforementioned Enter Shikari to give the site a 21st century overhaul, transforming it into a truly unique proposition. And at the heart of the facility resides the new Dolby Atmos studio.

Sound Decisions

It was Pete Hoffman at Miloco Builds who drew up the initial plans for the studio in 2023 after a site visit when it was still a shell. From there, Headliner’s first call was to Genelec who, after several positive conversations about the plans for the space and its potential for educational and community projects, shared the vision, and specced and deployed a full-range system.

Centred around Genelec’s The Ones family of three-way coaxial monitors, the system comprises an L/C/R trio of 8351Bs and W371As, with two pairs

“THE FRONT SPEAKERS ARE FULL-RANGE AND SUPERACCURATE, SO SONICALLY IT IS SPOT ON.”

RICK DICKERSON, AUDIO ENGINEER

of 8341As for the sides and the rears, and four 8331As on the ceiling. Finally, a 7380A subwoofer was positioned in the rear wall.

Audio engineer and long-time Headliner ally, Rick Dickerson, carried out the install, and followed Hoffman’s plans as closely as possible from the outset.

“The design was really well thought out, maximising the space not only in the main [Dolby Atmos] room but also the adjoining B-room, which is an ideal size for tracking drums, guitars, and vocals,” says Dickerson. “From the hanging of the first speakers with Andy [Bensley, Genelec’s regional business development manager] we were working as meticulously as possible to Pete’s original plans, which meant we needed to be incredibly accurate with our measurements and speaker positioning. Inevitably, a little trial and error came into play, particularly as we had the precise positioning of our SSL Origin 32 console to think about.”

The fact the studio boasts an SSL Origin 32 is of course a major plus point: not only is it a first-class analogue console, but it suits exactly

the kind of hybrid workflow that Headliner Spaces wanted to achieve with its studio build.

“The front speakers are full-range and super-accurate, so sonically it is spot on, which is critical; and having the console so near to the speakers means we have a very good mix position and also a really nice stereo image field. We can now do anything from Atmos mixing to post-production work, to tracking,” Dickerson explains. “The [SSL] Origin is inline, so we essentially have a 64-channel board, and monitoring information can be sent directly to vocalists without any latency. That is the beauty of the analog side; we can recall things we have already recorded and return them on our monitor inputs, which are directly connected to our DAW output.

“We also have the mic and line inputs, which are switchable to long fader or short fader on the same channels, and we can insert the console’s excellent E Series EQ. There are also inserts on both those signal paths. We tend to use the short fader for returning monitoring from the DAW, and the longer fader for tracking and sending things to it.”

The

Calibration Process

About three months down the line, it was time to call in Genelec’s Andy Bensley once more for the first stage of the calibration process.

“It really begins with the speaker placements,” says Bensley. “We spoke at length about what we wanted to achieve regarding acoustic treatment, but the key from the beginning was getting the speakers in the positions we wanted them to be in. I made a few site visits to hear the room tone coming together and make sure it felt balanced. Since The Ones are part of our SAM (smart active monitoring) family, we were able to get everything up and running really quickly using GLM calibration software. When we first started listening to initial tracks there was a lot of familiarity in terms of the playback, and I was confident we could get this system tweaked to a point where we had something that was not only accurate, but had authority in size and weight, and that would be really exciting for people to hear.

“My goal when doing these calibrations is to get it to a point where it’s in good shape for Dolby to come in and take their measurements and make their adjustments.”

As for the loudspeakers themselves, Bensley knew precisely what was needed, and relished the opportunity to dive into an Atmos space from scratch.

“From my point of view, it is rare to work on a Dolby Atmos room built from the ground up,” he explains. “In music, the tendency is to work around an existing stereo system and make the Dolby Atmos system fit to the room, so you are sometimes compromised by the size of speakers that can be integrated – because the main stereo system is the bread and butter. With this, there was an opportunity to design the room from the ground up.

“We went with 8351s for the LCR and paired them with the W371 woofer systems. Whenever there is an opportunity to go with an LCR of the W371s paired with the 8351s you get this incredible consistency right through the frequency

range, from the highest highs down to the lows; and it just makes for a great foundation for a Dolby Atmos system.

“The majority of good sounding systems and mixes are driven from the front, so the opportunity to put in a system that would really shine for the LCR and then set the sides and the rears and the highs for success was very exciting. I was really confident that in that size space, with that layout, the system would be great.”

From the moment Bensley became aware of the vision, he was convinced that Genelec could play a pivotal role in bringing a unique project to fruition.

“When we first started talking about the space, we were excited about the prospect of building on the history of The Pioneer and what it means to the local scene,” he continues. “There was always a sense that it was a sleeping giant and that there was so much potential with the venue, as well as the potential to reach out to the local community and aspiring artists coming through. There was a real opportunity to make something very special.”

One week after Bensley completed his work at the studio, Dolby’s Richard Addis paid a visit to further calibrate the room.

“With Dolby Atmos, you will usually have 12+ loudspeakers in a [Dolby Atmos] system, perhaps comprising different models, in different mounting conditions, at different distances away from you,” he says, explaining the Dolby Atmos calibration process. “Maybe different brands in some cases, too. So, the goal with calibration is, first and foremost, simply to get this disparate speaker set to act as one.

“This process starts with room design. Most performance issues can be avoided, mitigated, or treated with good room design and acoustic treatment options, way before reaching for EQ as a solution. Things like speaker placement relative to the walls can massively impact the sound at the mix position, so our top priority is to ensure that we physically set the room up well.”

Once this has been done, the calibration process involves assessing and adjusting for three objective measures.

“Firstly, there is time alignment,” Addis continues. “Does the audio from each speaker reach the mix position at the same time? In the simplest sense, this counteracts physical distance differences between speaker positions, but additionally, with modern DSP-enabled speakers we need to assess whether any additional ‘invisible’ latency is added by the onboard DSP. This could be maybe as much as six or more milliseconds, and when you consider that a millisecond equates to around about 30cm/1ft of distance, you absolutely must take this into account.

“Secondly, consistency of frequency response. As you pan a sound around the room, does it tonally match regardless of where the audio is placed? We achieve this with considered use of EQ, making sure we are not trying to counteract room acoustic issues, for example. We also employ bass management to extend the frequency response of any speakers which do not satisfy the full range requirement down to 20Hz.

“Lastly, there is level alignment. Does the playback level from each speaker match, as heard at the mix position? Once the EQ calibration has been done, it is a pretty straightforward process to match SPLs.”

In ensuring that these three key aspects are addressed, Addis utilised SMAART software and Genelec’s GLM calibration technology.

“SMAART is a live analysis tool which allows us to get a picture of the acoustical performance of the system in the room,” he explains.

“On-paper specifications of loudspeakers are usually measurements made in anechoic chambers - but as soon as you put a speaker into a physical environment, this performance will change significantly due to how the sound interacts with the walls, surfaces and materials within the space.

“The first thing to do before we start calibration is to understand this inroom behaviour, in large part to steer us away from trying to correct things better dealt with physically, or simply just left alone. The fact that SMAART updates live means we can very quickly make adjustments and see the results in real time.

“We take a large number of measurements before we do anything else: Transfer Functions give us our speaker time delays, and the phase and magnitude responsesgreat for identifying low end room mode issues. Impulse Responses give us the RT60 information for the space and allow us to diagnose reflection paths. And initial RTA traces help with gain staging, level setting, and initial configuration of bass management. Assessing all of these measurements gives us a full and clear picture of the in-room system behaviour, so we can optimise it before reaching for EQ as

a last resort.

“GLM provides an auto-calibration solution, making the calibration process easy and accessible to anyone who does not have access to a system like SMAART. For the end user, investing in a full SMAART rig is overkill for a process that they will likely only need to revisit perhaps once per year after the initial configuration. GLM delivers a good result without any manual adjustment, however a manual calibration gives you a bit more opportunity to dig a little deeper and refine the calibration further.

“It is worth noting that for ongoing calibration support, we have a growing worldwide network of Dolby Certified Support Partners (CSPs), trained by us to perform calibrations to the Dolby specification – perfect for annual calibration checks over the lifetime of the system.”

To ensure that the space was optimally calibrated, Genelec and Dolby each employed microphoneoriented calibration processes - with Genelec applying a singlemic method and Dolby a sevenmic approach. Addis explains the reasoning for both these procedures: “We use a multi-mic measurement array to average the frequency response across the mix area. This leads to a better overall response across the mix area as a whole, compared to the results achieved from just a single microphone.

“For small spaces we may use fewer mics, but seven provides a good average – more than that, and you see diminishing returns. Also, an odd number allows for a middle mic, plus a balanced number either side, e.g. three left, one middle, three right.

“We place the mics in an offset pattern, so that no two are in line across the width or length of the room, to avoid two mic positions ‘hearing’ the same acoustical issues

either side of a line of symmetry.

“With GLM, you can run a single measurement calibration, or a multipoint calibration, which follows a similar principle to our Dolby method. Because Andy knew I would be in to fine tune on top of the GLM setup, he left it as a one-mic calibration. The mic array is only used for the averaged frequency response. For time alignment and SPL setting, we use the middle mic, placed at the mix position.”

Like Bensley, Addis was also particularly excited to work on a space that had been built from the ground up with an immersive setup in mind: “Any studio built from the ground up with Dolby Atmos in mind is a fantastic thing, as you can avoid some of the issues often found with stereo retrofits, such as dealing with new reflection paths from all the additional loudspeakers, for example,” Addis explains.

“The desire from Headliner founder and CEO Paul Watson and the team to ensure the room was of the highest quality possible was very clear, from the build through to the equipment provision. Given The Pioneer Club’s rich musical heritage and community and grassroots focus, it is fabulous to have Dolby Atmos as part of its future. Having a top-class studio available to the community is an opportunity for the next generation of local acts, and the direct link through the next door venue opens up a whole new offering for live recording and mixing.”

Atmos Mindset

“We decided to go for a number of different interfaces, partly due to the fact we are a content studio, so we needed the ability to plug different products in and have a play with them,” Watson reveals. “So, we decided on the RME Audio MADIface and a Ferrofish A32 Pro for going into the SSL.

“Our main output for Atmos mixing is a pair of Lectrosonics BOB 88 devices, which gives us 16 channels of Dante output. The conversion is remarkably good, so we have been utterly blown away by the sound quality. We also have 16 channels of input if we so desire; we could actually accommodate a 9.1.6 system with 16 channels if need be.

“For the binaural side of things, we can flip between that Dante output and our Audient ORIA, which is an excellent box - it gives us the binaural we want and various other things, as well as local I/O. Plus, it can connect directly to the Dolby renderer. On our [Black Lion] patch bay we have the ability to jump the ORIA directly to our speakers, and when we’re doing surround or Dolby Atmos mixes we tend to leave the ORIA plugged in as that means we can flip between binaural, full surround, and all points

in between. It allows us quick and easy access to all the variations of surround mixing. We also have the ability [with the renderer] to select Apple’s own distribution of Dolby Atmos, so you can hear how it is going to work for those subscribed to Apple Music.”

The studio also boasts some key outboard for further flavour: Neve 1073s, Focusrite ISAs, and a number of Black Lion preamps and compressors currently sit in the racks, with more kit on the way; and with regard to outputs, the multi-purpose nature of the facility dictates that a raft of options is available.

The full range of technology on offer, Watson emphasises, is emblematic of the studio’s modus operandi.

“The keyword when we put all this together was ‘flexibility’,” he states. “We wanted the studio to be able to do anything, and to be as flexible as possible, so we put a strong focus on music education, Dolby Atmos, and also being able to accommodate post-production work. The three 50-inch Leyard LED screens which we mounted on the back walls of the Atmos room linked to our main Mac monitor are fantastic for projects of any size, from huge music productions to movie scores and working to picture. So we just tried to think about everything, really.”

“IT WAS ALWAYS OUR INTENTION TO BUILD A FANTASTIC DOLBY ATMOS ROOM, BUT ACTUALLY DOING IT IS ANOTHER THING ENTIRELY.”

