Audio Technology - Issue 111

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Regular ContributorsMartin WalkerPaul TingenGuy HarrisonGreg WalkerGreg SimmonsBlair JoscelyneMark WoodsChris BraunRobert ClarkAndrew BencinaBrent HeberAnthony GarvinEwan McDonald

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In MemoryFor Orr – A Shabtech Life

By: Andy Stewart

All material in this magazine is copyright © 2015 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process with out written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974. The responsibility is on the person, company or advertising agency submitting or directing the advertisement for publication. The publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, although every endeavour has been made to ensure complete accuracy. 7/9/2015.

Yesterday I went to the memorial of one of my

oldest and best friends, Calum Orr, who last week

passed away peacefully after a 15-year battle with cancer.

I’m still in shock and feel sick right now at the prospect of

reducing my friend to a bunch of hopelessly inadequate

words on a page.

Sitting in the studio we built together – The Mill – I

can’t help now but reflect on how strange it is that the

inanimate objects we build outlast us so easily.

Cal and I spent many long hours over several years

slogging our guts out on this place, as long-time readers

of AT may recall. Cal’s energy and enthusiasm for the

studio’s construction back then was infectious. Now the

walls stand as permanent reminders of his craftsmanship

and selfless, unwavering work ethic.

The man himself is no more, though as Andrew

Bencina pointed out during his eulogy yesterday, while

Cal’s life may have ended after a long fade-out, the

albums he wrote, recorded, mixed, mastered or in other

ways inspired play on through the speakers and memory

banks of countless acts who worked with him over the

last 25 years.

Today this control room sits in silent reflection, a giant

hole torn in its side.

Cal built so many things. Apart from his own

recording spaces, which sprang up like blackberries

wherever he happened to reside, Cal was also the builder

of a vast and disparate array of things: confidence in

others, vast plug-in libraries, cutting-edge computers

(for himself and his friends) and a reputation for

inventiveness on a shoestring.

Cal was an engineer of the recording, mixing and

mastering varieties, a multi-instrumentalist, band

manager, confidante and producer. He was a roadie,

a tour manager, a tech, an accidental psychotherapist

and a teacher. He was a surfer, a philosopher, a father, a

husband and a moral compass for others.

He gave advice freely – when it was sought – even if he

knew it would put him out of a job, and facilitated and

inspired countless bands to help themselves in this world

of zero-budget productions. He would build them a

recording computer if necessary, or loan them equipment

for free if that’s what it took to get the project over the

line. When Angie Hart of Frenté made an album recently

with essentially no budget, it was Cal who loaned her the

gear without question, and picked it all up again when

she was done – for nicks.

And in the face of illness Cal was courageous like no-

one I’ve seen before or will ever see again.

Cal always thought and spoke outside the box,

always looking for new ways, more efficient and

cutting-edge methods of doing things. He abhorred

lazy conventions and railed against establishment in

whatever form that took.

He was also one of the most elastic and engaging

conversationalists I’ve ever known; equally at home

talking to a fellow surfer as my mother. He was truly

gifted at inspiring others, passionate about virtually

anything that engaged his voracious mind, and an

enigma of sorts. No sooner had you figured Cal out than

he would confound you.

His strong will for life and unwavering commitment

to everything from music recording to social justice

continued right to the end. Always looking forward, Cal

inspired us all with his wit, his charm, his lack of charm,

his inappropriate comments and his anarchic tendencies.

One thing he always strove for – which is perhaps

most relevant here as a parting thought about Cal –

was a passionate performance each and every time he

pressed ‘record’: a good strong funky groove, a powerful

vocal, a screaming guitar line. He was fascinated with,

and wholly committed to, getting the best performance

he could out of everyone he worked with, filling

musicians with positive vibes about themselves…

making them feel like a star.

He was himself a star… unique, loyal, affable and brave.

He will never be forgotten by anyone who knew him.

Rest in peace my friend.

17 February 1968 – 21 August 2015

AT 6

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A V A I L A B L E N O W !

CONTENTS111

REGULARS12 What’s On13 Studio Focus: Studio 5214 Studio Focus: Merloc Studios24 Quick Mix: Tim Millikan34: Watchout!: Audio Networking66 Quick Mix: Michael Pollard74 PC Audio76 Apple Notes98 Last Word: David Dearden

FEATURES36 Neil Young & the Ultimate ‘DIY’ large-format console48 Decoding Eno’s Discreet Music on its40th Anniversary60 Reggae Meets Rhumba: Cuban & JamaicanLegends Together for the First Time68 Wham, Bam, Thank You Schram!ex-Triple J Alum Mixes Voltaire Twins

REVIEWS22 Audio-Technica System 10 Camera-topWireless Setup78 Yamaha TF1 Digital Live Console82 Bose F1 PA System90 Shure PG Alta Microphones94 Arturia Beatstep Pro Controller

Kurt Vile Hits Sonic Byways to Avoid the Ticking Clock 54

Summing Up: Rich Costey Dumps His SSL for Of Monsters & Men

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– Chris Lord-Alge

REGULARS

What’s OnAll the latest from around the studio traps.

Got any news about the happenings in yourstudio or venue? Be sure to let us know [email protected]

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

NEWMARKET STUDIOS

Dave McLuney was in for a week with Jenny

Thomas tracking her new album with some

amazing string players from the Melbourne

Chamber Orchestra.

Perth band Methyl Ethel were in for a live-filmed

studio session thanks to Remote Control Records.

The crowd enjoyed a beer while watching the

band do their thing in the jungle-themed studio

transformation. Simon Cotter was behind the

desk capturing the recording.

Callum Barter has been out on tour with #1

Dads doing FOH, but in between shows he mixed

a new album from Brisbane band Columbia Buffet.

The Harrison console is in the process of getting

re-capped channel by channel. The Newmarket

engineers are hearing bottom end for days after

some solid soldering sessions from the guys at Dex

— 40 channels is quite the effort.

Callum also mixed some of a project Andrew

McSweeny has been working on with a remote

community up in Hope Vale, north Queensland.

Andrew took up a bunch of location recording gear

to record and film some great songwriters in the

local indigenous community up there.

BLACK PEARL STUDIOS

A large variety of musicians have frequented the

studio to begin and continue their projects, with

jazz, rock and country appearing to be the favourite

flavours of the month. One of the larger projects

currently being recorded is The Music Matters

International Original Artists Charity Album; an

initiative of the School Broadcasting Network Inc

(SBN). The SBN is an Australian youth charity

which is intended to become an annual platform to

promote young emerging artists who have positive

messages to share through their music. The Music

Matters Charity Album will be launched in Sydney

in November at The Banksia Awards and then

in December at Federation Square as part of the

Fair@Square Festival. The US launch for the Music

Matters Album will be in New York in early 2016.

DELUXE MASTERING

Jack the Bear has mastered projects for Dave

Mudie, 5 Way Addiction, The Dead Leaves, and

The Feelers (including for vinyl).

Adam Dempsey has been hunkered down

mastering for The Bon Scotts, Cabbages & Kings,

Gene Veldhuisen, Lilly Tunley, Lucola Bang,

Pockets, Taxidermy Hall, That Gold Street Sound

(including for seven-inch vinyl), Fabien Toonen,

Tom Lee-Richards, Zulya & The Children of the

Underground (mixed by Myles Mumford), and Jane

McArthur’s ongoing 12 Months 12 Songs series.

STUDIOS 301

Studios 301 in Sydney is rubbing shoulders with

some elite peers as part of the Converse Rubber

Tracks campaign. The gist is that a bunch of

aspiring musicians will be given the chance to

record at one of 12 global landmark studios. So

301 is listed in company with Abbey Road, Sunset

Sound and Tuff Gong in Kingston, Jamaica. More

news on which artist it will be, coming soon.

In regular 301 news, Yuck by Alpine was mixed

in the studio, and the single Foolish mastered

by Leon Zervos. Leon also mastered Kooky

Eyes, the second single from The Jungle Giants’

forthcoming album Speakerzoid, and The Silver

Lake Chorus’ debut album. When It All Bleeds

Out by Mt Warning was mixed by Jordan Power

and mastered by Ben Feggans. And Steve Smart

has mastered the first single from the debut album

by City Calm Down, Rabbit Run, as well as I For

An Eye by Brisbane indie-rockers WAAX. Simon

Todkill was on the boards mixing international star

Charli XCX’s Spotify Live Session.

APHEK STUDIO

Greg Dixon’s been recording a single for Charlie

Crook, with Anton Hagop producing. Anton

particularly enjoyed playing Greg’s new custom

shop Martin acoustics, which he put to good use

on the A-side. They recorded material for a ’70s

concept band and continued work on ongoing

projects for both R.B. Brown and Ric Thomas. The

studio’s new Reddi valve DI has been a popular

addition enjoyed by visiting bassists.

AT 12

Studio 52 has undergone some updates recently,

with major improvements to Studio C. The studio

has been extended with a new drum room,

vocal isolation booth and amp isolation room.

Previously, Studio C was mainly for soloists and

electronic production, but now the studio can

handle whole bands just like Studio A and B. The

new drum booth has a very modern, bright sound,

complementing the palette of unique sounds

offered by each drum booth in Studio 52. Studio

52 uses a combination of SE, Audio-Technica and

Sennheiser microphones along with TLA valve mic

preamps for drum recordings.

Anna Mannering recorded her song Son Of

Korah at Studio 52 late last year and recorded a

music video with Brendan O’Shea. She has just

been announced as a finalist in the US-based

Unsigned Only 2015 song competition.

This is the 19th year of the Kool Skools Project

for Studio 52 and Music Feeds in Sydney has

again been hired to deliver the NSW recordings

with around 40 albums between them. Over 700

albums have been recorded as part of the project

since 1997. Some of the artists who have come

through the project include Missy Higgins, Cat

Empire, Delta Goodrem, Jordie Lane, Kelebek, Axle

Whitehead, Dean Geyer, Marc Collis and Natasha

Duarté to name just a few.

New to the mic locker at Studio 52 are a pair

of 4400As and a T2 from sE — and they’re loving

them. The 4400s are being used as drum overheads

in the new Studio C drum room and the T2 is on

bass instruments and guitar cabs, even lead vocals.

www.studio52.com.au

STU O FOCUS

AT 13

THE WICK

Mondo Rock returned to Wick Studio’s big

rehearsal room in July, with Jon Lemon (Beck,

Pink Floyd, Nine Inch Nails) taking FOH

responsibilities. Jon was very impressed with

the unique facility: “Having regularly worked in

rehearsal studios in London, LA, NYC over the

past 35 years, I was extremely impressed with

Wick Studio’s facilities; from the smallest rooms

to the biggest, the quality of audio gear and the

great care and consideration of the acoustics in all

rooms is exceptional.

“Studio A is an excellent space to work in for

preparing for shows or tours, having the separate

control room with enough space in it to set up a

front of house control rig is brilliant, not to mention

being able to use the PSI monitoring system which

certainly made it easy for me to transfer my mix

into the live arena post-rehearsal.

“I was also aware it would have been easy to

setup a small PA in the main live room along with

the band if you wanted to, as there is so much

space there. Wick has done a world class job from

my perspective.”

Mondo Rock are touring the country on their

Besto Mondo Tour with special guests Mi-Sex.

SAE

SAE audio and film students and staff joined forces

with Brisbane indie-rock band Royales at this

year’s SAE Open Day to record and shoot a new

track. Aspiring audio engineers, producers and

filmmakers got a first-hand glimpse into what’s

involved in pulling together a video recording

— and to see a live edit broadcasted through the

tricaster. Brisbane lecturers Conor Roberts, Simon

Temple and Scott Hamilton were the brains trust

behind the collaboration.

SAE Brisbane students have been working

closely with live mystery game craze, Escape Hunt

Brisbane, to create a soundtrack for a new game

based on one of the most notorious prisons in

Australian history, Boggo Road Jail. SAE lecturer

Rose Parker designed the student project and says

staff at Escape Hunt Brisbane are pretty impressed

with the first production draft.

On a more classical note, SAE audio students

are wrapping up production on their second

album for jazz virtuoso Bart Stenhouse, from the

NSW Northern Rivers. Students took a lead role

in planning and executing the production. Bart

will be performing on Saturday 10 October at

SAE Institute.

SAE Melbourne lecturer and synth enthusiast,

Nick Wilson gathered an auspicious collection

of vintage, pre-MIDI equipment at Synthposium

in August. The event was also an opportunity

for students, staff and visitors to get up close and

personal with some of the country’s leading synth

experts including keys player with The Models,

Andrew Duffield, dance pioneer Dave Carbone,

Melbourne musician Shags Chamberlain and

As of September, Canberra will have a new

studio on the scene. ACT-based producer

Sam King will be opening his new recording

space Merloc Studios. King is no stranger to

the local music scene in Canberra, over the

last 12 years he’s toured and performed with

The Ellis Collective, Mr Fibby and Burrows.

Recording has always been a passion too,

starting off as a wet-behind-the-ears 14-year

old with a four-track cassette recorder. Up

until now, King had been honing his craft in

his home studio, producing records for artists

such as Owen Campbell, Julia & The Deep

Sea Sirens and Cracked Actor. With enough

jobs under his belt to warrant an expansion,

King set about constructing Merloc Studios,

which has taken two years to finish. But

worth it. “One of my main objectives in the

design of the Merloc Studios was for it to be

the kind of space that inspired you to want to

play music,” said King. “I wanted it to have all

the industry standard functionality and also

be an aesthetically pleasing space.” And the

nation’s capital will be the better for it.

www.merlocstudios.com

tonmeister Les Craythorn, who recently renovated

the rare Synthi100 modular synth.

CRYSTAL MASTERING

Records tweaked at Crystal Mastering include

those for HorrorShow,

Undertow, Clint Hogardt (mixed by Geko),

Basement Spaceman, Rattlincane, Kevin Cassey,

Riot Kingdom and Creatures from the Bog.

Indigenous hip hop was also mastered by engineer

Joe Carra for the acts Red Dust and The Indigenous

Hip Hop Project.

S IO OCUS

AT 14

MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

GENERAL NEWS

Even though Avid has pencilled a tentative release

date for the S6L around the North American

winter, it’s still got a long way to go around the

software development merry-go-round. At

SMPTE 2015 in Sydney when Gil Gowing, Avid’s

Manager of Pro Audio Solutions Design, gave

AudioTechnology a rundown of the live system’s

current state, he described it as being in a pre-

Alpha stage — at least two more Greek letters

before anyone outside of Avid gets their hands

on it. There’s still plenty of scope for firmware

refinements as many things aren’t locked down; a

few times I asked what a button does, and Gowing

would respond, ‘not sure yet, we’re still deciding.’

The hardware is pretty much ready to go though.

And the first thing you notice is how compact

the surface is. “Some of the feedback we got from

customers was they wanted a compact surface, but

with a lot of control,” said Gowing. “We wanted to

make the experience very rich in visual feedback,

but the navigation had to be fast and intuitive

for people to walk up and use it.” The tri-angled

layout of the S6L surface kicks up the monitors to

almost vertical, putting them and the knobs within

easy reach. The ergonomics feel spot on, making

movements on a flat-topped Profile seem stretched

by comparison.

The master section touchscreen allows you to

navigate and route the console with ease, and a

universal bar at the bottom of the screen displays

what’s on the console surface. Gowing also says

you’ll be able to create fader layouts made up of any

input, output, bus or matrix, and put them in any

order — something that seems a given, but not all

manufacturers allow.

TOUCH & YOU’LL TURN

The S6L is similar to Avid’s S6 studio control

surface — mini LCDs connected to knobs, and

global colours — tweaked for live sound and

without the gloss finish. The four channel encoders

initially display a set of ‘most used’ parameters per

channel, things like input gain and compressor

threshold. There are a few different ways to spill

channel parameters across all the encoders, either

via the touchscreen, paging through, or using the

channel select buttons in tandem with function

buttons that display parameter modules.

There are three options, two 24-fader variants

— one with touchscreens over all three fader

buckets, and a cheaper version with only a master

touchscreen — and a 32-fader version with all its

touchscreens. Gowing reckons once people get a

feel for how the touchscreen integrates with the

workflow, they’ll see the value in the touchscreens

above each channel bank. It’s undoubtedly faster

to work on the console with them there, though

it’s more touch and turn — no touch and dragging

EQ parameters, for instance. While it’s possible for

screens to be added later, Gowing was unsure at

this stage whether Avid will offer that option.

One option Gowing said you can hang your

hat on, is a promised Thunderbolt recording

expansion card. Out of the box, you can record 64

channels directly to you Macbook Pro’s ethernet

port over AVB — double the Firewire option card

for the Profile. Shortly after the S6L starts shipping,

Gowing promises a Thunderbolt card will ship that

will quadruple that channel count to 256 — all at

96k without having to buy an extra Pro Tools rig.

96K ALL THE WAY

Which brings us to one of the biggest leaps over

past Venue systems: the S6L system runs at 96k,

without sacrificing any flexibility. The system

comprises three parts; an S6L control surface, an

E6 engine and Stage64 I/O boxes. Initially, there

will be two different engines, running at 32-bit

float. The E6 144 Engine will handle 144 input

channels, 64 buses, LCR output and 16x16 matrix

with full processing.

The E6 192 Engine will handle 192 input

channels, 96 buses, LCR output and 24x24 matrix

with full processing. For the first time, instead of

running everything on the engine via proprietary

DSP cards, Avid has split the processing into a

hybrid system. “There’s a core that has dedicated

processing to run the entire console — all the

input channels, busing, outputs, matrixes, and all

its processing,” said Gowing. “Leaving all the AAX

DSP on the cards just for plug-ins. Previously, you

would have to choose how you wanted to configure

the system. If you wanted a certain amount of I/O,

it would leave less chips on the DSP for plug-ins,

and vice versa. Same with buses and graphic EQs, it

was always a tradeoff.”

Again, you get the same number of channels, etc

whether you’re running at 48k or 96k; no halving

the channel count with a higher sample rate. The

option for a system-wide 48k sample rate is there

for a few reasons; compatibility with older Venue

systems, if you’re broadcasting in 48k, or if you’re

recording and want to cut down on hard drive

space. There’s no down-sampling into Pro Tools, so

you have to choose one sample rate or the other.

NETWORK EFFECT

The S6L system is connected via AVB ethernet.

As to why Avid chose AVB over something like

Dante? Gowing: “It’s an open standard. And it has

high ease of use — no need to assign IP addresses,

SMPTE 2015: HANDS ON WITH AVID S6LReport: Mark Davie

it’ll just work. Dante and Optocore are proprietary.

They’re good options, but we’re keeping them as

just options. We’re working with Audinate on a

Dante card for this, that will come out after it’s

shipped. The S6L will still operate via AVB, but

you’ll be able to pick off streams and put them onto

a Dante network via an optional card.”

There’s no word on latency yet, but like MOTU,

Gowing estimates they’ll be under AVB standard’s

fixed 2ms latency within their system. You can

either chain devices together or use an AVB-

compliant switch to implement a star configuration.

While Avid will make recommendations, it doesn’t

plan on getting into the IT peripheral business

itself.

I/O EVERYWHERE

The Stage64 box has 64x32 I/O, with new IC mic

preamps from THAT Corp and updated conversion

in keeping with the Euphonix/Avid philosophy

of “making it as high quality as possible, without

having ‘a sound’,” said Gowing. “We try to be super

clean, and you can add the colour with plug-ins.”

It also features built-in MADI outputs so you can

simultaneously pick off a MADI stream at the box.

At 48k, you can tap two mirrored MADI streams,

allowing you to split off to two different locations

without any extra gear. A new headphone amp

onboard lets you monitor a pair of input or outputs

at a time and troubleshoot the I/O at the rack,

without interrupting the mix workflow. “When it

ships, the E6 144 Engine will handle three Stage64s,

and the E6 192 will probably do four,” said Gowing.

“Eventually we’ll broaden that number. Obviously,

you’ll only be able to use the number of input and

outputs the engine can handle, but you’ll be able to

spread I/O across your network and choose where

you’re going to get your I/O from. When we ship,

you will be able to use enough I/O to max out your

engines, it’s just a matter of having the software

bulletproof before we expand that number.”

A VENUE IS A VENUE

Gowing was quick to remind me that while the

S6L is a completely new live system, it still runs

on Venue software. Gowing: “It’s still Venue, but

re-skinned and resized for a 1920x1080 monitor.

Older shows will load up just fine on the S6L.”

AT 16


AVIOM ADDS DANTEwww.aviom.com

Aviom’s new D400 and D400-Dante A-Net

Distributors are designed to distribute power and

digital audio data to an Aviom personal mixing

system and provide users with an easy, affordable

way to get into Aviom personal mixing for live

performance or recording applications. The

standard D400 has an A-Net input — ideal for

those using an analogue input module or a digital

console card as the front end of their system,

while the D400-Dante has Dante I/O instead of

the A-Net input. The D400-Dante allows up to 32

Dante channels to be routed to the personal mixing

system, which makes connecting to a Dante-

enabled digital console or audio network as simple

as plugging in a Cat-5 cable. Up to eight personal

mixers can be connected to each D400 or D400-

Dante’s A-Net outputs, and an unlimited number

of distributors can be used when creating larger

systems with more than eight performers.

PAVT:(03) 9264 8000 or [email protected]

RODE EXCITED, BUY APHEX

Founder and Managing Director of Rode, Peter

Freedman, announced the purchase of the US-

based audio technology manufacturer, Aphex.

Founded in the mid-1970s, Aphex has become

one of the big names in the music and broadcast

industries, with products and technologies used

in a wide range of applications for music, film,

video, theatre, gaming and communications.

Growing up in professional audio as I did, I

have always had incredible respect for Aphex.”

commented Mr Freedman. “They’ve always been

the best in the business at enhancing the recorded

audio experience”. David Wiener, Chairman and

CEO of DWV Entertainment, previous owner of

Aphex, added: “Aphex is in the best shape ever in

the company’s history. I look forward to seeing

Peter’s exceptional passion and energy focused on

growing Aphex with new products and programs.

Rode is an incredible success story of the modern

audio movement, and now with Aphex in its stable

I am excited to see what will come next”. We are

too. Hopefully we can all get excited about some

Big Bottom coming our way. For now, Aphex will

continue to trade as usual.

Rode:(02) 9648 5855 or [email protected]

AT 17

TASCAM 64-TRACK RECORDER$3499 | www.tascam.com

Tascam has introduced the DA-6400, its new 64-track recorder ideal for

applications such as live recording, event capture, multichannel playback,

or even as a backup to critical DAW sessions. The DA-6400 records up to 64

tracks at 24-bit/48k to an internal, swappable SSD drive. 96kHz recording

is also possible with a limit of 32 simultaneous tracks of recording. On the

rear panel you’ll find SMPTE timecode, word clock, RS-422, parallel and

Ethernet connections. MADI, Dante and AES/EBU multichannel I/O cards are

supported, and two audio interface slots provide input and output flexibility.

Housed in a 1U rack unit and available with a single or dual/redundant

power supply, the DA-6400 is a flexible and capable solid state recorder for

professional remote tracking.

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

RODE REPORT: IXLR ~$150 (tbc) | www.rode.com/ixlr

Having released a mic for just about every conceivable video

recording situation, Rode has been turning its hand to the bits

inbetween to bring up the quality of capture along the way. The

new iXLR takes a few of the conversion lessons from the iXY

iOS mic series, and opens up the process to any mic. The iXLR

is a little box that connects to the end of any XLR microphone,

like Rode’s Reporter mic, and converts its output to digital —

specifically to funnel into a Lightning connector-equipped iOS

device. It’s a simple gadget, not much wider than an XLR that

has two controls; a switch to boost the level of dynamic mics by

20dB, and a thumb-adjustable headphone volume control that

doubles as a record pushbutton. That, of course, means there’s

a headphone output for getting that mouth to mic distance

consistent. In conjunction with iXLR’s release later in the year,

Rode has also flagged a new recording app to go with it.

Rode:(02) 9648 5855 or [email protected]

AKG’S MINIATURE MICSwww.akg.com/pro

According to AKG, and card-carrying theatre professionals,

smaller is better when it comes to wearable microphones.

The MicroLite series is AKG’s new line of miniature reference

microphones. Ideal for broadcast, theatre and conference

applications, the series includes lavalier, ear-hook and

headworn options that provide comfort and flexibility, as well

as moisture resistance and EMC protection. The LC81 MD is a

cardioid lavalier microphone designed to be as inconspicuous

as possible with a diameter of 4.8mm, length of 10mm and

a weight of just 2g. The LC82 MD has an omnidirectional

capsule, making it ideal for musicals, theatre, churches, and

large-format presentations. The EC81/EC82 and HC81/

HC82 are ear-hook microphones engineered for accurate,

specific placement, and are available with both cardioid and

omnidirectional capsules. A variety of accessories are available

with the MicroLite series, including wire-mesh protection caps,

foam windscreens, lavalier clips, and perspiration and makeup

protectors.

Hills SVL:(03) 9890 7477 or www.hillssvl.com.au

JBL 7 SERIES MASTER REFERENCE MONITORSwww.jblpro.com/7series

The new 7 Series Master Reference Monitors from JBL Professional are

in production and now shipping. For the 708i 8-inch two-way, and 705i

5-inch two-way installed monitors, JBL has engineered two entirely new

high-excursion 5-inch and 8-inch woofers that give the 708i and 705i robust

low-frequency output into the 30Hz range and peak system output of 113dB

and 107dB respectively. JBL’s patent-pending Image Control Waveguide and

crossover work in concert to produce a smooth transition, detailed, spatial

imaging and neutral response. Front-ported birch plywood install-ready

enclosures include bottom and rear-panel mounting points. The speakers are

powered by Crown DCi 8|300N eight and four-channel installation power

amplifiers, and the entire system can be externally controlled using Harman’s

HiQnet Audio Architect software, a hardware controller or wireless tablet.

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

AT 18

AT 19T

INTEGRATE: dLIVE, Si, F1, REDLINE & MORE

With over 100 new products released at Integrate this year, there was a lot

to explore and discover over the course of the three-day-long exhibition.

Primarily an AV integration show, with big players in the audiovisual industry

like Panasonic, LG, Sony, Extron and Samsung making their presence known

on the floor, there was also a good representation of audio companies bringing

some exciting new products to Australia for the first time.

Among the noteworthy releases was the new flagship console from Allen &

Heath, the dLive . Having made a favourable impression in the digital mixer

market with its iLive lineup, A&H extends its reach with dLive by ‘doubling’

(hence the ‘d’) several of the features from the iLive series — 128 inputs, 64

outputs, two 12-inch screens and 96k sample rate.

While there wasn’t a huge amount of pro audio gear on show at the Jands

booth, the Soundcraft Si Impact made enough of a splash to carry the load.

Now available in Australia, this 40-input mixer is an affordable digital desk

candidate that boasts some well thought-out features — separate knobs for

every EQ band, Lexicon effects onboard, dynamics processing by dbx, and

Soundcraft’s FaderGlow for enhanced visual indication of groups.

Big news at the Bose booth was the F1 Model 812 Flexible Array system.

Feeding off the design of the L1 series, the F1 features an active 8 x 2.25-inch

loudspeaker and accompanying subwoofer — the standout feature being you

can shape the vertical dispersion pattern of the loudspeaker by angling the

driver units to suit the venue. See Mark Woods’ review in this issue for more.

PAVT had the new Redline series of active loudspeakers by EAW on display.

The RL12 and RL15 are separate two-way 1,250W 12-inch and 15-inch

speakers with trapezoidal enclosures, and joining them was the RL18S 18-

inch subwoofer with EAW’s DynO DSP. Australis had a complete wall of

Turbosound speakers on display, sitting each model in a giant version of an

IKEA bookshelf so you could check out the amplifier/DSP panels on the rear.

Videos from Integrate of the A&H dLive, Soundcraft Si Impact and Bose F1

can be seen at the AudioTechnology website or YouTube channel.

D&B DEMOS ARRAY OF NEW GEAR

National Audio Systems hosted an all-day partner

meeting for its d&b audiotechnik clients on

Tuesday August 25th at Melbourne’s Festival Hall,

where it showcased new products from d&b and

conducted training on line array processing — all

with plenty of listening examples.

The Y-Series point source and array systems

were fired up, letting participants get an ear full

of these Q-Series replacements. The point source

speaker/sub combo was a classic example of ‘it

sounds way bigger than it looks’. d&b has made

the most of affordable 3D printing to iterate

impressive looking new waveguides, resulting in

some exquisitely parallel dispersion plots. The 10D

and 30D installation amplifiers were introduced,

both with d&b DSP onboard as well as GPIOs and

system status monitoring capabilities. The 10D is

designed for use with the smaller systems while

the 30D will drive any d&b system you pair it with.

The xC column speakers were looking anorexic

next to the Y-Series and J-Series flown line

arrays, but an acoustic track played through them

proved they were no sonic weaklings. The new

Max2 wedge was also on display, set up with a

SM58 and mixer to give the soundies a chance to

count to two to their hearts’ content and evaluate

the speaker’s sound dispersion and response to

feedback. The session was seen out with a ground-

shaking demo of the J-Series array and J-Subs,

leaving many to question whether they’d ever

heard Festival Hall sound so good.

National Audio Systems:(03) 8756 2600 or [email protected]

AT 20

DIGICO S21 GETS GROUP WELCOME

Group Technologies’ unofficial Integrate sideshow

was a welcome chance for past and prospective

clients to clap their eyes on the all-new Digico

S21 console and revel in Group’s hospitality. At

headquarters, Group had set up highlights from its

high-end PSI Audio range of monitors with a single

armchair front and centre for anyone that wanted

to get personal with these gobsmackingly good

monitors. Also in the listening room lineup were

Quest’s latest IP67-rated line of speakers . The

MX series is due to go into production towards the

end of the year and shows a level of sound quality

you don’t typically expect from outdoor speakers.

That was just the warmup for some serious

shootouts at Wick Studios just around the corner.

Group converted the main tracking space into a

mock mini-festival with a small stage at one

end and concert touring rigs flown at the other.

First cab off the rank was the RCF NX series L24A

active columns speaker array. With an onboard

1400W amp and DSP that offers phase alignment,

equalisation and more, there was a lot in a slim

package. Even smaller though was the tiny Coda

Audio compact line array. The two-way TiRay line

array boxes are the size of a lunchbox but don’t

sound it. Both the TiRay and TiLow 12-inch bass

extension speakers have integrated rigging systems,

and Coda’s Ease Focus II simulation software will

get them throwing into all the right places.