DANTE ECOSYSTEM

One of the most notable aspects of the space is the ability to record from stage to studio via Dante. Due to the proximity of The Pioneer’s 400-cap live venue to the Atmos room, it is now possible to capture live performances in real time and produce a fully immersive mix if so desired. And with demand for this type of content rising exponentially, the future looks very bright indeed.

“At the moment we are running a Dante Virtual Soundcard which gives us 64 channels of I/O at 48kHz,” adds Watson. “The reason for going down the route of Dante was not just because we believe it is a very high-quality transport system for audio - and Rick [Dickerson] has used it himself in live environments - but from our point of view, the studio is on a site that includes three venues, and that is where its true potential lies. The Suet Yard is our bar/caféan acoustic venue that can also host DJs; the skate park has an incredible amount of potential and can probably hold 800 people; and then there is our main live venue, which is a 400-capacity room with a full line array system and LED wall.

“So, it dawned on us that being able to use those spaces, as well as

PAUL

WATSON,

HEADLINER FOUNDER & CEO

record live performances - maybe even a Dolby Atmos mix of a live performance - would be fantastic. There is a Soundcraft Vi1000 console in the main venue with a Dante card in it; having that Dante output means audio can be sent directly from that desk via Cat5, and then straight onto a DAW into the studio. It won’t be long until people are wanting to do more live recordings and mixes in Dolby Atmos, and for education and experimentation, this is a real USP for Headliner and The Pioneer.”

The studio is now officially Dolbycertified, making The Pioneer Club the first Dolby Atmos Music Studio in Hertfordshire. Furthermore, some of the UK’s top artists have already been making full use of its capabilities.

“It was always our intention to build a fantastic Dolby Atmos room, but actually doing it is another thing entirely,” says Watson. “It would not have been possible without our friends in the industry and forwardthinking companies like Genelec and SSL seeing what we were attempting to do, jumping on it, and helping us maximise the space to entirely new levels. And this is just the beginning.

“Some significant artists have now made music in here, and we will be able to talk more about those projects in due course - but the feedback has

been fantastic, and everyone seems to want to come back,” concludes Watson. “We have also been working hard on getting footfall into the live spaces: our weekly open mic nights [in The Suet Yard] have started really well; and we are now working with some major live music agents to bring in touring acts to the live venue. The future is bright.”

Looking forward to 2025, Headliner has plans to build two Academies: a Music Academy dedicated to musical instrument tuition for kids as young as five; and a Pro Academy for students who want to dive into music production or follow a career in pro audio or AV. The Dolby Atmos room will be pivotal in both, leaning in particular towards group sessions and masterclasses.

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& JESSICA WILDE

Photo credit: Olivia Brytz Media

“I REALLY FELT COMPELLED TO WRITE A SONG THAT WAS ACTUALLY ABOUT ‘GOOD’ LOVE, AND I FELT LIKE JOSH WAS THE PERFECT PERSON.”

In this twelfth LD Systems Live Sessions, powered by Headliner, Josh Barry (MOBO UnSung Class of 2023) and Jessica Wilde performed original song Love Like This live at Signal House Studios.

Both vocal powerhouses, Josh and Jess together create an exceptional tone; here they performed through an LD Systems MAUI G3 rig and MON 15 A G3 Stage Monitor, and Earthworks SR117 microphones. Headliner caught up with the pair after their performance…

How did the collaboration between the two of you come about?

Josh: We’ve been working together for quite a while because we both worked with Piers [Aggett] from Rudimental on a track, and hopefully that’s gonna be coming out soon. We just had to do something together.

Jess: Do you know where we met? I was thinking about this the other day; Josh was doing one of his totally crazy, immersive shows called The Josh Barry Experience and he had people dancing in the middle and was getting people up to sing with him. One of our mutual friends pushed me in and was like ‘sing!’, so I sang and then me and Josh started going off together, and we

were like, ‘oh, yeah!’ From that moment, every single show that Josh has done or I’ve done, we’ve had each other come down to perform. Whenever I get on stage with Josh it’s good vibes. And then we wrote a song together, well a couple of songs actually, but this is the first one that’s come out. My album came out on the 13th of June, which Love Like This is a part of.

Tell us about the inspiration behind Love Like This.

Josh: Love Like This is just about being in life and then kind of stumbling into what you didn’t realise you were looking for. When we were writing it we were just like, ‘this is about the best love.’

Jess: My last project was really about wading through the toxic relationships and all of that, and with this project it’s a lot more about love generally. I really felt compelled, and wanted to write a song that was actually about ‘good’ love, and I felt like Josh was the perfect person. I’ve never written like an actual proper love song before and it just flowed very naturally.

Josh: It can sometimes be hard to write something like that without being really cheesy, but it was really good. I think we did it in about half a day.

How did you find performing through the LD Systems MAUI rig?

Jess: I found using the LD Systems rig really, really great. When I heard it back it sounded beautiful and crystal clear.

Josh: As soon as we came in, the sound just felt really nice and really clean. It sounds absolutely crisp. I’d definitely recommend the system to anyone.

PIERS AGGETT THE SOUND OF RUDIMENTAL

As part of British band Rudimental, producer Piers Aggett has played a pivotal role in shaping the sound of not only his own outfit, but the East London music scene from which they emerged. Headliner caught up with him from the band’s studio for a chat about his life in music so far, production techniques, and the invaluable role of Neve within his workflow.

“This place has a bit of history,” Piers Aggett tells Headliner as he appears before us via Zoom from Rudimental’s Major Tom studio in Shoreditch. “In the ‘80s it was the Eurhythmics’ place and then some garage heads had it in the ‘90s. I’m not too sure what happened after that, but we took it over around 2010 and we’ve made all of our albums here. It’s a nice location; a good hub. We’ve had Ed Sheeran, Dizzee Rascal, Stormzy, you name it in here. MNEK used to have

the side room. It’s a special place and I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

It’s a space that has evidently served Aggett and his bandmates Kesi Dryden and Leon ‘Locksmith’ Rolle well over the past 14 years. Together they have produced some of the most successful drum & bass records of the 21st century, topping the charts with their debut album Home (2013) and its follow-up We the Generation (2015) topping the UK albums chart.

They have also achieved platinum record sales around the world, scooped awards at the BRITs and MOBO Awards, and received a Mercury Prize nomination for Home

It was the burgeoning UK garage movement bubbling beneath the streets of East London around the turn of the millennium that first prompted Aggett to start creating his own music.

“EACH SONG IS SO DIFFERENTTHERE ISN’T ONE SET WAY OF WORKING.”

“My dad got a PC around ’98 and I was about 12,” he says, walking us through his first foray into the world of songwriting and composition. “Grime was happening, and my dad was a Junglist so we always had jungle on in the house on vinyl. He was also in wedding covers bands and used to play in local pubs on the weekend as a second job. So I was brought up around that and played in his band when I was in my teens My sister was a garage head, but I was into grime.

So, I started making grime beats. I was DJing on pirate radio, making music on Reason and Cubase. That was around the time of Dizzee, Wiley, So Solid Crew. That was the scene I was involved in. I used to make music with rappers and singers on my eight-channel Cubase setup. I can’t even remember what mic I was using, but it was something basic. It was my first taste of music production and getting something played on the radio, albeit pirate radio. And all of us in Rudimental came from that scene.

“It was incredible,” he continues. “It was crazy what was happening in East London. Hearing people like Dizzee Rascal on Rinse FM in those early days… growing up as a kid, that was like my dad hearing Bob Marley on the radio in the ‘70s. I’m not comparing them as artists, I just mean I’d never heard anything like it.”

It was around 10 years later that Aggett started to notice the needle shifting on his own career in music.

“There was the house music scene around 2009-2010 and I had made some money from a song on a compilation,” he elaborates. “That was my first ever check. I spent that on studio rent and was still working two jobs at the time. But not long after that Feel The Love came out and we moved into the pop scene with our soulful, uplifting drum & bass. When it went to No. 1 that was when I could quit my job and focus full-time on music. I was still learning then - I’m still learning now - but at that point I was still developing my craft. It was a big shift in my life.”

Having worked and collaborated with an eclectic array of artists, Aggett’s production process has indeed developed. As well as growing his studio toolkit and technical prowess, one of the most important skills he has cultivated is the ability to pivot and adapt from project-to-project.

“The production process tends to change a lot with us,” he says. “We never go away and write an album

over a few weeks like a rock band might do. We make ideas on our own with our laptops and then bring them together. In our studio there are lots of keyboards and synths, guitars, and a drum kit, so we can add real instruments where we feel we need them. We’ll call in other musicians for that. So, if I have a beat that I’ve made and I want to hear a brass section, I’ll get a horn section in. Each song is so different - I can’t say there is one set way of working. We tend to jam over each other’s ideas, and we also get our drummer Beanie in sometimes to create beats and vibes, which we can take into our writing sessions.”

“I’ve learnt how important it is to keep your sessions clean from the off – that’s come back to bite me bad, and we’ve lost sessions,” he continues with a laugh. “We’re not a very organised outfit! We’re like, let’s throw everything at it, listen to it a few hours later and then mute what we don’t like. One song might take two years, and another might take two days, and then we put it out a month later.

“The vocal signal chain for us is massively important,” he continues. “When you have Emeli Sande or Jess Glynne in the studio, the demo vocal can be the one, so you want to make sure you’re recording it the best you can. We have a Bock version of the Telefunken 251 and we run that through a Neve 1073OXP. I can’t imagine using anything other than a lovely warm Neve on a microphone! And we have a Shadow Hills compressor. With a good mic and a Neve you really can’t go wrong.”

Rudimental have a pair of Neve 1073s in a lunch box setup – one for vocals, one for guitar - and Agget’s most recent acquisition is a Neve 1073OPX, which he was mightily impressed with after using a loan unit on some recent drum tracks.

“We love that old school warm sound that you get with the 1073. It marries really well with Rudimental’s sound; it’s actually a really crucial part of our sound. And when I tried out the 1073OPX, although the sonics are slightly different, you’re getting the core 1073 sound across eight preamps, so it’s perfect for sticking on a drum kit, or running various synths through. We recorded some tracks recently for the new album, and [Rudimental drummer] Beanie’s kit sounded great through the OPX.”

Recently, after trialing Neve’s 1073OPX unit on a few sessions with Rudimental drummer, Beanie, Aggett acquired the unit as a great multi-functional tool: “The Neve element is one of the most crucial aspects of our

sound; its the rich sonic warmth that flows through our recordings.”

In addition to the innate audio characteristics of the 1073OPX, Aggett also notes that it can elevate the overall quality of the signal change in its totality.

“One of the amazing things about the 1073 is you can even take a cheaper mic and gain it, and with a good singer it’s like you don’t need a really posh mic,” he explains. “The Neve preamp just boosts the right frequencies. It gives the most honest replication of what a good mic is trying to do, so it’s great to have in the studio from a sonic perspective.

“And it’s not just vocals. Guitars, bass, they all go through the 1073 lunch box and they sound fat, in your face, and warm. It just brings that rich, 1970s warmth and quality that we love.”

As for the future, Aggett reveals that a new Rudimental album is almost complete, although no release date has been set.

“We’re finishing our next album over the next few weeks,” he says. “We are going to play some clubs in America before the end of the year, then it’s all about getting the album out, which we are really excited about. It’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” he concludes. “So, we’re really looking forward to getting it out.”

AMS-NEVE.COM

RUDIMENTAL.CO.UK

MYTH OR TRUTH?

The best sounding live console was originally designed for broadcast.

Hearing is believing – sign up and find out for yourself.

byCOLBY RAMSEY

STREAMING TO SUCCESS

RICHARD RAY

Headliner recently discovered how AUDIX microphones are supporting the musical endeavors of popular streamer Richard Ray…

At one time or another, every musician has played along to their favorite bands and thought, “If only I could get paid for this.” Richard Ray does. Having built a robust fanbase on live streaming platform Twitch, where he is known as officedrummer, he performs drum covers three days per week for up to eight hours per session, covering as many as 100 songs, eight of which he preserves on his YouTube channel, Office Drummer Daily.

He responds to viewer requests, often taking on songs on the spot without having played them before. His musical chops are matched only by his improvisational intuitions, and both are further supported by his AUDIX microphones. These include the D6 on kick drum, several D4 on his toms, and the PDX720 studio dynamic mic as his primary narration and ’casting mic.

“I was at one of those assemblies at school where they try to get kids to join a band or orchestra, and I was just fascinated by the drums,” he says of his beginnings. “Later, the first album I ever bought for myself was Dookie by Green Day, which had so much great drumming on it. At 14 years old, I got my own drum set and started playing in bands. After high school, I went on tour with my band all over the world. It was called 100 Onces, and we were a two-piece instrumental math-rock band.”

Ray’s tipping point into streaming was one that is all too familiar to performers by now. “When the Covid-19 lockdowns started happening in 2020, I obviously couldn’t play with live bands anymore,” he recalls. “I discovered live streaming, and somehow I have been able to build a following and sustain myself doing it.”

A cornerstone of his prodigious streaming output is a high-quality drum sound with worry-free workflow, which is why he relies on AUDIX microphones. “I first learned about them hanging out with Thomas Lang and seeing AUDIX all over his studio,” he says. “Thomas is the drummer of stOrk, a progressive metal band out of L.A., and has also worked with John Wetton,

who played bass and sang in King Crimson and the band Asia.

“Because I cover a lot of metal and heavy rock tunes — Metallica, Tool, and a lot more — the D6 is essential to my kick sound,” Ray continues. “It just gives me the big beef with that nice little click on top.”

The D4, or rather several of them, adorn his toms. “Not only do they sound great, but the way they can clip directly onto the drums makes them so easy to ‘set and forget’ for recording sessions and streaming,” he says.

Of course, Ray is not just playing — he’s talking to his Twitch audience and explaining what he’s doing as he does it. For this, he finds the PDX720 to be unparalleled. “The PDX is just so good at capturing my voice clearly and communicating what I’m saying above the drum kit,” he explains. “It doesn’t get too much bleed from the drums, it pairs very well with my UAD compressor, and importantly, it’s sturdy. If I’m talking while playing eight hours straight, there’s a chance I’ll hit it with a drumstick given how tightly everything is set up. I don’t worry that the PDX will get damaged.”

Ray has sage advice for musicians

who would love to monetize their online presence.

“Intuitively, streaming seems perfect for hermits,” he cautions. “But at baseline it’s about building community. Think of it like a show in a small club, only it’s even more intimate in a way. Beyond your musical talent, people are showing up to make connections with each other just as much as with you. So, your main role is to provide a safe, welcoming space for them to do that. Talent alone doesn’t mean you’ll build a following, just like it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a gig.”

With the goal of building more community in mind, Ray’s next online adventure will incorporate an even more interactive format, not to mention his trusty PDX720. “I had made a few Instagram videos where I asked people to guess a song just by the drumbeat,” he teases. “Game shows are popular on Twitch, so I’m going to formalize this into a show called ‘Guess This Song.’ I’ll be the host, so I won’t just be sitting behind the drum kit all the time. A host needs a great speaking mic, so the PDX is going to occupy a central place of honor!”

JOE ELLIOTT

DEF LEPPARD | LEAD SINGER | 8424 CONSOLE

Our Engineer Ronan and I wanted a Neve, and we identified the 8424 - which is a magic desk. I have one in my studio here, and Ronan has one in his studio - it works really well.

THE FREESHOOTER

THE BREGENZ FESTIVAL

The Bregenz Festival, held annually in Austria, is a renowned cultural event celebrated for its dazzling open-air performances – the main attraction being a showstopping floating stage upon Lake Constance. Established in 1946, the festival showcases a rich, cultural program of opera, classical music, and theatre, attracting artists and audiences from around the world. Each summer, audiences enjoy performances in a breathtaking lakeside setting amid the scenic backdrop of the Austrian Alps.

The jewel in the festival’s crown is undoubtedly the Seebühne – the largest floating stage in the world – which boasts a 6,658-seat openair amphitheatre. One of its most striking features is the enormous, visually captivating stage designs that reflect the themes of the operas performed. This year’s production was Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz ( The Freeshooter ), which was staged on a vast, elaborate 300-tonne set that was designed to represent an apocalyptic scenery with the remnants of a village after the Thirty Years War.

Indeed, the Bregenz Festival is not just a feast for the ears, but also for the eyes, making it a unique highlight

on the international arts calendar. Headliner travelled to Austria to take a look behind the scenes, and discovered how a Lawo mc²96 grand production console makes this extraordinary event possible.

“It’s a huge set – even for Bregenzer Festspiele’s standard,” nods Clemens Wannemacher, head of the Bregenz Festival’s sound department. “We have close to 7,000 seats here and the stage is very close to the audience area. It’s very wide, plus it’s very deep. Preparation takes a long time, so we start three to four years before opening night.”

You read that correctly: years of meticulous preparation go into each and every Bregenz Festival performance to ensure complete audience immersion. Consider the stage’s dimensions alone (and that’s without factoring in that it’s floating on a lake): the stage this year was approximately 45 metres deep and 70 metres wide, and the smallest distance from the edge of the stage to the first row of spectators is just under four metres.

To ensure each audience member experiences pristine audio in this outdoor venue, the sound must deliver a spatial sound experience that closely resembles that of a live music theatre.

“In regards to the audio, the most important part is to hide the speakers in the set,” discloses Wannemacher, gesturing around the expansive open-air amphitheatre. “Also, the actors and the singers move around the whole stage, so it’s difficult for us to keep

track of wherever they are. One thing we really focus on is making it as easy as possible for the audience to follow the singers, so that they listen and they just know [where the singers are] – that’s the goal.”

The audio system is unique in that it utilises a sophisticated spatial audio rendering technique characterised by the creation of virtual acoustic environments. The orchestra plays live in one location, the singers perform on stage, which is all brought together in a breathtaking acoustic experience for the visitors by Wannemacher.

“We have the orchestra sitting inside the festival house, and we transmit them to the lake stage outside,” he explains. “There are close to 60 mics – and that’s only for the orchestra.”

The mixing console making these technical feats possible is a Lawo mc²96 powered by an A__UHD Core DSP engine, which manages all microphone signals from the

singers on stage, the choir and the orchestra performing in the closeby opera house, as well as the playout feeds. Reflecting today’s requirements for immersive audio productions, the mc²96 provides not only superb tools for surround sound mixing at the Bregenz Festival, but also a dedicated elevation controller as standard.

In multi-user mode, 64 rotary encoders in each 16-fader bay give direct access to all important parameters to create an additional central control panel and allow for independent operation and monitoring of a second engineer.

“We have two guys mixing: one mixing the voices and one mixing the orchestra, stage musicians and everything else,” says Wannemacher. The mc²96’s automated mixing capabilities include an Automix function that adjusts the levels of active and inactive mics, while maintaining a natural sounding ambient level.

“THE GOAL HERE IS TO REALLY SURROUND THE AUDIENCE WITH A VERY NATURAL-SOUNDING ‘ROOM’”

This feature provides Wannemacher with unique functionality for the event due to its numerous singers and orchestra members.

“The other challenge was to make sure that the radio mics work in this set,” he explains. “The set consists of a huge pool, and the actors really use the water! They are swimming, diving, kneeling and playing in the water. We tested a lot of different mics to make sure that they do work once they get wet.”

Tying everything together is the Lawo mc²96 console: “The Lawo mc²96 is a central part of Bregenz Festival,” stresses Wannemacher. “We really used the new multichannel format features: you can use any multi-channel format you want, and we use mono, of course, and stereo, but also 5.1. and 9.1.4, on the same production. That’s really handy. FOH takes care of all the ins and outs that are going through the system, which is quite extensive. We really maxed out our 512 licence!”

The mc²96 boasts up to 2,496 DSP channels and up to 256 summing buses, which Wannemacher finds essential for this event. “A big advantage about the Lawo console is that it can handle a lot of channels,” he nods. “It’s very reliable. For instance, it has many VCA groups and we group them together so you can mix the whole show with four fingers. Most of the show, we just have two faders for the orchestra, plus reverb, and

then another fader for the stage musicians and another fader for the choir, and all of that makes up more than 100 channels.

“We have a lot of sound effects,” he points out. “We pre-produced them in 9.1.4 to really emphasise the immersive possibilities that we have here: birds, crows, wind, wolves howling and a church tower.”

Another challenge was to compensate for the lack of reflective surfaces typical of concert halls and opera houses. This was accomplished using innovative electro-acoustic techniques that replicate the acoustic experience of an acoustically treated venue. Outside they may be, but the audience still expects a listening experience akin to that of a concert hall. “We have three main goals to achieve here,” agrees Wannemacher. “The first goal is to make it loud enough so that everyone can hear. The second goal is to create nice acoustic surroundings. The third is to amplify the singers where they are on stage: if they move, the amplification has to move with them.”

He elaborates: “We have a huge audience area. We don’t have walls, we don’t have a ceiling, we don’t have a back wall, so we have to recreate all of this. The goal here is to really surround the audience with a very natural-sounding ‘room’.”

To achieve this, the audio team set

up a complicated mic system within a hall, and then recreated it outside in the open air. Also key to the success of the outdoor audio was Müller-BBM’s VIVACE, an electronic room acoustics system designed to improve the acoustics of a listening space (even if that’s outside!) without robbing it of its individual characteristics.

“Using the mc²96, we mixed the signals from the room mics and the VIVACE system for the surrounds,” says Wannemacher. “That’s the 3D audio part of our system, and we have a custom built machine for that. It’s called the SpatialSound Wave by Fraunhofer Institut. We can feed 64 objects into the machine, and this helps us move the objects throughout the sound system.”

As the sun sets over Lake Constance, Wannemacher reflects on another successful Bregenz Festival, which once again pushed the boundaries of creativity and sound, ensuring its place as a pinnacle of cultural excellence year on year.

“If you are looking for a good night and to be entertained for two hours, then it’s the right spot to come to,” he smiles.

Photo credit: Kevin Yu

r d s byDAN GUMBLE

GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN

AJA

Canadian artist AJA has been enjoying her busiest year yet, releasing numerous singles and writing new material at every conceivable opportunity. Headliner caught up with her to talk creativity, the art of collaboration, and why she’s always ‘looking for a different angle’ in her songwriting…

“I’m currently up north in Muskoka, and I’m just hanging out,” a beaming AJA informs Headliner as we join her via Zoom from her home a couple of hours outside of Toronto. She’s taking a short break between writing and releasing new music, most recently in the form of her latest single – at the time of our conversation at least –Little Black Dress

“I’ve been trying to write as much as I possibly can,” she tells us, recapping her year so far. “This summer I did a Nashville songwriting trip and I was there for about five days and I got five really cool songs that I’m excited about. I went on two tours, which were really fun, and I’ve just been getting ready for some new releases. It’s so much fun though, I love it.”

Her excitement and passion for music are immediately palpable. With virtually every exchange during our time together she speaks of the love she feels for songwriting, performing, and collaborating.

“I grew up loving music and singing for anyone who would listen,” she says, explaining how her relationship with music first began. “Before I was speaking, I was humming along to music. And then as I grew up my parents realized I was not so bad, and started teaching me different types of music. I started different lessons and classes and really learned to love music as a culture, learning about different styles and how to push myself vocally.

As I got older, I started to learn how to write music and I just fell in love with it and have continued doing that ever since. From early on I was learning how to push myself with my voice,

and then I learned how to play guitar and piano. That’s when I learned how to accompany myself.”

Unsurprisingly, the variety of styles and genres AJA was absorbing through her music education was mirrored in the music she was listening to when not sat with a guitar or piano.

“I learned jazz when I was really young,” she recalls. “This was when I was around six. I also loved pop – I was a big fan of Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, and Beyonce. But Ariana Grande was definitely my favorite. But jazz is what helped me learn my own soul. It taught me how to push myself and find my voice.”