Group’s technical sales guru Drew Menard then

walked everyone through a handful of monitor

speaker options, with Quest’s QM series again

impressive for the price. RCF NX co-axial monitors

were set up onstage to reflect a band’s live mix and

had plenty of mid-range power, and Nexo’s 45n12

curvilinear floor monitors really showed off their

controlled dispersion.

Turning to the other end, Nexo’s new Geo

M6 compact line array uses some of Nexo’s STM

smarts. A single NXAMP can power up to 12

boxes, which also happens to be the maximum

hang per side. The M620 full-range box can be

flown alongside the M6B sub box with only a

slight difference in the box’s rim giving it away. The

polyurethane cabinets mean these boxes are light

weight but incredibly rigid with no resonances

even at ‘battlespeed’. Speaking of battlespeed, the

last demonstration was a variety of Nexo STM

configurations, including a hang of the newer

Omni module. The highlight being no noticeable

tonal difference between light program and a

full-blown pin-you-ears-back playback of Killing

in the Name Of, thanks to the processor’s built-in

compensation.

After the speaker demonstrations, we were treated

to a guided walkthrough of the Digico S21 . It’s

a whole new GUI that looks a lot less busy than

the SD series, wihtout sacrificing much in the

way of functionality. The work surface is similarly

sparse, with new multi-touch features keeping

a lot of control onscreen. The software, which is

built in Unix instead of Embedded XP, is still in

beta but already felt pretty stable in use and looked

graphically smoother than its bigger siblings.

Check out our video online at audiotechnology.

com.au for Drew’s walkthrough, including the

impending connectivity options.

Group Technologies:(03) 9354 9133 or [email protected]

AT 21

PRICE$599

CONTACTTechnical Audio Group:(02) 9519 0900 or [email protected]

PROSEasy to set upGood sound qualityLightweight

CONSNo high-pass filterA little chunky

SUMMARYWhile there are higher quality alternatives, the System 10’s price point and ease of use make it a good choice as a wireless recording option for video, whether it be your first wireless mic product, or as a backup to your current system.

NEE

D T

O K

NO

W

AUDIO-TECHNICA SYSTEM 10 Portable Camera-Mount Wireless SystemIt’s a hot market for hot-shoe mountedmicrophones and Audio-Technica hasminiaturised its System 10 wirelessseries to fit the mould.Review: Preshan John

REVIEW

Ah, the DSLR, our least favourite of audio-capable contraption. So

good at video, so lousy at audio. Thankfully, there’s loads and loads

of audio manufacturers willing to help out. Case in point, Audio-

Technica, which has released a hot-shoe connecting ENG-style wireless

system that won’t break the bank. Of course, it’ll fit more sophisticated

cameras too, but we all want that nice bokeh on the cheap.

Audio-Technica has placed the same 2.4GHz technology as its

desktop System 10 receiver into a portable camera-mount body.

Notably, the bodypack and handheld transmitters are the same. The

system on review comprised a bodypack transmitter, camera-top

receiver and lapel microphone.

PUNCHING ABOVE ITS WEIGHT

Lifting the units out of the box, the lightweight transmitter and receiver

didn’t quite feel like they’re built for a strenuous lifetime of performing

field-recording duties. Nonetheless the plastic construction is neat,

compact and ergonomic. The light weight of the receiver actually works

in its favour. The last thing you want sitting on top of a heavy DSLR is

another heavy chunk of metal — especially if you’re shooting hand-held.

Although light, there is a certain chunkiness to the system. The

transmitter is about double the size of the top of the line Shure

miniatures. The lapel microphone is similarly large. No amount of sewing

it into clothes will disguise this ‘loud and proud’ lapel.

The initial set-up of the mic/receiver was simple. The receiver charged

up in a couple of hours via micro-USB cable and the transmitter was

ready to go with two new AA batteries. The internal rechargeable battery

is a neat touch, but if you’ve forgotten to charge it there’s no recourse to

switch to a standard alkaline. Simultaneously powering on both units

saw them connect immediately and autonomously but there is a Pairing

button on the receiver as well.

The System 10 provides a very healthy output level, and there is a level

control on the bodypack that can be adjusted with an included mini

screwdriver. The sound quality itself is pretty good and held its own up

against a pricier counterpart by Shure, albeit with less finesse in the highs.

It certainly does the trick for spoken word applications or wherever else

you’d use a lapel mic; recording a live speaker or presenter, for example.

Recorded voice was reproduced with clarity and a pleasant midrange

when we recently took it out for a spin on a tradeshow floor.

On the odd occasion you’re channeling your inner La Blogotheque and

using it on anything other than vocals, a test recording with an acoustic

guitar and vocal revealed better-than-expected results. Securing the

microphone in a useful spot without some kind of rigging contraption is

the hard part.

WELCOME RECEPTION

In operation, the System 10 is very stable. The dual antenna diversity

transmission/reception keeps the audio stream clear and uncorrupted.

I didn’t experience any dropouts or loss of connection, even with two

rooms and three walls between the receiver and mic. The receiver features

Peak and Pair indicator lights, and there’s an LCD with readouts of the RF

signal level, receiver and transmitter battery level, and System ID. There’s

also a 3.5mm monitor output with level control — very useful when you

need to check that the mic is hearing what it’s supposed to.

There are two stages of attenuation available on the receiver (-10dB ,

-20dB), and a switch for either a balanced or unbalanced (dual mono)

output. Unfortunately there is no high-pass filter option and this really

limits its outdoor applications, as the mic is quite prone to wind noise,

plosives, and any kind of rumble in general.

At $599, the System 10 is on the cheaper end of the scale for wireless

video microphones, but you do get pretty good bang for your buck.

If your interest in video recording has grown to where you crave an

improvement over your camera’s internal microphone quality, the Audio-

Technica System 10 is certainly worth considering.

AT 22

AT 23

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QLDBris Sound 07 3257 1040Guitar World 07 5596 2258Totally Technical 07 3270 1111Strore DJ 07 3099 6916ACTBetter Music 02 6282 3199

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Authorised Apogee Pro dealers

www.sounddistribution.com.au

distributed by

LIVE NEWS

MOTU’S CROSSOVER BOX$3495 | www.motu.com

MOTU is releasing a product that blurs the line between what’s

a studio or stage-specific device. The new Stage-B16 is a flexible

stage box, stand-alone mixer and audio interface. Housed in a 2U

rack enclosure, it features onboard DSP with modelled vintage

compression and effects, USB2.0/3.0 compatibility and conversion

up to 192kHz. On the front you’ll find 16 mic inputs with digitally

controlled preamps and phantom power, eight XLR analogue

outputs, four channels of AES/EBU connectivity and a headphone

connection. MOTU’s web app software runs on your favourite

browser on a laptop, and provides complete control over the

Stage-B16 in whichever application you choose to use it. Or you

can hook it up to a wi-fi router using the Ethernet port and control

it wirelessly with a smartphone or tablet. A second Stage-B16 can

be connected via Ethernet cable and more I/O can be added with

the MOTU AVB switch (sold separately).

Network Audio Solutions:(02) 9525 2088 or www.networkaudio.com.au

HILLSONG TUNES TO SHURE

The recent sell-off of bandwidth by the Australian Federal

Government meant a lot of work for some; checking for

compliance and replacing equipment that is now unreliable or

illegal to operate. For Hillsong Church, it was also an opportunity

to evaluate the current market offerings in radio microphones

and in-ear monitors before they replaced inventory across their

several locations in three states. Hillsong services are verbally and

musically dynamic, with worship leaders, singers and musicians all

relying on their radio devices to get their message heard, and with

clarity and reliability. Across Hillsong’s locations, the technical

team decided on a combination of Shure UHF-R, ULX-D, and

QLX-D radio microphones, along with PSM 300, PSM 900, and

PSM 1000 in-ear monitors. “We’ve gone to ULX-D in all campuses

except Baulkham Hills, where we’ve stayed with UHF-R,”

Facilities Project Manager, Steve Le Roux, elaborated. “Most main

campuses run around 14 channels of IEM, six MC mics, and six

vocal mics. Our 12 satellites usually run about six channels total.”

Jands provided extensive support to Hillsong during the rollout,

including RF engineering to ensure correct frequency allocation

per site and region.

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

Who have you been touring with lately?

Gurrumul, and I’ve been busy with Rockwiz.

Who have you worked with in the past?

Midnight Oil, INXS, The Cruel Sea, Paul Kelly, Crowded House, Neil Finn, The Divinyls.

How long have you been doing live sound?

I got started mixing my brother’s bands 35 years ago.

You favourite console?

It would be the Midas XL4 for sheer sonic quality.

Favourite piece of kit?

The Lexicon 480L is the best reverb in the world. It sounds great on everything.

Most memorable gig?

I’ve been lucky to see and mix so many amazing artists over the years, but had the perfect show with Midnight Oil one night at Irvine Meadows in California. Everything fell into place straight out of the

with Tim MillikanInterview: Neil Gray

MIXThe

QUICK


AT 24

ZED NOW WITH POWER$2299 | www.allen-heath.com

Allen & Heath has extended its well-known ZED series with the

launch of ZED Power 1000, a compact 2 x 500W powered mixer

with onboard FX, nine-band graphic EQ and USB recording/

playback. The amplifier addition is a two-channel, Class D type

coupled to a linear power supply designed with robustness,

high peak headroom and smooth bottom end in mind. The

two amplified outputs can be used as a stereo PA or mono plus

monitor/sub setup. The ZED Power 1000 has eight mic/line inputs,

each with three band EQ, plus two stereo inputs. Two of the jack

inputs can be switched to accept a low level input from a guitar,

allowing you to go without a DI. The USB connection allows

playback to/from a computer for capturing stereo recordings of

shows or playing tracks from a laptop. The mixer is also equipped

with XLR main stereo outputs, 60mm faders, a flexible monitoring

section and 16 high quality digital FX. ZED Power 1000 weighs

in at a modest 10.3kg and has a robust carry handle built into the

chassis for easy transport.

Technical Audio Group: (02) 9519 0900 or [email protected]

blocks; huge crowd, band absolutely fired — was just one of those special nights.

How has your mixing setup changed in the last 15 years?

Probably having the freedom to finesse things a little more with the introduction of digital consoles. I’m not sure if I’ve actually changed the way I do things, its more the layout of my console that’s changed.

When digital came in and people discovered plug-ins, everyone wanted to use everything; your entire night was spent chasing your tail trying to keep everything under control. I use very few plug-ins these days, but being able to run a chain of plug-ins is extremely handy when required. For example, I like using a Waves C4 Multiband compressor along with a VEQ4 and then into a Fairchild on my main vocal, I just seem to get the clarity and warmth I’m after with that combination.

What’s been game-changing over the last 15 years?

I’m not sure if there has been any one feature or piece of gear that’s made a discernible difference for me. Maybe having versatility

within speaker manufacturer’s lines. For instance, L-Acoustics and d&b both have small-, medium- and large-size cabinets. Being able to use say d&b Q series in theatres and still have the same voicing as the J-line means my mixes are more consistent from theatres to arenas and festivals.

How have your working methods changed?

They haven’t — it must be the highest quality audio I can produce from the first bar of the first song. We have the tools to do this now; audio should not be hit or miss.

Any tips or words of wisdom for someone starting out?

It’s all about the vocal, that’s where the information of a song is; the vocal must be pristine. It’s no good having the greatest kick drum sound if the vocal is buried.

Volume does not equal talent. Use your ears, not the screen. If it sounds wrong, it is wrong. Trust your ears, it’s the one thing we all have in common, whether you’re an engineer or not, people all hear through the same interface.


D&B MAKES POINT OF V SERIESwww.dbaudio.com

d&b has injected some tech into the humble point-source speaker.

Building on the three-way passive design of the ‘just below

J’ V-Series line array modules, d&b Audiotechnik’s V7P and

V10P point source boxes house two 10-inch drivers in a dipolar

arrangement with a rear mounted 8-inch MF driver attached to a

dual chamber horn. The exits from this horn design create another

dipole around the centrally mounted 1.4-inch compression driver.

In typical d&b fashion, the V series’ dispersion plots are super

straight, holding the 75-degree wide dispersion of the V7P, and

110-degrees of the V10P, constant down to around 350Hz. Both

have 40 degree vertical dispersions. The V series’ LF venting

arrangement also extends frequency response down 59Hz,

meaning it can stand on its own. But for true extension down low

in ground-stacked applications, the new passive cardioid V-GSUB

is an ideal companion. It shares the same specs as the VSUB and

only requires one amp channel to drive it.

National Audio Systems:(03) 8756 2600 or [email protected]

AT 25


SOFTWARE NEWS

ACCUSONUS ERA-DUS$299 | www.accusonus.com

Ever had to part with a perfect recording of a musician’s moment

of true inspiration, all because it was contaminated by some

unwelcome noise and reverb? Accusonus has released ERA-D,

a plug-in with a simple and straightforward user interface that

manages noise and reverb problems quickly and effectively.

The patented technology in the software analyses information

from multiple microphones when available, and explores the

multichannel information to better suppress reverb and/or noise.

A number of tools on the market require that you deal with noise

and reverberation issues separately, lengthening and complicating

workflow. ERA-D differs in that it simultaneously removes both

noise and reverberation in the one plug-in. Set to be a good tool

for studio mixers and post-production engineers alike.

IK’S LIMITER MAY SURPRISE YOU€124.99 | www.ikmultimedia.com

The T-Racks Stealth Limiter by IK Multimedia is an ‘ultra-

transparent’ mastering inter-sample peak limiter, pitched as a

“versatile sonic ninja of a mixing and mastering tool.” Its new

smart level-tracking algorithm works to reduce levels below

the volume ceiling moment-by-moment instead of applying

traditional look-ahead, envelope-based fast attack compression;

resulting in increased transparency and perceived dynamic range.

The plug-in has the straightforward controls you’d expect from a

limiter, with four modes that can be used for different mastering

purposes: Tight, Balanced and Harmonics 1 & 2. It also features an

infrasonic filter that, when engaged, cuts out unwanted sub-bass

frequencies from your mix that could overwork the limiter —

that’s some really low cut.

Sound & Music:(03) 9555 8081 or [email protected]

WAVES’ NEW GEMUS$99 | www.waves.com

Saphira is the first plug-in from Waves’ new Cobalt series. Its

tagline being ‘Analog that only Digital can achieve’. And where

better to start than that analogue buzzword, harmonics. Saphira is

an advanced harmonics shaping tool to give your tracks analogue

musicality, depth and ‘glue’. It allows you to separately adjust both

even and odd harmonics with the Edge and Warmth controls. It

also features a four-band EQ, seven different harmonics modes

with graphical representations of each, and five tape speeds for

adding wow and flutter. Waves reckons we use ‘glue’ wrongly,

talking about compression, when it’s more often the compressor’s

added harmonics. The proof is in the pudding, it seems. Cobalt

Saphira lets you directly control your harmonics without

compression, helping to ‘glue’ your tracks and turn them into a

more cohesive mix with more depth. Demo it at home and see if

Waves is on the money.

Sound & Music:(03) 9555 8081 or [email protected]

KLANGHELM FREEBIEFree | www.klanghelm.com

Audio plug-in developer Klanghelm has put out a vibey little

compressor called the MJUC jr — the little brother of the colourful

MJUC. Modelled with a variable-mu design, it’s designed to

handle both smooth levelling and heavy-handed pumping. It has

two gain stages and interstage transformer simulation, offering

a deep and lively soundstage. The three-position timing switch

not only controls the attack and release times of the unit, but also

the slew rate of the transformers and the timing of other parts

of the circuitry that directly influence the generated harmonics.

Derived from Mk 1 and Mk 2 of its big brother MJUC, the

MJUC jr. is supposed to combine the natural, dense compression

characteristics with the more forward-sounding and harmonically

driven signature of the vari-mu compressors of the early 1960s.

AT 26

Introducing the first portable loudspeaker that lets you easily control the

vertical coverage – so wherever you play, more music reaches more people

directly. The Bose F1 Model 812 Flexible Array Loudspeaker’s revolutionary

flexible array lets you manually select from four coverage patterns, allowing

you to adapt your PA to the room. Plus, the loudspeaker and subwoofer

provide a combined 2,000 watts of power, giving you the output and impact

for almost any application. Your audience won’t believe their ears.

©2015 Bose Corporation.

1 speaker. 4 coverage patterns.

Bose® F1 Model 812 Flexible Array Loudspeaker

STRAIGHT J REVERSE J C

SHAPE YOUR SOUND

F1.Bose.com.au | 1800 659 433

AT 28 MORE NEWS AT www.audiotechnology.com.au

GUITARIST’S BIAS FOR DESKTOPUS$99 | www.positivegrid.com

Positive Grid, creator of the BIAS amp guitar amp modeller, has

announced the release of BIAS FX desktop. BIAS FX Desktop’s

dual amp mode replicates the tone of two real amps set up

together, and its dual signal chains provide two fully independent

effect paths running in parallel. Effects are plentiful with both

modern and classic items such as digital, spring, and stereo delays,

tube screamers, fuzz, tremolo and more. And when integrated

with BIAS Amp (available separately), users can select a different

preamp, power amp, cab, mic and EQ for each. Users can also

download any Amp Match models from BIAS Amp, capture any

real amp tone, and run them in dual amp configurations to create

a flexible amp tone creation tool. ToneCloud allows musicians to

share and download thousands of user and artist rigs right from

the cloud. Worth checking out if you’re a recording or performing

guitarist, or if you just enjoy a fun jam session.

REAPING NEW BENEFITSFrom US$60 | www.reaper.fm

The popular and affordable DAW Reaper has just released its latest

version for Windows and OS X. Reaper 5 features some valuable

additions on top of the usual recording, editing, processing,

mixing and mastering toolset. Among the most notable of these

changes are VST3 plug-in support, allowance for up to 512

channels of I/O with ASIO, improved performance and lower

CPU usage, and big improvements to video support. Version 5

also has much improved automation functionality in the areas of

MIDI/OSC learn support and FX parameter automation. Reaper

contains hundreds of studio-quality effects for processing audio

and MIDI, and built-in tools for creating new effects. If you’ve

never used Reaper before, you can try before you buy with a 60-

day free trial. From then on, you can purchase the DAW from as

little as $60USD, with the price including free software updates up

to version 6.99.

Ear Monitors Australia®38 Hall Road,

South WarrandyteVIC 3134

T: 03 9844 2524www.earmonitorsaustralia.com

“My EMA In Ears sound awesome and havenever let me down over the last 10 years”

Custom Moulded andGeneric Fit In-Ear Monitors

AUSTRALIA WIDE & INTL SERVICEEMA Supporting Australian Touring Artists

- Shannon Noll


DSD FREE-4-ALLFree | www.tascam.com

Tascam has released Hi-Res Editor, a free application that supports

up to 11.2MHz DSD files or 384k WAV. The software allows

playback and export of DSD files without intermediate conversion

to PCM audio, and is available as a download for Windows

from the Tascam website. DSD Audio can be played natively

through supporting USB devices such as the TEAC UD-501 and

HA-P90SD. In cases where a PCM interface is used, or even the

computer’s built-in audio, the software automatically plays DSD

back through the interface at any available sample rate. A section of

the DSD file can be exported as a new file, either in DSD or WAV

format, to separate a long recording into individual tracks. Two

DSD files can also be combined into a new file, for example when a

file over 2GB is divided. DSD audio can be converted to PCM, and

vice-versa, for burning to CD or online distribution. In addition,

Hi-Res Editor can edit the gain level for WAV format audio.


UAD SPRINGS AKG REVERBUS$199 | www.uadio.com

Universal Audio has released a plug-in version of the AKG BX20

spring reverb unit. The original, released in the late 1960s, was

known for its thick and dense sonic character featuring the quick

onset of a classic plate reverb and also the natural-sounding

density and diffusion of a chamber with minimal flutter that’s

typical of other spring reverbs. The AKG BX20 plug-in by UAD

provides the sound and features of the original hardware, plus

other features for added flexibility. You can now ‘stereoize’ tank A

or tank B, giving you more balanced stereo imaging. The Direct

function allows you to mute the tanks direct signal, giving you

more control and minimising conflict with the original source

audio. According to UAD, the BX20 “envelops your sources in

gorgeously dark, dense ambience that only spring reverb can

provide.” The plug-in has been exclusively endorsed by AKG and is

for use with UAD-2 hardware and Apollo interfaces.


CARBON ELECTRA’S DEBUT£63.09 | www.pluginboutique.com

Carbon Electra is a powerful and intuitive sound-mangling

machine created for Plugin Boutique by Aussie synth nuts Davide

Carbone and Josh Abrahams of S:amplify. It’s a four-oscillator

subtractive synth with each oscillator featuring an adjustable pulse

width, frequency modulation and multiple wave types, including

pitch-able noise. It has been developed as an advanced learning

tool, that will be getting a workout at Carbone’s School of Synthesis,

with an emphasis on programming ease. The displays act as a

comprehensive information tool as well as an accurate guide to

each parameter change. Based on vintage analogue routing, it also

features flexible modulation options including an editable stepper

and note performer. There are six filter types, with drive and

saturation settings for the vocal filter. You also get a pedal chain-

like FX section and over 600 presets, including artist presets from

Mike Huckaby, Kosheen, DJ Pierre, Rob Lee and more.

SLATE DIGITAL CUSTOM SERIES BUNDLEUS$149 | www.slatedigital.com

Slate Digital’s Custom Series bundle features two plug-ins; EQ and

LIFT. EQ was the result of studying over a dozen classic analogue

EQs and identifying their stand-out attributes. The plan was to

then implement the best of them all in a single plug-in. The boost

and cut for the four EQ bands (high, high-mid, low-mid and

low) each have an analogue hardware inspiration behind them,

yet according to Slate, “despite the EQ’s hybrid nature, you’ll find

it to be extremely cohesive, intuitive, and really really natural

sounding.” LIFT is a two-knob EQ plug-in designed to be simple

to use but extremely musical. Each knob has two settings that

alter its characteristics and how it affects either the high or low

frequencies. Slate Digital claims it’s “a true workhorse processor

that will come in handy more than you’ll ever imagine.”

Awave:(03) 9813 1833 or [email protected]

AT 30

Unit 10, 163-173 McEvoy St, Alexandria NSW 2015 P (02) 9698 4444 E [email protected] W australismusic.com.au

WE’VE MADE A SOUND ADDITION TO OUR COMPANY.

LEFT TO RIGHT: PETE COSTELLO, DAVE KELLY, BEN RUUT, NIK BUCHANAN.

With over 40 years experience in the Music Industry, Australis Music Group is proud to expand into the Pro Audio / Install markets.

Led by our newly assembled team of highly experienced specialists, our aim is to be your Provider of Choice.

We have the People, the Product and the Passion.

Contact our team to talk audio!

NI’S REAKTOR BUILDING BLOCKS$279 | www.nativeinstruments.com

Native Instruments has released Reaktor 6 — the latest version of

the modular DSP environment that’s been at the core of the Native

Instruments brand since its release as Generator in 1996. Reaktor

6 delivers major innovations for instrument builders as well as

being the most approachable version of the software for anyone

interested in deep sound experimentation with the addition of the

new ‘Blocks’ workflow. Blocks provides the speed and flexibility

of modular synth patching combined with the benefits of working

in the digital domain. Reaktor 6 comes bundled with 30 Blocks

in several categories, each with a specific purpose (see NI site for

more). The world of Blocks is expected to grow as the vibrant

Reaktor community builds and shares new Blocks and Blocks

patches – all available for free online at NI’s Reaktor User Library.

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

WAVES’ GOES ALL EMO$149 | www.waves.com

Plug-in developer Waves has introduced eMo D5, a 5-in-1

dynamics tool — that’s a gate, compressor, de-esser, leveller and

limiter, all rolled into the one GUI. Made to be a Swiss army

knife dynamics tool for both live and studio engineers, the eMo

D5 boasts ‘zero latency’, low CPU consumption and pure sound

quality. The plug-in is the first to utilise Waves’ new Parallel

Detection technology that allows each of the five processors to

respond to the original signal and to each of the other processed

signals simultaneously — the idea being users can have more

control over the dynamics changes introduced by the processors,

ensuring that the final sound achieves better clarity without over-

compression. The eMo D5 plug-in also provides a combined gain

reduction metre for the leveller, compressor and limiter for easier

monitoring and level control.

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

SOLAR-POWERED RECORDING IN MALAWIwww.audient.com

Mobile recording studio, Wired For Sound revisited Malawi this summer

to record young musical talent in the region. On the gear list was

Audient’s iD22 USB interface and ASP880 8-channel mic pre and ADC.

Three weeks into the third phase of the project, and beset with power cuts

and connectivity issues, they still managed to record 40 local musicians.

Sound engineer Simon Attwell explains how they overcame the

problems with the electricity: “We have done all the recordings using our

solar setup built into the vehicle, powering a MacBook Pro, the iD22 and

headphone amp. In fact, we are going solar all the way, using a Studer

200w pure SW inverter. It gives us excellent clean power, free from clicks

or interference.”

The iD22’s compact design and portability make it ideal for location

recording, but this showed its reliability too — even when powered

by the sun. “We’ve also installed two solar powered recording studios

(mirroring our set up — two channel interface and laptop powered by

solar panel) in Monkey Bay and in Mchinji.”

Out of Wired For Sound’s list of recording locations, a jail is possibly

among the most unique: “We used the ASP880 in Kachere Youth Prison

in Lilongwe to record the prison band. It was an amazing experience. We

were a bit concerned about getting it all up and running, but it linked

perfectly and we were recording eight tracks within minutes.”

Innovative Music:(03) 9540 0658 or [email protected]

AT 32

1300 30 66 70 • [email protected] • www.networkaudio.com.au

Watchout!Following protocol to track the latest in audio networks.Column: Paul Doornbusch

REGULARS

I’m waiting for the day some Elon Musk-type

figures out how to make wireless recording

commonplace. The best we’ve got so far is Mikme

— a product of the little Indiegogo campaign that

could — and bandwidth is still a limiting factor

that hasn’t been solved. For the immediate future,

audio will be distributed over computer network

cables and equipment.

It’s a natural development. The data is already

in digital form and networks and computers are

rapidly increasing in performance. Bandwidth

isn’t a problem for ethernet like it is wireless. With

gigabit ports on every new computer, transporting

400+ channels of 24-bit/48k audio over a single

network cable is not unreasonable!

Computer networks work by breaking data into

‘packets’ and then using an intricate set of protocols

to get the data packets where they need to go. There

are protocols for many purposes (see sidebar), from

getting and sending email, to requesting webpages,

to streaming video. A little delay here and there

doesn’t bother data like emails or webpages. But for

audio, we need reliable data delivery or else we get

highly undesirable clicks.

There are a number of systems for running

digital audio over a computer network. CobraNet

and EtherSound are older solutions; Q-Lan, Dante

and Livewire are more recent developments; while

AVB and AES67 are the latest. Let’s look at three of

the main players.

DANTE

The world did not wait around for manufacturers

to build an interoperable system, Audinate’s

proprietary Dante audio networking solution

basically took over the live sound market because

it works well and is available now. Several

manufacturers announced support for Dante in

their live sound consoles from 2012.

The benefit of Dante is that it works over current

networking equipment, particularly network

switches, because Dante works at Layer 3 of the

protocol stack (see the accompanying sidebar).

Dante offers 512 channels in and 512 channels out

of a device, all at 24-bit/48k, over standard network

cable (CAT5e). The maximum sample rate is 192k

and this reduces the channel count to 128 channels,

still not too shabby!

However, as Dante operates over standard

network equipment it does not guarantee delivery

of packets. Latency is 5ms and can be aligned

across devices for accurate synchronisation, but

this requires careful network management. With

multiple connections, Dante offers click-free

failover to another cable in the event of a fault.

There is also no support for video data in Dante.

Dante, being the oldest of these three, has the

greatest support among manufacturers. The long

list of names includes Yamaha, Midas, Allen

& Heath, Bose, Soundcraft, Lake, Shure, EAW,

Avid, AKG, Audio-Technica, Behringer, DiGiCo,

Focusrite, Extron, QSC, Presonus, SSL, Studer and

more. This makes Dante something of a de facto

standard in audio networking, but there are some

exciting developments on the horizon. Read on.

AUDIO VIDEO BRIDGING

Audio Video Bridging, or AVB, is an open standard

not owned by any single manufacturer. It offers a

more plug-and-play solution and overcomes some

of the limitations of Dante. AVB operates at Layer 2

of the network stack which has several advantages.

On the downside, it needs special hardware — an

AVB-capable switch.

AVB allows for 400 bi-directional channels per

device of 24-bit/48k audio data. Significantly, AVB

offers guaranteed delivery of AVB packets with

only 2ms latency. This is achieved with hardware

control reserving up to 75% of the available

network data bandwidth exclusively for AVB

packets. The downside of this is that you cannot

send AVB packets over the internet or between

networks because that sort of data is all controlled

at Layer 3.

However, as utopian as AVB sounds, equipment

has been slow to appear and Dante has increased its

Dr Paul Doornbusch is the Associate Dean, Audio Production Program Leader, at Australian College of the Arts. Paul loves computers so much, he reconstructed and documented the music played by Australia’s first computer (CSIRAC) while he was a composer-in-residence at the Computer Science department of the University of Melbourne.

Historical & AES67 Networks: Q-Lan Livewire Ravenna, etc

Dante Equipment: Yamaha Midas Shure, etc

AVB Equipment: MOTU Avid Meyer, etc

AVB Network Switches

Stanndard Managed Network Switches

AES67

AES67Dante

So in the future we may well see audio networks like this:

AT 34

user base in the meantime. Significantly, Audinate

has said that Dante will support AVB when it is

established. While manufacturer implementations

may be slow in appearing, both Presonus and

MOTU have recently released AVB equipment,

plus Avid and Meyer have had it for a while. Other

manufacturers supporting AVB include Apple,

Crown, Beyerdynamic, DBX, Soundweb London,

Netgear, Cisco, AudioScience and so on.

AES67

The Audio Engineering Society has developed

the AES67 standard for audio-over-IP

interoperability. AES67 is a Layer 3 protocol that

offers interoperability between various competing

audio networking systems, such as Dante, Q-Lan,

Livewire, RAVENNA and so on. It also identifies

common elements with AVB and documents how

it interoperates with AVB.