An already precocious talent, AJA’s early aptitude for music was soon to be recognised far beyond the realm of her friends and family when, at the age of just 10, she entered

and emerged victorious from the Perez Hilton Can You Sing? cover competition.

“That’s when my parents realized, OK, maybe it’s not just us that thinks she’s really good,” AJA laughs. “Maybe other people think so too, and that’s when I got exposed to a lot more people. It was on YouTube, so I got a lot more viewers than I normally would have gotten, especially at 10. I was on different Toronto news stations, radio stations, and I absolutely loved every second of it. It’s stuff that some people might not like but I absolutely loved it. That’s when I started to focus on writing, releasing, finding management. I was very young, so my parents were obviously very involved with that, too.”

This willingness not just to embrace but to dive headlong into every available opportunity has opened AJA up to all manner of artistic possibilities. It’s led her to work with an eclectic range of collaborators. The thread that binds her work together and maintains its distinct identity is, she says, her focus on writing about relatable experiences from a different perspective.

“JAZZ HELPED ME LEARN MY OWN SOUL. IT TAUGHT ME HOW TO FIND MY VOICE.”

“I always want people to connect with my music,” she elaborates. “I feel that if a story in a song is relatable to me then it’s definitely happening to a bunch of other people out there. I’m a 20-year-old girl, so there’s always something going on in my life. There’s always some sort of drama or something that I need to get out and write about. And I like to find a different angle on things.

“As for my process, I don’t really have a preference as to how I write as long as it feels authentic. I like to push myself vocally, so I enjoy creating melodies that push me out of my comfort zone.”

Her recent songwriting trip to Nashville is one that she points to as an example of the way she likes to work in the studio, seeking to make the very most of every session.

“I flew in and within 30 minutes I was writing,” she says. “Every single day I was writing, and it was so much fun. I love being in Nashville and getting to write with new people. You’re meeting new people every day. It’s so easy to just get the songs flowing when you’re in a groove every single day. It’s like, okay, what did I make yesterday? What do I want to write about today? How am I going to make it even stronger than the one from yesterday? How can I make it different? How can I make it about something else? Or maybe about the same subject but from a different angle?

“Being able to do trips like that is so amazing and each person is so different that if I went into each session and said, OK, I want to write the exact same song, it would still end up being different. For me, going to a session is like going into therapy. I might not know the person, but I’m going to tell them everything - every little detail about my life. Sometimes it doesn’t work and that’s just because not everyone’s going to work perfectly together, but I feel like most of the time I end up getting some really cool music. And sometimes I create relationships with these people and will go on to have a whole body of work with them.”

While one session from the next may vary drastically depending on the collaborator, how much of a factor does the location itself play in AJA’s process?

“It really depends on where I am mentally,” she considers. “So, for Nashville, for example, I was living in Toronto. So, I did go to Nashville, but my head was still writing about Toronto. For me it’s more about my circumstances and where I’ve been

as opposed to where I am. I think the style of writing is a little bit different, depending on where you are.

“In Nashville, they really do use music as a 9-5 kind of job,” she continues.

“So, they work really hard, and they get these songs out as quickly as they can.

LA is a lot slower and chill, you know?

Like, let’s get a bite to eat. Let’s hang out. Let’s talk about it for two hours. So, it’s very different in the form of the way the song comes together.”

For now, AJA looks set to close out a hectic 2024 in similar fashion to how she started it - by working on yet more new material and paving the way for an even busier 2025.

“I have an EP that I’m hoping will come out before the new year,” she signs off. “But it’ll most likely come out early January. I just can’t wait for people to hear it!”

INSTA: @ITSAJA

‘ENHANCING THAILAND’S CREATIVE LANDSCAPE’

KANTANA SOUND STUDIO

Traithep Wongpaiboon, pro audio veteran and managing director of Thailand’s Kantana Sound Studio, tells Headliner about his journey in audio, the studio’s ambition to enhance the nation’s entertainment industry, and the role of Merging Technologies in bringing those ambitions to life…

When did your career in audio begin?

My career in audio began in 1992, during the music industry’s transition from the analog era into the digital world. I started by recording, mixing, and mastering music, gaining a strong foundation in sound engineering. About a decade later, I transitioned into audio post-production, focusing on dubbing and mixing for major Hollywood studios. This shift led to opportunities in film, and soon I was overseeing original audio postproduction for local Thai films.

In 2000, I took on a management role at Kantana Sound Studio, which was the most advanced audio postproduction facility at the time. Since then, we have expanded Kantana

Sound Studio into a comprehensive audio service provider, offering sound design, Foley, ADR, mixing, translation, and dubbing across multiple media feature films, OTT platforms, gaming, and more. Our clients come from all over Asia, especially Southeast Asia, which has driven us to expand with additional branches in Vietnam and Indonesia. Today, we operate 42 studios, including five theatrical mixing stages, 12 ADR stages, two Foley stages, 10 near-field mixing studios, 11 editing suites, and two music mastering studios. It’s been an exciting journey from music to a full-scale post-production business, allowing us to serve clients throughout the region with world-class audio solutions.

What is your ambition and vision for the studio as managing director?

The inspiration to start Kantana Sound Studio emerged from a profound passion for audio production and a commitment to enhancing the creative landscape of Thailand’s entertainment industry. Launched in 1994 as part of the Kantana Group, which has a rich history in media production since its founding in 1951, the studio was established with the ambition to fill a significant gap in high-quality audio services for film, television, and music.

From the outset, our vision was to set a new standard in audio postproduction within Southeast Asia. We aimed to create a full-service audio post-production studio capable of delivering world-class quality across feature films. Over time, we expanded our offering to include services for OTT content, gaming, music score mixing, and mastering.

Our goal was to build a talented team and state-of-the-art facility that could not only meet global standards but also push the boundaries of what’s possible in sound. This includes everything from sound design and Foley to dubbing and immersive audio experiences.

At the core of our mission is the desire to bring together artistry, technology, and storytelling. We take pride in our ongoing commitment to this ambition as we continue to expand our capabilities and provide unparalleled experiences for our clients.

What have been some of the most memorable projects you have worked on?

One of the most memorable experiences in my career has been the honor of working with the renowned director Wong Kar Wai. Collaborating with him and his team offered invaluable insights

into the cinematic world, where we learned so much on both technical and creative levels. Working on his films required meticulous attention and countless days of refining every sonic detail, but it was always an immensely rewarding experience. Wong Kar Wai’s films are known for their emotional depth and visual elegance, and to be entrusted with helping shape their sound was both a privilege and a point of pride for us. Each project with him is a reminder of why we’re so passionate about what we do, and seeing the impact of his films worldwide makes us proud to have played a part as sonic creators in bringing his vision to life.

How big a focus is there on immersive/ Dolby Atmos projects?

Immersive audio, including Dolby Atmos, Atmos Music, and Apple Spatial Audio, is a major focus at Kantana Sound Studio. As audience expectations for sound quality continue to evolve, we’re fully committed to providing cuttingedge immersive experiences that enhance storytelling and pull viewers and listeners deeper into the world of each project. We’ve equipped multiple stages with Dolby Atmos and have dedicated teams specialized in spatial sound design to ensure every project meets the highest standards.

This approach is essential not only for feature films and OTT content but also for gaming and music production, where immersive sound greatly enhances emotional impact

and depth. By offering Atmos Music and Apple Spatial Audio, we’re able to expand our services into music production, helping artists and creators deliver an immersive listening experience that resonates deeply. Immersive audio is a core part of our studio’s vision, and we’re continuously investing in the latest technology and expertise to remain leaders in this area.

Tell us about your relationship with Merging Technologies – how did you first discover their products?

We first heard about Pyramix from peers in the industry – it always came up as a DAW for quality. Then, a coworker mentioned that Merging also made great interfaces and suggested we try one out if we had the chance. That led to a month-long demo with a Hapi unit and we quickly learned what it could do. After some conversations and meetings with Merging’s engineers, it became clear how we could use their units to expand and replace existing Pro Tools hardware and start using audio over IP to create a reliable, high-quality multichannel backbone that would connect all our recording studios and mixing stages. That insight showed us the flexibility of their gear, and it’s been the core part of our setup since.

What are the key pieces of Merging gear that you use at the studio today?

We started off with a few Horus and Hapi units and built a dedicated AoIP infrastructure around them, which we later expanded with the Anubis monitor control units when they became available. Anubis made it easy to switch between mix stems, like DMEs and OV vs Foreign. It also switches easily between the different immersive formats like Theatrical Atmos, Auro 3D, and the standard Dolby 7.1/5.1 configurations. Now, four of our five theatrical mix stages run on Horus units. This setup gives us a lot of flexibility – it connects easily to the DARC, AES67 and all the way to the power amps and older hardware units such as the TC m6000, which are now patchable in any room. And if in need, we can add an extra DAW to a mix stage - all it takes is a LAN cable, with no need for complex cabling.

Our Foley stages and several ADR stages run on Hapi units, and we also use Anubis in our smaller recording studios. Across all of these spaces, we rely on Merging’s gear for its clean mic preamps and flexible AoIP patching.

What really sets Merging’s products apart is how reliable they are. The firmware and functionality just keep getting better with each update, which means the gear adapts as we do. We also appreciate the dual redundant power supply – it’s a small detail, but it gives us extra peace of mind. And Merging’s support has been great whenever we’ve needed it.

How would you describe the state of the recording industry in Thailand?

The recording industry in Thailand is vibrant and continually evolving, with a unique blend of traditional and modern influences that shape its sound. There’s a growing demand for high-quality production across film, music, and digital content. Thailand has become a regional hub for audio post-production, with studios like ours working on everything from local feature films to international projects.

What does the future hold for you?

The future for Kantana Sound Studio is focused on growth, innovation, and expanding our capabilities to meet the evolving demands of the industry. We’re continuously investing in new technology and advanced audio formats to keep pushing the boundaries of what we can offer. Our goal is to make Kantana a leader not only in traditional audio post-production but also in emerging areas like gaming audio, Atmos Music, and multilingual localization, serving clients across Southeast Asia and beyond.

Another priority is skill development for our team. As technology advances, so do the skills required, and we want to ensure our team remains at the forefront of the industry. This means ongoing training, exploring AIenhanced audio tools, and maintaining our commitment to creative excellence.

Personally, I’m excited about these growth opportunities and am passionate about expanding Kantana’s reputation on a global scale. We aim to continue delivering world-class audio experiences, pushing creative limits, and building partnerships that allow us to bring impactful soundscapes to audiences everywhere. The future is about elevating our work and staying true to our mission of combining artistry and technology to create the best audio experiences possible.

MITSKI THE LIVE EVOLUTION OF Words

by DANGUM

B L E

Nashville-based Worley Sound has achieved L-Acoustics Certified Provider (CPr) status, immediately putting its new designation to work on Mitski’s expanded North American tour, Headliner discovers…

The critically acclaimed singersongwriter’s latest outing, initially set to conclude in April, grew to include a second leg of dates in August and September, featuring larger venues such as a three-night stand at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Morrison, Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Portland’s Moda Center, two nights at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and concluding at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl. This expansion demanded a shift from relying on house PAs to carrying a dedicated system, leading to the deployment of a comprehensive L-Acoustics K Series package powered by the new LA7.16 amplified controllers, giving the tour a newly expanded fidelity in these venues of up to 20,000-capacity.

The tour’s growth mirrors Mitski’s rising popularity and the increasing scale of her performances.

“For the first leg of the tour, we were reliant on house PAs, which, despite the inconsistency, tends to be a good way to test drive systems,” explains FOH engineer Patrick Scott, who has been with Mitski since the spring of 2022. “For the first few months, we used just about anything you can put sound through. For the current run, we knew it was time to carry our own PA.”

The decision to partner with Worley Sound and utilize the L-Acoustics K Series came after careful consideration of the tour’s evolving needs. Scott continues: “Through prior experience and conversations with Worley, we decided on K Series. The main reason people come to these shows is their connection with Mitski.

With this system, we’re getting that intimacy and clarity while still having the space in the sound field to show off the arrangements and subtleties of the musicians.”

The system consists of 32 K2 for mains, 24 K3 for out-fills, and a quantity of Kara II paired with 16 K1-SB and 16 KS28 subs, plus eight A10 frontfills and four A15 stage side-fills. Notably, this marks the first tour to travel with a K Series system driven completely by LA7.16. Subs are driven by LA12X amplified controllers. Two P1 processors and an LC16D drive all the controllers in a redundant Milan-AVB network, with analog as the fallback system. Utilizing the M1 measurement

suit capabilities of P1 allows system engineer Eric Rogers to quickly and effectively time and tune the room.

Rogers, who has also recently been out with ODESZA and Bon Iver, elaborates on the system’s capabilities: “The single box resolution of K Series driven by LA7.16 allows us incredible gains in precision for the SPL target spanning our listening audience. With the high resolution and implementation of the latest autofilters, the definition in the LF response of the array from top to bottom is quite impressive.”

“IT’S BEEN VERY HELPFUL HAVING THE SAME SYSTEM SHOW TO SHOW.”

According to Scott, the versatility of the L-Acoustics system has proven crucial for accommodating the tour’s diverse venue requirements. “This system scales rather nicely,” he notes. “Not only can it scale in size, but we’re also drastically changing acoustic environments from theaters to arenas to sheds, and the system works well in all of these configurations.”

Monitor engineer Ashoka Kanungo, while not directly in front of the PA each night, appreciates the consistency the new system brings to the tour, with the K1-SB flown behind the K2 to control LF energy.

“It has been very helpful having the same system show to show,” she shares. “When we weren’t carrying PA, I was constantly battling the different sub configurations - there were a lot of center-flown subs - and that impacted the band’s experience onstage. It has been so much easier having the same setup and Eric as our SE to help with that.”

For Mitski’s production manager, Nick Hardy, the choice of Worley Sound as their provider was equally important in supporting the tour’s growth. “At the end of 2023, Patrick and I were having conversations and getting audio bids from most of the major players,” says

Hardy. “A colleague had great things to say about Tom (Worley) and his approach to audio and business. In our first conversations with Tom, we knew that we wanted to work with Worley. His wealth of knowledge and attention to detail are impeccable.”

Tom Worley, CEO of Worley Sound, sees the investment in L-Acoustics as a strategic move for his company’s growth. “Having focused primarily on bespoke control packages for the last three years we felt the demand to deliver a full-service audio offering without having to rely on subhiring. Adding the K Series system to our inventory not only allows us to compete in a larger market, but also gives us the ability to nurture our clients on a similar growth trajectory. We are delighted to be an L-Acoustics CPr. This strengthens our long relationship with L-Acoustics and reinforces our network in North America and globally.”

Backed by seven musicians playing a variety of instruments, Mitski presents a multi-faceted show, but from Scott’s perspective, it is largely about the different dynamics.

“There are pin-drop-quiet moments, big anthemic parts, and most stops in between,” he notes. “L-Acoustics’ K

Series is really good at transitioning from one dynamic moment to the next and showcasing the detail in each. There is clarity, and a very specific smoothness as well. This tonality is incredibly sympathetic to the approach of the production in the sense that feels timeless rather than overhyped and crispy.”

As Mitski continues to perform to larger audiences, the partnership between Worley Sound and L-Acoustics aims to ensure that her shows are delivered with the ‘clarity, power, and nuance they deserve’, marking a new chapter in her touring career.

L-ACOUSTICS.COM

DIGICO ON THE ROAD WITH KYLIE

QUEENOFPOP

“KYLIE HAS BEEN MIXED ON A DIGICO GOING BACK YEARS, AND I WANTED TO KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY.”

Kylie Minogue recently capped her first Las Vegas residency at the Venetian Resort’s new Voltaire venue, accompanied on the road by a DiGiCo Quantum852 console in her monitor world, as Headliner discovers…

Kylie released her 16th studio album Tension late last year, reaching the number one spot on the heels of sell-out shows in London, Rabat, and Athens this year. The Australian singer/actress/presenter is a twotime Grammy Awards and four-time Brit Awards winner, a holder of the UK’s Order of the British Empire (and its Australian counterpart), just this year was named one of Time magazine’s “most influential people in the world,” and has toured 19 times since 1989, selling out arenas and stadiums globally.

For much of that run she’s been accompanied on the road by DiGiCo,

most recently with a Quantum852 console on monitor duties. The desk, piloted by IEM engineer Kevin Glendinning, was supplied by Solotech UK for her recent run of shows in Europe.

Glendinning, whose live-mix portfolio includes work with Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, and Mumford & Sons, among others, first encountered Minogue mixing her stage sound for broadcast fly dates, including her 2009 appearance on American Idol. It was a role he’d reprise occasionally with her over the next 15 years as other television opportunities arose, such as in May 2023 for Idol once again, and then later that year to mix monitors for her Las Vegas residency.

“Her main engineer and dear friend of mine, Matt Napier, was busy with other things at the time in 2009; both Kylie and Matt were based in London and I was in L.A. at the time,

so I became kind of her West Coast engineer,” Glendinning recalls. “If she had to fly over and do one song at the CBS film set or something, it didn’t make sense to fly Matt over, so I helped out years ago. Then, when they needed a monitor engineer for the Las Vegas shows, I got a call from management. It was like hearing from old friends.”

It turns out that both Minogue and Glendinning are also old friends with DiGiCo consoles. He’s been using them almost exclusively since he toured on Lenny Kravitz’s Love Revolution tour in 2008: “Kylie has been mixed on a DiGiCo going back years, and I wanted to keep it in the family,” he says.

For the Vegas residency, an SD12-96 was chosen, based on its compact footprint for the intimate venue, but the Quantum852 for the European shows came about in a somewhat more dramatic fashion (and very apropos for Minogue, whose stage shows include elaborate costumes and sets inspired by sci-fi films).

“I wasn’t able to make DiGiCo’s 21st birthday party in London last year, so instead I had a friend who’s great with film and video technology create a hologram of me from my Los Angeles office to them for the celebration!” Glendinning adds. “They were introducing the Q8 and that was my introduction to it. I asked James Gordon if he could get me one for Kylie’s next shows, and he moved heaven and earth to do it.”

Glendinning was glad he did; the desk was everything he expected, and more. “What I really, really enjoyed, and the first thing that stood out to me, was the accessibility of whatever you’d like, wherever you’d

like it,” he says. “I can keep Kylie’s things balanced over here and keep them in the up bank the entire time, and then have the band, and the guest artists we have come up, in their own sections. I can lay things out and structure the board in a way with excellent accessibility that is totally intuitive. The Q8 is a big console, but it feels like less of a computer and more of a classic mixing desk, which I think is the ultimate goal. Yes, they’re a terrific technology company, and I have always appreciated the sonics and the support from DiGiCo, but they also really deliver when it comes to what a desk should feel like.”

Glendinning has been using Quantum852’s onboard Mustard and Spice Rack processing liberally, literally replacing all of what was once outboard gear with it. “Everything is on the console, everything is onboard, and it has all been outstanding,” he says. “They’re in love with the ’verbs on the acoustic guitars and on the vocals. I don’t want to mention any names, but

she had a very exotic, very high-end reverb unit that I simply just replaced with the stock vocal plate on the console. The processing has been absolutely terrific.”

On the other end of the Optocore loop, Kevin Pruce has mixed Minogue’s vocals from front of house for 15 years, in a career that’s also spanned FOH stints with Björk, Madonna, Duran Duran, Lana Del Rey, and Tears For Fears. He’s been a Quantum338 fan ever since the desk was introduced at the 2020 NAMM Show. Since then, he says, “I love it, it is my favorite DiGiCo console. For me, it is about the ergonomics of working quickly and efficiently on the surface. The screens are a great improvement and make working in bright light much easier. That the layout is similar to the SD7 is also a bonus: three screens and a master section, while Mustard and Spice Rack are great additions as well.”

Minogue occupies a unique niche in entertainment though, oddly, not in the U.S. In fact, Minogue has only toured North America once — nine shows in the U.S. and Canada in 2009. Even Billboard scratched its head back in 2002 as to why her worldwide success wasn’t matched in America, the world’s largest music market. But that hasn’t stopped Minogue, who has sold 80 million records worldwide, from reaching new generations of fans year after year.

It’s the same thing that DiGiCo has been doing. But for every new step and star in the DiGiCo lineup, Glendinning says

the underlying narrative has been about the technology’s consistency from each generation of consoles to the next. “DiGiCo has been part of the Kylie ‘sound’ for decades,” he says. “From SD to Quantum, I can plug a show file in and be ready to work anywhere, and the artist will have a familiar sound signature and relevant mix balance. That’s the real accomplishment.”

DIGICO.BIZ

KING IN THE CASTLE CODA AIRAY

PERFORMS AT GERMAN OUTDOOR CONCERTS

Words by COLBY R A

The Wasserschloss Klaffenbach in Chemnitz, Germany, is a sixteenthcentury moated castle which this summer provided a stunning location for a series of four outdoor concerts, featuring a variety of popular music acts. Artists as diverse as hit machine The BossHoss, actor and country singer Kiefer Sutherland, heavy metal favorites Blutengel, indie rockers Kaffkiez, and British song poet and electro musician Anne Clarke, all performed in the historic space.

The team from Chemnitz-based Schalldruck.Audio, led by Reinhard Tochtenhagen, was responsible for sound and lights, and chose a CODA Audio system to meet the challenges presented by this heritage setting. Crew chief Robert Bretschneider describes the brief.

“The castle is a great location but it does have its pitfalls,” he says. “The entire courtyard is paved with cobbles and surrounded by stone walls, so reflections are unavoidable. Added to this, the area is quite wide in relation to the throw distances, and the audio reinforcement hangs in front of the stage towers, with the potential to obstruct sight-lines.”

Schalldruck deployed a solution centered on CODA’s flagship AiRAY line array. Two sets of 10 AiRAY (four at 90°, six at 120°) formed the main hangs, with two pairs of ViRAY with 120-degree couplers covering the near field area. Two pairs of N-APS on stands were used as outfill, while the low frequency range was covered by a sub array of 10 SCP-F and four SCV-F sensor-controlled subwoofers. The system worked perfectly according to Bretshcneider.

“With all the components in the high and midrange being based on the same driver system, matching the

“THE SOUND PERFORMANCE WAS EXCEPTIONAL AND THE SLIM PROFILE OF THE AIRAY AND VIRAY ALLOWED FOR MINIMAL IMPACT ON THE SIGHT-LINES.”

phase response was a piece of cake and ensured even coverage to every corner of the site,” he recalls. “The sound performance was exceptional

and the slim profile of the AiRAY and ViRAY allowed for minimal impact on the sight-lines.”

The system was powered by CODA Audio LINUS14D DSP amplifiers which performed excellently under difficult conditions, according to Bretshcneider.

“The conditions in the courtyard are unique – it gets very hot during the day and then cools down rapidly in the evening, so it’s very different between midday soundchecks and evening performances – the temperature fluctuations didn’t affect the amps at all,” he says. “I’m always impressed by the resilience and robustness of the CODA products – we’ve carried out many shows in

poor weather conditions and never experienced any impairment of function or sound. The N-APS in the outfill area don’t enjoy the benefit of a stage roof and consequently have to endure a lot, but they invariably perform reliably and deliver flawless sound. I’m always impressed!”

The flexibility of the system allowed for the wide variety of musical styles to be seamlessly adapted to, with rich low frequencies and clear intelligibility.

“The response we received from the customer was excellent but sometimes

the best praise doesn’t need words – the happy faces of the engineers sitting at the console is the perfect endorsement for me,” Bretshcneider concludes. “That tells us we’ve done a good job and that it was the right decision to rely on CODA Audio.”

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COLBYRAM S E Y

A PERFECT COMBO ORANGE AMPS TAPS CELESTION SPEAKERS FOR NEW BASS CABINETS

During its entire tenure, Orange has relied on Celestion speakers, the company celebrating 100 years of excellence in loudspeaker design in 2024, as the foundation of its tone and reliability. The long-time partnership between Celestion and Orange continues in the new Orange OBC115C, OBC410HC, and OBC810C cabinets for bass guitar, employing Celestion’s PULSE XL drivers: the 15.25 in the15-inch OBC115C, and the 10.20 in the multi-speaker OBC 410C and 810C.