With AES67 there is an open standard for audio

data over IP. Open standards are good for a number

of reasons, and should result in cheaper equipment

overall. AES67 allows these competing systems

to interoperate, and to get audio data between

STACK O’ PROTOCOLSThe way computers send information over networks is that each computerhas an address, and ‘packets’ of information are sent from one address toanother.

It’s a bit like sending a cake to someone in separate slices, one slice at a time.But instead of being able to whack the whole address on the envelope, youcan only put one detail on each. You have to start with their name, then slotthat envelope inside another with the street name and number, then intoanother envelope with the city written on it, and lastly, stuff it all into a finalenvelope labelled with the state.

Like this:

Once the piece of cake gets to NSW, the post office takes off that envelopeand sends it to Sydney, where that envelope is removed and so on until it’sdelivered to Sarah. As you can imagine, this adds considerable overhead tothe process and it can get complicated if the pieces of the cake should arriveout of order.

In computer networks, each application or piece of network equipment addsan envelope to the packet of data, which is later removed when it has arrivedat the next destination. The Open Systems Interconnection model is a con-cept that standardises and characterises the communication functions forcomputer communication. You can imagine each of the seven layers addingan envelope with items such as the addresses of the sender and receiver, ses-sion for the date, the packet number, the time to live, and — for digital audiodata — when it should be played.

Network protocols have evolved different characteristics. You might wantthe cake to get to the destination as quickly as possible and you don’t care if a

little gets lost, or maybe you need all of the cake to arrive in order and none toget lost, but you don’t care if that takes longer. Some network protocols arefaster and less reliable (like UDP, often used for streaming media) and someare very reliable (like TCP/IP, used for email and web page transmission) andwill resend a packet that gets lost, so that nothing corrupts the message.

The OSI Network Protocol Stack below shows the various logical layers thatare needed to push data around a network. Each of these layers typicallyadds header information (the envelope example). Header information isadded as data moves down the stack. At Layer 3 the data is broken into pack-ets, and so on until the data is transmitted over the cable as bits in Layer 1.

<envelope state: NSW

<envelope city: Sydney

<envelope street name & number: 49 Flinders St.

<envelope apartment number: 4

<envelope name: Sarah

>

>

>

>

Layer Name Data type Which Layer?

Host Layers

7. Application From the network process to the application

Data

6. Presentation Data representation and encryption

Data

5. Session Inter host communication

Data

4. Transport End-to-end communication and reliability

Segments

Media Layers

3. Network Path determination and IP (logical addressing)

Packets Dante AES67 Q-LAN by QSC RAVENNA

2. Data link MAC and LLC (physical addressing)

Frames AVB AES51 CobraNet EtherSound SoundGrid REAC by Roland

1. Physical Media, signal and binary transmission over the cable.

Bits AES50 A-Net by Aviom vRockNet by Riedel

networks. So if a connection is made between an

AVB network or product to an AES67 network or

product, then AES67 will allow the audio to be sent

to a Dante network or product!

So in the future we may well see audio networks

like this:

NET EFFECTS

Of course, users drive adoption, and for most

Dante already provides a suitable solution. Dante

is not perfect and users have reported issues such

as clicks and PC firewall issues. It’s a new game of

diagnostics with this technology. However, most of

the time it works as intended and it is here now. As

needs change in the future AVB offers some real

advantages and should be easier to manage, use

and debug. AES67 allows the interoperability of

these systems so there is a way forward regardless

of the system you chose (or more likely inherit

somehow). The real world may well see several

of these systems working together because of a

historical mix of equipment.

AT 35

FEATURE

GEARING UPTO TAKE ONMONSANTO

To record Neil Young at the famous Teatro, Jon Hanlon linked up the UA Green and Brown Boards with a Neve BCM10 and PSM12 into the ultimate DIY ‘large format’ console.Feature: Paul Tingen

Artist: Neil Young & Promise of the Real Album: The Monsanto Years

AT 36

Neil Young an old fogey? With the legendary

musician approaching 70, the description has

been whispered a few times, even if there’s too

much respect for the man for most critics to say it

out loud. There’s a peculiar video on YouTube (Neil

Young Shows Haskell Wexler His LincVolt) that

initially seems to confirm the old-fogey angle.

Young — baseball cap, T-shirt and scruffy jacket,

sunglasses, heavy sideburns and long hair — shows

off his shiny, 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible.

His look has ‘old hippy’ pasted across it in neon,

and the car itself screams nostalgia, suggesting an

owner firmly rooted in the past.

The devil is under the bonnet though, because

while it’s easy to miss when Young calls the car an

“electric cruiser” right at the beginning, a moment

later he explains that it’s powered in part by a

generator that runs on “cellulosic ethanol, a future

fuel made from waste.” The more cynical may still

categorise it as an old-hippy pursuit — ‘Young’s

an environmentalist, you know’. But as the video

progresses and Young shows the gleaming, hyper-

advanced technology just underneath the surface of

the Lincvolt, the realisation dawns that the car is, in

fact, totally and utterly futuristic.

The Lincvolt project is initiated and presumably

funded by Young, and its mission statement is

to “to inspire a generation by creating a clean

automobile propulsion technology that serves the

needs of the 21st Century and delivers performance

that is a reflection of the driver’s spirit.” With the

world heating up increasingly fast and mankind

desperately needing to cut its CO2 emissions, it

does not get more forward-looking and relevant

to our times than that. Neil Young undoubtedly is

an old hippy, but he also is far more with the times

than many people a quarter his age. 1-0 to Young in

his tussle with the 21st Century.

YOUNG STAR BUCKS

The same reflections, and conclusion, come to

mind when considering Neil Young’s latest musical

project, his 36th studio album The Monsanto Years.

Young’s 51-minute rant against the Monsanto

multinational company (think Roundup),

Starbucks, and big companies in general hijacking

our democracies and endangering our environment

and our lives, has come in for quite bit of criticism,

ostensibly because the lyrics are too “didactic.”

These reviews also often have a hint of ‘who does

he think he is to lecture us about anything?’ And

yet, at a time when news of fast-approaching

Armageddon is dominating newsfeeds everywhere,

the question is far more pertinent why the vast

majority of today’s artists take the ostrich-approach

to the Big Issues Of Our Time. That’s Young 2, 21st

Century 0.

There’s more. The Monsanto Years sees Young

team up with a band of youngsters (’scuse the

pun), called Promise of the Real, featuring Willie

Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah. Presumably, the

idea is for Young to tap into their youthful energy

and help him connect with a younger generation.

The album was recorded at the Teatro theatre in

Oxnard, a coastal town half an hour north of LA,

where Daniel Lanois set up shop in the late ’90s and

recorded and produced classic albums by Willie

Nelson, Bob Dylan, and others.

The Monsanto Years was recorded in typical

Neil Young fashion; quickly, nearly live, full of

rough edges, and to analogue tape using vintage

analogue gear. Yet it turns out that a Pro Tools rig

running at 192k was also involved. So just like the

LincVolt, a combination of vintage and advanced

21st Century technology was used, and the result

sounds downright spectacular; big, panoramic,

energetic, gutsy and very alive. All this surely

helped in prompting sympathetic reviewers to state

that the album sees Young, “at his usually defiant,

belligerent and downright hostile best,” and “on

angry, brilliant form.” 3-0 to Neil Young?

SHIP STIRRER

John Hanlon manned the ship during The Monsanto

Years sessions, not only engineering, mixing and

co-producing (with Young) the album, but also

as the project’s general organiser, studio designer,

and trouble-shooter. Perhaps it’s Hanlon’s old Navy

and/or electronics background, but he’s extremely

precise in his recollections, remembering that he

got the first call from Young for The Monsanto

Years project on December 17, 2014, saying that

he wanted to record a new album… with Promise

of the Real as backing band… at Teatro. Hanlon

was immediately aware that Young’s simple

pronouncement posed some significant challenges.

“It’s really important for Neil to find a space

where he can set up and be comfortable,” explains

Hanlon. “That usually means big spaces. Teatro

is a big, empty theatre, with a high ceiling, and

all the seats have been taken out, so the acoustics

are cavernous. We could have worked in tons of

places with better acoustics but Neil had his heart

set on Teatro so it was my job to make the live area

work and build a studio there for him. He wanted

to record there because of the vibe and because of

what the place represents. Particularly the great

records that have been done there, even though it

was with a different producer and 18 years ago.

“Also, the band consists of really accomplished

musicians, with whom he’d worked at a benefit

earlier in the year, and he wanted to work with

them because they’re fearless and not afraid to go

for things, yet take his lead. This meant that I had

to record six musicians including Neil, which posed

its own problems as we were working all-analogue

with a limited amount of inputs and buses. I had

a ton of work to do in terms of organising the

acoustics, the band set-up and the studio. What

I thought of Teatro did not matter. What was

important was to make it work technically, and

create an atmosphere where Neil can relax, and

just be in the moment inventing and performing

music. If I could achieve that, and Neil’s happy,

I had a chance of recording great and heartfelt

music. Because that’s what it’s all about, capturing

the moment.”

THEATRE TREATMENT

Hanlon elaborated on the considerable amount of

preparation that “capturing the moment” at Teatro

required. “Given that Neil’s call came just a week

before Christmas, all I could do for the rest of the

month was get on the phone and start lining up

vendors, the acoustic team and so on. I started

readying the recording space the first business

day of the new year, January 5th. I laid down mats

and carpets and put up gobos in the area where

the musicians played to dampen reflections, and

installed large panels against the back wall to

break up the flutter echo. Of course, when the area

filled up with gear it helped as well. The acoustic

crew I had hired came in to work on the control

room, which I had decided to build in the former

projector room upstairs. It’s as bad an acoustic

environment as you can have, with a big concave

ceiling that was like the upside down hull of a boat,

so we put clouds and traps up there, in the back

and front, in the corners, and also left and right

of the theatrical space, to turn everything into

listening areas I could trust.

They’re the sounds I remember from when I was growing up in the ’90s. That’s the truest kind of nostalgia I can find

“The acoustic treatments were done in the first

week, while I was installing the gear with Jeff Pinn.

Most of the gear came from Neil’s studio at his

Broken Arrow ranch. I first worked there on his

album Ragged Glory with producer David Briggs in

1990, using the Record Plant mobile truck. It was

the first time I encountered the 12-input Universal

Audio Green Board. It’s an all-valve console, built

in 1965, based around UA 610 mic pre units with

EQ at 100Hz and 10kHz. It sounds great, and was at

one point owned by Brian Wilson. In all I had four

consoles set up in the impromptu control room at

Teatro. From left to right from where I was sitting

they were a suitcase-model Neve PSM12, the Green

Board, another 16-input UA board which we call

the Brass Board, and a Neve BCM10 sidecar. THE

BRASS BOARD IS A SOLID STATE VERSION OF THE GREEN

BOARD, WITHOUT MIC PRES OR EQ, ALL HAND-WIRED WITH

POINT-TO-POINT SOLDERING ONTO A BIG PIECE OF BRASS,

AND ONLY LCR PANNING. I BELIEVE IT WAS HANDMADE FOR

NEIL AROUND 1969.

“I also brought in a Pro Tools rig, tons of

outboard, and Neil’s Studer A827 24-track tape

machine, with a 16-track head block. I had used the

same machine for the recordings of Americana and

Psychedelic Pill (both 2012) but with an 8-track head

AT 37

block. Those albums were done with a four-piece,

but I needed more tracks to be able to record six

musicians. I set up 28-30 microphones at Teatro,

which is not a lot to record a band, but you don’t

use stacks of microphones when you’re confronted

with the small amount of inputs that I had! I also

set up a PA, mainly so they could hear themselves

singing, and to amplify the percussion. My studio

monitors were PMC IB2s as main monitors and

PMC twotwo.6s as nearfields. I don’t EQ bottom

end on small bookshelf speakers, and Neil wants

playback to be as loud as possible when he comes

into the control room with the band. So the IB2s

served a dual function. The ability to check the low

end is crucial for me, because the mid-range and the

top are very affected by the low frequencies.”

CAPTURING IMPERFECTION

Setting up the Teatro recording space and studio

took Hanlon and his crew two weeks. Once all the

equipment and acoustic treatments were in place, he

began the second phase of conducting the sessions.

“Neil had recorded demos of him singing with an

acoustic guitar at Capitol Studios in LA, with Niko

Bolas and Al Schmitt engineering. I brought a CD

of that in on Monday January 19, for Lucas and the

band to be able to hear the changes and melodies

and lyrics when they came in for the first time. They

also brought a few of their own tunes — it was part

of the deal that I’d record them playing some of

their own stuff as well. They ran through each of the

eight songs on Neil’s demos, and a few of their own,

over the course of a week, making sure they didn’t

learn Neil’s songs into the ground, so to speak. Neil

hates it when everybody learns things to the point

that the life goes out of it. A lot of music today has

been perfected way too much, which is not human

nature. Neil is into the human condition and into

capturing imperfections.”

Having Promise of the Real run through the

songs for a week also allowed Hanlon to perfect

his setup and get the best sounds possible. THE

PRODUCER HAD ONE MORE VARIABLE TO NEGOTIATE,

WHICH IS THAT YOUNG PREFERS TO RECORD AROUND THE

TIME OF THE FULL MOON. With the next new moon

on February 3rd he wasn’t expecting Young to

arrive until the end of January, but in fact the main

man turned up on the 26th. “Neil came in with

one additional new song, and the band learnt that

very quickly. We went straight for takes after that.

We usually recorded three takes of each song at

the most. Sometimes we got it on the first take. If

we didn’t have it in three takes, we took a break

and moved on, then came back to the first song a

few days later. The main thing is for everyone and

everything to stay fresh.”

The recording and mixing setup that Hanlon

had built at Teatro sounds straightforward

enough, but the lack of inputs and buses meant a

rather complicated web of signal chains. Using a

16-channel mixing desk without EQ or continuous

panning, plus quirky mix preferences on the part of

Young, required meticulous forethought. Hanlon

went into detail on what was involved, starting

with the microphones right at the beginning of the

signal chains.

Hanlon: “The fact that I didn’t have many mic

inputs was handy from one perspective, because

the fewer microphones you use, the less phase

errors you are going to introduce into your

recording. I COME FROM A LOVE OF ENGLISH ROCK ’N’

ROLL RECORDS, AND ALL MY MICROPHONE TECHNIQUES

I had four consoles set up in the impromptu control room at Teatro… a suitcase-model Neve PSM12, the Green Board, another 16-input UA board which we call the Brass Board, and a Neve BCM10 sidecar.

AT 38

ARE BASED ON THOSE BY CHRIS HUSTON, ANDY JOHNS,

EDDIE KRAMER — THE GUYS WHO CUT LED ZEPPELIN 2 —

WHO ALSO USED A LIMITED AMOUNT OF MICS. My whole

concept at Teatro was to try to balance people in

the room as best as possible, even before I put up

any microphones or switched on the PA. I placed

the guitar and bass amps in a semi-circle, with the

drums behind them so the drummer is not getting

the full force of the amps and hearing himself. As

long as you maintain dynamics in the playing area,

you get much better performances.

“I recorded the drums with only three mics, using

the Glyn Johns method, with a pair of Neumann

U67s above, at a 90-degree angle from each other

and in front of the kick a Neumann tube 47 with a

large piece of foam to protect the capsule from air

pressure, and a Neumann 47 FET as backup. I had

leakage from the guitars, but leakage is your friend.

You’re hearing everything at the same time, and

that’s your record. I augmented that drum setup

with a Shure SM57 on the snare and a Neumann

KM84 on the hi-hat, but I only used them

occasionally. I bused the kick drum to Track 1, and

the 67s, SM57 and KM84 to Tracks 2 and 3.

“I had another Neumann 47 FET on the bass

cabinet, and while I also had a direct, I usually used

the 47, which went to Track 4 on the tape. I LIKE TO

USE TWO MICS ON THE GUITAR CABS, A SHURE SM56 AND

57 — ANDY JOHNS STYLE — WITH ONE MIC CLOSE AND

STRAIGHT ON, AND THE OTHER ANGLED. THE STRAIGHT-ON

MIC GETS YOU THE MIDS AND TOP END, AND THE ANGLED

MIC THE LOW END. As a result you don’t need EQ.

I used this technique on Neil’s Fender Deluxe

and Magnatone amps, and on Micah Nelson’s

Princeton, but Lucas played both my 1964 Fender

Vibroverb and another old Princeton. Because I

JOHN HANLON BIOJohn Hanlon first worked with Young on Rag-ged Glory (1990), as an engineer and mixer, and has since worked on a multitude of other Neil Young projects, including Weld (1991), Arc Weld (1991), Unplugged (1993), Sleeps With Angels (1994), Young’s Dead Man soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch film (1996), Are You Passionate? (2003), Americana and Psychedelic Pill (both 2012). Having been trained in electronics in the Navy and worked in the computer business, Hanlon was hired by a small film sound post-production facility in San Francisco in 1973. He fell in love with tape machines and studio technology in general, played guitar, and later moved to LA, where he was a roadie for several well-known acts, worked as a studio tech at Record Plant Studios and A&M Studios, and eventually landed himself a job at the Beach Boys’ studio in Santa Monica. He went independent in the early 1980s, and did a lot of work with producer David Briggs, known for his pioneering work with Neil Young. The rest, as Hanlon says, “is history,” with much of Hanlon’s current time being taken up working at Young’s Broken Arrow ranch, just south of San Francisco, on the musician’s archives. In ad-dition to his work with Young, Hanlon has over the years also worked with the likes of The Beach Boys, Cat Stevens, Dennis Wilson, Stephen Stills, R.E.M., Jackson Browne, and many others.

didn’t have enough inputs, I had just a single 57

on each, angled at around 30 degrees off-axis, so

I covered both the top and the bottom end. Neil

played an acoustic guitar on the track Wolf Moon,

a pre-war Martin D28 formerly owned by Hank

Williams, and I recorded it with an AKG C12A and

direct from the pick-up. The guitars went to Tracks

5 and 6, and Neil’s on Track 7.

“I had a Neumann KMS140 on Neil’s vocal,

which is cardioid, because he tends to move

around a lot, and this was recorded to Track 8. To

pick up less from the room, I used hyper-cardioid

Neumann KMS150s on the three band members

who sang; Lukas, Micah and [bassist] Corey

[McCormick]. These went to Tracks 11, 12, and

13. We also overdubbed backing vocals on some

songs using a Telefunken 251 and a 47 FET for the

double. I recorded those overdubbed vocals directly

to Pro Tools, and they came up on Channels 15-16

on the Brass Board for the mix.

“Track 9 had percussion, which I recorded

with a pair of fixed cardioid Neumann TLM103s.

THE ROOM MICS WERE ON TRACK 10. I PUT UP FIVE OF

THEM, CONSISTING OF A PAIR OF KLAUS HEYNE-MODIFIED

NEUMANN U87S IN FRONT OF THE BAND, TWO COLES 4038

RIBBON MICS BEHIND THE DRUMS, AND A TUBE NEUMANN

47 LOW IN FRONT OF THE STAGE FOR MORE BOTTOM END.

I didn’t use the Royer ribbon mic I put up on the

balcony, because it had too much delay, which

made it useless. It would have gone to Track 15.

“And finally, on Track 14 I had the subkick. I sent

the kick mic out to a big subwoofer in the back of

the room and recorded that back in, so I could get

more bottom end on the kick. It excites the room

and also gives the drummer a better sense of his

kick drum. In the end it was a 14-track recording. I

also had a pair of AKG C12As on Neil’s ‘Gold Rush’

upright piano, which is named like that because

it was used on After The Gold Rush, and a pair of

matched AKG 451s on a pump organ. I never used

any of them. But if there are instruments in the

studio that Neil can play, I better be ready to record

them, otherwise I risk being in a world of hurt!”

INS & OUTS

So far, so straightforward, though Hanlon’s

approach in reducing 28-odd mics to 14 tape tracks

was not quite as clear-cut. Hanlon elaborated both

on his bussing and some of the outboard he put

into action. “The outboard was a lot of tube and old

solid-state stuff, and it was all used during tracking.

They included a pair of Pultec EQP-1As on the bass

and kick, and a Neve 2254 compressor on the bass

microphone and DI. On the guitars I had Neve

32264 compressors and Lang PEQ2s — I like what

the Lang does to the low-mids and upper bottom

end on guitars. It sounds great. The mic pres on all

the vocalists were Neve 1073s, and Neil’s vocal went

through my Quad Eight compressor. I used three

UREI 1176 compressors on the other vocalists.

“All my inputs came down to 12 on the Green

Board, 10 on the BCM10, and external 1066 mic

pres for the bass and DI, and 1073s for the vocals.

The Green Board’s 610 mic pres were great for

guitar amps and room mics, and I used one line

input for Neil’s vocal from the Quad Eight.

I DIDN’T APPLY ANY EQ ON THE MICS ON THE GREEN BOARD,

BECAUSE THE CONSOLE SOUNDS SO OPEN AND BALLSY,

YOU DON’T REALLY NEED TO DO ANYTHING. The drums

and percussion and other room mics came in on

the BCM10. The Neve PSM12 was there because

I needed extra buses. It was used to combine the

room mics that came in on the Green Board and on

the BCM10. The Green Board only has four buses,

but none can be multiple assigned. I needed to

combine the room mics that came in on the Green

Board and the BCM10, so I used their echo and

foldback outputs to go to the PSM12, where they

were blended into a single output going to Track 10

on the tape recorder. I didn’t need the room mics in

stereo as I already had enough width from all the

other microphones, particularly the drum mics on

Tracks 2 and 3.

“THE STUDER WAS RUNNING AT 30IPS, WITH 5000FT

REELS, WHICH GAVE ME JUST OVER HALF AN HOUR OF

RUNNING TIME. I HAD TO DO SOME ‘HOT’ REEL CHANGES,

WHICH WAS TRICKY! After recording things on

the Studer, I transferred them to Pro Tools at

24-bit/192k. The reason was that if you start

running tape a lot, you begin to lose high end. It

may not be discernible to most people, but the

sound does change. I love tape and love rolling it

back and forth, but we treated these 2-inch tapes as

masters. The way we worked gives you the option

of doing all your mix preparation in Pro Tools,

and then later using time code to connect the tape

recorder again to mix from the actual tape. We

didn’t do that in this situation. The 14-track Pro

Tools recording of each session came up on the

Brass Board and I mixed on that.”

ON THE CLOCK

Given that Young and Hanlon are self-declared,

diehard analogue fans, the use of Pro Tools is

a little puzzling, though the answer, at least on

Young’s part, appears to mirror his championing

of the hi-res Pono music player. “The reason to go

to digital is practical,” replied Hanlon. “But when

we use digital, Neil wants to go to the highest

resolution available. We have done listening tests,

and 192k sounds great, though it does depend on

having a good clock. We have used the Apogee Big

Ben, which I think is very musical, and I checked

out the Antelope, Rosendahl Nanosync, Aardvark

Aardsync and the new Pro Tools clock, and they’re

all really good. WE DID A SHOOT-OUT AND WENT WITH

THE GRIMM AUDIO CC1, BECAUSE IT SOUNDED THE BEST

WITH 24-BIT/192K AND THE NEW AVID HD I/O CONVERTERS.

“I love the sound of tape, and these days it’s more

of an effect. I used to like the lower output tapes,

because you can get more tape compression, but

with the high output tapes now you really have

to work to compress it, and sometimes the tape

machine electronics start to distort before the

tape saturates! With rock ’n’ roll there’s so much

harmonic distortion on everything, I like what

happens when you put the whole band on tape,

but if I was recording jazz or classical, I might go

strictly digital, at high resolution. But up to a point

it does not matter what I like. Neil likes tape, and

then wants it recorded to hi-res digital as soon as

possible. Once again, just like with the place where

we recorded, it doesn’t matter whether he’s right

or wrong, if that’s what he wants and I can make

it happen, I have a happy performer and will get

better takes.

“It’s a similar situation with the mix. Everything

you do with Neil is a fight against time, because he

doesn’t like waiting. The moment we had finished

the transfer to Pro Tools and they came in to listen

back, I was mixing the session live on the Brass

Board and that was our starting point. That first

playback with me running the faders — or rotary

pots in this case — doing a mix better be going

somewhere, because Neil is really into the vibe of

what’s going down in the moment. He’s not afraid

to decide that’s the final mix. While he’s also not

afraid to bin a mix, when necessary, often he gets

wedded to the first thing he hears. David Briggs

told me a long time ago: ‘IF YOU DO A MIX FOR NEIL YOU

BETTER MAKE IT GREAT, OR MAKE IT UNUSABLE BY RUNNING

A 1KHZ TONE THROUGH IT, BECAUSE ANYTHING IN-BETWEEN

HE WILL USE!’

“I consider my initial mixes roughs, but Neil

doesn’t like me to mess too much with them.

He doesn’t like it when things get too perfected.

Sometimes I was able to do another mix because

you always try to improve on what you have done.

Neil has good ears, so if he liked the new mix

better, that’s what we went with. Either way, all

the mixes were done on the Brass Board, which

meant almost exclusively adjusting levels. If EQ or

compression was necessary, I had to use a plug-in

in Pro Tools, which I did in a couple of songs, using

the UAD 33609.

“The stereo mix went to my monitors, back

to Pro Tools, and to an Ampex ATR 102, with

quarter-inch tape running at 15ips. I like quarter-

inch tape, and I decided to make a change. I MIXED

TO ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL AT THE SAME TIME, AND LATER

WE COMPARED THEM. SOME SONGS SOUNDED BETTER

RIGHT OFF THE QUARTER-INCH TAPE, FOR OTHER SONGS

THE DIGITAL MIX SOUNDED BETTER. I also transferred

the tape mix prints back to Pro Tools. We did

some editing on a couple of songs at Fantasy and

Shangri-La studios, then I took the digital mix files

to Bob Ludwig who mastered the album. I like to

be there for the mastering, particularly with an

album like this that I co-produced, engineered and

mixed. It’s all my fault!”

Hanlon laughed. Whether he made mistakes or

not was probably not the issue most prominent on

his agenda, in the context of working with an artist

who sees capturing the moment and imperfections

as an essential aspect of “recording great and

heartfelt music.” Judging by the aural evidence,

Young and Hanlon succeeded in their aims. That’s

3-0 to Young, with a little bit of help from his

friends, amongst them, notably, John Hanlon.

If there are instruments in the studio that Neil can play, I better be ready to record them, otherwise I risk being in a world of hurt!

AT 40

After shootouts from the US to Iceland, Rich Costey decided the Shadow Hills Equinox summing mixer eclipsed his SSL console. But his downsizing hasn’t reduced the sound of cinematic Icelandic folksters, Of Monsters and Men, one bit.Story: Paul Tingen

FEATURE

Artist: Of Monsters and Men

Album: Beneath the Skin

AT 42

Last year, Rich Costey had one of the biggest

‘Eureka!’ moments of his career. It resulted in

him radically changing his mix method, and

replacing it with a brand new approach, which is, in

essence… erm, more or less the same as before.

Confused? Read on.

For Costey, long one of the world’s most

prominent and dedicated out-of-the-box mixers, it

was a watershed event. The ‘more or less the same’

bit consisted of Costey finding an alternative way of

laying out his mix in a similar way as he had done

on his beloved SSL K series at El Dorado in LA,

with the same audio-, effects- and VCA-channel

layout, and maintaining his previous outboard

signal chains and general workflow.

From El Dorado, he explained how and why he

squared this particular circle that put his beloved

console largely out of action: “I’ve always mixed on

analogue consoles, and have used and even owned

nearly every kind imaginable, having occasional

romances with vintage Neves, modern Neves, SSL

J, SSL G, SSL E, you name it. Each desk offered

something special but also brought a certain set of

sonic issues that I eventually found myself battling

with. I have heard plenty of in-the-box mixes that

I like, but whenever I had a go, I was inevitably

disappointed by the shallow depth of field,

narrowing of the stereo space, and a kind of hollow

bottom end.

“Last year I was looking for a summing mixer

for my B room and auditioned quite a few. OUR

PROCESS FOR AUDITIONING SUMMING MIXERS AND

EVEN CONSOLES IS TO PULL UP A SESSION THAT IS LEVEL

BALANCED IN THE BOX BUT IS ROUTED OUT OF SEPARATE

OUTPUTS. I’VE BEEN USING A WEEZER TRACK THAT I MIXED

CALLED TROUBLEMAKER TO DO THIS FOR A NUMBER OF

YEARS. It’s not a large session so it’s easy to route

the entire multi-out of 30 outputs. We align the

D/A converter, put all the faders at zero, adjust the

panning and hit play, making a straight bounce into

my stereo A/D. Frustratingly, none of the summing

mixers we auditioned had the punch of a real

console except for one, the Shadow Hills Equinox,

which sounded amazingly good. It sounded very

similar to a Neve 8058. I had problems believing

it, so I did more and more tests and started doing

stem recalls and radio mixes through it. They all

sounded great.

“My next project was the Death Cab For Cutie

record, Kintsugi (2015), which I produced and

mixed. I started mixing that on the K, but for

whatever reason, I felt the mixes could hit a bit

harder, and tried to mix them via the Equinox. I

ended up mixing most of the songs twice, and in

every case we ended up using the Equinox mixes.

I have developed a fairly complex routing system

in my studio for the SSL, and because I have been

mixing on analogue consoles all my life, I have

become accustomed to grouping things to certain

outputs, and having a certain layout for the session.

This way no matter what song I mixed, the layout

of my SSL was more or less the same. When I

started mixing via the Equinox, I still wanted to

have all those elements in place.

“For example, when people use four mics on the

bass drum, they often put them on separate tracks

rather than combining them, which means you

end up EQ’ing each track separately. That’s fine

but I also like to have a more holistic approach,

combining the bass drum mics into a single place

where I can adjust the overall sound. I do that with

everything. I have an aux track for the kick, for the

snare, for the toms, and so on, which allows for

a slightly more macro approach to treating each

of these elements and also for running parallel

compression on them.

“To copy this approach over to the Equinox

we developed a Pro Tools session layout with the

recorded tracks at the bottom of the session and

built a parallel of my SSL at the top of the session.

This parallel consists of about 60 tracks, with

audio aux tracks at the top, followed by outboard

aux effects tracks, and below them VCA tracks,

which mimic the VCA tracks in the middle of

the desk. They are then routed to the 30 inputs of

the Equinox with a healthy chunk of effects and

outboard still going to the SSL K.”