Since its inception in 1968, the Orange brand has become synonymous with rich, complex tone and premium build quality in guitar and bass amplification. Adopted early on by Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Wonder — who deployed an Orange amp to achieve his signature Clavinet keyboard sound — the manufacturer continues to release industryleading heads, cabinets, and combo amps of distinction.

In this interview, Orange founder Cliff Cooper and engineer Adrian Emsley weigh in on over half a century of partnering with Celestion to produce the world’s most coveted amplifiers, and on why the PULSE XL was best suited to their new bass cabinets…

What differentiates Orange in the landscape of great British amps?

Cliff Cooper: Well, they certainly have a sound. It’s the sound of the transformers as well as the tubes. I would characterise it overall as more of a round sound, with more harmonics, as compared with other British brands with which you may be familiar. In the beginning and to this day, I also think

they’re beautifully made. It’s a pleasure to look inside one. I also would say they’re quite good value for money.

Cliff, what was your own path into becoming a musician?

CC: Around 18 years old, I initially joined a skiffle group! [Skiffle is an American folk music genre known for inexpensive and homemade

instruments such as washboard, kazoo, and harmonica]. I actually played an upright bass consisting of a barrel and a broomstick with a single string. Not long after, I was able to join more professional bands and afford a bass guitar and amplifier. But skiffle was really my introduction to music.

“TO BE CONSISTENT WITH THE SHOP COLOURS, WE COVERED THEM IN ORANGE. IT WAS A CLASSIC CASE OF NECESSITY BEING THE MOTHER OF INVENTION.”

The legendary audio engineer Joe Meek participated in some Orange designs, and you played in a band with him, correct?

CC: That’s right. The band was called The Millionaires, and I played bass. We made a single that rose to number 12 in the charts, and Joe passed away just before the release of the follow-up single.

It was after that I decided to focus on the recording studio, starting in a basement. But after that we took up residence in the West End of London. We found a derelict space and turned it into a studio. This was the beginning of Orange Amps, but as a shop.

Did the retail business outrun the recording studio?

CC: We got quite busy in the shop, yes. We painted the shop orange, and actually got in trouble with the local council at the time for looking ostentatious, as “civilised” colours were important at the time and most shops were black, white, or brown. It’s funny how the money we made in the shop financed the studio little by little, and we were incrementally able to buy nicer recording equipment. I don’t think we would have been able to start making amplifiers were it not for the shop.

Did the retail shop lead to designing and selling your own amplifiers? How so?

CC: I had Vox equipment. Prior to the AC30, I had a single-speaker cabinet, and I can’t recall the model of the amp head, but I thought Vox was very good. The studio included a shop space which we had been using for storage. There was a picture window we had whitewashed on the inside for privacy. But when we removed the whitewash and put some Vox amplifiers there, people wanted to buy them the same day! That is what started us on the path of buying and selling musical equipment.

CC: Like many small shops, we had trouble early on getting the bigger brands to consider us registered dealers or send us equipment. I had a background in electronics and thought, “Well, let’s make our own amps and put them in the window!” We found a company to manufacture our designs.

To be consistent with the shop colours, we covered them in orange. It was a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention.

What was one of Orange’s first big successes in terms of recognition?

CC: The first person to use our amps in a highly visible way was Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. After that the whole band adopted Orange amps we made specially for them. Around the same time, we were lucky that the studio began to take off, and we got a lot of famous names recording there and hence being exposed to our amps — Stevie Wonder, Paul Anka, The Bee-Gees, Tom Jones… so many.

You mentioned the rich harmonics as a chief characteristic of Orange Amps. What is the secret behind that quality?

CC: We designed our own transformers. Most amps have three secondary windings on the upper transformer. Most of ours have eight, and even our smaller amps have five. The result is that sidebands created by transients above human hearing bounce back into the audible range in phase, where normally they’re out of phase. That, and after all this time, still using Celestion speakers!

How long have you had a relationship with Celestion?

CC: It’s over 55 years now. As I was mentioning, in the very early days we couldn’t get supplies. Celestion was an exception, but when we couldn’t get them, nothing else we tried sounded the same, nor was built with the same quality.

Adrian, how did you come to be involved with Orange Amps?

Adrian Emsley: I joined Orange in 1997. I started out in the industry as a tape op, drummer, and guitar player, then got into building one-off tube guitar amps for certain players. I also operate my own mastering house, Table of Tone Mastering.

CC: Adrian is really just the best amp designer. He’s very clever and absolutely passionate about tubes. For a time, we licensed the Orange name to Gibson in the 1990s and didn’t produce amps ourselves again until about 1997. At that point, Adrian was the one who designed a custom amp for Noel Gallagher of Oasis, which launched us into a global company once again. He also developed the eight-winding transformer I described earlier.

What were your design goals for the new OBC-115C, OBC-410C, and OBC-810C bass cabinets?

AE: We needed to update our bass cabinets, so we got a group of bass players in and did a shootout between the Eminence, LaVoce, and Celestion PULSE XL in our 8 x 10”, 4 x 10”, and 1 x 15” cabinets. The Celestions came out as the preference in these listening tests for all three cabinets.

CC: It didn’t come as a surprise that we were very pleased with Celestion. We like to build simple amps and cabinets, with no more than the number of components necessary to achieve the desired sound. I think they sound purer that way. Celestion speakers contribute to this because we can be sure of getting the sonics we want without over-engineering the signal path.

How did the PULSE XL loudspeakers best serve you on this project?

AE: Bass cabinets with multi-speaker configurations apply more damping to each other when wired in parallel, which is why we use the 32-ohm versions of the PULSE XL in the 10-inch cabinets. This results in the cabinet staying cleaner at higher volume. In general, Celestion drivers have a lot of sonic detail, along with a smooth and musical breakup. This has been the case since the original G12 alnico, right up to the current Vintage 30.

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‘IF YOU THINK ABOUT SYNC IT’S GAME OVER’

TONY ANDERSON

Ambient and neoclassical composer Tony Anderson joins Headliner for an insightful chat about his unconventional route to global success, the art of composition, the world of sync, and how Augspurger Monitors have shaped his career.

Tony Anderson is both an enigma and an open book. There’s a candid affability about him that is simultaneously offset by a sense of unpredictability. His manner is charmingly familiar, yet it’s impossible to guess at what his answer to any given question will be. He’s a hugely successful composer –his work has notched up over seven million streams per month across Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, and on TikTok his music has received 1.3 billion views in the last year – who

is generally indifferent to music. He’s an ambient and neoclassical specialist whose core influences are the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. As a budding musician he hated playing piano and instead opted to flex his creative chops via an illegally pirated version of Fruity Loops. He describes sync as a distraction, despite having countless works licensed across film, TV.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of music in my life, and to this day it’s not a huge part of my life,” he tells Headliner from his L.A. home. “I don’t listen to playlists and when I’m writing an album I don’t listen to music because I don’t want to regurgitate it. I made that mistake back in 2016 when I scored a film and used the chords of Hello from Adele on one of the main songs and completely ripped it [laughs].

“When I was a kid there were piano lessons, but I hated them,” he continues. “It wasn’t until I heard the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy in the late ‘90s that I really got into it. And then I heard the trance movement coming out of Europe, which at that point was 140 bpm or something like that. It was like giving a mouse cocaine! I loved it because it wasn’t this boring classical stuff I attempted to learn on the piano as a kid.”

It was around this time that Anderson would start toying with his own musical ideas. As well as the electronic music he was devouring, he also became increasingly drawn to the compositions of Hans Zimmer.

“I started producing music on a family computer using Fruity Loops,” he recalls. “I had an illegally cracked pirated version. That’s what set me on fire! And then there was Hans

Zimmer, who is such a master of melding genres. It was that mixture of electronic and classical that blew my mind.”

So how did he navigate his way from the family computer to a fullyfledged career as a composer?

“It was in college,” he says. “Friends would stop by the hall and hear what I was doing, and they’d ask what it was. That was their mistake because I’d make them sit for 20 minutes and show them [laughs]. I had no emotional intelligence to know that my stuff was pretty bad and no one wanted to hear it! Thankfully a friend of mine was a filmmaker, and he was making small documentaries for non-profits. They were humanitarian stories, and he gave me an opportunity in 2008 to write music for a film.

“By 2009 I decided I wanted to intern for Hans Zimmer in L.A.,” he continues. “One night around 2am a friend said they knew someone who worked for Hans and that he’s at his studio right now. So, I drove to Santa Monica and at 3am I got led into Zimmer’s lair [laughs]. It ended up not working out. The last I heard from his team was to stop calling. They said if I kept calling, they’d blacklist me, and that my stuff sounds like shit!

“By 2010 I’d tried to make it work but it didn’t feel like the career for me. So, I quit and founded a non-profit with a friend. I thought it was over.”

Like so much of Anderson’s life up to that point, an unexpected turn would get his career back on track.

“It was 2012 and I was staying with my brother,” he says. “One day I was at a conference learning how to make films better - we were making humanitarian films - and I met a group who licensed music to filmmakers. I didn’t know what that was, and it wasn’t until the last day that I talked to them and understood what they did, and it blew my mind. I said I’d given up on music but gave them a Dropbox link with all my work. They sent a contract to me the next week and I didn’t even read it [laughs]. Thankfully it was highly equitable and allowed me to own all my music, and my life changed dramatically after that.

“It was mind-blowing to have Hans Zimmer, or his team, say, ‘We don’t like your stuff’, and then a few years later have the marketplace reward me for work that I thought was total shit. I had so much insecurity around my work - I still struggle with that. I thought I was done. And I’ve been with the same licensing group for 12 years now. They’re called Music Bed.”

Having enjoyed major success releasing music as an artist, as well as via all manner of licensed applications of his work, Anderson insists that writing specifically to attract sync deals is a significant misstep.

“The album I’m on now, which is about growing up in Nebraska in the ‘90s, I am not considering sync licensing for,” he says. “I want the music to sound like a time capsule, so I’m not listening to music. It’s kind of weird, but I broke into my childhood home that had been abandoned for 20 years to take pictures. It’s on a farm, and it was unbelievable. This is a microcosm of how I write now when I do an album. I’m all in.

“As for sync, let me address this quickly. It is a distraction. If you think about sync, it’s game over, because you’re constantly trying to anticipate the needs of a marketplace instead of writing what comes from the heart. If you can find a lane as an artist and write from that internal north star, you’ll have sync agencies that want to hit you up. You’ll have directors that want to hit you up. It does not work in the reverse order. If I were to listen to advice on what’s selling I’d have been 35 different artists with 35 different monikers. My career would be in shambles and I would be filled

with anxiety. I’d just be thinking about money. Honestly, I’ve not checked my financial statements with licensing in eight years because it started messing with me psychologically.”

One of the most important tools Anderson has come to rely on is Augspurger Monitors. Though commonly associated with hip-hop on account of their notoriously powerful low-end, Anderson explains that it is a misconception that they lend themselves more to one genre than any other.

“People ask me about them a lot,” he says. “It’s because I need something extremely accurate for the frequency range I’m writing in. I’ve been able to find a way to craft layers together and these speakers are my north star. I have the Duo 8s and there’s a 12-inch sub beneath each.

“My sound is the way it is because I’ve been hearing it on these speakers for so many years. If I were to move to other systems, my stuff would sound

dynamically different.”

Anderson also elaborates on the specific qualities he seeks when at the mix stage.

“My music does not have percussion very frequently,” he says before our time together runs out. “It functions mostly in the mid-range. I remember hearing Augspurgers for the first time and they were not flattering to my sound; they exposed how badly it had been mixed - all the mid-range had been jammed on top of it itself.

“I remember cringing and thinking, if I can ever afford to buy a pair of speakers that tell me the truth about my music and help me get it dialed in, I’m getting them,” he concludes. “It wasn’t until 2016 that I was able to afford a pair. Now I hear everything. And I love them.”

AUGSPURGER.COM

JBL305PMKII

“JBL IS A BRAND SYNONYMOUS WITH INNOVATION, AND ITS LEGACY IN LOUDSPEAKER DESIGN SPANS MORE THAN SEVEN DECADES.”

The JBL 305P MkII studio monitor speakers have become a benchmark in the audio production industry, offering an exceptional balance of price and performance. Known for delivering pristine sound quality and professional-grade features, they have found their way into home studios and professional setups alike. But what truly makes the 305P MkII special? Let’s explore the key aspects that make them so unique.

A LEGACY OF EXCELLENCE: JBL’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION

JBL is a brand synonymous with innovation, and its legacy in loudspeaker design spans more than seven decades. The 305P MkII is a product of this rich history, combining JBL’s decades of research and development into a powerful, compact, and affordable monitor.

Central to the 305P MkII’s standout performance is the patented Image Control WaveGuide technology, which is inherited from JBL’s flagship M2 Master Reference Monitor - a system valued at nearly £9,000.

This waveguide ensures precise imaging, a detailed soundstage, and a wide sweet spot, all of which are crucial for professional audio work. Whether mixing or mastering, the 305P MkII allows listeners to hear every detail, making it easier to place elements in the mix and achieve professional results.

This technology allows the 305P MkII to deliver remarkable sound accuracy at a price point that makes it accessible to both professional and home studios alike. The waveguide design is what sets these speakers apart, providing clarity and focus that rivals far more expensive systems.

DESIGNED FOR ANY ENVIRONMENT: THE VERSATILITY OF THE 305P MKII

One of the key strengths of the JBL 305P MkII is its ability to adapt to a wide range of listening environments. Whether you’re working in a top-tier professional studio, a smaller project space, or even a home studio, these monitors are designed to perform consistently.

The 305P MkII comes equipped with a Boundary EQ setting, which compensates for low-end build-up that can occur when monitors are placed near walls or corners. This feature is particularly valuable for those working in small or acoustically challenging spaces, as it ensures accurate low-frequency reproduction no matter the setup.

Combined with its compact design, this makes the 305P MkII an ideal

choice for producers and engineers who may be limited by space but are unwilling to compromise on sound quality. The ability to finetune the monitors’ response to suit any environment adds significant flexibility, allowing users to maintain a neutral and accurate listening experience, no matter where the monitors are placed.

SUPERIOR SOUND QUALITY: PRECISION AND PERFORMANCE IN ONE PACKAGE

The primary function of any studio monitor is to provide accurate and honest sound reproduction, and the JBL 305P MkII delivers in spades. Thanks to its updated transducers and bi-amplified Class-D design, the 305P MkII offers exceptional clarity, neutral frequency response, and wide dynamic range.

These monitors are designed to reveal every detail of your mix, from the subtlest nuances to the most powerful crescendos, without coloration. The transducers, specifically designed to offer optimized damping, allow for a quick response to transients, making the 305P MkII ideal for handling dynamic material such as percussion or vocals.

This neutral sound profile is critical for producers and engineers, as it allows them to make mixing and mastering

decisions that translate well across a variety of playback systems. The 305P MkII doesn’t artificially boost any part of the frequency spectrum, which ensures that mixes sound great whether played back on professional systems, consumer devices, or even in live environments.

BORROWING FROM THE BEST: THE M2 CONNECTION

The 305P MkII is much more than just an affordable monitor - it incorporates key technologies from JBL’s ultra-high-end M2 Master Reference Monitor, a system regarded by many as the pinnacle of studio monitoring. The Image Control WaveGuide, first introduced in the M2, shapes the sound dispersion of the 305P MkII to create a seamless transition between low and high frequencies, delivering a coherent and natural soundstage.

The result is a speaker that offers outstanding imaging and depth, allowing producers to place instruments and vocals in the mix with precision. This level of soundstage accuracy is typically reserved for much more expensive monitors, but JBL has managed to bring this feature to a far broader audience with the 305P MkII.

BUILT TO LAST: UNCOMPROMISING DURABILITY

Studio monitors often face demanding conditions, from long mixing sessions to high-volume playback. JBL ensures that the 305P MkII is more than up to the task by subjecting the drivers to an intense 100-hour stress test. During this test, the monitors are pushed to their maximum output levels to ensure that they can handle the rigors of everyday studio use.

This robust build quality means that the 305P MkII can withstand the wear and tear of frequent use without compromising on performance. Whether you’re working on critical projects or just enjoying music at high volumes, these monitors are designed to deliver reliable, flawless performance, year after year.

A MONITOR FOR ALL: VERSATILITY AT ITS CORE

One of the standout features of the JBL 305P MkII is its versatility. These monitors are suitable for a wide range of applications, from professional studios to home setups. Their compact size and adaptive Boundary EQ settings make them perfect for smaller spaces where placement flexibility is essential, while their superior sound quality ensures they can hold their own in

larger, more demanding environments. Whether used as a primary monitor in a home studio or as a secondary reference in a professional facility, the 305P MkII provides a level of performance that is hard to beat at this price point. Their accurate sound reproduction, rugged durability, and advanced technology make them a great choice for anyone looking to invest in high-quality studio monitors.

A LOOK TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF THE 305P MKII IN MODERN PRODUCTION

As the landscape of music production continues to evolve, the need for reliable and accurate monitoring remains a constant. The JBL 305P MkII is positioned to be a key player in this future, offering the kind of performance and reliability that modern producers need. Whether you’re working in traditional studio spaces or adapting to more flexible, mobile setups, the 305P MkII offers the tools you need to create great music.

With its combination of cutting-edge technology, versatile design, and durable build, the 305P MkII is more than just a set of affordable monitors - it’s a powerful tool for any producer or engineer serious about their craft.

CONCLUSION: A MODERN CLASSIC IN STUDIO

MONITORING

The JBL 305P MkII is a celebration of everything that makes JBL a leader in audio innovation. Combining advanced technologies like the Image Control WaveGuide with a focus on durability and reliability, these monitors offer an unbeatable blend of performance, versatility, and affordability. Whether you’re just starting your journey in music production or you’re a seasoned professional, the 305P MkII delivers the clarity and precision you need to bring your projects to life.

With the 305P MkII, JBL has once again raised the bar for what’s possible in affordable studio monitors, making high-quality sound accessible to all.

JBLPRO.COM

TONI BRAXTON & CEDRIC THE ENTERTAINER

When Love & Laughter, a collaboration between R&B singer Toni Braxton and stand-up comedian Cedric the Entertainer, took up a Las Vegas residency this year, the demand for tickets was such that they are now undertaking a repeat season at the 3,200-seat Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. The shows marked the American concert debut of GLP’s JDC2 IP versatile new hybrid strobe. Lighting designer Ryan Healey explains how they dominated the entire residency…

Healey – whose work ranges from global esports events to TV spectaculars – was brought in by the show’s director, Mark Swanhart. He explains how he adopted GLP’s JDC2 IP following a demo set-up by GLP’s Rick Potter. “I was honored to be the first to have my hands on one – they totally impressed me and Joe [Holdman, lighting programmer]. They had so much potential use for our show,” he enthuses.

Twelve of the fixtures, along with 12 each of the impression X5 and X4, provided by L.A-based Volt Lites (from its warehouse in Las Vegas) formed an alluring floor package – and a bonus for Healey was that that JDC2’s forbear, the JDC1, features in the venue’s fixed overhead rig to help provide a homogenous design.

Healey is no stranger to GLP’s dynamics and build quality. “Since I’ve been working professionally, there’s barely been a show that hasn’t had a GLP product on it,” he says. “The X4 became a standard workhorse and now the X5 Series will become common on shows that we do. As for the X4 Bar 20 and JDC1, they totally changed the game.”

Although Vegas is his first experience of a residency, Healey has enjoyed a close working relationship with Swanhart in both the TV and experience worlds. “I missed live work, and when this residency came along it was a perfect opportunity [to re-

engage] with the entire team I’d been working with,” he explains.

Knowing the ground package had to work harmoniously with the overhead rig, he says: “When the JDC2 IP came along it was the perfect combination: a floor package that was unique to the show which would interact with the existing overhead and feel like one complete design. With one fixture I could do so many different things… the JDC2 dominates the whole show.”

“In particular I was super-impressed with the DigiFX [engine], the brightness, and the fact that the plates [above and below the strobe line] are so large. I was looking for something that could be seen from the very back of the house and which had a large impact from the floor. With Toni’s musical direction there were a lot of musical enhancements for which the JDC2 is a perfect foil – and it turned out to be a real showstopper, which is used in every number without ever looking the same twice.”

Having DigiFX on board enabled him to throw different patterns. “It was like having the cooler older brother to JDC1 playing on the floor,” he smiles. As for the impression X5, programmed in Mode 6, they provided full pixel control, and were primarily used for backwashing the band, as well as side-lighting the dancers. “They were perfect for that,” Healey says. “The benefit to using such a fixture was that when there were no dancers we could use them as a beam fixture, or a large-faced pixel-controlled FX fixture. Even when we were using them as dancer sides, we could do some fun FX with the pixel controls that could read on dancer’s bodies and costumes.

“We also shut off the outer ring of pixels and then they looked like a smaller wash light – a whole different fixture with a pencil tight beam that could be seen from the back of the theater.”

The JDC2 IPs were programmed on a grandMA3 (95% timecode in Mode 4 – Segment 12/24) by Holdman. “This gave us full pixel control alongside the built-in DigiFX,” he explains.

It was then left to board operator Mo Epps to animate them. “Being the stellar programmer that he is, Joe came up with things that I wouldn’t even be able to think of. He’s a genius,” notes Healey. “With the DigiFX being scalable and moveable on the face plate, Joe created musical hits where the DigiFX could move left to right, up and down, grow bigger or grow smaller. It was a super cool new way to pick up on something musically and also have something visually unique from what you can get out of a regular flare.”

“The way that the DigiFX features are implemented and interact with pixel/strobe control is similar to other strobe units’ built-in FX macros, so it’s a very approachable fixture,” remarks Holdman. “The JDC2s were a vital part of the show, adding muchneeded punch and dynamics to the floor package – and when running the JDC2s alongside the JDC1s, the response was identical.”

The DigiFX functionality had added a surprising benefit, he elaborates. “Typically, I avoid any built-in FX macros, as they’re usually things that

I can create and have finer control over with the console’s FX engine. The DigiFX features, on the other hand, allow for effects that aren’t possible with direct DMX control of pixels. We were able to use a bunch of the clips in various places throughout the show – and it looked great!”

According to Healey, all the production creatives were delighted. “I’d specify them again a million percent in both the TV and live spaces; if you want to fill an arena with a lot of light I can envision having hundreds of them on a single back wall truss, running video content through them,” he concludes. “And because the JDC2s are IP rated, I can imagine them fitting in nicely with a lot of the projects I do outdoors.”

GLP.DE/EN/

ONE-TAKE SOUND

ACTORSON ACTORS

Production sound mixer Adam Young reveals what it’s like to record stars like Kim Kardashian and Brad Pitt for Actors on Actors using Lectrosonics.

Adam Young’s career as a production sound mixer runs the gamut: prestige series, feature films, daytime television, documentaries, extreme sports, commercials and awards events including the Grammys and Golden Globes are just some of the categories found on his extensive CV.

Just a few highlights are Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Last Call with Carson Daly, and commercial campaigns for major brands such as Nissan, Draft Kings and Playstation.

He has depended on Lectrosonics’ latest generation of fully digital wireless since it was released — the DSQD and DSR4 four-channel receivers; DBSM, DBSMD, and DCHT transmitters, and M2 Duet system for crew communications. He describes how the systems’ RF handling, audio quality, range, and durability helps him reach high channel counts and deliver consistently excellent results under demanding conditions.

“THEY’RE COMING IN ON A 45-MINUTE TIME FRAME TO HAVE A COMPLETELY UNSCRIPTED CONVERSATION. YOU CAN’T CALL SOMEONE BACK IN.”