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Costey’s next project after Death Cab For Cutie

was producing (with the band), engineering, and

mixing, the second album of the Icelandic indie

pop/folk band Of Monsters and Men. The album

mix allowed him to refine his new mix approach,

while his mix of the album’s lead single, Crystals,

provides a perfect illustration of exactly how he

goes about it.

Of Monsters and Men was one of the world’s

biggest breakout acts of 2011. Their impressive

debut album My Head Is An Animal went platinum

and to No. 1 in Australia, while lead single Little

Talks was five times platinum. What is it with

all these Icelandic artists hitting it big globally?

Add together Björk, Sigur Rós, Ásgeir, Emilíana

Torrini, GusGus and Sólstafir, and on a pro rata

population basis that would equal an improbable

500 Australian acts with global reach.

Of Monsters and Men’s first album came

into being very organically and without any

expectations, but the pressure was on with the

follow-up. OMAM sought the services of Costey as

a sympathetic big name producer, who could help

them build on their previous success and expand

their sound into a slightly more earthy, rock-like

direction. The band surely had a good look at, and

listen to, Costey’s impressive credits, which include

Fiona Apple, Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys, New

Order, Bruce Springsteen, Pink, Chvrches (see AT

Issue 109), and Muse.

Costey: “I think they were trying to find a

collaborator who could help them on their path,

rather than tell them what their path was supposed

to be. Most Icelandic people I’ve worked with tend

to be fairly hard-headed and are very secure in

their intuition [perhaps explains their worldwide

success? – Ed]. There were some areas I could help

them and other areas where they knew exactly

what they wanted to do. The final result is in part

to do with my style and the way I like to hear

things. I like things that are cinematic and have a

more direct, natural humanity in the sound. There

was, of course, talk of how the band likes things to

sound — which in general is big and lush — and

also that they wanted to make a more honest-

sounding album. They had grown as players, and

given their first album had been made quickly,

this was a chance to showcase what they sound

like as a band. I think it’s easier to pick them out as

individual players on their second album than on

their first.

“We started September 2014, doing about

three weeks of pre-production at their rehearsal

studio and recording fairly concise demos into

their Pro Tools rig. Some of the songs were fairly

well-formed, and some changed quite a bit during

that process. Crystals was one of the songs that

changed considerably. It was a much slower song

initially, with only the chorus being up-tempo. I

felt that it might be exciting for the song to take

off right from the beginning, so we took that

path. The driving toms during the verses are key

to the song’s propulsion and were worked out in

rehearsal. Arnar [Rósenkranz Hilmarssonis] a

fantastic drummer with a very creative approach,

and he’s also seriously loud. We approached the

arrangements from different angles and gradually

the best ones stood out. That way when we got

to the actual recording sessions — which took

place at Sundlaugin Studios in Reykjavik during

October, November and December — there weren’t

too many surprises and it was just a matter of

trying to get the best performances. In general,

when working with a band, you want them to feel

comfortable during recording, and not to sit there

thinking and trying to get their parts right.

“We had a pretty complete collection of demo

recordings with rough mixes by the time we

entered Sundlaugin. Before we began tracking a

song we would typically reference these demos

for tempo and feel, then go ahead and cut the

song. Sometimes with a click but most often

One of the handy things about being a mixer and a producer is that the producing process spills over into the mixing. You can completely re-arrange everything at the last moment if you choose to

AT 43

CRYSTALS MIX

The Crystals Pro Tools session is a whopping 197 tracks; a combination of Costey’s new SSL-equivalent mix setup at the top of the session and the recorded tracks beneath. The 39 aux tracks relate to the audio tracks in the lower part of the session, and are equiva-lent to the audio channels on the SSL. Below that are 14 VCA tracks; consisting of drums, toms, percus-sion, bass, guitar, lead vocal, Pro Tools effects, loops, synths (x3), brass, intro, and All VCAs. Eight outboard aux tracks sit below those, acting as an equivalent to effect returns on the desk, connected to a Bricasti reverb, AMS DMX effects unit, GML 8900 EQ, Hughes SRS sound retrieval system, Neve 33609/Millenia chain, Prism EQ/RCA BA6A compressor chain, and a Standard Audio Stretch compressor.

13 mix prints sit in the middle of the session, and tracks 77-197 are the actual recording session. Begin-ning with the impressive amount of drum tracks — 44 in total — followed by bass, Moog bass, guitars (24 tracks), vocals (12 tracks), keyboards and finally brass and French horns. It’s a big session, even by today’s standards, but there are few plug-ins apart from on the drums and vocals aux tracks in the top third of the session.

Costey lifted the lid on what’s going on: “The reason for the lack of plug-ins is that I simply like to get the sound I want on the way in. If necessary, I’ll treat things quite heavily while recording. The idea of waiting to make things sound good in post-production doesn’t get me too excited, unless the goal is to transform and challenge the existing material. Also, I use a native Pro Tools system instead of HDX, which means that latency can be an issue when you’re using tons of plug-ins while tracking. The band were onboard with the notion of treating sounds on the way in. To be honest, even during the mix the band was more interested in trying out different arrangement ideas until the very last second, rather than getting involved in the sonics. Of course they care about reverb treatments and delays and whatnot, but most of the mixing process was about getting them to sound big and great, and then tweak some arrangements here and there.

“Having said all that, I used quite a lot of outboard dur-ing mixing. Of the outboard aux tracks I used the AMS DMX for some delay and chorusing effects, and the GML 8900 compressor was used on the drums. I use the Hughes SRS daily for widening the stereo image, and in this session it was largely deployed for ambientkeyboard sounds and in some cases backing vocals and guitars. The 33609 compressor to Millenia EQ was a parallel on the lead and backing vocals, and the Prism EQ to RCA BA6A was a parallel on the kick and snare. The RCA BA6A parks just about anything, and isgreat on the kick and snare.

“At the top of the session are kick and snare trigger aux tracks. Native Instruments’ Battery and Addictive Drums are in my mix template by default, just in case I need them. In this session I added some Battery snare samples, and some claps, stomps and synthetic drums in the choruses. My Battery sample library has thousands of sounds I’ve collected over the years. The3-4 sends on several of the drums aux tracks go to theGML8900, and the 27 send goes to the Prism to RCA

chain. Bus 59 is a UAD AMS RMX18 plug-in for drumreverb. The toms have a Decapitator plug-in, whichgets turned on in the choruses. The toms and acousticguitar really propel this song, and it was importantthey worked well together.

“The bass aux has an Oxford plug-in EQ rolling off thesubs, and the Brainworx bx-digital V2 to reduce someof the typical resonant notes one deals with on a bassguitar recording with passive pick-ups. The track isalso volume automated to further even out any reso-nances. The acoustic guitar aux also has the OxfordEQ, again to take out some of the bottom end that Ididn’t need. It also went to the Hughes SRS to widenthem up a bit and a UAD EMT 140 reverb.

“I tried mixing Nanna [Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir]’s andRaggi’s [Þórhallsson] vocals a couple of different ways.

The actual lead vocal aux has a Renaissance De-

esser on it, going into a UAD 1073 plug-in, which is fan-tastic, a UAD dbx160 compressor and the Decapitator to add some edge. 28 goes to the Standard Audio Stretch, which adds a bit of top end to the vocals. The Stretch mimics the breathy, steamy high end that you could get from old modified Dolby units, of which I have many. Nanna and Raggi’s lead vocals blend reallywell together naturally, so I treated them very simi-larly. You want to put them in a similar space.

“The session was at 24-bit/96k. For the final mix print I went via Esoteric Audio Research 660s to GML EQ mix chain and printed back into the session using a separate Pro Tools rig with a JCF Latte stereo A/D converter. I sent 96k files to Bob Ludwig for mastering. I also print to a Soundblade rig, running at 16-bit/44.1k for references.”

AT 44

without as they tended to sound better that way.

After comping takes, we began the process of

overdubbing and often completely replacing

elements of the basic tracking. Part of their process

includes doing a lot of drum overdubs, with toms

and snares, percussion and stomps and handclaps,

and all kinds of madness.

“As far as studio gear is concerned, I brought

over a lot of gear from El Dorado, because even

though Sundlaugin is pretty loaded, particularly in

the microphone department, I wanted to remain

familiar with the signal paths. The most essential

piece of kit I brought were my Neve BCM10, which

has 10 vintage 1073s, along with some vintage

Universal Audio 1108s. The rest was the usual stuff

in my rack, like UREI 1176s, Neve 33609, Roger

Mayer RM58, Esoteric Audio 660s, Distressors,

Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor, The Equinox,

plus a bunch of my modular synths. I also brought

my Burl Mothership converters, as they are the

only multitrack A/D that I can really get behind.”

I’ve always mixed on analogue consoles, and have used and even owned nearly every kind imaginable

AT 45

SHADOWING THE SSL

Mid-January 2015, a month after the recordings at

Sundlaugin were completed, OMAM and Costey

reconvened at El Dorado for, “more overdubs,

mostly vocals, a bit of programming, and

working with David Campbell on horn and string

arrangements. We did split things out over my SSL

K for this, because it’s easier to have lots of inputs

coming into the console at the same time, ready

to go. After that we began the mixing process. I’D

BEEN LISTENING TO THE EQUINOX ALL THE TIME WHEN WE

WERE IN ICELAND, AND HAD BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO THE

SOUND, BUT I STILL DID A MIX OF CRYSTALS ON THE SSL,

AND ANOTHER USING THE EQUINOX, AND AGAIN I DECIDED

TO GO WITH THE LATTER. To be perfectly honest

though, I don’t think the band cared either way.

“We had already created the template, with the

60 tracks at the top mimicking my SSL layout,

and the typical mix process was for my assistant

Mario to load our recording session into the

mix template session and set it up. I would then

reference the latest rough mix for balance and

get the tracks knocked into shape from that

perspective. Once that sounded good I would

have a look through the individual audio tracks,

combining different groups of instruments to

check relationships. The drum/acoustic guitar

relationship was very important; the acoustics

really were an extension of the drums and

percussion. The toms in particular had a lot of

overtones in the low mids, and I had to tame these

to maintain some amount of clarity. To be honest,

that was a bit of a challenge. The solution was

mostly reductive EQ and careful monitoring of

room mics.

“The main room at Sundlaugin, which used to

be a swimming pool, sounded so good that the

temptation was to crank it up on everything, but

you obviously can’t do that. I tended to have the

room sound on the kit. Then I backed off with

overdubs and used artificial reverb if necessary.

I mixed Crystals a number of times, and each

time we were looking to refine the arrangements

of the guitar melodies. One of the handy things

about being a mixer and a producer is that the

producing process spills over into the mixing. You

can completely re-arrange everything at the last

moment if you choose to.”

“I’m very proud of this album and I know the

band is as well. Crystals did quite well on the radio

but I don’t expect this album will duplicate the

sales figures of the first album; no one expected

that. The band were pushing back a bit against the

sound that defined them on their debut and we

were all working to establish something that feels

perhaps more lasting and emotional. You don’t

want to live or die by your radio hits. The album

reached No. 3 in the US which is the highest US

chart position for any Icelandic album, No. 4 in

Australia, and the response to the album is still

growing. I think the band are in it for the long

road. They are massively gifted people.”

AT 46

I ended up mixing most of the songs twice, and in every case we ended up using the Equinox mixes

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On its 40th anniversary, Discreet Music was decoded and reconstructed using Eno’s Oblique Strategies for a one-off performance to card-carrying members of the Brian Eno fan club.

Story: Mark Davie

DISCREETLY DECODING ENO’S MUSIC

FEATURE

AT 48

Trying to be Brian Eno isn’t easy. Just ask

Brian Eno. In 1995, when he was attempting

to recreate Discreet Music using his Koan

generative music system, the maestro himself

found it impossible. In his diary A Year with

Swollen Appendices, Eno wrote: “I am trying to

replicate Discreet Music as accurately as possible.

This is actually very hard — trying to duplicate the

complicated analogue conditions of the original: a

synth that never stayed properly in tune, variable

waveform mixes and pulse-widths, variable filter

frequency and Q, plus probably something like 30

audible generations of long-delay repeat, with all

the interesting sonic degradation that introduced.

“My attempts to replicate Discreet Music result

in interesting failure after interesting failure.”

Comforting words, I’m sure, for Matthew

Brown when he got the call up to do exactly what

Eno couldn’t, recreate Discreet Music live onstage

in front of thousands. It wasn’t just him up there,

but he had to figure out the bit with the out-of-

tune endlessly matrix-able vintage synth and reels

of tape degradation.

I recently headed along to the State Theatre

at Melbourne’s Art Centre to witness the event,

titled Discreet + Oblique. The conceit was to take

the themes from Eno’s Discreet Music, on its 40th

anniversary, and apply his Oblique Strategies cards

to it in a live setting.

Onstage with Brown were Australian

experimental trio, The Necks — Chris Abrahams

(piano), Tony Buck (drums), and Lloyd Swanton

(bass) — on one side. Flanking the other

side of the stage were Golden Fur members

Samuel Dunscombe (clarinet), Judith Hamann

(violoncello), and James Rushford (viola).

Behind Brown on two risers were the two

Eno acolytes who co-produced the show, Leo

Abrahams on electric guitar, and David Coulter

on vibes and saw.

The whole performance wasn’t just a

celebration of Discreet Music’s 40th anniversary,

it was a mashup tribute to Eno as well. Towards

the back of the stage sat a four-poster hospital

bed; a ‘joke’ reference to the conception of the

whole ambient music genre. The story goes that

when Eno’s friend put on a record in his hospital

room they left the volume so low Eno couldn’t

hear it properly. Too sick to get out of bed and

turn it up, he lay there noticing how the sounds

were subsumed into the environment, beautifying

it, rather than being a focal point. Whoosh, the

dawn of ambient music.

Likewise, Eno’s video art Mistaken Memories

of Mediaeval Manhattan — projected from a TV

on its side onto the big screen between Oblique

Strategy cards — came after Discreet Music and

isn’t technically supposed to be projected at

all. “Bringing that TV into the hospital room

doesn’t make much conceptual sense really,”

said Abrahams. “But it’s a celebration and an

anniversary so it’s a bit of a mashup.”

I guess performing music — through a giant

Meyer Sound system — that was founded upon the

sensation of not being able to properly hear it is,

technically-speaking, not strictly ambient either.

CARDS OUT FOR ALL TO SEE

During the performance, Abrahams would

randomly flip Oblique Strategies cards from a

deck, and slide them under a document projector.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the cards

are intended to trigger a fresh thought process that

might get you out of the creative doldrums. They

read things like, ‘Repetition is a form of change’,

‘What is the reality of the situation?’ ‘(Organic)

machinery’ and ‘Remember those quiet evenings’.

Some were obvious influencers. When ‘Fill every

beat with something’ came up, it was as if someone

had called Tony Buck’s number at the butchers.

Others like ‘Intentions, credibility of, nobility of ’

felt a bit like trying to read 10 minds at once.

Abrahams was coy about the ratio of

improvisation to structured arrangements.

He didn’t want to give the whole game away;

concerned that punters experiencing the show

at the Barbican in London in a couple of months

would be cheated of the guessing game if the

veneer was stripped away. “Part of the interesting

thing about it is that it’s not certain how much is

planned and how much isn’t,” he offered. “There’s a

framework in which improvisation happens, but it’s

quite a tight framework in terms of what happens

at what time.” There’s still scope for the pieces to

be longer or shorter, and have different textures or

energy, but it’s still going to be roughly the same

pieces. After all, that’s the whole conceit — Discreet

plus Oblique. It’s still got to be Discreet Music,

“recognisable,” said Abrahams. “Without it being a

boring retread of the existing music.”

Whether or not the pieces are fully improvised

or entirely structured is somewhat beside the

point. Everyone that turns up to a Brian Eno

tribute concert is probably somewhat familiar

with his first major ambient work, whether it’s

clogged in every-greyer grey matter or freshly

imprinted. The point is that using the Oblique

Strategies cards is supposed to fun, not didactic.

You don’t have to follow them to the letter. “The

purpose of the Oblique Strategies is to reframe

the producer’s relationship to the music they’re

making,” reminded Abrahams. “Or the musician’s

relationship.” For an audience of thousands who

may have never used the cards, the show was a

chance for them to get in on the act. To experience

first hand the effect the cards can have.

“The cards serve a function, but essentially I

see it as a theatrical device,” said Abrahams. “The

whole event is supposed to be a celebration of the

anniversary of this piece and also a celebration of

Brian’s work. The cards — their language, humour,

gentleness as well as their depth — is a really big

part of what he’s like as an artist, but also what he’s

like as a person. Although he’s frequently seen as a

very serious theorist, which he is in some ways, he’s

also extremely good fun!”

The show was comprised of about two hour-long

pieces with a break inbetween. Essentially riffing on

sides A and B of Discreet Music. But Abrahams said

they never made it to an hour in rehearsal. He’d

worked with all the musicians before but “I didn’t

really know what kind of contribution they were

going to make because their repertoire is so diverse

in terms of what atmospheres they create,” he said.

“Strangely, after the first couple of run-throughs, I

felt I could predict the energy of it. But I certainly

couldn’t predict how amazingly they would have

dealt with the Discreet Music motifs. I think we

were all holding something back at the rehearsals.

We never got to the end of Discreet Music in

rehearsal; we would come in at 20 minutes, which

is way too short. We needed the tension of an

audience to actually do the piece properly.”

FLIP ON FRIPPERTRONICS

Discreet Music begins with the slow entrance of

the main motif, a confluence of EMS Synthi lines

looped on a Frippertronics system. As Eno’s diary

alludes, there’s a bit more to it than that. In the

album liner notes, there’s a basic diagram of the

Frippertronics system that plots the basic points:

synthesiser to graphic EQ to echo unit, then into

the tape delay system comprising looping back

from the playback head of one onto the record

of another. For Brown, that was like looking

at a tourist snap of a building; he needed the

schematics, which no one had.

He started by decoding the loops. Brown: “The

two repeated phrases have such slow attacks, it’s

really hard to work out the loop size. I could hear

there were two delays happening; a short one made

on the Echoplex, and the longer one, which I think

went for 66 seconds. I CHOPPED ALL THE LONG LOOPS

UP, MEASURED THE SAMPLE SIZES AND AVERAGED THEM TO

GET THE MOST ACCURATE IDEA OF THEIR LENGTH. I looked

at the spectrograph of the sound and saw it wasn’t

going above 3kHz. I realised it must be slowed

down. I suspect Brian Eno made it, then slowed it

down on the tape machine to 3.75ips from 7.5ips.

It was quite hard to reproduce, because I think he

did one take, and mixed it down onto one track,

then did a second take with a second melody and

mixed that down onto the other half of the 1/4-inch

tape, which the diagram on the back of the record

doesn’t mention.”

For the Frippertronics system, Brown used a

pair of Revox B77 MkII two-track tape machines,

Brian is someone who hates looking back and talking about the past. I really respect that because he’s honestly one of the most forward-looking and unencumbered people

AT 49

MUSICAL MIXByron Scullin is active in essentially every part of the audio industry; from producing, engineering and mastering to composition and sound design. It’s his musical sensibilities as well as his experience with the avant garde that make him a top choice to mix FOH for left-of-field performances like Discreet + Oblique.

AT: What affect did the cards have over how you mixed the show?

Byron Scullin: Not much, because they’re so ambigu-ous and open-ended. I just noted them to be aware that certain things might be taking place, or they might be transferring to other instruments.

AT: How do you set yourself up to be able to handle the diversity of sound coming at you?

BS: I was mixing the show on the Digico SD8. In rehearsals I accounted for all the instrumentation and organised the session to enable a response to what was happening. Coming up with control groups where I could have the entire band’s 28 inputs across 12 faders, with enough specificity to bring people in and out or mute as needed. The electronic effects processing was split across separate groups as well; as their own instruments on faders for riding those shapes. For an artist like Brian Eno, effects aren’t really effects, they’re other instru-ments; reverb’s not used to give spatial context to a certain sound, like it’s playing in a hall or a bathroom.

The effects units are used to extremes where they often become textural devices. I was using some effects in the traditional way. For example, a bit of long-tailed reverb to help what was a relatively small string and clarinet ensemble have a slightly larger sound. Then also bringing in heavily-processed effects in Ableton Live at various points based on what cards may or may not show up and what the musicians are doing.

AT: What effects were you using in Ableton Live?

BS: I built a set of very long delays using Max for Live, inserting the stock Ableton reverb to add a little bit of softness to the delay chain by smearing the attack and release of the envelopes. They become more textural and less punctuated as they begin to feedback.

There was one playback element at the start of Dis-creet Music, and a context reverb using Exponential Audio’s R2 plug-in. Rhythmic-based reverbs are my flavour of the month; it’s a counterpoint to impulse response reverbs whose tails can sometimes drop away a little quickly or be a little bit peculiar.

AT: The Hamer Hall Meyer Sound PA is quite epic. Was it easy to mix on?

BS: I left the system design to Norwest, and it was really well tuned. On a well-tuned system with a lot of overhead, if you get your gain structures right at the console you’re just using EQ to solve problems not to build much tone. The most stressful part was there was no sound check. We had rehearsals in the room then an hour-

and-a-half turnaround before the gig. I was only able to bring up all the instruments and make sure the tone was sitting okay, check my gain structure and feel the faders out. Then we launched in and did the show. I production managed the new music sound art festival, Liquid Architecture, for 12 years, so I’ve done a lot of avant-garde and experimental work. Often you don’t really know what the performers are going to play. It requires you to come from an extremely sympa-thetic place musically, sometimes to the detriment of ‘good sound’, because the artists want to make terrible sound, crazy sound, a weird sound, or some-times no sound at all.

AT: The Necks drummer (Tony Buck) never really seemed to be using the kit in a traditional way, did that require a particular miking regime?

BS: It’s about keeping most of it to overhead micro-phones, with standard kick, snare and hats. They gave me an AKG D112 for the kick, but there’s no hole in the jazz kick drum so that microphone wasn’t so great for that context. I had to use quite severe EQ to tone down the bottom end, because it has a bump and a sealed kick drum with no damping inside has such a massive low end resonance anyway. The way Tony plays drums, the toms act more like resonant membranes for the things he’s got on top of them. It’s like he has a trestle table in front of him with a bunch of instruments, the trestle table just happens to be made of toms! Sometimes he’ll pull

AT 50

straddling the ends of a long trestle, with a length

of tape running over the top of his EMS Synthi.

Brown: “You have the tape running past the heads

from the left hand one, then past the heads onto

the takeup reel on the right hand one. The sound

gets recorded on the left hand one, and goes past

the playback head of the right hand machine,

which is plugged into the record head of the left

hand one. It makes a copy of a copy of a copy. So

the sound breaks down and you get that wonderful

tape delay sound.

“The delay time is relative to the speed the tape

is moving and the distance between them. I divided

the length by four, because the original length was

about 6.4m, which was too big for the stage. WE

TALKED ABOUT HAVING A ZIG ZAG ARRAY INBETWEEN THE

TWO MACHINES, WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN A NIGHTMARE

— BITS OF COAT HANGERS FAILING MISERABLY.

“I suspect Brian Eno had it shorter and slowed

the tape down to get the final result. If you do the

maths, you can probably guess the size of his living

room from the maximum length of time he could

get out of them. A bit of acoustic archaeology.”

The initial Synthi patch had Brown a bit

bemused: “The more I looked into it, the less it

sounded like the EMS synthesizer and more like

the high notes of an oboe, or clarinet. When he

was in Roxy Music, Andy McKay — who was also

very experimental and avant garde — played those

instruments. I started suspecting it could possibly

be a loop of McKay playing, and feeding into the

system rather than the synthesizer. Maybe I’ve been

staring at it too long.

“The wonderful thing about the EMS Synthi

is it uses a matrix. You can do all these ‘illegal’

things like tell the sound that’s coming out of

the synthesiser to modulate the tuning knob, so

you’re doing FM synthesis. The audio and control

information is one.”

In the second piece, one of the highlights was the

merging of Brown’s Synthi solo into an energetic

clarinet part, highlighting how alike the two could

sound. “For my solo, I took a few cues from when

Brian played in Roxy Music,” said Brown. “The

solos he did were a bit like that; crazy bombastic

things that wobbled all over the place. With the

patch, I had the LFO controlling the wet/dry mix

rate of the spring reverb. And the ring modulation

was coming in and out. There was a lot of stuff that

sounded like ring modulation but was actually

frequency modulation.”

The other module on Brian Eno’s diagram

was the graphic equaliser, which Brown set to

“shift so it goes through the EQ. There are certain

frequency patterns the magnetic tape picks up;

it will feed back and get sweet spots. But if you

change the EQ all the time, it will allow different

parts of the sound to get through and feedback

more so than others.”

DIAL IN THE RADIO

While Discreet Music was just a synthesiser and

delays, and the other side of the record primarily

a string orchestra, Abrahams did some decoding

too and noticed some cumulative effects he could

emulate on guitar. Abrahams: “There seem to

be some keyboard overdubs, and once the tape

delays get really thick in the first piece, it gives the

illusion of there being other instruments. I used the

guitar to try and fill in the gaps beyond what the

other musicians were doing.

“In the first half I was trying to blend with the

vibes and the tapes, because the frequency range of

the guitar isn’t dissimilar to the range of the EMS.

In the second half I drowned out the space with an

organ-ish sound.

“From there, it was a case of being very selective

about when the sounds have attack. For most of

the show the sounds were a combination of a slow

attack delay, a quiet context, and high-pass filter

reverb with a long pre-delay. Normally when I

perform, I’ll have hundreds of sounds in a show.

But this time I only wanted to have one or two so

them off and start playing drums normally, so you have to be prepared for that. He also has a lot instru-ments he agitates with his feet, so I have a ground mic down on the floor next to the hi-hat.

AT: With so many different timbres coming out of each instrument, do you EQ much at all?

BS: I keep it super straight and very practical, lots of filtering just to deal with the fact the monitoring is sitting on deck with the band, so addressing low end feedback. Then I just EQ to taste. On consoles like the Digico or Avid you can do specific things like insert a graphic on an overhead to deal with a bit of feedback or tone.

AT: The mic selection must play a big part in getting great tones then?

BS: I treat it like a studio and go for fairly neutral characters. I had AKG 414s as overheads. They’re not particularly glamorous, but are a real Swiss Army knife. I also had 414s inside the piano set to a figure eight to use the side-pattern rejection for the PA on stage. It was a huge Steinway concert grand so the possibility of feedback is strong. Chris can turn the piano almost into a spectral synthesiser where he rapidly plays shimmering chords, then it resolves back to becoming a piano again. I had a DPA mic on the double bass, as well as a DI signal and a Beyer M88 on his cabinet. I also put DPAs all over Golden Fur. DPAs are such a godsend for getting great sounds out of acoustic instruments. I had Sennheiser, e609, I think on the guitar cabinets.

Neumann KM184s over the vibraphone.

AT: Are you setting up compressors to help handle the shows’ dynamics, or are you just riding the fadersall night?

BS: I preset a bunch of compression settings, mostly just to deal with loud attacks. On drums they’re all really fast attacks, as fast as it will go. I’ll set higher ratios, like 3:1, but have them dialled out and switched on. I can dial them in if I need to bring them down. I used a little on the vibraphone because it was jumping out a bit, and a little touch on the kick drum at points. I used a multiband compressor across the piano group, adjusting the settings so it’s taking care of the critical bands, between about 6kHz at the top and 500Hz at the bottom. It’s very wide in the middle,with a really slow attack time because I want to let all the attacks of the piano through. I just want the compressor to ease in and hold the mid-range down when it gets very hectic. Not muffling it too much to destroy the sound of the piano but enough to containit a little bit. Fairly long release times there as well, so it’s very easy on/easy off compression with a low ratio of 2:1 or maybe less. Then lots of riding. My philosophy is that no one particular instrument should dominate over anythingelse. In an ambient music context, all the sounds should sit evenly together. If you listen to a lot of Eno’s ambient music records that really bears true. Nothing ever gets particularly loud, it all just sits and

hangs together as a whole; a single texture. I was trying to allow as much interplay as I could — the shimmering sound of the vibraphone leading into the piano and strings — so it becomes very hard to tell where one instrument begins and another one lets off. The musicians are doing that, it’s not a happy ac-cident. It’s where the action is. I’m trying to maintain that balance, then if the energy goes higher, I’m riding it with them, increasing and decreasing. I mix on the faders all the time. I DON’T KNOW WHAT

ENGINEERS ARE DOING WHEN I GO TO GIGS AND SEE THEM

KICKING BACK AND NOT ON THE FADERS. In some music contexts I guess that works, but we have enough over-compressed, limited music in pop music production music now that when you go to see a live show you really want to get that dynamism. When I’m mixing live, I’ve got to work with the band and perform alongside them to make sure their per-formance comes across to the audience. The energy rises and falls in the room as the band rises and falls in the room as well. That’s something I learnt when I was starting out and working on musicals. There’s so much fader-riding in big budget musicals. Hearing that and under-standing what a difference it made. Being musically sympathetic is a driving force with me, rather than technique and equipment. I meet a lot of people that are into the tools, but I’m a bit ambivalent about tools at the best of times.

It’s like he has a trestle table in front of him with a bunch of instruments, the trestle table just happens to be made of toms!

AT 51

it’d feel like a chamber ensemble.

One of the more recognisable sounds was a

broken up radio effect that Abrahams summoned

from his pedal chain of an Eventide Pitch Factor, a

Strymon Timeline and a Strymon Big Sky. “There’s

a really nice lo-fi module in the Timeline pedal,”

said Abrahams. “THE RADIO SOUND WAS THAT GOING

INTO THE BIG SKY. IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO JUST DIAL UP THE

RADIO SOUND, YOU HAVE TO PLAY IN A VERY BROKEN WAY

TO MAKE IT CONVINCING.

“I like sounds which are simple but give a lot

back, so you feel like you’re collaborating with the

sounds in a way. It gets really expressive with very

little movement on your part. There was one part

where the bass of the EMS needed a bit of a backup,

so I had a four-octave down pitch shift on the

Eventide going into a high-pass filtered reverb — it

made a 63Hz throb.”

THE GHOST OF ENO PAST

Leo Abrahams has been working on and off with

Brian Eno for 14 years now. In that time he can

only ever remember the Oblique Strategies cards

coming once; relatively recently actually, on the

High Life record.

As far as Abrahams is concerned, the cards are

just a manifestation of Eno’s way of working that

the man himself doesn’t actually require the use

of them. “The feeling the cards give you — that

lateral thinking about music — is very familiar

to me having worked with him,” said Abrahams.

“It’s like the cards are a manifestation of one of

his philosophies of work. I don’t think he’s had to

resort to using them because he does things like

that just by being who he is.”

It was the first time Abrahams had performed

a tribute to one of Eno’s works without him being

there and he was a bit worried about it. “In a

way it feels a bit creepy!” He said. “I thought if

you’re going to do a tribute then you ought to not

know them. Also, Brian is someone who hates

looking back and talking about the past. I really

respect that because he’s honestly one of the most

forward-looking and unencumbered people, and

I didn’t want to stalk him to look at it. But as it

turned out he was really generous and supportive

with the project.

“I didn’t talk to him much about the nuts and

bolts of it but he wrote the very generous program

notes and let me come over and scan the original

cards he made by hand in 1973, which appeared in

the second half. I did say to him, ‘I’m sorry if this

is awkward for you because I know you don’t like

looking back.’ His reply was, ‘This is so long ago it

almost seems like someone else’s life!’”

Matthew Brown’s EMS Synthi dopesheet for his solo: “With the patch, I had the LFO controlling the wet/dry mix rate of the spring reverb. And the ring modulation was coming in and out. There was a lot of stuff that sounded like ring modulation but was actually frequency modulation.”

The purpose of the Oblique Strategies is to reframe the producer’s relationship to the music they’re making

AT 52

Kurt Vile hops betweenstudios up the West Coast toavoid the ticking clock andwinds up recording the nextLoser with Rob Schnapf.Story: Mark Davie

FEATURE

Artist: Kurt Vile

Album: B’lieve I’m Goin Down

AT 54

“It wasn’t trying to be like the Foo Fighters

record.” Kurt Vile’s bandmate Rob Laakso

assured me no cable TV money and syndication

rights prompted their 12-stop nomadic recording

trek for his latest album B’lieve I’m Goin Down; just

a journeyman trying to reassess his creative process.

It’s not uncommon for Kurt to drop in at

multiple studios over the course of making an

album. The record before last, Smoke Ring for

My Halo, started out in a couple, he said, and

blossomed from there. But this time there was a

bit more purpose behind his choices. Halo was

more of an East Coast record; this time, he wanted

to stick mostly to the West Coast so he could play

with Stella Mozgawa, the drummer for Warpaint,

and Farmer Dave, slide guitar player and roaster

of hot nuts. “You can tap into other worlds and

atmospheres as opposed to flying everyone to you,”

explained Vile. “Which feels more contrived.”

Those feelings surrounding the process are

important for Vile, whose music is largely

introspective. There was another he’d carried for a

while, but peculiarly for a songwriter, never been

able to fully articulate. During the making of the

five records before B’lieve I’m Goin Down there

were occasions he felt the process had robbed

him of the time to do particular songs justice. He

wanted to see if he could correct that imbalance.

“One example I have is my song Peeping Tomboy,”

offered Vile. “I was really feeling it when I wrote

that. My wife was away and I knew I was just about

to be fired from my job, like psychic or something.

I had just signed to Matador, so it didn’t matter, but

life was so uncertain; my wife was so uncertain.

“I would play the song live and really get into

it. My idea was to try to sound like I’d just written

the song all alone in my house in the middle of the

night. Just wait to capture that certain vibe. But

when it was finally time to lay it down, I don’t think

my performance was that good but it’s the best

one there was at the time. I think part of it was just

being in this big studio and I was nervous with all

these nice mics around and it really moved fast.”

His last two records, Wakin’ on a Pretty Daze and

Smoke Ring for My Halo, were recorded with John

Agnello, who Vile says was “totally on the team,

but you still had to talk about schedules and pick

the studio far in advance.” This time, Vile wanted to

follow that hunch, that maybe he could evade the

symptoms of being pressed for time. “I just wanted

to not worry that I’m sitting around in the studio

jamming until 5am, not necessarily knowing what

I’m doing,” said Vile, feeling like he’s frustrated

people in that way before. “I knew I’d grown as a

musician so maybe I could tap into it easier. THAT

WAS MY THEORY. I JUST WANTED TO STAY COMPLETELY BY

MYSELF, UNGUARDED, FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.”

VIOLATORS UNITED

Without someone like Agnello pulling the pieces

together, Vile needed someone to step into that

role. Luckily, he’d been surrounding himself

with talented engineers and producers for years.

Rob Laakso had been working as an engineer

and producer until — after a couple of cameos

throughout the years — he joined The Violators

(Vile’s band) full-time in 2011. In fact, recalled

Laakso, Vile was the first person to ever pay him to

record. Back in 2001 he recorded some tracks for

Vile on his 8-track reel-to-reel that serendipitously

ended up soundtracking the video intro for lead

single Pretty Pimpin’. “Rob is a really good multi-

instrumentalist but he’s also a gear and synth

nerd,” described Vile. “He can sit there and f**k

with tones for a long time, whereas I’m way too

ADD for that.” Laakso was installed as the de facto

co-producer/head engineer for the record. “I wasn’t

the sole producer, like Phil Spector or something,”

he made clear.

“We just happen to work well together, he’s a

good engineer and he’s in my band,” reasoned

Vile. “I had these songs I didn’t necessarily want

somebody else to play on right away but he’d be

there, so I’d be comfortable. There wasn’t any

outside person looking at the clock.”

Kyle Spence, the Violator’s drummer, also has

a home studio called Ronnie Jones Sound where

Spence recorded some of the early sessions. Vile

also thought it was time he got in on the act, roping

in FOH engineer Tommy Joy between tours to help

convert his practise space into a recording studio.

“We bought Pro Tools and all these things, but I

had to say ‘f**k Pro Tools’ for myself. You just have

all this I/O popping up and next thing you know

you have all these virtual tracks and I don’t know

what’s going on any more.

“I said, ‘I want to get a tape machine’. Tommy

discouraged it but we ended up getting one. Our

first experiment was I’m An Outlaw [the second

song on the album] and it turned out awesome.”

That was before Vile had set foot inside another

studio; he knew he was onto something.

FEEL NO SAME

While Vile felt good about the process, Laakso had

to make a few accommodating adjustments. “At

Rancho [De La Luna] I was definitely doing more

engineering than playing,” he said. “Which wasn’t

how I envisioned it at first. It just seemed like the

best way to do it. It would have been fun to be in

the room with them.” On the other hand, he prefers

“doing guitar parts while I’m driving the computer.”

As for Vile’s wont to wile away the hours into the

night, Laakso wishes he “could have pushed a little

harder sometimes. I can stay up all night if I have

to, but it’s not my choice. There was a lot of that on

this record, but I don’t think I ever ‘called it’ because

I was too pooped. It was a pretty self-motivated

record, Kurt wasn’t lacking for songs or material to

work on. He was excited to do it; we all were.”

The other back-of-brain mental note was sonic

consistency across studio hops. “It definitely was

something we were conscious of and concerned

with going into the recordings,” said Laakso. “Other

albums that had been recorded in various locations

with different people involved turned out quite

well. Whether or not we were always using the

same vocal mic, we had faith that it would work

out in the end, in part because of the mixers and

mastering engineer, Greg Calbi. I like it when

albums sound somewhat varied, so long as there’s

still a cohesion to them. Some albums sound too

‘samey’ to me. As much as I might love the songs, I

can find them a bit fatiguing.

“There were a lot of engineers involved. Usually

I wouldn’t meddle, but I would respectfully not be

shy about calling out bad ideas. I’d bring certain

pieces for continuity. But it wasn’t really something

that formed any decisions. We wouldn’t refuse to do

something because we didn’t have a particular mic

that was used on other songs.

“There were a ton of mics used on Kurt. I got

an original brass capsule AKG C414 towards the

beginning of the sessions that everyone agreed

sounded awesome on him, but it ended up self-

destructing. I thought the capsule was toast, but

that ended up not being the case.”

RANCHO RETREAT

A large portion of the tracking ended up happening

at Rancho De La Luna. Vile was scheduled to jam

with Malian group Tinariwen, who were recording

at Rancho. So it made sense to book some

recording time for the weeks after.

Every song was recorded in a different way, but

always with the intention of at least capturing a live

performance of Vile’s guitar and vocal to build on.

Kidding Around on the other hand, started with a

MIDI map, but it was the exception. “Sometimes

it’s isolated, sometimes it’s not,” said Laakso.

“He was in the room live with everybody during

Wheelhouse and there was a fair amount of bleed

into the vocal mic. I’d rather capture him being

excited in the room, then in an iso booth in his

own sequestered corner. The performance would be

better. Sometimes we tried doing acoustic tracks in

the rooms with the drums at Rancho, which has a

fairly small live room. It was a little too ridiculous.

Every drum was louder than the acoustic guitar

in the acoustic guitar mic. There’s actually a lot of

VILE TOUR DIARY LAAKSO’S CHRONOLOGY OF STUDIOS:....

Red Room — Vile’s practice space.

Ronnie Jones Sound, Athens GA — “Kyle’s studio, our drummer.”

Rancho De La Luna, Joshua Tree CA

Ronnie Jones Sound, Athens GA — “Again.”

Pink Duck, LA

Thump, Brooklyn NY

Transmitter Park, Brooklyn NY— “No recording that made it, but some editing and a rough mix that did end up on the album.”

The Bunker, Venice Beach CA — “Quick stop for work on Life Like Mine.”

MANT, LA — “Schnapf’s studio for mixing and some tracking.”

Tarquin Studios, Bridgeport CT — “Peter Katis mixing.”

Outer Space — Mixing.

Sterling Sound — Mastering.

AT 55

bleed in Lost my Head there, which is part of the

drum sound.”

To help control the bleed between Vile’s acoustic

and vocal, Laakso usually used a figure eight polar

pattern. “But sometimes the vocal will still end up

crazy loud in the mic,” said Laakso. “I try to isolate

electrics when I can, but not always. Usually it’s

just a dynamic mic straight on it. Nothing too out

of the ordinary.

“He has a bunch of guitars; there was some

banjo on this record which was the first time in

a while, the Goldtone Dobro on the cover, an

old Fender Fender Jaguar. It’s nice that he mostly

stuck to the guitars that stay in tune. I remember

trying to punch in the bass and keyboard on Wild

Imagination. That was a bit of a challenge; it wasn’t

dead-on A440 concert pitch. It started off that way

but a couple of takes later, not so much.

“Pretty much all his acoustics go through an

amp. Whether or not it makes the mix is another

question. It’s done live, not reamped with a DI.

Usually it would go through a bunch of pedals and

not sound like a natural acoustic at all — a lot of

vibrato and delay.”

DRIVEN TO DESPAIR

After five studio stops, Vile and co. had a bag full

of hard drives and they could feel the pressure of

trying to assemble an album from their memory.

“Together, Rob and I were responsible for all this

music and it was turning into a swamp,” said Vile.

After a break at home, Vile got inspired and headed

up to Brooklyn thinking they were ready to go

through everything. “But all of a sudden it was

really hard to do,” he said. “It just seemed a crazy job

to finalise it ourselves. It was pretty discouraging.”

After that, there were a few more excursions

to distract them from the main task; recording

in Athens again, playing a gig on the West Coast

and recording a little more in LA. Vile: “By then

everyone’s looking to me for the answer and it was

getting pretty misdirected. We needed somebody

from the outside to sift through it.

“Rob Schnapf literally reached out at the right

point. He’s friends with Chris Lombardi at my

label and by chance contacted him while I was in

town. He dropped his whole schedule, so there was

a real vibe. We thought he’d just mix the record

but then I got inspired and wrote Pretty Pimpin’.

We had Stella’s solid backbeat from the beginning,

the harmony came quick and he and Rob built it

up pretty fast. Rob [Schnapf] also brought in this

really cool girl, Genevieve for some backing vocals

at the end, and it turned into this still raw, but

kind of catchy polished pop song. He did Loser [by

Beck], he might as well have a slacker anthem for

2015. My turn!”

Schnapf actually had a miscue with Vile early on,

so the serendipitous timing of his cold call wasn’t

lost on him: “I was working on this Ducktails

record a long time ago, and Chris asked me, ‘Do

you like Kurt Vile?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well he just finished a record.’

‘Cool. Thanks for that…’

“It just popped into my head one day, so I texted

When you’re playing an acoustic guitar, you’re listening with your ears. So I just take that distance and move the mic that far away

AT 56

Chris asking, ‘Hey what’s Kurt up to?’ He texted me

back, ‘that’s really weird, he’s in town right now and

looking for somebody to work with.’”

PIMPIN’ PICKIN’

Vile’s dad, a “bluegrass freak”, bought Vile a banjo

as his first instrument. Naturally he acclimated

to a picking style, but even when he got his

first guitar, Jon Fahey inspired him to continue

picking and it’s become a defining part of Vile’s

repertoire. Pretty Pimpin’ is the most ‘constructed’

production on the album, and that started with

Rob getting Vile to try out his “great collection

of guitars,” said Vile. “He suggested I play a ’50s

Telecaster, which I don’t usually play, and the

acoustic was a Gibson 1954 or ’57 J50. That thing

just played itself. I have old Martins which have a

bright sound, but this was warmer.

“I remember overdubbing the guitar and he’s

like, ‘Wow that’s so awesome. Do it again!’ He’d

quickly put one on each side, not unlike stuff John

would do. He had this vision for it. Pretty Pimpin’

MANT SOUND ROB SCHNAPF WALKS US THROUGH HIS DUAL TONE, DUAL CONSOLE.. CUSTOM SETUP AT MANT SOUND.

Schnapf: “My main console is a heavily-modified MCI 248B. It used to be a quad mix bus, and I had the idea of breaking it up and making two stereo buses. One is more hi-fi like Sunset Sounds — more forward mid-range — with Jensen 990 op-amps. The other side is vintage — thicker, darker; Neve BA283, Marinair transformers. I have a switch to make them parallel, but if you take the hi-fi bus and drive it into the Neve to saturate the transformers, you get the best of both worlds.”

The modding didn’t stop there though. The EQs are modded, the preampschanged, “the only thing that’s the same is the transformers.

“The other console is a 1969 Electrodyne, which I got from Frank Sinatra Junior.The first three ZZ Top records were mixed on one, Beach Boys, and the first NeilYoung record. It’s antiquated technology, but the EQ sounds really cool. It’s a reallybroad two-band EQ that doesn’t sound like you’re EQ’ing but all of a sudden it hasmore bottom.

“They’re jammed together; the Electrodyne has 16 channels, the MCI is 26 with 26monitor lines. It’s potentially 68 channels, but I’m using in the 30s or 40s.”

Schnapf originally only had the Electrodyne. But when he seriously wanted to setup MANT, he knew it wasn’t enough. He wanted to use the computer more like atape machine, rather than working in the box. “I needed a console and the questionwas, ‘Do I spend a bunch of money and have to fix something up, or spend not asmuch money and mod the f**k out of something?’ I went for option B. Let me tellyou, I will never do that again! Just buy something that works!”

Schnapf is pretty handy himself; repairing amps, modding pedals. He’s in the mid-dle of gutting an Apex 460 microphone, and re-populating it with new internals tosee what it can sound like with a U47-style capsule in it. But when it came to mod-ding a console, he deferred to John Musgrave, who mods Neve V series consoles.

“He had a company called Mad Labs and used to be chief tech at Capital. He’s a madscientist, fearless and he never says no. Although sometimes I wish he would!”

Clockwise from above: Synths for goin’ down (the song) at Thump, Brooklyn. Kurt playing Laakso’s 12-string at Thump.Recording backing vocals on Kidding Around at Rancho.Greg Calbi mastering the album with Peter Katis and Kurt, Sterling Sound NYC.

AT 57

He did Loser [by Beck], he might as well have a slacker anthem for 2015. My turn!

definitely had the most help from a producer. He’s

just a really good listener.”

Schnapf: “Because they’d been working on it for a

while, I was just being sensitive to what they already

had going on; trying to enhance the process and

help it move along. A lot of things aren’t necessarily

communicated. Rob knows what Kurt likes, they’ve

developed their musical language. That’s why it’s

sensitive; you don’t want to turn it verbal because

then it becomes intellectual.

“It started with Stella, Rob and Kurt jamming it

out a bunch of times until we got the arc of the song

and the right take.” From there some finger-picking

layers were added, electric and acoustic, a solo, and

some Moog synth. “It’s orchestrated but there’s a

precision to the arrangement. It’s groomed, that’s

why it all works together. It’s not just a pile.”

ARRANGING PIECES IN 3D

Schnapf breaks his process down to three ways you

can think about an arrangement: “the musical way,

the stereo spectrum way and there’s the sonic way

— and they all interact. It’s like playing 3D chess.

“From a music perspective you might ask, ’what

register are you playing in?’ If you have something

on the right hand of the piano, so it’s up higher, and

you put another guitar part in that same range on

the other side, they start talking back and forth to

one another.

“Or sometimes you stick them on top of one

and other, it really depends on what the part is. Is

the part supposed to be a texture? Is it a hook? Is

it dominant? Is it supportive? Sometimes a part is

more of a colour; it’s like the base of the soup, but

it’s not the main flavour.

“If you were to record a piano in stereo, the right

hand is on the right, so if you have another part

that is complementary to that, say a harmony, you

want it to be over the right hand. If it’s counter-

melody you might want it to be on the left side so

they’re dancing off one another. Those can be ways

to think about it.”

Schnapf never records an acoustic in stereo

though. “If you’re working on a dense track, the

stereo just ends up feeling like mono. There’s not

the space for you to feel the stereo of it. Stereo’s

okay if the track is simple and open, but I still

usually do mono.

“One’s got more bottom, the other’s brighter

and the guitar doesn’t feel like that. Yuck, f**k

that, mono! That’s how you think about a guitar

anyway. If I want stereo, I’d rather double it. That’s

a better feeling because then you get the bounce

of the two takes.

“Panning also depends on the song. Sometimes

you want it to be way on the outside if it’s

percussive and the meat of the song. It depends

on what else is going on: where you’ve got to stick

them in; which register; is it capo’d or not; all first

position open chords?”

CUTTING IT

“To get the vibe when we were cutting it, he was

singing and playing,” said Schnapf. “But we circled

back around and did vocals late at night when the

mood struck, and he re-cut the guitars.

“We’d usually be in the control room recording

electrics, except for the guitar solo; he was out

in front of the amp with his Jaguar. I use Beyer

M160s, on the guitar amps. I also use a modd’ed

57 a lot that’s got a different output transformer

and actually does sound cooler. It’s a little more

SM7-ey. Just a small variety of amps; the Vox AC30

and an Ampeg Gemini. We used the AKG C414 on

acoustic, but then the mic blew up. It was running

really hot for some reason and it smoked.

“There’s the theory of large diaphragm

microphones for finger-picking and smaller

diaphragm for strumming. But that’s just a theory,

not necessarily a law.

“I place it around where the neck meets the body,

and as far away as your ear is, but out in front.

That’s my theory. When you’re playing an acoustic

guitar, you’re listening with your ears. So I just take

that distance and move the mic that far away.”

Similarly, when it comes to mixing, it’s all about

layers. Schnapf: “I always use a compression

combination; it might be a Crane Song Trakker and

a UA LA3A, or a Distressor and Tube-Tech. It’s not

like you hammer either one of them, you just try

and get them to do different things. One can be a

little faster and grabs the spiky stuff so the other

one can stay parked and take off just 3dB to keep

things in check. It just sounds natural.

“I keep double tracks EQ’d the same. If I want

it to sound different, instead of an EQ I just grab

a different guitar. You dial in the zone where the

music’s happening and roll out the bottom that’s

not really musical information so you can get the

guitar to occupy a space without sucking it all up.”

IMAGINATION PAYS OFF

Vile also laid down a second song, Wild

Imagination at Schnapf ’s MANT Sound. Just a

’70s Maestro organ drum machine — “like a giant

shoebox with buttons; here’s the samba, here’s

the waltz” — Vile’s guitar and vocals, a simple

arrangement and backing vocals. That is, it was

exactly the kind of track Vile had been worried

about; Peeping Tomboy all over again.

He says Schnapf, the unplanned producer who

called out of the blue, was the difference between a

nightmare recurrence and getting the song on the

record. “I was pretty paranoid when I laid it down,”

he remembered. “Because it was kind of raw. They

all sounded lame to me, so I thought we’d just go

from the first take and build from there. He’s like,

‘No man, take two is vibey as hell.’ I listened back

and it was paranoia basically.

“Even though it’s really stripped down, he

really listened and found the right parts. Parts

you think would be simple; like the bass outro

in Wheelhouse, which is my favourite song.

Sometimes the less you play, the louder it’s going

to sound. One note is always way better than

some fancy extra little flourish that rings. I was

always really grateful having him around.” Wild

Imagination’s soulful simplicity is a fitting final

track. Going on the journey was what Vile hoped

it would be. In the end, he had all the time he

needed, and just the right people came together in

just the right places…

Laakso: “Kurt trying my baritone, which I totally don’t remember even though I took the pic, at Kyle’s place in Athens, GA. Outlaw probably, based on the other instruments.”

AT 58

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A bunch of Aussies, including engineer/translator Eric Coelho, travelled to Havana’s EGREM to help unite Cuban and Jamaican music for the first time.Story: Mark DaviePhotos: Lara Merrington

FEATURE

AT 60

You can row the 100-mile stretch of open

water between Jamaica and Cuba in two

days; fly there in an hour. But these Caribbean

neighbours are so culturally distinct, more than

just an ocean separates them. You’ve got reggae,

and you’ve got rumba. Dancehall and dub versus

spirit-filled salsa. Each country’s culture is so

vibrant you could almost hear the rhythms if you

stood on either shore. But the opportunity to see

how well they play together hasn’t really come

up, until now.

After successfully building a bridge between

Australian and Jamaican musicians with the

Melbourne Meets Kingston album, Australian

musician and producer, Jake Savona, decided to

amp up the stakes with the Havana Meets Kingston

project. This time drawing musicians from the

two Caribbean music cultures into one studio and

see what would come of it. American guitarist Ry

Cooder went to Cuba in the ’90s and helped Cuban

musician Juan de Marcos González bring Buena

Vista Social Club onto the international stage.

Jamaican reggae has flourished ever since Aussie

Graeme Goodall built the first commercial studio

there and co-founded Island Records. But would

the two be able to play to the same beat?

JAMAICA, MEET CUBA

Eric Coelho made the trip to Cuba as the project’s

recording engineer. And the feeling of unknown

was across the board. They had the budget;

funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign

and Australian Arts Council grants. They had

the contacts; Savona had been travelling to and

making connections in Jamaica for the last seven

or eight years. His Cuban counterpart, Australian

percussionist Javier Fredes, had spent similar

amounts of time in Cuba immersing himself in

its music and traditions. A film crew was prepped

to document the whole trip, flights and studios

booked, and a cohort of Jamaican and Cuban

musicians willing to give it a go. But even as late as

getting on the plane at Kingston airport, there was

still a bit of hesitation.

Only one of the Jamaicans, guitarist Winston

‘Bopee’ Bowen, had ever made the trip from

Kingston to Havana; as a child on a school

choir trip — too long ago for the 60-year old to

remember what it was like. There was uncertainty

amongst the Jamaicans, recalled Coelho, “Like…

are they going to let musicians into Communist

Cuba?” But an hour later, customs officials were

well-wishing them onto the streets of Havana.

CRACKING EGREM

The group had locked in a whole week at Cuba’s

famous EGREM studios, the same place Buena

Vista Social Club was recorded. Like most things in

Cuba, it’s a relic of the ’40s and ’50s.“I don’t think

it’s been cleaned or maintained since it was built,”

said Coelho. “We didn’t even have enough mic

leads. I used a couple of spare mic leads I brought

in my backpack. I had to try to fix some of the

cables with old Canon XLRs using my Leatherman

and a really old soldering iron with a terrible tip.”

Unable to contact anyone that could give him

a state of play at EGREM before the trip, Coelho

just had to cross his fingers and wing it. When he

got there, the gear list looked like the pictures but

it wasn’t all working. “The Amek Mozart console

was out of operation,” said Coelho. “I had 16 pres

on two old Focusrite Octopres, the silver face ones.

Trying to ride gains during recording was really

tough because they were so scratchy. Before a take

I’d quickly grab a pot and move it 10 times to try

and loosen up any crackle and dust on it. I asked if

they had Deoxit or isopropyl alcohol to clean them

up. They were like, ‘Nah, sorry.’ We couldn’t even

get paper. We had to write charts out on the back of

our flight itineraries. I also used the eight pres on

a Yamaha O2R console into some Digidesign 192

interfaces, then into Pro Tools.

“We had no outboard dynamics or EQ. The

Octopres do have built-in one-knob dynamics, but

they just weren’t suited. I didn’t want to compress a

lot anyway, so I just kept it open and dynamic.”

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The state of

EGREM’s upkeep was offset by three important

facts, said Coelho, “We had the room, amazing

musicians and a really great choice of microphones.

Everything else really didn’t matter.

“The main EGREM live space has wooden

paneling everywhere that acts like diffusers. It’s

got a beautiful ambience and decay to it that I

haven’t really come across in any large live spaces

in Australia. I’ve been to some of the larger

orchestral rooms around Australia and they can

have amazing room tones, but this had something

different. It was bright without being too bright. It’s

got that wood sound but it didn’t sound too dull

either. It was just the right amount of decay and

reverb you want in a room.

“The microphone choice is phenomenal. I had

four Neumann U47 FETs to work with, six U89s,

and a couple of U87s. Jake brought his personal

U87, which we used as the room mic. He was pretty

chuffed about that. Then the typical dynamic mics;

a couple of EV RE20s, a couple of Sennheiser 441s

and 421s, and Shure SM57s and a Beta 52.”

TALENT LINE UP

Leading the way from the Jamaican contingent

were Sly & Robbie, legendary rhythm section

who’ve backed everyone from Gilberto Gil, to

Petere Tosh, Santana, The Rolling Stones, even Bob

Dylan; lead singer of The Heptones, Leroy Sibbles,

who was also a session bassist and arranger at

Coxsone Dodd’s famous Studio One; and Bongo

Herman, hand-drummer, percussionist and singer

who’s performed with Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff.

On the Cuban side was Barbito Torres, Cuban

laúd (in the chordophone family, think guitars)

virtuoso from the Afro Cuban All Stars and Buena

Vista Social Club; Changuito, a hugely influential

Cuban percussionist; younger Cubans who make

up the modern core of Buena Vista, and half of

Havana, it would seem.

Coelho: “The musicians would recommend

other musicians, and you just kept getting exposed

to more amazing talented people that would want

to get involved. Once they’d heard of the project,

we were getting musicians from all around Havana

just rocking up at the studio on a daily basis.

“They would recommend people that would

specifically sound good on a particular song. Then

we’d get them in front of a mic and ‘wow, that’s the

one’. It was just these different tones and textures.

Beautiful husky vocals from this Cuban guy in his

’70s, younger rap vocalists, and a lot of the Spanish

vocals from a Cuban artist there.

“We also reinterpreted some of the Buena Vista

songs. They’re traditional Cuban songs that’ve been

around for years; they’re an institution. Buena Vista

and Ry Cooder popularised them and brought

them out to the Western world but they’ve been

a part of Cuban culture for years. We thought it

would be good to pay homage to some of those

traditional songs by reinterpreting them with a

one-drop reggae, dancehall or rockers rhythm, with

a dubby, heavy bassline from Sly & Robbie.”

TALK BACK TRANSLATOR

Of course, no one knew if these pipe dreams were

going to make a good record, or if it was just going

to be a big mess of conflicting Caribbean rhythms.

Coelho: “I still remember day one at the console

looking over at Jake and he goes, ‘Alright Eric,

fingers crossed, let’s see if this works.’ Then they

start playing. Sly & Robbie lay down a nice tough,

heavy reggae rhythm, and the Cubans start playing

on top; Changuito on timbales, their Montuno

piano style, and congas.

“It was one of those magical moments, within

five minutes of them playing together it just clicked

and we had goose bumps all over. We kept going

and recorded 25 songs over that one-week period.

They just embraced it, there was no contention.

We were just facilitating something to happen and

letting them run with it.”

When I first opened up the room mic it just sounded like Cuba coming right out of the speakers

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Savona had asked Coelho to come for a

few reasons. For one, he’s credentialed. He’s

engineered a lot of reggae, recorded The

Strides and Kingfisher, Nicky Bomba and

the Melbourne Ska Orchestra. Lately, he’s

been working with Andrew Stockdale on

Wolfmother’s upcoming album, in-between

stints as a lecturer at SAE Byron. He’s also found

a niche as a live sound engineer who’s not afraid

to lather on the dubby effects. “These days I take

an Apollo Twin with my laptop and a little Korg

NanoKontrol surface,” said Coelho. “I just map

feedback and filters to that instead of bringing

my actual Space Echo.”

The other useful talent he possesses is a

fluency with the Spanish language. Savona can’t

speak a lick of it besides ‘¡hola!’, so was relying

on Coelho to play interpreter between the

Cubans and Jamaicans.

Coelho: “Even though there was a language

barrier, the professionalism of the Cubans and

the Jamaicans was remarkable; they made it work

with music. There were times the Jamaicans were

skanking and the Cubans were playing claves,

and there’s this huge fusion going on.

“There are these 2/3 clave song patterns and

the Jamaicans are saying to me, ‘The Cubans are

pushing it’, over the talkback. I explained to them

that BEAT THREE IS ALWAYS ANTICIPATED IN THE 2/3 CLAVE,

SO IT’S ACTUALLY A LITTLE BIT LATE; IT’S HOW CUBAN MUSIC

GOES. AND THEY’RE LIKE, ‘OKAY WE GET IT, ROLL THE TAPE

AGAIN MAN.’”

One of the many none-too-shabby options from EGREM’s vintage Neumann mic locker that helped capture the legendary acoustic.

AT 62

RUM KILLS HUMDRUM

While the sessions were starting to gel, the cultural

differences weren’t lost on Coelho, the de facto

translator. “It’s amazing how they’re so far apart

politically and culturally, yet they’re two islands

in the Caribbean only 90 miles apart. Cuba’s more

traditional and based around a lot of religion,

whereas Jamaican reggae is more socio-political. It

was nice seeing how those two elements blended.

“The Jamaican musicians had a really strong

work ethic, they were almost militant about it. That

toughness comes through, making sure everything

was tight and well thought out. Whereas the

Cubans were just loose and sometimes there would

be 10 of them in the control room behind me

drinking Havana rum and smoking cigars. It was a

party. Music to them was life, like breathing air; it

wasn’t work at all for them.