Having only one chance to get it right is par for the course at Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, which has featured guests including Jennifer Anniston, Kim Kardashian, Brad Pitt, Natalie Portman, Jodie Foster, Margot Robbie, Cillan Murphy, Emma Stone, Cate Blanchett, and many more.

“You’ve got high-profile actors, two at a time, interviewing each other,” explains Young. “They’re coming in on a 45-minute time frame to have a completely unscripted conversation. You can’t call someone back in. You can ask them to start a take again, but it’s not going to have the same energy. They shoot very wide, which means I can’t fly boom mics as a primary.

“I’ve done 17 seasons of Actors on Actors. Every season since the Lectrosonics digital came out, I haven’t taken a single wireless hit. I’d really highlight that as evidence of their reliability.”

While Actors on Actors does not require especially high channel counts, much of Young’s other work does.

“I had about 30 channels of wireless,” he says of a recent and as yet unreleased project. “The scenario was a classroom, where a celebrity comes in and surprises the kids, gives a speech, and takes questions. The director’s vision was a free-flowing Q&A with all the students. I’ve got three boom operators covering zones, six cameras, and [the celebrity] was there for a maximum of two hours. So, no retakes. Because the digital receivers are backwardcompatible with the Hybrid transmitters, we were able to use a mix of the two and squeeze 30 clean frequencies into a small L.A. classroom location, and it worked flawlessly. Lectrosonics really delivered for me there.”

RF needs were even more extreme on the Foo Fighters’ documentary special Preparing Music for Concerts. “The

entire Foo Fighters frequency team was there for their live sound, and I have to work around the channels they have up,” Young recalls.

“They were also running Duet systems for their in-ears. It made for about 45 to 50 channels in total. I coordinated with their monitor engineer Ian Beveridge. It came down to the ability of our gear to be fully wideband, not being beholden to frequency blocks. If I had to put three channels on block 21 and one more in block 22 and sneak another two in on block 19, no big deal. The shoot was a smashing success. I can’t overemphasize that you had a full concert sound team with things like every guitar having a transmitter, combined with a full film team, all using Lectrosonics wireless, and it all went off without a glitch.”

With creative needs driving demand for more frequencies but larger market forces shrinking that spectrum, Young relies on the wideband tenacity of Lectrosonics digital to extract proverbial blood from stone.

“Production is under assault,” he observes. “We’re a speck of dust to big telecom and other entities. The cleanest spectrum in L.A., for example, is 470 to 536 MHz, but there can still be hits from emergency bands, or just strange behavior because of reflected signals ghosting onto other frequencies. But, because of the filtering of the Lectro digital wideband stuff, and because that lets it squeeze more usable channels out of a given bandwidth, I’ve had no problems getting large channel counts.

“With Lectrosonics digital, I can match any of my transmitters to any of my receivers, switch between my main cart and my bag, give people options, and have no problems making everything work.”

GUSTAFSON

DREAM SOUND

YFY STUDIO

YFY Studio in Chengdu, China has recently been certified as a Dolby Atmos Music Studio. Musician and producer Hu Xiaohai tells Headliner how he carefully assembled a series of high-end equipment in this recently upgraded music production studio.

Hu Xiaohai has deep roots and extensive experience in the music field. In 1990, he co-founded several renowned Chinese rock and jazz bands in Chengdu and Beijing. While playing bass with these acts, he participated in the creation and recording of more than 10 albums and performed at dozens of largescale concerts.

Since establishing the YFY Music Studio in Chengdu in October 2002, he has produced arrangements and recordings for more than 100 albums, and composed or produced over 3,000 musical works including individual songs, dance music, film scores, and TVC jingles.

He recently invested in a Prism Sound Dream ADA-128 Modular AD/

DA Convertor, which now plays a key role in the studio, guaranteeing exceptional performance for audio signal conversion and processing.

“During comparative tests with other similar products, the ADA128 demonstrated unmatched advantages in both functionality and sound quality,” enthuses Hu Xiaohai. “Its extensive channel throughput capacity (up to 128 analog channels) and precise 32-bit A-D/D-A signal conversion, supported by a highend precision word clock, ensure every sound detail is faithfully reproduced. Whether it’s soft string music or intense drum beats, the ADA-128 captures and processes sound in its purest form. This tool is indispensable for our pursuit of highquality music production.”

The Dream ADA-128’s chassis, with its multiple expansion interface cards, offers flexibility, boasting 16 I/O slots and four host slots in a 2U rack space, with four independent word clock domains. Currently, it includes 32-channel analog input and output cards connected to the analog mixing console, as well as two eight-channel AES cards linked to the multi-channel digital effects processor, and an immersive sound monitoring speaker system with ample expansion room remaining.

Routing between I/O interfaces and the mini DigiLink host card is straightforward and flexible: once set up, it’s a one-time effort. Additionally, configuring and monitoring

operational status can be done via a web browser GUI anytime.

Previously, Hu Xiaohai used a Solid State Logic Matrix SuperAnalogue DAW control mixer, but these days he’s using an SSL Origin ‘In-Line’ console for the new studio for multitrack recording and mixing.

The control room in the upgraded studio is much larger than the previous one, and his stereo speakers have expanded in line with this, upgrading his original Genelec 1237As to the 1234A studio monitors with dual 12-inch woofers. This system complements Hu Xiaoha’s 7.1.4 immersive monitoring system, comprising Genelec three-way

coaxial 8341As, smart active twoway 8340As, and a 15-inch lowfrequency 7380A DSP subwoofer, which provide a powerful, all-round and immersive accurate auditory experience for music production.

“Whether making stereo music or immersive sound works, they ensure that the final audio effect meets our artistic pursuit and professional standards,” notes Hu Xiaohai.

With the support of DMT (Digital Media Technology Co., Ltd.,) a Prism Sound distributor, Dolby-certified partner and pro audio system integrator in China, YFY Studio was recently certified as a Dolby Atmos Music Studio.

“Obtaining this certification is a recognition of our team’s efforts and also proves our advantages in equipment selection and technical strength,” Hu Xiaohai elaborates.

“This not only provides strong support for us to attract more excellent music projects, but also adds new vitality to the development of Chengdu’s music industry.

“We recently completed a Tibetanstyle world music album, Jidu,” he uses as an example. “With the help of the Prism Sound Dream ADA128, we successfully captured the brilliant performances of each band member. During the mixing process, we achieved a wide and deep auditory experience, earning high praise from both the band and the production team. The Dolby Atmos version is currently in the mixing stage, and we believe it will deliver an astonishingly spatial and amazing result,” he concludes.

THREE ESSENTIAL RULES

Words by MIKE

Pro audio executive Mike Dias serves up his top tips on how pro audio manufacturers can successfully place products with the finest artists, engineers, and technicians in the business…

The question ‘can manufacturers place product without being skilled at networking’? is at the heart of everything I do. As a longtime reader of Headliner, I believe that the answer to this same question is the core strength of the magazine — part of the DNA that makes every article work. The way that I see it, Headliner is a unique space that connects music lovers with their favorite artists and those same artists with their favorite gear manufacturers. It’s that balance that makes the magazine such an interesting read.

Every issue is a combination of art, people, and technology. And it takes all three to achieve a balanced ecosystem. Of course, a concert can’t happen without the artist. But it surely can’t happen without the audience — or the sound systems and all of the supporting infrastructure. It takes all three pieces to create the show and if you only focus on one aspect, you miss the larger picture.

The same is true for marketing and product placement in the music industry. If you only focus on one aspect, you miss the larger picture. But when you think of your role and what you offer in the context of the holistic ecosystem, then you can start to become highly effective. After securing well over 100 placements with A-list engineers and topgrossing artists around the world, here are my three rules for successful product placement.

RULE #1:

KNOW YOUR PLACE

As a product manufacturer, you must realize your place in the hierarchy

“As a product manufacturer you must realize your place in the hierarchy and within the ecosystem.”

and within the ecosystem. I know that you think your product outcompetes everyone — and you might even be right about that — but that doesn’t matter. Your product is fungible. And it can be replaced by anything else at any time. Do not take that personally. Simply treat that as a fact so that you can detach emotion from you doing your job. If your product is as great as you think it is, you might have a chance of success. And if it’s objectively not, then you still have a chance but you’ll be operating under

a different set of rules and you’ll be targeting a different echelon of talent. The key point is not where and how your product sits relative to its peers — that’s the red herring that most manufacturers get hung up on — but that in the bigger picture of artist/ audience/infrastructure, your product simply plays a supporting role in the overarching context. It’s just not as important as you think it is. Treat it as such and you can then move on to the next level.

RULE#2: IT’S JUST A TOOL

Once you accept that your product isn’t the main focus, then you can get down to the real marketing and placement work. Ask yourself and your team — but more importantly ask all of your eyes and ears out in the field — who does the product serve? Because nine times out of 10, your product is a tool for the engineer or for a tech, not for the artist. That distinction changes everything.

Most senior managers and company owners want to focus on artists, while it’s the engineers and backline that matter. They are the ones that make or break your placement opportunities; the true decision makers. If your tool makes their job easier, then you have a great shot at securing that placement.

This is where networking comes into play because these people — these tastemakers — are invisible by design. If you don’t already know them, you are not going to find them. You’re not even going to know where to start looking, which is where the greatest value of Headliner comes into play. Every month, Headliner shines its spotlight on all the unsung heroes of all your favorite tours. You are as likely to read about the monitor engineer for your favorite concerts as you are the next up-and-coming popstar. Take notes and pay attention. Doing that exercise for a few issues will let you move on to the next level.

RULE #3: IT’S WHO YOU KNOW

Like everything in life, product placement comes down to who you know. But it’s more nuanced than that. It’s not just who you know, it’s how well you know them. The degree of the relationship matters. Just because you read about Taylor Swift’s sound engineer in the latest edition doesn’t mean that you can just call him up and make things happen. That’s not how life works, and that’s certainly not how deals come

together. Relationships take a long time to grow. They are based on trust and success. Most importantly, they must be mutually beneficial. That’s the part that’s most often overlooked.

As a manufacturer, you are primed to think about placements from your vantage point. Your manager will always want to know the ROI on that product that you sent out. But that’s the wrong way to think about it and if no one has ever broken this news to you, then I’m sorry to be so harsh about it. But it will never happen for you. You will never score a win with a top artist or that A-list engineer.

So, if you start to make it difficult for them and when you start to throw up a lot of roadblocks and friction points — like contracts and invoices and loaner program forms — they are going to move where things flow more like water. Or a better way to say it, they are going to call someone they know; someone who makes things easy; someone who gets the job done. They’re going to call me or Greg McVeigh and our fellow peers and we’ll deliver and end-run you. And that was your shot that you blew. You won’t get another chance.

THE PATH FORWARD

If effective product placement is an area that your company struggles with, please share this article with everyone on your team — especially your manager and department head. Either commit to doing placements properly, or stop wasting everyone’s time trying until this issue is resolved internally. Because you cannot play if you do not have the right support from all internal team members. And if you are a manager who is reading this and you either do not like what I am saying or do not believe me, please get in touch directly and we can talk through the more subtle elements of this to find a process that works for you and for your company’s goals and aspirations.

Mike Dias writes and speaks about

Why Nobody Likes Networking and What Entertainers Can Teach Executives. He is one of the few global leaders in Trade Show Networking and he helps companies maximize their trade show spend by ensuring that their teams are prepared, ready, and able to create and close opportunities. This column will be an ongoing feature because Mike loves talking shop and is honored to give back to the community. If this article was useful in any way, please reach out at Mike Dias Speaks and let Mike know about what you want to hear more about next time.

CRAFTED FOR CREATORS

FOR 75 YEARS , AKG microphones have captured the essence of the world’s most iconic artists, from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. The legendary C414 condenser microphone, born in 1971, is a staple in studios around the world, prized for its versatility and clear, natural sound. Today, our C Series family evokes the classic C414’s sought-after sonic character while offering flexible recording choices for any studio, at any budget. Use one on your next session and capture something amazing.