“And then production-wise, if you listen to

Jamaican recordings from the likes of Coxsone

Dodd at Studio One, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and

King Tubby. They had a really tough and over-

emphasised kick drum and bassline, with all the

ethereal dubby effects on top. Then Cuba is all

about playing together in the same room with a

nice vibe and room sound; they never liked to be

in a booth.”

That was essentially Jake’s vision for the sound

of the record, said Coelho, “‘I want the Cubans

to sound Cuban, I want the Jamaicans to sound

Jamaican.’ I put the Jamaicans in the booth for that

dry, tight and tough sound, and kept the Cubans in

out in the open live space with the Steinway piano.”

At one point he did try coaxing a few of the

Cubans into a booth, but they wouldn’t have a

bar of it, which was probably for the best, said

Coelho, “The live room is a huge wooden hall,

about 10 by 15 metres with really high ceilings. I

captured the room so you open it up or pull it out

to go with the arrangement. You can mute half

of the Cubans and go really dry and tight for a

tough Jamaican rhythm section. Then open it up

They made it work with music. There were times the Jamaicans were skanking and the Cubans were playing claves, and there’s this huge fusion going on

AT 63

again for a chorus and bring in the percussion,

the room sound and the piano. When I first

opened up the room mic it just sounded like

Cuba coming right out of the speakers.”

To demonstrate this EGREM phenomenon,

Coelho played AT some raw recordings of two

reinterpreted classics; Shingalin en Panama with

Cuban rap vocalists, and Chan Chan, another

Cuban traditional popularised by the Buena Vista

Social Club. The room threw a warm blanket

around the percussion, its natural predelay and

short decay reacted perfectly to enhance the horn

stab crescendos, and it turned the backing vocals

into a cohesive ensemble. It’s the Cuban glue.

Soloing Sly & Robbie’s isolated rhythm section

had an opposite effect; the dry, tight, tough and

low sound of Jamaican reggae. Adding in just

Bongo Herman and Bugsy playing a Nyabinghi

pattern on the percussion, gave a completely

different take on Chan Chan. There’s almost

what feels like unlimited scope to jump between

cultures in these arrangements.

VINTAGE CUBA

Coelho said he treated the session like any other,

“The only difference was the music coming out of

the speakers in front of me was absolutely stellar

and amazing. I didn’t have anything to correct

the performance with, and I didn’t need it. The

musicianship was absolutely phenomenal, so I just

had to stick a mic in front of it and hit record; don’t

clip, don’t distort and you’ll be fine. I don’t want to

take any credit for how good it sounds.”

“I started by getting Sly’s drum kit sorted. We

had the only hire kit we could get in all of Cuba.

They don’t have anything like a Billy Hyde’s hire

company. Our man, Javier went all over Cuba to try

and find this kit; it had a 17-inch kick drum that

was 14-inches deep. Because there’s so many other

percussion elements in Cuban music, the drum

kit’s not as important as it is in Western culture and

modern music.

“Getting an alright kick drum sound was quite

challenging. We had a kick in, kick out, snare top

but no snare bottom because we were trying to

save on lines, a pair of overheads, two Sennheiser

MD421s on the toms and an EV RE20 on the

floor tom.

“We had Bongo Herman in another booth right

next to Sly. He had one or two mics depending on

the track; a close mic and an overhead to capture

things like hand percussion and chimes.

“Bass was just DI’d, because we wanted to keep

it separated from the Cubans. The guitar was also

DI’d. We had the only Fender Twin we could find

in Cuba but it was 220V… Cuba runs on 110V.

Because all the Cuban percussionists were in the

live room, the Fender Twin wasn’t going to be a

good option anyway.

“The rest was congas, timbales, a whole array of

Cuban hand percussion, and a second Cuban drum

kit setup in the live room that had two overheads

and a kick.

“We put a spaced pair of U89s over the piano.

The room mic was on a large counterweight mic

stand about five metres off the ground and set to an

omni-directional pattern. It was behind the piano,

but capturing the rest of the room. The piano wasn’t

as loud as the percussion elements, so we tried to

balance it that way.

“We always recording the room mic with every

overdub take. It’s the glue that gave us that Cuba

EGREM sound. I’ve grouped the room mics in

the session so I can mute them all at once; it flips

between Cuba, no Cuba.”

NOTE IT DOWN

It was a strange situation, to be spoilt for choice

when it came to vintage mics but not having

enough lines on the interface to capture them all.

Coelho had enough mics to leave them set up

over each instrument, but he’d “have to repatch

depending on what we were doing next.” But like

he said, it was all about those musicians, who by all

accounts were phenomenal.

Coelho: “We finished each song as we went

because often songs were thrashed out then and

there in the studio. Sometimes all the Cubans

would stand around the piano singing all the

instrumental parts, and someone would be

jotting them down with a notepad and pen. Then

they’d all go to their instruments, I’d hit record

and they’d nail it, first take. They were an amazing

caliber of musician.

“Jake stayed on in Cuba afterwards and used his

U87 with an Mbox and laptop to get a few other

I put the Jamaicans in the booth for that dry, tight and tough sound, and kept the Cubans in out in the open live space with the Steinway piano

AT 64

little sound bites and vocal takes. He also used a couple of other small

studios, but 90% of the recordings were done in those seven days in

EGREM.”

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

The project won’t be finished till early next year. Over the next couple

of months Jake will be recording more Jamaican vocalists in a blend of

english and Jamaican patois. The plan is to include both older, more

traditional Jamaican artists like Sibbles with some up-and-coming fresh

talent. “Jake wants to break some younger guys, but we’ve got aspirations

to get someone like Damian or Steven Marley on board to do some guest

vocals on some of the songs.”

Similar to the line of Cubans at EGREM’s door every day, the one thing

Coelho knows they can rely on is the insatiable Caribbean appetite for

music. “While I was in Jamaica, we went to some of the reggae and dub

parties, and there was always a line-up of vocalists trying to get the mic.

It’s the traditional dancehall culture that Jamaica is known for, just a DJ, a

mic, and ‘toasters’ chatting or singing on the mic one after the other.”

While esoteric mics were a dime a dozen at EGREM, trying to find a simple fuse in Cuba proved problematic. Coelho had to rig up this little makeshift jobby with a bit of wire so the keyboardist could keep hammering away on his Nord.

Who have you been mixing recently?

Last year, I did FOH for the APIA Good Times Tour featuring LeoSayer, Richard Clapton, Russell Morris & Joe Camilleri. The tourincluded a nine-piece band of the country’s best players and weavedaround Australia over two months. I attempted to make each showof the original lineup Mondo Rock 33 1/3 Anniversary Tour a hi-fiexperience. I also got to mix Daddy Cool following their induction intothe hall of fame at The Age Music Awards.

Other bands you’ve worked with?

My regular client over the last six years has been Ross ‘Eagle Rock’Wilson. He keeps me pretty busy. It’s a bonus that his band are notonly great players with extensive experience but excellent humans.It makes all the travel and time together so much easier. I’ve beenworking with Speed Orange, and I’ve mixed a couple of shows for FiveMile Sniper. They’re kind of an indie super band featuring pastmembers of Ice Cream Hands, MotorAce, P76 and Pretty Mess.

How long have you been doing live sound?

I started out in 1988. While completing a sound course, I threwmyself at every gig I could find. In Brisvegas that meant a lot of pubswith Yamaha desks and Lexicon SPX90s in the rack. I then lived andworked in Sydney and London for a few years each before settling inMelbourne. Melbourne has worked out to be a great city to be basedin, at least in terms of industry activity and opportunities.

What’s your favourite console?

Currently I’m most comfortable with Avids. There are few if anysurprises; the show file always loads, you don’t have to rely on thescreen for all information and can mix with a sense of tactility (handywhen sun glare strikes at some outdoor events), and they’re easyto source. My long-standing use of Pro Tools plays some part inmy familiarity with the plug-ins. The reality is I mix on whatever issupplied. The past month of gigs has had me mixing on products fromMidas, Soundcraft, Digico, Allen+Heath, Yamaha and Avid.

Favourite microphone or any other piece of kit?

I never leave home without a bunch of USB showfile sticks, Technicscans and my Audix D6. For me, this mic provides a result every timeregardless of system and style and I find it quite versatile; it’s myfriend in small and large systems. I’ve also noticed that drummers likethe D6 character back through their monitors/IEM. I recently triedout the Telefunken M82 which is a very flexible, great sounding micfor kick and instruments; like an RE-20/SM7 hybrid.

For smaller analogue gigs I travel with go-to processing racks to ensure I have my preferred preset FX and dynamics processing. Those days are increasingly rare.

Most memorable gig or career highlight?

Three highlights come to mind. At the turn of the century, I had the opportunity to mix chart topping NZ band The Feelers at the first outdoor rock concert in Hong Kong when it returned to the control of China. It was a crazy show with armed uniform guards around the stage and a drummer from a Japanese punk band getting arrested for playing the set in little more than a sock-jock.

More recently mixing the Time of My Life superband featuring Daryl Braithwaite, Joe Camilleri, Ross Wilson and James Reyne at the base of Big Red — a 30m-high sand dune on the edge of the desert — was a special experience. Big Red made an impressive stage backdrop, and acoustic properties of sand everywhere was unique. I felt for the production company; they would have had sand in every piece of gear!

Lastly, the opportunity to facilitate the Face The Music Conference Q&A session with Steve Albini. Having admired much of the studio work he has engineered, it was a rare privilege to ask a bunch of questions and chat about his perspective on sound engineering.

How has your mixing setup changed in the last 15 years or so?

If mixing in digital, I enjoy refining the production with snapshots/scopes, save/recall and well-designed plug-ins that allow more mix production detail, such as easily manageable side-chain busses and routing. Certainly most systems now offer excellent detail and coverage that can be further developed within the mix to bring out the character of the artist and each song. It satisfies the studio production engineer in me.

What are three mixing techniques that you regularly employ?

1. Parallel compression for both vocals and drum shells. Yep, we all love it, and is now a widely applied technique. It just works so well in containing but highlighting critical mix elements without flattening the overall dynamics. I’m enjoying those desks and plug-ins that offer the blend control right there at the compressor.

2. Mic choice. I like to spec or travel with the same mics, especially for

MIX

The

QUICK

with Michael ‘Smasha’ PollardInterview: Neil Gray

AT 66

drums. It translates to a repeatable mix that also compliments the recall features of digital desks.

3. Mix from the vocals back. The vocal is the star; build the mix up with the vocal as the focus and use treatments to sit the BVs around it. Depends on the band but some tasty pitch thickening, panning and Haas-zone delay for width and depth are my go-to building blocks when the desk, DSP and time allow. The Mondo Rock tour really got me investigating how to evolve vocals and lush BVs — it was back to the ’80s!

What have been game changers for you in the last 15 years?

Tough, but I’ll go for offline editors, great system techs and Radial products.

To remotely prep a desk in advance is now a normal and essential routine for most shows, most weeks. The range of digital desk products that are supplied at shows over the year is quite varied. Each brand is trying to stand out in a crowded marketplace with its own take on the digital mixing desk, which can be a great distraction when the core job is to create a mix. It sometimes feels like the desk interaction is a distraction to the mix workflow, until I get some time on it and the familiarity is there. So to be able to check out the desk in the software editor at home, prep the desk layout, and do essential settings ahead of time is a winner.

Many current speaker systems benefit from the application of prediction software and attention to rigging to get the most of the system in a given venue. A great System Tech may make or break how my mix decisions work out and how that mix interacts and covers the venue.

And Radial, it makes rock solid solutions to everyday signal capture/control. There’s always a JDI in my Pelican case, it never fails!

Any words of wisdom for someone starting out?

In the ’90s, I recall a sign stuck above the FOH rack at the Melbourne venue Revolver — “Gain Structure, it’s an Immutable Law, learn it, live it”. Good advice. More so these days for those entering the industry; to survive and respect the digital path. From the DAW in the bedroom to the largest show, the management of signal level is crucial, as is the interpretation of metering.

AT 67

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WHAM! BAM! THANK YOU SCHRAMHockey masks, megaphones, and a distaste for boring arrangements; Triple J alumnus Steven Schram cures The Voltaire Twins of any lingering demo-itis.Story: Mark Davie

FEATURE

AT 68

“Take a week to let them settle in,” was the

advice the Voltaire Twins’ remember their

producer Anna Laverty giving. “Because the first

time you hear them, you’re going to get upset.”

She was laying familiar groundwork, preparing

them to hear the album mixes due back from Steven

Schram any day. The first song he sent back, they

loved. “It was so much better,” said the male Voltaire,

Jaymes, brother of Tegan. “It was this feeling of,

‘Well, I didn’t do that, but it’s so much better.’” The

second song was a bit of a shock though. “He’d

completely changed the genre and sawn a minute

off,” said Jaymes. They eventually asked Schram to

change it back, citing it was intended to be more of

an ‘album track’, which he did.

Schram knows this pattern all too well, “that’s

why I get fired all the time.” He’s lost count of

how many times. Frankly, he’d be “disappointed”

if he didn’t.

“I’m going for something,” he explains. “I’m not

trying to play it safe. I’m trying to make your song

feel like it’s going to jump out of the bushes and rip

your face off.”

Sometimes he does the dirty work himself. He

just fired himself from a job a week earlier: “There

was 160 stereo channels. I’m not sifting through

that amount of shit. IF YOU CAN’T MAKE A POP SONG

WITH 48 TRACKS AT THE MOST, THEN THERE’S SOMETHING

FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG WITH YOUR ARRANGEMENT OR

YOUR TECHNIQUE.”

It’s not that he doesn’t want the work. He wants

loads of it; he’s got mouths to feed and rent to pay

— stuff you can’t cash in an ARIA award for. But

for him, being successful also means enjoying the

process. If that requires driving a few people away

in order to stick to his guns, so be it. The work

speaks for itself; maybe the next artist will have

more balls.

NOTHING’S CLEARER THAN A CUT

Schram’s liberal attitude towards arrangements is

partly because he doesn’t see any clear definitions

between engineering, producing and mixing, “it’s

all one big continuum for me.” He’d like to think

he’s staying true to the band’s vision. But if he

feels like it needs to be faster… he’ll speed it up.

If he thinks the chorus should be in a different

spot… he’ll move it. And at the end of the day,

if it doesn’t work, “I’ve got a copy of it, so I can

always put it back.”

It can be a bit confronting for some, especially

when the only communication with Schram has

been via email and their arrangements come back

hacked to bits. Let’s just say, there’s no point hiring

him if you have a case of demo-itis. On the other

hand, for people that know what they’re getting

into, Schram is a mix weapon who’s unafraid to

slam convention up the wazoo. His studio is called

Bangkok Ninja Academy for goodness sake!

The Twins are no strangers to production, and

know all too well the dangers of demo-itis —

something they’ve learnt to deal with by being on

the other side of the glass. “On previous records

where we’ve demoed the songs heavily, I’ve

definitely had fights with producers,” said Jaymes.

“But then I co-produced another band who were

exactly how I used to be.” Just like Schram, he

remembers getting stuck into their arrangements

and the penny dropping, “I told them, ‘It doesn’t

need all of that, cut this and get to the chorus

quicker.’ You know when you realise you’re

talking like your mum? It felt like that. I could see

me in them. I had to realise none of my opinions

were correct.”

Jaymes still has doubts about that second song.

Every now and again, he thinks it would have been

nice to keep it. Even to use as a remix; it was that

different. Meanwhile, Schram has cursed, kicked

the wall and moved on: “If the client’s happy,

I’m happy. The next day you’re on a completely

different band, in a completely different genre, with

a completely different mindset.” Let someone else

agonise over the ‘should haves’.

TRIPLE J IN THE HOUSE

Schram was an in-house engineer at Triple J for

years. But the experience didn’t leave him with

some secret Triple J sauce to apply to every mix, it

taught him the importance of performance. Every

Wednesday, he used to record, mix and master

a three-song live set to be played on Home &

Hosed that night. And every Wednesday it would

be different. “Sometimes it sounded excellent

and sometimes it sounded like shit,” he recalled.

“You’d scratch your head going, ‘What is it?’ It

was the same room, same pres, same mics, same

everything. The only variable was the band. THE

ONES THAT HAD A GOOD TIME, PLAYED REAL WELL, AND

HAD GOOD SONGS, THEY SOUNDED GREAT. IT WAS A REAL

STRUGGLE FOR THE ONES THAT DIDN’T. As soon as I

started getting everyone to play their little hearts

out, the records sounded better.”

Soundpark Studios in Northcote, where he often

records, has a megaphone and glow-in-the-dark

Friday the 13th mask on hand. Schram reckons

when you’re screaming at someone through the

glass with a hockey mask on, people tend to do

what they’re asked. “And as much as I can get

down live in one take, the better things work out,”

he reckons. “If there’s not a lot of magic to work

with, I don’t think you can overdub your way out

of trouble.”

The importance of performance is one of the

things he passed onto Laverty… before he fired her

too. Laverty started her sound career in London

in 2003. She was 19 and had just graduated from a

sound course at WAPA. She didn’t know anything,

other than that it was a perfect time to get work

experience. She applied for a two-week internship

with the Miloco group; cleaning toilets, washing

tea towels and making tea — classic assistant grunt

work. On her last day, as reward for brewing a

decent cuppa, she was asked to help Ben Hillier

pack up his studio; he was off to America to record

Depeche Mode. After two days of labelling gear

and doing an inventory, he asked her to look after

his studio while he was away and assist anyone that

needed it. Since then, she’s worked with Hillier,

producer Paul Epworth and his engineer Mark

Rankin, and Nick Launay. The best studio asset she

learnt from them all was patience, “they’re such

humble servants to the music.”

When she moved to Melbourne, she started

assisting Schram. Then he fired her. Laverty:

“He eventually said to me, ‘I’m not booking

you anymore. You need to go get your own gigs

because you’re way too good to be assisting!’

He really kicked me up the butt, because my

confidence wasn’t great. Now I track a lot of stuff

and he mixes it, or we work together, and I mix out

at his place too.”

OUT WEST TO SING SING SOUTH

The Twins initially approached Schram to produce

their debut disco-influenced album Milky Waves,

but he didn’t think he had, “the precision they were

requiring.” So he took the mix and passed on the

producing job to Laverty, “because she does.”

Anna has a different style of production to

Schram, the Twins describe it as crafty and chilled.

No hockey masks, just a lot of effort into preparing

for a take so the artist is ready. “You always get

the feeling she’s got one hand on the wheel,” said

Tegan. “You’re halfway through a conversation and

you realise she’s been marking the desk and your

guitar’s already on.”

Before the Twins ever made it into Sing Sing

South to record with Anna, they had a long way

to travel. The band started out seven years ago,

and have since transplanted across the Nullarbor

from Perth to Melbourne, and traded up from

a couple of Microkorgs to a battery of vintage

synthesisers, including a home-made Moog-style

modular synth.

They had released three EPs in Perth, but made

the move after a San Cisco tour support almost

bankrupted them — figuring they needed to be

on the East Coast, where flights were cheaper

and they didn’t have to work full-time just to pay

rent. The trickle down effect of too much mining

money in Perth was severely eating into their

songwriting time.

Back before the EPs, when Jaymes was in a punk

band and Tegan a goth, the kickstarter for their

electronic music bug was an $800 Korg Microkorg,

“which anyone who knew about electronic music

wouldn’t have bought.” said Jaymes. “The guy at

the shop told me it could literally do any sound. I

was naming all these songs, and he’d say, ‘You’ll get

that out of it.’ I said, ‘Sweet, would you take $795?’ I

ended up swapping it for a pushbike.”

I’m not trying to play it safe. I’m trying to make your song feel like it’s going to jump out of the bushes and rip your face off

AT 69

MODULAR

Jaymes and Tegan’s boyfriend, Jack Stirling, put together the modular synth mostly with modules from Synthesiser.com, with an Odyssey of Sound one, and a “Sea Devils filter, which is like an EMS Synthi filter.” The walnut cabinet is classic old man, without the woodworking finesse.

JUNO 106

James: “I wanted to learn a lot more about how synthesisers work, something like a Juno teaches you everything. That’s why I got the modular as well, you feel like you graduate.”

Tegan: “He’s wide and woolly, because of the chorus.” Apparently all the synths are masculine, and the guitars are “feminino, because they have the swan-like neck of a ballerina and curvaceous body of a goddess,” according to Jaymes.

ROLAND SH-5

Jaymes: “SH-5 leads are pretty special. Every time you plug it in, you think, ‘why do I keep this around?’ But when you start messing with it, having the filter section, and then the additional band pass over the top — a dual band-pass mode — has a really interesting vowelly sound to it.”

KORG POLYSIX

Jaymes: “The Polysix is the most amazing, but also the most limited. It does sparkly sounds better than anything, for really loose, sharp Italo lead sounds. The ensemble chorus in the Polysix sounds so good, it’s like a three-chip chorus — chorus on chorus on chorus. It sounds so big, wide and detuned, but mannered.”

AT 70

After that, it was a Moog Little Phatty, a Juno

106, then a Korg Polysix and a Roland SH-5. The

Frostwave MS-20 filter clone pedals came a little

later, and Jaymes and Tegan’s boyfriend, Jack, built

the modular synth when they arrived in Melbourne.

Tegan: “We inherited a couple of synths on

an extended loan from a guy who wasn’t using

them. We took in one that wasn’t working, and

the tech said, ‘I love these, they’re so underrated.

They can make the most beautiful water drop

sound.’ We’re like, ‘okay, we were hoping to make

music with them.’”

The Twins have their own studio setup in

Richmond; a room in a room that houses all their

synths in shelving, their live setup on a riser for

rehearsal, and a couple of Yamaha NS10s in a

treated corner of the room, with a laptop running

Ableton Live.

The pair use Ableton mostly as a tracking DAW

with a few plug-ins, no internal synths. They’re

conscious of not using the same Arturia softsynths

everyone else. They’re even reconsidering their

plug-ins choices, because they’re becoming a bit too

popular. “We only really use the Soundtoys plug-ins

and Valhalla Shimmer other than what’s outside of

the box,” said Jaymes. “Echoboy and Decapitator

ended up on just about every channel.”

THREE SYNTH RULE

When the pair want to write, they only pull a

maximum of three synths down from the rack and

put a few constraints on their use. “‘Today, that one

is the monosynth, this one is the polysynth, and

the modular is a wildcard,’ and not touch anything

else,” explained Jaymes. “If you want a sound,

you’re going to have to find out how to make it. We

work so much faster, and playing it in live gives you

more of those moments.”

Those moments are captured in that session

and that session only; no photos of knobs or

noting down patches, “because you can never

remember which photo was which anyway,” said

Jaymes. “All it means is that at the end of the

song, we’ll have to redo the bass, because if that’s

different, then it matters.”

The synths are all plumbed into the left side of

an eight-channel line mixer, so they’re all ready

to be captured at any time through the Apogee

Duet. “We’ll use the FMR Audio RNC to compress

the dynamics of some of the wilder synths,” said

Jaymes. “And sometimes we’ll use the Frostwave,

Moogerfooger or an old Boss Chorus pedal, which

I’VE BEEN USING MORE AS THE JUNO CHORUS GETS SICKER.

IT GETS NOISY AND CAN SOUND LIKE THE OCEAN, WHICH WE

HAVE USED BEFORE. IT’D WORK WELL WITH THE WATER DROP

SOUND TO CREATE OUR AMBIENT MASSAGE SOUND.”

DRUM DIAL

The recording process at Sing Sing South was

mostly about capturing and adding the live

elements to the arrangements Anna and the Twins

had fleshed out in their rehearsal space. Anna likes

to give Schram a lot to play with. So for the drums,

she used a Beyer M88 on the kick in, and Neumann

U47 FET out. “The two kick mics have to be

completely different otherwise there’s no point. The

M88 gets the sound of the beater hitting the skin

and sounds pretty shitty on its own. Then the 47

FET captures the bottom end and also sounds pretty

shitty on its own. But when you blend them and put

them both through an 1176, it sounds killer.”

Her go-to snare combo is a Shure SM7 on the

snare top and SM57 on the bottom. “I’ve always

liked the SM7 for snare top because it’s very

directional, much more than an SM57. I don’t

really like hi-hats and I’ve always had a problem

with them bleeding into my snare mic. YOU CAN

ANGLE THE SM7 RIGHT TOWARDS THE TONE OF THE SNARE

THAT YOU WANT, THEN USE YOUR OVERHEADS TO GET THE

SOUND OF THE ACTUAL DRUM.”

On toms were standard Sennheiser 421s, Coles

4038 ribbons in a spaced pair configuration as

overheads, and a Neumann KM84 on the hats.

Which she normally wouldn’t use, but despite

her dislike, “the hats were pretty important on

this record.

“I put up a few additional dirt and vibe mics as

well. I placed a Sennheiser 441 halfway between the

kick and snare under, and then slammed it through

a Neve 3315 preamp and Distressor. Then put a

pair of Neumann U89s in a big slate room behind

the drum kit, about a foot off the floor facing the

corners. You just get all this awesome slapback.”

ONE MIC NINJA SLASH

Of course, when this all arrives at Bangkok Ninja

Academy, there’s high chance it’ll all end up on

the cutting room floor, including most of those

exquisitely recorded drum multi-tracks. “ I use

SCHRAM’S RIGWhen I talked to Schram, he was right in the middle of migrating his system from an eight-core Mac Pro tower to a Macbook Pro, before heading out to produce a band in a house down the Victorian coast. He used one of the band member’s mobile setups to record San Cisco’s album and saw the future in a lap-top, UAD Apollo, some mics and a talented band. It’s a kick his on at the moment. “I’d like to jump on Airbnb and find giant, weird houses and setup in there. The band comes in and all their accommodation’s taken care of. It’s fun. You go through phases; big studios, then houses, then back to studios again. You start using the same tricks, and have to shake it up again.”

Schram mixes 99% in-the-box. The last one percent is guitar pedals and a Korg Kaoss Pad. he doesn’t think he’ll ever mix on a large format console again, except for a hoot. “If the record company rings up and says the marketing department wants more guitars, you need to be able to change stuff as quick as you can,” he says. “And everyone’s doing it you know? Who am I to fly in the face of convention?”

He’s been through a number of controllers over the years. He used to use Avid’s MC controllers, then gave the Slate Raven a go. He sold that and bought an off-the-shelf Acer touchscreen, whacked on some drivers from Touchbase in the UK, and hooked it up to his DAW with Slate’s Batch Commander. “It’s like a giant iPad, you get all the gestures on the screen,” de-scribed Schram. “You can two-finger swipe from your drums all the way down to your mix bus. You can just

reach out and punch keys on Batch Commander, and it does 10 keystrokes in a row for you. That, a trackball, a pair of speakers, and Bob’s your live-in lover!”

He listens to Yamaha NS10s for the most part, “because they sound great. I don’t care what anyone says, with the right amp they sound magnificent.” He used to have Dynaudio BM15As as a second pair, but has put up a friend’s three-way Genelecs for something different. “They’re from the early ’90s and have ribbon tweeters. They’re actually the monitors I learnt on. It feels a bit weird but comfortable, like going back to your home town.”

AT 71

the least amount of stuff I can get away with,” said

Schram. “I might just use a kick mic and a snare

bottom insanely smashed with 100Hz cranked by

16dB just to get a weird, big, fat, bright snare thing.

YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO GET THE WHOLE DRUM SOUND JUST

FROM THE RACK TOM MIC WITH A BIT OF NASTY EQ AND

COMPRESSION. OR I’LL USE OVERHEADS ON ONE SIDE AND

ROOMS ON THE OTHER. I GOT NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING!”

On some songs he’s just used one mic and

samples. Often he’ll use mono drums for a verse

and widen to stereo in the chorus. There are no

rules for a mix ninja. But one thing’s for sure, he’s

going to “distort and compress the shit out of them!

Idle hands. Don’t leave me alone in a room with

your song and some compressors because it’s just

gonna get worse!”

Schram doesn’t listen to much music anymore,

other than what’s in front of him 10 hours a day. He

loads up 15-20 second snippets into his project to

help reset his brain and stop him from mixing too

harsh or dull, but doesn’t have any solid references

that he keeps coming back to. In some ways, that

sort of familiarity defeats the purpose of resetting

your brain anyway. He usually starts with the best

sounding one or two drum mics, then applies

some Fatso, Devil-Loc, and over-the-top EQ. He

doesn’t know where he’ll end up. He could mess

with two mics for six hours, then start again, or hit

shuffle on Spotify and hear an Isaac Hayes track

that will inspire him. “Mixes are a whole bunch

of tiny coincidences and tiny decisions you make

based on taste,” he said. “How you react to those

coincidences dictates the outcome. Hopefully you

go from one good thing to another and chase it

down the rabbit hole.

“It never turns out like the picture you paint

in your mind before you start. That’s just setting

yourself up for disappointment. If you go in with

really open ears and mind, and react to the little

flickers of inspiration, then you’ll get to somewhere

really exciting and you’ll generally be more pleased

with the outcome.

“I don’t know how other people approach it,

but I do know that a lot of stuff sounds really safe.

Maybe that’s a result of chasing something so

hard that you neglect all the cool shit that could

potentially happen and run with that?”

It’s the madness behind the method. He’s trying

to “create mistakes”. By moving a chunk of backing

vocals randomly along the timeline, or dumping

percussion into another part of the song, you can’t

plan what might happen.

“There’s no set thing, you just react to what’s

going on. OBVIOUSLY I DON’T PUT 15 SNARE DRUMS

THROUGH 2000 MARSHALL AMPS ON A PAUL KELLY RECORD.

I’D TRY IT BUT HE WOULDN’T LIKE IT, ‘I don’t think that’s

appropriate Stephen.’”

His secret to getting those crunched, one-mic

drum sounds right is adding good bottom end. “I’ll

often fire off a sub, something really, really low. It

sounds like the drum sound you get in a nice shop.”

Aka, a ‘bought one’.

“I don’t use reverb on drums,” he continues. “The

Voltaire’s might have had some tom-tom overdubs

with reverb on them. But on the rare occasion I

use an effect, it will be a delay. When you compress

overheads really hard, that becomes your room

sound. Anna doesn’t do that dumb thing a lot of

people do where they filter all the bottom out of the

overheads. You definitely won’t need your tom mics

if you’ve got full range, well-balanced overheads.”

TUNE UP: COMPRESSION & OIL

Schram’s four favourite compressors at the moment

are the Eventide Omnipressor, Soundtoys Devil-

Loc, and ELI Fatso and Decapitator. “I try to be

disciplined,” said Schram in a moment of reflection.

“Monitor quietly, and try to not compress and

distort everything.” He’ll often parallel compress

a lot of elements as a failsafe to make sure there’s

still life and punch in the mix. He also uses a lot of

EQ to compensate for the effects of compression.

“WHEN YOU COMPRESS SUPER HARD YOU EITHER GET A

LOT OF TREBLE HAPPENING OR ACCENTUATE A FLUFFY NOTE

THAT YOU MIGHT NEED TO SCOOP OUT,” he explains. “I

have band-pass filters everywhere, they’re like little

focus knobs; to get stuff up, or out of the way of

something else, or as an effect.”

On the effects side, Schram loves modulation. “I

like things underwater and wobbly. I love oil can

echoes — I’ve got the rotating sound synthesiser,

oil-can jobby from Morley here — so one of my

favourite plug-ins is the Tel-Ray plug-in.

“I love Echoboy, of course, I use it on everything.

I also have some Lexicon impulse responses that

got corrupted in the download. I didn’t realise at

the time. It sounds like a giant serpent coming out

from the depths to attack you. That’s my favourite

effect, and it’s all mine thanks to my dodgy internet

connection.”

AGE OLD PRACTICE

It’s obvious that Schram loves mixing. Eventually

he’d like to give up the recording game and just

mix, where it’s obvious he can have just as much

influence as any recording engineer or producer on

the process.

“You get too old and cranky to chase kids

around studios with a megaphone and a stick,” said

Schram. “I’ve got four year-old twin girls at home.

They’re sane compared to most of the bands. A

lot of the time making a record is like running a

crèche. I would love to finish up just mixing at the

end of my years. Everyone who seems to be at the

top of their game with mixing is in their mid-‘50s.

I really think it takes that long to get that good at it.

I’m 38, so I’ve got a few years of practicing to go.”

If there’s not a lot of magic to work with, I don’t think you can overdub your way out of trouble

AT 72

AT 73

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PC Audio Microsoft Windows 10 — is it safe to take the plunge?Column: Martin Walker

REGULARS

Well it’s here, it’s (for most of us) free of

charge, and if your PC is currently running

Windows 7 or 8, you’ve probably also had a little

window icon pop up on your Taskbar to remind

you about it. It is of course Microsoft’s Windows 10

operating system, which I first discussed back in

AT105. The reason for the jump from Windows 8

to 10 is still a bit of a mystery, but the Start button

is back (hooray), and the emphasis is on a single

operating system that runs on everything from

your Windows mobile phone to your air-

conditioned control room full of audio servers.

The Windows 10 scrolling Start menu now

incorporates an extra pane of Windows 8-style tiles

housing live apps, although you can switch these

off if not desired. A new Cortana ‘digital assistant’

(first seen on Windows Phone 8.1) helps you track

down info both inside your PC and online, and

her interactive AI personality will no doubt cause

HAL-loving aficionados to swoon, although so

far I’m proving immune. The new Edge browser

largely supersedes Internet Explorer, while the Task

View simultaneously displays all your currently

open windows until you pick one to be in the

foreground, and virtual desktops let you set up

pre-designed app groupings. The Action Center

pops up incoming notifications as they arrive and

archives them all, while the new Mail, Calendar

and Photos apps also seem very popular.

These new features are all great fun, but as a

musician my main interest is of course audio

and MIDI recording/playback. Audio PCs work

at their best when they concentrate on this one

activity, without being interrupted by talking digital

assistants and a host of incoming notifications

from the Internet. Moreover, most musicians rely

on low latency audio and MIDI streaming, so any

slight timing changes at a low level can clobber our

ultimate performance quite easily. Industry pundits

are saying that under the hood Windows 10 is

very similar to Windows 7 and 8, so if you have an

office or other mainstream application that runs

under either of these operating systems it’s almost

guaranteed to run on Windows 10 as well. With

DAWs it’s another matter entirely.

UNDER THE HOOD

With Windows 10, Microsoft announced

significant improvements to their Audio Core

coding, resulting in lower latency for both

WDM and WASAPI. These formats are beloved

by Cakewalk Sonar users, but the vast majority

of PC musicians using other DAWs still rely

on Steinberg’s ASIO drivers to run their audio

interface hardware with very low latency. First

introduced by Steinberg in the late 1990s, ASIO

minimises the potential delays by talking directly to

the soundcard at a lower level than normally used

by the operating system, using specially written

driver software. Windows 10 MIDI also introduces

a new MIDI API that provides lower, jitter-free

MIDI latency as well as multi-client operation

(so several apps can access your MIDI interface

simultaneously).

We now have a situation where a lot of low-

level audio and MIDI code in Windows 10 has

been altered, which in turn provides plenty of

opportunities for existing apps to fall prey to a

variety of performance and timing ‘issues’. Here

are a few examples. As I write this, Steinberg

recommend that you don’t upgrade to Windows

10 if running any of its Cubase/Nuendo range

of products, while its range of hardware audio

interfaces are also affected by ‘Issues with sample

rate changes’. Roland’s range of audio interface

hardware and drivers are largely compatible with

Windows 10, although some (mostly MIDI-based)

products are not compatible and apparently

never will be. Avid (the makers of Pro Tools)

have announced that, “Avid has not completed

qualification of Windows 10 and strongly

recommends customers DO NOT upgrade to this

OS version until qualification is complete. There

are also known issues with the current shipping

versions of some of our products that will need

to be addressed prior to qualification.” Currently

Native Instruments does not recommend updating

to Windows 10 “until all systematic tests are

completed and full compatibility is confirmed for

our products”, which is a polite way of saying you’re

on your own if anything goes wrong.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Admittedly, problems like these are nothing new to

musicians – the first time I wrote a magazine article

explaining how to optimise PC MIDI and Audio

timing was way back in 1998. I went on to explore

in depth the real-world MIDI jitter problems that

resulted in sloppy drum machine timing, and

nearly 10 years later in 2007 I was still having to

explain in print the arcane mysteries of PC system

timestamp to resolve MIDI timing problems! So,

what’s happening with Windows 10 is no surprise

to me, or to other PC audio specialists. Having

said that, Cakewalk’s WDM-friendly Sonar has

tested 100%-compatible with Windows 10, and

managed to run at lower latency than under

Windows 7 and 8. A raft of musicians have already

taken the plunge with other DAWs and their

anecdotal evidence suggests no problem areas at

all (although I’d hazard a guess that their MIDI

timing may be a little awry!). A few musicians who

took the Windows 10 plunge early on and ran into

DAW problems have seemingly resolved them by

resorting to the Windows 10 Compatibility Mode

options, which essentially trick apps into thinking

that they are running on some previous version of

Windows. However, this is a long way from actually

running them on the previous operating system,

and is highly unlikely to resolve timing issues.

Overall, Windows 10 is obviously a worthwhile

upgrade for mainstream folk, and of course it

makes perfect sense if you’re buying a new PC.

However, if you’re thinking of running the free

upgrade on an existing PC I suggest you first visit

your audio interface manufacturer to check for its

Windows 10 compatibility. A few interfaces already

have official statements along the lines of, ‘We are

sorry but we have no plan to make it compatible

with Windows 10’. Once you know your interface

is okay (or if not, that you’re prepared to replace

it), check with your particular DAW developer

to see if 100% compatibility with Windows 10

has been specifically and officially announced.

If not, and you’re running a commercial studio

with paying customers, I’d hold off for the time

being, at least until your DAW developer releases

an update that combats any current problems. By

all means upgrade other studio PCs that are not

mission-critical, so you can enjoy the new bells and

whistles, but the last thing you want to be doing

is explaining to clients that the reason their drum

machine tracks sound sloppy is due to Windows

10. What fun!

AT 74

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Apple NotesClean up your mac and backup your backups with these favourite Mac toolsColumn: Anthony Garvin

REGULARS

A couple of issues ago, I took a closer look at

how to harness some of Mac OS X’s built-in

tools to improve performance and workflow on

your DAW-equipped Mac. Now I’m going to

introduce you to a few of my favourite third party

tools that will help keep your Mac humming.

Onyx is a very useful free utility that serves as a

one-stop shop for both general system clean-ups

and tweaks to Mac OS X. The Automation feature

is the simplest way to use Onyx, as it combines

both of the utility’s Maintenance and Cleaning

steps into one simple operation. With these user-

selectable Automation options, Onyx will execute a

thorough list of processes that verify the structure

of your startup volume, repair disk permissions,

run maintenance scripts, clean caches, delete temp

files and other operations that help with a general

system tidy-up.

For most users, the default options in the

Automation window will be fine. In more recent

versions of Onyx it doesn’t clean System Caches by

default. Unless you are deliberately using a third

party utility called Trim Enabler, I recommend

checking this, as it will remove potential gremlins

born from crashes, corruptions or other hiccups

during day-to-day operation.

Onyx also allows you to dig deeper with the

settings and customisation of OS X. If you are

interested in digging deeper with Finder options

— tweaking the way the Dock behaves, changing

the background picture of your login screen, and

plenty more — this is where you can do it.

OmniDiskSweeper is a simple utility that

analyses any given drive and displays which folders

are taking up the most space on it (and with the

cost of SSD drives still being quite high, wasted

space can be an expensive problem). Ordering the

folders from largest to smallest, it allows you to

drill down into each folder, where it continues to

display everything in order of largest to smallest

file size, so you can decide what you might want

to delete or move elsewhere. A word of warning;

OmniDiskSweeper will display all the files and

folders on your disk, hidden by the system or

otherwise. If you aren’t sure what something is,

don’t delete or move it!

Carbon Copy Cloner, simply put, is the most

useful third-party back-up and drive cloning tool.

It’s hard to look past Time Machine for day-to-day

backups, but compared with what CCC can do,

it’s Apples to apple pie. At its most basic, CCC can

take an exact ‘image’ of a drive partition and make

a bootable duplicate of it on another partition, or

copy the data into a disk image file for restoration

via CCC at a later date. This becomes invaluable

when upgrading your boot drive (simply clone

the old drive to the new one and then swap them

over), or if you’re tempted to try a new OS or major

DAW update, you can make a clone of your system

drive prior, and if it all goes wrong, you can simply

restore an exact image of your system drive, like it

was before the updates.

Exploring this feature laterally, it becomes

extremely useful for a studio operator who has

any number of clients coming into operate their

studio DAW on a day-to-day basis. We all know

everyone has their favourite plug-ins, preferences,

tweaks and quirks. More often than not, it can be a

frustrating task operating a system after someone

else has had their way with it.

I am a firm believer that the less software you

have installed on a computer, the less that can go

wrong, and hence the more reliable it will be. So if

a client wants to install their plug-ins and change

your DAW preference, let them. Just restore your

‘master’ CCC image once they are done to return to

your preferred and reliable setup.

If you work in a large facility or computer lab,

ask your IT people about DeployStudio. It takes

this concept further by allowing images to be

restored quickly over a network, and to multiple

machines if required.

Beyond straightforward clones, recent versions

of CCC have added Scheduling and SafetyNet

features that allow it to become a very useful

backup tool. If, for example, you want to do a

daily backup of your audio drive to another drive

separate to Time Machine, then CCC can be

setup to do this; all at a pre-determined time that

won’t risk the performance of your Mac during

sessions. Plus, if you use the SafetyNet feature

it won’t delete old versions of files. Each backup

process will move these files into a dated SafetyNet

folder on the backup drive. If you want to keep

a bootable backup of you system drive, you can

use the scheduling feature to backup your boot

drive periodically. Should the worst happen and

your boot drive fail, you can simply re-boot off the

backup and keep working.

Onyxwww.titanium.free.fr/onyxFree

Carbon Copy Clonerbombich.com$53.99

OmniDiskSweeperwww.omnigroup.com/moreFree

AT 76

What will you create?Introducing the new F8 MultiTrack Field Recorder.

With 8 mic-pre’s, 10 tracks, and rock-solid Time Code.

The next iconic sound is closer than you think.

We’re Zoom. And We’re For Creators.

The new Zoom F8Hollywood sound. Within reach.

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WIN AN F8

PRICETF1: $3999TF3: $4999TF5: $5999

CONTACTYamaha Music Australia:(03) 9693 5111 or au.yamaha.com

PROSIntuitive layoutFluid operationMulti-touch screenManufacturer endorsed presets

CONSFlashing tap button

SUMMARYThe TF makes getting around a digital console easy. You don’t have to deal with layers if you don’t want to, and a combination of touchscreen and Touch & Turn operation makes operation easy. 1-knob EQ and Comp, and official microphone manufacturer presets, only further the simplicity.

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YAMAHA TF1Digital Live MixerTouchFlow digital mixers are an analogue die-hard’s best friend.Review: Mark Woods

REVIEW

CREENING IT — Every-thing is well lit, different sections are separately dimmable and the screen is good outdoors.

SHOWS ITS STRIPES — I liked the way the even number channels are painted a different shade of grey, it’s distinctive and helps identify the channels at a glance.

ANGLING FOR ATTENTION — The console is an attractive workplace with its modern, angular looks and spacious layout. The front section with the faders is nearly flat, the mid-dle section with the occasional buttons and signal meters angles up. The top section with the screen and often-used controls angles up more steeply again, but it’s slightly recessed to keep the controls within easy reach.

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They must live for excitement at Yamaha. You

can’t help but like a company that makes

mixing consoles and motorbikes. I’ve long thought

that sense of adventure goes some way to explaining

why its serious products combine high-

performance, bold design and bullet-proof

packaging. Motorbike or a mixing console, you

want it to work when it counts and you don’t want it

to crash. It’s about the thrill of movement, and the

TF series of digital mixers have been purposefully

designed for fluid operation. Under the banner of

TouchFlow Operation are several concepts that start

by making it easy to get going, and finish with a

console that is fun to drive at showtime.

Made specifically for live sound, the TF Series

is Yamaha’s entry-level digital mixer and it’s aimed

squarely at the highly competitive 16-32 channel

professional mixer market. It will be used in venues

and churches, and by production suppliers and DIY

bands. It’s the friendliest digital mixer I’ve tried so

far and cleverly designed for the mix of pro and

casual users who will get their fingers on the faders.

MAKING GOOD GAINS

The TF1 boots up like an analogue desk with 16

combi XLR inputs on the back panel, two big

FX returns and 1:1 routing. You can do all sorts

of patching with the Auxes, DCAs and Custom

channels… but not with the input channels. Makes

sense to me, you may lose a little flexibility but it

makes for straight-forward setups and reduces the

chance of confusion in situations where there are

multiple users.

There are several ways to set up channels.

It’s easy to start from flat and build up your

own settings the old-fashioned way. There are,

however, interesting alternatives. GainFinder is

a cute program that sets the input gain of any

given channel; make the sound, get the light in

the middle and it will be good to go. Like a guitar

tuner you don’t have to understand what you’re

doing, just watch the display. It’s fast, safe and could

be genuinely helpful in some applications. Best of

all, its optional. Input levels can also be set by the

Touch & Turn knob or by dragging on the screen.

The more interesting alternative is to use the

QuickPro Presets, available on both inputs and

outputs. When setting up input channels a handy

library lists instrument-specific settings as well

as settings for particular microphone models.

Yamaha has drummed this feature up in cahoots

with a handful of well-known mic manufacturers

that so far includes Shure, Sennheiser and Audio-

Technica. Choose the mic, choose the instrument

and you get specific factory-approved Gain, EQ

and Comp settings, including phantom power

and instrument name on the channel strip — in

your choice of colour. If you’re familiar with the

particular mics it’s interesting to see what the

makers have recommended. If you’re not, it’s a safe

option. It’s also a fast way of working as it puts a lot

of common processing choices into action at once

and I found the settings to be close to what I might

do anyway.

Output channels get their own library of generic

presets designed for different physical locations,

including settings for running IEMs from the stereo

aux sends. In a similar manner to the inputs you

get EQ and compressor settings that have been

well chosen to get you going quickly without doing

anything crazy to the sound. The output presets

extend to specific settings for Yamaha DXR speakers

in different environments, but third-party speaker

manufacturers will no doubt be added over time.

TF FOR TOUCHFLOW

In use the TF mixers live up to the TouchFlow

promise; the layout gives you instant access to the

things you really need, use all the time or you want

to access quickly. Focus on the multi-touch screen

means less thinking about which button to press,

or knob to turn, and more listening. The console

can be operated very simply but it’s rewarding to

explore the depth of control that is available and it’s

hard to get confused or lost.

Most users will be familiar with the Overview/

Selected Channel layout common to most digital

mixers. Here eight channels are displayed on the

Overview screen at one time, but rather than

buttons to scroll to the rest, you swipe. Touch

a parameter on a channel and the channel is

selected, touch again and the parameter details

are displayed. After that you may only need to

touch and use pinch/drag gestures on the screen

to get the sound where you want it. The on-screen

parameter controls have got nice big buttons that

you touch to activate and drag to adjust. Pinch

gestures change the EQ width and everything

you do is accompanied by clear visual feedback.

Apart from being pleasing to use in the modern

mobile phone manner, it means you don’t need

the common hardware knobs used to adjust the

selected parameters.

Knobs have their uses and after the multi-touch

screen the next feature aimed at making life easier

is the Touch & Turn knob. Well-placed for easy

reach, the Touch & Turn knob is a multi-function

device that’s assigned by touching parameters

onscreen. Touch Input on the Overview screen

and it provides instant access to the input gain

of any displayed channel. It’s the same routine

for grabbing control of selected EQ parameters,

HPF, gate/comp thresholds or FX levels. Touch

the parameter again and you get to the detailed

controls where it adjusts the selected parameter as

an alternative to dragging on the screen.

1-KNOB TO TWEAK THEM

You may not need to use the detailed parameter

controls at all if you use Yamaha’s new 1-knob

EQ and 1-knob Comp functions, both controlled

by the Touch & Turn knob. These are activated

by the user when you’re setting up a channel, or

It’s the friendliest digital mixer I’ve tried so far and cleverly designed for the mix of pro and casual users who will get their fingers on the faders

AT 79

automatically as part of the QuickPro Presets.

Designed again for either speedy operation or users

who don’t fully understand the meaning of the

parameter values, these effectively give you more

when turned up. More what? More everything.

On input channels the 1-knob EQ has two

modes, Vocal and Intensity. If you have selected a

particular microphone model from the QuickPro

Presets, then Vocal mode will probably give

you a HPF, some low-mid cut and some high-

mid boost. Winding up the Touch & Turn knob

simultaneously delivers more HPF, more low-mid

cut and more presence boost. Or less if you turn

it down. You can also draw your own curve and

have it exaggerated or understated. It’s clever stuff

and very easy to use. Intensity mode is similar

but aimed more at instruments. 1-knob EQ also

works on the Main and Aux outputs with the

Vocal mode being replaced by a Loudness mode

that progressively boosts low and high frequencies

while cutting some low-mids.

The 1-knob Comp does the same for channel

dynamics. The basic settings are established by the

preset; turn it up with the Touch & Turn knob and

you get more threshold, more ratio and more make-

up gain. The potential for over-processed channels

is the risk when a single knob controls several

parameters at once but the settings are all valid and

there are sensible limits on the amount of boost

on hand. Any setting can be changed or removed

with a touch on the screen if it’s not to your liking. I

didn’t get any nasty surprises when operating.

EFFECTS WITHIN REACH

On-board effects are based on Yamaha’s SPX range

and while there are eight FX processors available,

the input channels can only directly access two

of them at a time. These get dedicated returns on

the surface, the rest are accessed via the stereo aux

groups. At first this seems a curious setup in the

digital age. It’s reminiscent of old analogue desks

where you would set up a reverb and a delay from

the two available sends, and if you wanted more FX

you inserted them across channels or groups.

There are six stereo aux sends in the TF

mixers, each with a processor attached. These

sends would often be used as part of a monitor

setup, particularly for IEMs with, for instance, a

multiband compressor across the send. The stereo

aux sends can also be used as subgroups and sent to

the Master Out, with your choice of effects, or they

can be used as purely stereo FX send/returns.

The two main FX returns are kept within hand’s

reach, which keeps the focus on the console

surface. A big FX Mute button just above the

returns is great for muting your FX between songs.

If you know what you’re doing, there’s plenty of

opportunity to tweak just below the surface, but it’s

certainly convenient to be able to control the most

commonly used effects without changing layers. A

Tap button in the bottom corner of the console is

in a handy place but I would have liked to be able

to stop it flashing the whole time, I’d prefer if it

stopped after a few flashes and then started again

when you tapped it the next time you needed it.

FAMILY LINEThe TF series is available in three sizes. The baby TF1 has 16 XLR mic inputs, 17 motorised faders and can be rack-mounted. The TF3 and TF5 have 24 and 32 input channels/faders respectively. All models also have two stereo inputs, 16 XLR omni outputs and two stereo returns, 20 aux buses (eight mono, six stereo), eight DCA groups, eight FX plus 10 GEQs, and 34 tracks of both recording and playback. Internal audio processing is 48k and the mics plug into Yamaha’s recallable D-Pre preamps.

DOUBLE HANDLE — Angled cut-outs on the sides double as visual enhancements and handles.

AT 80

What impressed me was the way I could confidently move around the console, listening and adjusting without wearing the brain out by having to think about it too much

MONITOR PERFORMANCE

The TF1 is an excellent monitor board, the larger

models equally so if you need more input channels.

The eight mono aux sends have a compressor

plus parametric and graphic EQs in place. I half

expected the graphic EQ’s 31 bands to be thrown

across the faders but they come up on the screen

where you drag the virtual faders to adjust the tone.

It’s much simpler to follow and the virtual faders

readily return to zero.

The mono aux sends would normally be used to

drive stage speakers and they don’t have access to

any FX. Good. The six stereo aux sends, complete

with FX, should be enough for the IEM or other

stereo send requirements of most bands.

The first time I used the TF1 live was doing

monitors for Tim Rogers & The Bamboos at the

Theatre Royal in Castlemaine and I had a ball.

Great band — which always helps the sound —

plus Tim’s style and energy made for a pumped-

up show. We had seven sends working; the band

knew what they wanted, and I found I was able to

respond to their requests as fast as they could fire

them at me. The Sends On Faders buttons are right

at hand, the colour-coded, illuminated channel

strip helps you find particular channels quickly,

and individual EQ/Comps are always at the ready.

For bands willing to forgo the personal touch of a

helpful monitor engineer, the TF Monitor mix iOS

app allows them to wirelessly control their own

levels from a iPhone or iPad.

FRONT OF BRAIN

As a front-of-house console, the TF mixers offer an

engaging and rewarding experience. I thought the

sound quality was great; the recallable D-Pres are

transparent, the processing does what you expect

and the FX are customary Yamaha quality. What

impressed me was the way I could confidently

move around the console, listening and adjusting

without wearing my brain out by having to

think about it too much. The EQ and dynamics

processors are so easy to use — from wherever

you are on the console — that they allow you to

make tweaks instinctively and quickly. The Touch

& Turn knob was usually already assigned to the

right parameter. I found it made for very active

operation. There are several fader banks, as well as

all the aux sends on faders, but not once did I get

confused about which layer I was on.

With the FX returns on the topmost layer,

most FOH mixing will be done without any layer

changing. Both the 1-knob EQ and 1-knob Comp

multi-functionality grew on me, particularly on

vocals where the 1-knob control of HPF, low-mid

EQ and a touch of presence gave good control of

the proximity effect, body and bite in one action.

The TF mixers are live boards and their record/

playback capabilities are designed with live

recording in mind. A USB socket allows for stereo

playback (.wav and .mp3) or direct stereo recording

from any output bus. Another USB port connects

to a computer, and with the included Cubase AI

software installed it’s possible to record/playback

up to 16 channels of 24-bit/48k audio. Up to 34

channels can be accessed via most other DAWs.

Recorded shows or rehearsals can be played back

in a different location and channels can be freely

switched between live and playback for virtual

sound checks. The TF StageMix iPad app allows

for wireless control of the mixer enabling remote

mixing or monitor setup.

MORE LAYERS TO COME

The TF series is brand new and some pieces are

still falling into place. At the time of writing the

second fader layer is not being fully utilised.

With some soon-to-be-released add-ons and

revised firmware it will be possible to use the

NY64-D expansion card in conjunction with the

Tio1608-D Dante-equipped 16-in/8-out stage rack.

Connection is via a convenient Cat5e LAN cable.

The preamps in the Tio 1608-D can be remotely

controlled from the TF mixer and up to three of

these can be connected at the same time to create a

48-in/24-out system. Software updates will include

more settings from microphone manufacturers.

Speakers can especially benefit from specific

settings for different uses/placements and this is

another area that will grow.

Yamaha continues to chase quality and push

design boundaries with enthusiasm. Designed to

provide a rewarding experience to a wide range

of users, the TF Series sets a high standard for

an entry-level pro mixer with technology that’s

right up to date. TouchFlow operation facilitates

engaged, active mixing with a sense of playing,

or driving, the console. The multi-touch screen is

command central and the first in this price range

to use one. I grew up on early Yamaha analogue

consoles and have several of them in my shed. I

bet they still work too. It’s an open question as to

whether the current breed of digital consoles will

still be working in 35 years but if any will, they’ll

be the Yamahas. Where the development of digital

audio technology will lead over that time is less

certain… a USB socket in the back of the head

perhaps, so we can simply think the sound. But for

right now the TF series will do nicely.

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CONTACTBose:1800 173 371 or f1.bose.com.au

Portable designBuilt-in stand

tap, and a companion sub; this portable package will fill rooms you never couldwith a plastic box.

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Bose F1 Flexible ArrayIt looks like a point-source box, but Bose’s F1 portable system has an array of unique features

REVIEW

PRICE$1699/piece

CONTACT

PROSLine array clarityFlexible vertical throwP bl d i

CONSToo smooth for hard rock

SUMMARYBose has taken a typical point-source-looking cabinet and filled it with a mini-linearray. With a horizontal spread of 100-degrees, variable array angles, 1000W on

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features.Review: Mark Woods

AT 82

Bose does things differently. There’s lateral

thinking behind many of the products in its

large range of consumer and industrial products.

Audio systems for live sound is only a part of what

it does and Bose doesn’t release new offerings very

often. When it does, Bose always seems to have a

different way of finding new solutions to old

problems. The well-liked 800 series from the late

’70s had a processor and 8 x 4-inch speakers. Light

and easy to move around, they still sound okay

today. The L1 Series uses line array principles in a

portable system. It’s been around for over 10 years

and still finds favour with performers who enjoy its

ability to cover both the stage and audience with

clear, even sound. Not surprisingly the new Bose F1

system is different again. A hybrid approach, it uses

elements of conventional powered speakers

combined with line array techniques to create a

specialist FOH system with a wide throw and

enough power to fill a small- to medium-sized

venue. The ‘surprise and delight’ feature is its ability

to control its vertical coverage angle.

CLICKING INTO GEAR

Much of Bose’s innovation is housed in the F1

system’s Model 812 full-range speaker. It’s a

similar size and weight (20kg) to other powered

speakers but the design is very clean with excellent

recessed handles on the top and rear. Made from

some tough composite plastic — in regulation

charcoal-grey — the finish is subtly textured and

patterned, but it’s the front of the speaker that

makes you look twice.

Looking past the perforated steel grille, instead

of the usual horn/woofer configuration there’s a

vertical array of 8 x 2.25-inch mid/high drivers in

there. Closer inspection reveals a 12-inch woofer

mounted further back in the box. The array inside

the laddered centre section and prominent centred

Bose logo ensures a distinctive corporate look.

Inside the cabinet there’s processing, protection and

1000W of power. Connections on the rear are all

familiar with two inputs; one is a mic/line XLR, the

other a choice of stereo 6.5mm or RCA sockets.

The 812 works on its own as a full-range

speaker; it’s pole-mountable and provides good

low frequency response (-3dB @ 52Hz) that’s more

than adequate for speech and medium level music

applications. But for live music or DJs this system

benefits more than most from being combined with

its matching subwoofer. The F1 Subwoofer houses

two 10-inch drivers and a 1000W amp in a cabinet

designed to fit in a car. Like the 812, transport is

made easier by good handles on the top and rear.

Construction is from wood with a composite

plastic base and lid. It weighs in a little heavier than

the 812 at 25kg but it’s still manageable for one

person. The low-end frequency response is strong

from around 40Hz, this allows the 12-inch woofer

in the 812 to be crossed over at 100Hz so it can

concentrate on the low-mids instead of trying to

reach down too low.

A great feature is the built-in stand — ‘extension

bracket’ in Bose-speak. Instead of the usual pole-

mount on top of the sub, Bose has made a plastic

frame that clips onto the rear of the sub cabinet for

transport. At the show it slots into the top of the

sub to support the 812 mid/high speaker and before

you know it you’ve got a time-aligned speaker stack

standing two metres tall. Not only is it a unique

look but it’s quite stable, the solid base is not as

wide as tripod legs but it’s squarer and harder to

trip over. You may never have to deal with speaker

stands again and I bet you won’t miss them.

F1 HAMMERS THE BENDS

Line arrays produce a wedge of sound that is

wide horizontally but narrow vertically. The

size of the array determines its effectiveness at

lower frequencies, so to be practical, portable

line array systems only deliver the array benefits

at mid/high frequencies. The subs are usually

conventional designs and omni-directional. The

F1 stack has a forward-pointing single 12-inch

woofer above the sub so it’s a fairly normal,

almost point source system up to the 600Hz

crossover point where the mid/high array starts to

do its thing. Dispersion is quoted as 100 degrees

horizontal and 40 degrees vertical. Listening

to the 812 up close, they sound good right on

axis with a smooth quality that refuses to bite

or feedback. The mid/high frequencies roll-off

strongly above or below the central axis compared

to point source designs, although the woofer has a

more normal conical dispersion.

The wide, even coverage and long throw high-mids mean good intelligibility over a large area while the lack of harshness makes for a relatively easy listening experience

AT 83

Arrays are weird up close anyway as the sound

needs some distance to develop. That combined

with the super-narrow vertical angle rules these

speakers out for stage monitor duties. Bose has

thoughtfully not provided a monitor angle in the

design, and the cabinet looks better for it. Using

powered FOH speakers as floor monitors is always

a compromise, but a common one, so there’s some

lack of flexibility here compared to regular powered

box designs.

These speakers do their best work as FOH

speakers in small-to-medium rooms with low-to-

medium volume acts. Arrays focus the sound and

reduce reverberation by not throwing sound all

over the room. The most noticeable benefit of this

is mid-range clarity, right where the vocals are.

GOT YOU COVERED

Sutton’s House of Music in Ballarat is a textbook

case of a room that could benefit from a line array

system and a good test for the F1. The 19th century

building was a perfect piano sales floor; long

room, high ceilings and naturally live. It’s a good-

sounding venue but reverberant, and crucially, the

bands play across the width of the room, requiring

the speakers to cover a wide area.

People eat and talk, others listen or dance

to the solos/duos/combos and other non-rock

acts that play there. The sound needs to be clear

but not loud or piercing, with intelligible vocals

throughout the room and enough low end power

to get people moving.

We set it up for a night featuring regular act

B3 Breakout; a three-piece ensemble featuring a

Hammond B3, drums, and guitar and vocals. The

F1 system was very quick to set up and sounded

ready to go straight out of the box. The room had

a boom that required some low frequency EQ but

the mids and highs sat close to flat. The noticeable

impression from the sound check was the F1’s

ability to fill the room. The subs were strong and

could have filled a much bigger space, but the mids

is where you could hear the difference compared to

horn-loaded boxes. The vocals surround you rather

than come at you directly from the speaker. They’re

not loud up close, but step back a little and it’s all

there. The high frequency response is adequate for

live sound, although somewhat lacking in transient

detail. They don’t want to feed back, they seem to

find their own level and they’re very even around

the room.

The F1 system’s horizontal coverage of 100

degrees was just wide enough. The high/mid

clarity falls off sharply at the edges, but it is a

wide room that normally takes four speakers to

get adequate coverage. I found them easy to mix

on and throughout the night, there was plenty of

unprompted confirmation from customers and

staff that the F1 was a superior solution.

Narrow vertical angle usually helps live sound

but sometimes the audience is positioned above

or below the speakers. Horn-loaded boxes often

throw high or low enough (or offer different angles

for the pole mount) but to get similar benefits

from an array it needs to be focused. The F1

812 addresses this by allowing the edges of the

top and bottom sections of the front grille to be

pushed in and out. This angles three of the eight

little speakers up, or down in the case of the lower

section. They snap into position with magnets and

the internal processor makes some compensatory

changes to the EQ. Between the top and bottom

angled sections you can create four distinct vertical

patterns that can be used in situations where the

The ‘surprise and delight’ feature is its ability to

control its vertical coverage angle

speakers are above and/or below the audience. It’s

a neat approach and necessary too as they sound

pretty dull if you’re not in line.

WIDE APPEAL

Another place arrays work well is outdoors and the

F1 system is powerful enough to cover medium-

sized events. The wide, even coverage and long

throw high-mids mean good intelligibility over a

large area while the lack of harshness makes for a

relatively easy listening experience. This is usually

a good thing but it’s also the limiting factor with

portable line arrays. If the going gets loud it can

expose the relative lack of bite and body on offer.

Point source, horn-loaded speakers are beamy and

squawky but they will cut through a loud band.

The Bose F1 System will appeal to venues, bands,

DJs and groovy bars but it would also be ideal for

corporate presentations or speeches. It’s fairly easy

to transport if someone in the band has a wagon

and could provide sound for over 500 people in

the right situation. The price is pretty on par with

similarly powered portable systems, but it’s got

some unique features and the high/mid array will

allow it to out-perform point source systems in

many audio environments.

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AT 85T

Follow us:

www.cda-proaudio.com [email protected]

Sydney, Australia 3.02/ 10 Tilley Lane. Frenchs Forest NSW 2086

T: + 61 2 9330 1750 F: + 61 2 8338 9001

Perth, Australia Unit 4, 17 Welshpool Rd. St James WA 6102

T: + 61 8 9470 2211 F: + 61 8 9472 3617

Relied on by the best producers in the world.

SCM20ASL Pro SCM25A Pro SCM45A Pro SCM50A Pro SCM100ASL Pro SCM110ASL Pro SCM150ASL Pro SCM200ASL Pro SCM300ASL Pro

PRICE$3709

CONTACTMixmasters:(08) 8278 8506 or [email protected]

PROSGreat tonal balance & characterSweet distortion is highly usefulRumble filter more flexible than most high pass circuitsDI sounds really good

CONSExpensiveLow output hampers recording of quiet sources

SUMMARYA great sounding valve design that ticks all the boxes for vintage vibe, sonic quality and versatility that you would hope for with a unit of this kind of pedigree. Clean and dirty tones are equally great and the rumble filter is a nice additional creative option.

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CHANDLER LIMITED REDD.47 Valve Preamplifier

REVIEW

Chandler has retraced the Beatles’ steps back even further in time to the Abbey Road/EMI designs of the ’60s.Review: Greg Walker

STEP UP — Getting the job done is a fairly straight forward affair; two large stepped knobs take care of coarse and fine gain control (at 6dB and 1dB resolu-tions respectively), while a smaller continuously variable knob controls output level.

VALVE DI — The 1/4-inch DI circuit uti-lises all the goodness of the unit’s EF86 and E88CC valve topology. The custom wound transformer-balanced I/O means there are some good creative options available here too.

RUMBLE IN THE — The special sauce feature on the Redd.47 is the inductor-based ‘rumble filter’ control which has stepped low frequency roll-off curves at 30, 60, 70, 90, 110, 130 and 180Hz. The curves are smooth to the point where tracking sources with maximum filtration engaged can be a valid creative option.

LAB-COAT CHIC — The Redd.47’s build quality is excellent. Its light grey faceplate gives the unit a subtle ’60s lab-coat vibe, further accentuated by black chicken-head knobs and semi-recessed silver toggle switches. There’s something about the look of these chicken-head knobs that doesn’t quite do it for me unfortunately. Despite being supremely functional and doing a good ergonomic job, their matte finish feels a little cheap — bakelite would have really nailed the look.

AT 86

With the stamp of approval from Abbey

Road studios/EMI, Wade Goeke and his

team at Chandler Limited have been riding the

wave of audio nostalgia as well as anyone over

the last decade. Up until now, Chandler’s focus

has been the solid state and earlier germanium

circuits that provide the tone and rich harmonic

characteristics so many of us are looking for

from the ’70s. Now that Chandler has expanded

its range to include earlier Abbey Road/EMI

1960s valve designs, it’s a wonder why the

company hadn’t delved into that particular

treasure trove earlier.

The Redd.47 preamp conjures up the ghosts

of the famous and famously rare Redd consoles

used on the Beatles albums of the mid to late

sixties. The price of admission here is steep and

puts this Chandler model under a harsher than

normal spotlight when it comes to a review.

Personally, I’m not parting with over $3k on a

mono preamp unless it will take me into a pretty

spectacular earth orbit and let me explore some

new audio landscapes along the way. With that

thought in mind, let’s hop in the Chandler way-

back machine.

QUIET ACHIEVER

My first experiences with the Redd.47 were in the

middle of a hectic week of screen composition

work for a TV show. I was almost exclusively

using ribbon mics to get a warm ‘old worlde’

sound. Switching from an API 512B to the

Redd.47 was a bit of an eye-opener, especially

in terms of output levels. The Chandler is one of

the quieter microphone preamps I’ve used in a

while with its maximum +57dB of input gain. I

was initially worried about high noise floors using

passive ribbon mics, but my fears were misplaced.

When quieter sources like soft violins were gained

up in Pro Tools, the signals were nicely intact and

the noise floor no worse than the API.

The acoustic instruments I recorded (strings,

clarinets, double bass, percussion and piano)

had a nice velvety quality to them and sat well

together in the mix. When I switched to a Zigma

Lol-47 condenser for further piano recording

I began to see another side of the Chandler. It

delivered great clarity and depth on my studio’s

‘character’ piano and there was a subtle harmonic

enhancement that I couldn’t quite put my finger

on but really liked.

A few days later this same setup got a real

workout on a Tim Guy album overdub where the

song needed some strong rhythm piano work (a

la a certain fab four). No surprise then that these

recordings came out spectacularly well. The part

nestled straight into the heart of an already well-

established mix without requiring any EQ and I

was starting to see how recordings made with the

Redd.47 could become very addictive indeed.

REDD ROVER

Next up the Redd.47 got a full workout tracking

an entire song from scratch and the pleasant

surprises kept coming. Acoustic guitar came

out sweet and smooth with a really great tonal

balance I hadn’t quite heard out of my battered

old Tama before. Even better on electrics where

the bite of a Fender amp was more than matched

It’s one of the sweetest sounding preamp saturations to ever land on my studio bench top

PRE-LIGHT CHECKS — The red backlit light indicates power status while phantom power, 20dB pad and polarity are dispersed across smaller toggle switches. These features are engaged in the downward position and bypassed when up which sounds straight-forward but felt confusing in use for some reason. Until I got really familiar with the unit I had to triple check the settings before plugging in my ribbon mics.

AT 87

by the Redd.47, delivering a sense of focused

aggression using condensers and dynamics. With

the right guitar and amp setup I can see Beatles

tragics banging out Revolver-esque biting lead

breaks through this thing ad infinitum. Once you

get a hotter input signal going into the Redd.47

there is plenty of harmonic saturation on tap, and

by riding the gain structure you can tune things

up for just a little or a lot. On drum overheads and

room mics this became a real asset of the Redd.47. I

was able to get a beautiful vibey breakup happening

on heavy crashes and other louder passages while

still retaining plenty of detail and quality in softer

sections. Redd.47 owners will definitely keep

coming back for more; it’s one of the sweetest

sounding preamp saturations to ever land on my

studio bench top.

If you want outright fuzz, there is the option of

gaining up a DI’d guitar or other source through

a preamp and feeding it into the Redd.47’s mic

input for your fill of the famous Revolution sound.

The technique, pioneered by Geoff Emerick

(against Abbey Road regulations), involved daisy-

chaining multiple Redd console channels together

to push signals into overdrive. The Redd.47

works a treat in this role as a tracking and mix

distortion generator. On vocals the Chandler was

both smooth and bold and carried my voice in a

musically satisfying way. Going straight into the

DI delivered a nice balance of body and bite on

various bass and electric sources.

RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE

Having gotten used to working with the Redd.47

at my place, I took it on a three-day location

recording job in deepest darkest Brunswick. Sophie

Koh had a full-size grand piano on loan in her

lounge room and we were starting work on her new

album which centres around her beautiful piano

playing. The Yamaha C7 is a pro-studio workhorse

and while I’ve never rated them as highly as some

do, this one did sound great in the room with

Sophie driving it.

Miking it up with a range of close and distant

stereo mic combinations we found tons of tone

but it was hard to get a really sharp focus on the

upper mid-range attack of the instrument in the

sea of overtones and harmonics. Having tried and

abandoned a few extra close miking ideas I settled

on a Charter Oak valve condenser about four feet

away from the opened top facing the inward curve

of the instrument. Plugging this into the Redd.47

and ramping the rumble filter right up to 180Hz I

was able to extract a little extra mono focus on the

percussive attack of the notes. It put the sonic icing

on the cake for what turned out to be a great day of

piano tracking.

Late that night we decided to do some rough

guide vocals so I plugged a Beyer M88 into the

Chandler and we bashed our way through the

songs. It was only the next morning I realised I’d

left the filter on the whole time and the resulting

vocal sounds were actually pretty great. Sophie’s

voice did lack a bit of body but the airy tone suited

her voice surprisingly well and was a great effect.

The filter is very natural sounding even at high

settings which makes it far more useable than the

more extreme daisy cutter ones I’m used to hearing

on preamps. The next two days were taken up with

cello and viola overdubs and I used the Redd.47 on

both these instruments via the Charter Oak and a

Sennheiser MD441 with great results.

REDDY TO ROCK

Despite using it in a wide variety of applications

with a wide range of mics I couldn’t find a chink in

the armour of the Redd.47 apart from the minor

issue of its comparatively low output levels. All in

all I found the Chandler to be extremely musical,

versatile and sonically pleasing as well as having a

few great creative tricks up its sleeve. For those who

can afford the asking price, the Redd.47 is going

to be a sweet investment in tone and vibe that will

keep you smiling for many years to come.

AT 88

83 Doggett Street, Newstead Located within walking distance to the thriving Gasworks entertainment precinct, Teneriffe

CityCat Terminal, Emporium, James Street Precinct and Commercial Road precinct 3 Studios, each with adjoining mixing rooms The 368m2 building is currently occupied by Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Creative Industries Faculty, as a recording studio for teaching and learning purposes Potential vacant possession in early 2016 or purchase now with leaseback to QUT

Outline Indicative only.

For SaleClosing Date for Offers

4pm, Wednesday 16 September 2015

Gregory Woods0409 305 22407 3002 8825

[email protected]

Outstanding Opportunity topurchase recording

studio in trendyNewstead

AT 89

•

•

•

PRICEPGADRUMKIT7: $925PGA58: $99PGA181: $175PGA27: $349

CONTACTJands:(02) 9582 0909 [email protected]

PROSQuick release drum mic tensionersGreat valuePGA181 condenser option at dynamic price

CONSHandling noiseDrum mounts not one-size-fits-all

SUMMARYShure’s PG Alta series of microphones are good value, and sound close to their more established counterparts. If you’re in the market for a drum mic kit, but thought you only had the budget for a couple of mics, think again.

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SHURE PG ALTAMicrophonesShure’s budget mics are all chips off the ol’ SM and Beta blocks. But how close to the originals do they come?Review: Mark Davie

REVIEW

AT 90

What is it with these budget mics and their

ingenious mic clip tension clamps? It’s a

revolution in anti-revolvers. Recently, I was

impressed by Rode’s cylinder-clamping NT1

shockmount that tightened with the slightest grip

of my thumb/pinkie combination. When I opened

the case to peruse Shure’s budget PG Alta drum

mic kit, the first thing I noticed about the tom mics

was their bicycle quick release-style mechanism on

the pivot joint. Surely that’s not new. But if it is, lets

roll them out to every articulating joint on the

market. They worked a treat; find position, lock in

place — too easy. Compared to the slightly slippy

traditional tensioner on Shure’s PGA27 condenser

mic shockmount, the quick release versions were

far superior.

Immediately I was getting a little excited about

the build of these PG Alta mics; the second

coming of the PG series which are priced at the

bottom of Shure’s range under the SM series. The

PG Alta range takes a few well-known Shure model

numbers and adds another competitive option to

the mix. So in the seven-piece drum mic kit, there’s

the PGA52 kick mic and three PGA56 tom mics,

derived from the Beta series; a PGA57 snare mic,

drawn from — you guessed it — the SM57; and

two SM-inspired PGA81 cardioid condensers for

stereo overheads.

Rounding out the gaggle of mics I had on loan

were the PGA27 large diaphragm condenser I

mentioned earlier; the small diaphragm PGA 181

side address condenser — a tubbier version of

the nifty Beta 181; and the PGA58 — no prizes

there. It’s a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to

how inspired these cut-down versions actually

are. There has to be a little bit of money saved

somewhere to warrant the budget figures. So where

are the cuts?

PGA58 — SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

Probably the best case to investigate would be a

comparison of 58s. The PGA58 sounds suspiciously

like the SM version. Remarkably similar, in fact,

with just a little less presence — like a good

understudy. The switch on the PG Alta isn’t silent,

but it’s not deafening either. I’d prefer it to have a

more secure snap to it though. The main difference

here is what makes the SM58 so special; its lack

of handling noise. The PGA58’s motor assembly

sits in a rubber-mounted cup, a similar design to a

lot of other handheld dynamics. But arguably the

best aspect of the SM58 is the elegant pneumatic

shockmount Shure engineer Ernie Seeler devised

for the Unidyne capsule. It basically drops handling

noise altogether. The PGA was a pretty close

approximation of the SM58’s sound, without the

mechanical design bells and whistles.

PGA181 — UP IN YOUR GRILLE

I haven’t tried the Beta 181 yet, but the PGA181

makes me keen to. Using it on guitar amps — its

natural home — it didn’t have that false, make my

amp sound like a solid state-sound I find some

condensers give me. It’s designed to be pressed

right up at the grille, and it excels there. In that

position, it can sound better than a mic worth 10

times as much that’s not designed for that purpose.

I suspect it has something to do with basket

resonances. I typically use dynamics and ribbons in

recording, and purely dynamics live, but I could see

this changing a few of my preconceptions.

The PGA181 can handle 138dB SPL, requires

about 18dB less gain than an SM57, to give you

an idea. And because you’ve got it pressed right

up against the grille, you don’t get nearly as much

stage bleed as other condensers. It’s less bitey than

an SM57 — a smoother, rounded finish, and makes

for a really good candidate if you’ve been looking

for a bit of a different flavour to a dynamic, but at a

similar price point to one.

PGA27 — SNUGLY IN ITS PLACE

The PGA27 large diaphragm condenser mic sits

snugly in its little nest like a boiled egg in its plastic

cup. Still, the low pass filter and -15dB pad on the

back side of the mic are easy to get at. It’s a lovely

looking mount that worked decently, though

tapping the mic stand still made its way through.

Recording speech from a hand’s width away,

the PGA27 didn’t have as much low end as other

mics I put it up against. In fact, there was little

difference between the normal and hi-passed takes

at this distance. It’s a clear mic with a nice, slightly

PGA 181 — A really good candidate if you’ve been looking for a bit of a different flavour to a dynamic, but at a similar price point to one

AT 91

exaggerated, high end presence that would make it

suitable for vocal work. One letdown was that the

frequency response changed more dramatically as I

moved around the mic than other large diaphragm

condensers. If your singer gets a bit off mic you

might find some dynamic EQ coming in handy.

CLAMPING DOWN ON QUALITY

The build quality seems quite good across the

board. The drum mics are robust; the grilles are

tough, and unlike the free-floating PGA58 version,

the diaphragm assemblies are all secured in place.

On the inside they’re mostly plastic, but precision-

machined plastic you could see lasting a long time.

The kit also comes with a zip up carry case, and

enough clips and mic leads.

The rim-mounting system is simple to use, but

a little limiting in a way that seems common for

these systems. I have a custom Ayotte kit here with

an isolation system that stretches most of the way

around each tom. It only leaves one third of the

rim exposed closest to the drummer; the most

in-the-way position for a mic. The one-piece plastic

part is designed to snugly hook over a standard

rim, which didn’t quite work for my situation —

something to keep in mind if you don’t want to use

stands. The clamp angles away from the edge of the

tom. So as you move the mic’s position away from

the drum head, it also moves closer to the rim —

again, a little inflexible compared to other mounts,

but a handy attachment for the right kit.

FULL KIT SOUND

I lined up the Shure PG kit against an Audix DP7

drum mic kit I use live. You get the same number

of mics in both packs, but the Audix is about two

and a half times the price. So keep that in mind.

The Audix D6 is a really simple-to-use kick

drum mic, especially live. Its scooped sound doesn’t

require a lot of tailoring. It has a more satisfying

thud than the PGA52, but the 52 didn’t need a lot

of help in the click department, which was good.

The PGA81 overheads were pretty well-balanced,

had the tightness of focus you want from small

diaphragm mics, and were a much lower output

than the Audix small diaphragm condensers,

which is perfect for overheads. They didn’t pick up

a whole lot of low end, which was actually quite

handy in live situations, where I’d usually engage a

hi-pass anyway. The PGA56s aren’t overly detailed

mics, but serviced the toms really well.

Compared to an SM57, the PGA57 snare mic

was missing a little bit of the high-end snap, and

consequently also a bit of the snare ribbon sound

coming through from the underside. Nothing like

the boosted 1-2kHz midrange of the Audix i5,

which gives it a pre-fabricated sound. It was really

a case of getting brighter as you went from the

PGA57, to the SM57, to the i5. So depending on

where you sit with your appreciation of the SM57

as a snare mic, you could go either way with these

two. I still preferred the 57 most of the time, but

going through these mics again made me think the

i5 was more useful than I’d been giving it credit.

It gave some nice snap, that brought out the snare

ribbon sound in a very even manner, and brings

the whole drum forward. They all had a similar

level of bleed, but again the high end of the SM57

rendered any hi-hat bleed more ‘useful’, if you can

call it that. It’s an industry standard for a reason.

While not as versatile as pulling together your

favourite esoteric pieces from the cabinet, the PG

Alta drum mic kit provided a really tight, one-stop

drum sound. If my budget for a drum mic kit only

extended this far, I’d rather have an entire mic kit

that gave me the full picture than just a couple of

mics to play with.

AT 92

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PRICEExpect to pay $399

CONTACTCMI Music & Audio:(03) 9315 2244 [email protected]

PROSThree sequencers onboardTap tempoSimultaneously sync andtrigger anything

CONSNone

SUMMARYArturia has taken its hybrid CV/Gate/MIDI Beatstep sequencer concept andbeefed up the control side considerably on the Beatstep Pro. Its added two moresequencers with simultaneous outputs from each to let you control pretty muchany style of electronic instrument.

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ARTURIA BEATSTEP PROSequencer & ControllerThe Beatstep Pro adds everything you may have missed from the smaller Beatstep, including tap tempo.Review: Brad Watts

REVIEW

Arturia has moved from strength to

strength over the years. Kicking off as a

software instrument manufacturer with its

sturdy recreations of not-so-sturdy vintage

analogue synthesisers, the company soon moved

into the realm of hardware with the Origin

keyboard. Since that time there’s been a

procession of hardware controllers and synths,

all of which borrow heavily from the analogue

ethos; lots of tactile control.

Last year, Arturia released the Beatstep

portable controller and step sequencer. Come

2015 and the ante has moved well and truly

upward with the Beatstep Pro. The new design

offers a stunning array of connectivity – enough

to make the unit a serious contender for the

keystone of a live performance rig. But more on

this shortly.

GATES OPEN

Like all Arturia hardware, the Beatstep Pro

is solidly constructed. It sits firmly on your

desktop ready to withstand years of percussive

bashing. The unit incorporates an assignable

MIDI controller, two analogue-style sequencers,

and a drum programmer/sequencer. The same

16 velocity sensitive and backlit trigger pads and

16 MIDI controller pots found on the original

Beatstep are present. However, the Pro adds 16

step programming buttons, offers an additional

section on the left of the unit for access to

sequencer functions, tap tempo button and

tempo value LED (a feature sorely missing from

the first Beatstep), transport controls, along with

pots for control over swing and randomisation

of sequences and other parameters. There’s also

a ribbon controller which will re-trigger the

pad your hitting at 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32 bar

timings. In sequence mode the ribbon controller

will loop the sequences according to the time

division selected.

Perhaps most invigorating is the unit’s

capability to simultaneously sync and trigger

via USB, MIDI and CV/Gate. This opens a

universe of possibilities. You could control

external analogue devices via the two CV/

Gate sections, even controlling those devices

via your DAW, control external MIDI devices

AT 94

and clock older external hardware with DIN sync

— standard 24ppqn or 48ppqn, or even a single

pulse per step. V- and S-trigger gate options

are supported, as are 1V/octave and Hertz per

Volt control voltages. Start/stop control is also

supported. Connection for these sync, pitch and

trigger sources is via 3.5mm jacks, and Arturia

provide the relevant breakout cables.

The eight drum gate outputs correlate with the

first eight trigger pads, with the first eight control

pots providing adjustment over gating length. And

you can record patterns directly into the sequencer.

As mentioned, this sets the scene for the Beatstep

Pro to act as the main conductor and sequencer

for a formidable live performance system. Should

you opt to use the Beatstep Pro standalone, without

the aid of a computer, power can be supplied via a

normal USB phone charger.

STEPPING UP

When it comes to step sequencing, there are 16

‘Project’ memory positions, within which can

be stored 16 sequences for each of the two step

sequencers and the drum programmer. That’s

plenty of slots for either compiling entire tracks, or

for a comprehensive array of motifs for mixing and

matching. When run in conjunction with a DAW

you can also trigger clips within the DAW.

When ‘stepping in’ those events to either

sequencer section, you can work to pitch

templates such as chromatic, major, minor, dorian,

mixolydian, harmonic minor, blues, leave the scaling

completely open or an additional ‘user’ template.

Each sequencer can contain up to 64 steps.

Arturia supplies editing software for the

Beatstep Pro whereby you can edit the controller

attributes of each control pot, each pad, and even

the step buttons. These controls can all be edited

to control the entire gamut of MIDI information,

with the exception of the pots affecting MIDI note

information and the step buttons not sending

velocity information. There are scads of options

in controller mode. The software doesn’t stop at

controller mapping, however. You can also program

the two sequencer sections and the drum section

via a typical matrix-style editing window. This

‘MIDI Control Center’ application also controls

Arturia’s other control surfaces such as the Spark

and Spark LE units, the previous Beatstep and the

Keylab range. So, if you’re racking up an assortment

of Arturia devices you can flip between them using

the same app. Very tidy indeed.

JUST ADD DEVICES

For such a tiny controller, the Beatstep Pro offers

an incredible range of functionality. With such an

array of options, from the multiple sync sources

through to the comprehensive control voltage

and gating, through to drum triggering and

more contemporary MIDI and DAW control,

the Beatstep Pro really is only limited by your

imagination and whatever machinery you can get

your hands on to integrate with it.

AT 95

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AT 97

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My father had a wunderlust. I must have attended more

than 10 schools in five different countries across Africa

and even Australia for a while, before dropping out as a teenager

and moving to Zambia.

By that point I knew I wanted to be involved in recording.

My father had purchased a lot of old equipment from the South

African Broadcasting Corporation. We had a good collection of

old ribbon mics — RCAs, BBC Marconi Type AXBTs — and an

old disc cutter that was in pieces. At the age of 15 I put that back

together and made it work. That stimulated my interest in all

things recording.

Zambia didn’t have a recording industry, so I considered my

options, made my way to Johannesburg and knocked on the door

of the largest studio in town and asked for a job. They said ‘okay’.

The studio was owned by David Manley [Founder of

Manley Labs] and was huge, it occupied six floors of a city

building with a different discipline on every level. As part of my

apprenticeship I went through each floor.

As was common back in the late ’60s, the studio was

building its own recording console — prior to the era of

standardised equipment. This console was based entirely on

V72 valves. I could handle a soldering iron, so I was roped into

building the console.

I went to London in 1970. London was the centre of the

recording industry and it was my plan to work there. That’s

as far as my ‘plan’ went. I flew out of a Rhodesia in the throes

of its (white) Unilateral Declaration of independence, when

its currency wasn’t valid and you couldn’t take money out of

South Africa either. So I landed at Heathrow with five pounds

in my pocket.

I knocked on the door of a studio called Advision in London

and asked for a job. They said ‘yes’. Actually they offered me

the choice of being a tape op or a junior tech. I asked which

paid more — tape op got 12 pounds a week and the tech job

attracted 15 pounds a week — so I took the tech job. Turns out

the senior tech Eddie Veal had recently resigned. I was thrown

in the deep end.

Fortunately, Eddie returned on a contract basis when he was

engaged to upgrade the recording console. The console was

designed by Dag Fellner and was one of the first transistorised

multitrack recording consoles of the time. It had 20 inputs and

eight group outputs and Eddie was upgrading the monitoring

section to work with our new 16-track Scully tape machine.

As the studio tech, it was my job to assist, which was a great

experience.

Eddie went on to do a lot of studio design. One of the first

he did was Jon Lennon’s private studio in 1971 to record the

Imagine album and he asked me to assist.

It was probably one of the very first private studios in the

world — it’s not like there were many commercial studios in

London at the time — and a big departure from the Abbey

Road atmosphere where even then men in lab coats stalked

the building ensuring you didn’t over-modulate this or use the

wrong mic on that.

During the recording of the album I would go to Jon Lennon’s

house and stay overnight just in case there were any technical

problems that might arise. I sometimes wish I’d picked up

the odd scrap of paper with lyrics scribbled on them for my

retirement.

From 1975 I worked full time with Eddie Veal building

consoles and studios, including a studio for George Harrison

at his home and another for Ringo who moved into Jon’s house

when he and Yoko moved to New York.

In the late ’70s I spent time with MCI and then Soundcraft.

Soundcraft was going through a rough patch financially, so

myself and Gareth Davis would contemplate what our next

move might be if Soundcraft went belly up. We decided to start

our own company, DDA.

By 1982 we’d gone full-time producing a small mixing

console first spec’ed for high-profile classical recording engineer

Tony Faulkner.

DDA became quite successful in a short time. Within four

years we had introduced a big split-design recording console

called the AMR24 which hit the right part of the market at the

right time.

The first time we exhibited that console in 1985 I recall the

people from Soundcraft dropping by to comment that “the

world doesn’t need another multitrack recording console. You’ll

never sell any of these.” We couldn’t make them fast enough.

With the success of the AMR24, I got a call from Phil Clarke

wondering if we’d be prepared to sell DDA. Klark Teknik had

just gone public, the Clarke brothers had a war chest of money

and were determined to grow quickly. I told Phil we didn’t want

to sell. We didn’t think anyone would be willing to pay what we

thought DDA was worth, given where we were taking it. Turns

out they were willing to pay what we thought it would be worth

and we became part of the Klark Teknik empire. That was then

absorbed by Mark IV Audio Group. We’d never intended to be

part of a big corporate machine but we were. That’s where we

stayed until 1997 when we escaped and started Audient.

The late ’90s wasn’t the right time to be launching an analogue

console but we didn’t know how to do a digital one. People

thought we were crazy, but we had enough feedback from studio

people to suggest there was a market and the ASP 8024 was

born. The console was designed for cost-effective manufacture

largely by the use of parallel mounted, multi channel printed

circuit boards and ribbon cabling, rather than traditional

modules and hand wiring. It’s proven to be a good design, in

fact, it’s still a strong seller today.

Audient is best known in the UK. When I’m in the US I still

have people talking about their DDA console, and I’ll encourage

them to retire it — you’ve had your money’s worth out of it!

I’ve never considered myself to be an audio design guru,

just a cluey tech, so to be still deeply involved in designing is as

satisfying as it is surprising. Maybe it’s that Antipodean thing we

share — an attitude of just getting on with it.

David is a founder of Audient and before that DDA. He learnt his craft in a time when a studio had to build its own mixing console. He’s taken that ‘can do’ attitude with him throughout his career. Pictured above is David with a DDA Forum Stage Monitor board in the early ‘90s.

LAST WORDwith David Dearden

REGULARS

AT 98

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Audio Technology - Issue 111

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