A udio T echnology ISSUE AU .(inc gst) NZ .(inc gst) AVID PRO TOOLS NATIVE INSTRUMENTS KOMPLETE ZOOM H HANDY RECORDER KORG MONOTRON RYCOTE INVISION USM-L JOECO BLACKBOX RECORDER STEINBERG WAVELAB reviews Patching your iPod into a professional audio system – the right way! GIGPIGLET RETURNS! US tour diary of the best & worst venues Subscribe & Win A FABULOUS SSL NUCLEUS! welcome to jingletown Green Day’s Oakland Studios THE MAGAZINE FOR SOUND ENGINEERS & RECORDING MUSICIANS
Patching your iPod into a professional audio system – the right way!
GIGPIGLET RETURNS! US tour diary of the best & worst venues
Subscribe & WinA FABULOUS SSL NUCLEUS!
welcome to jingletownGreen Day’s Oakland Studios
THE MAGAZINE FOR SOUND ENGINEERS & RECORDING MUSICIANS
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Introducing the next generation of Pro Tools.Professional audio production as you’ve always wanted it.
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(' GIGPIGLET’S TOUR DIARY PT II During the second leg of Brooke Fraser’s US tour, Gareth ‘Gigpiglet’ Stuckey discovers what makes some of the best (and worst) US venues tick.
() WELCOME TO JINGLETOWN Green Day’s private clubhouse/ studio has grown into a full- blown facility over the last couple of years. AT investigates why the go-carts are out and an SSL has moved in.
%' YOUR WORD Readers’ Letters.
%* NEWS News and new product information, including interviews with SAE’s Tom Misner and live mixing legend, Howard Page. $) HOME GROWN AT ventures back into the world of beats, rap, and megaphones to talk to hip-hop exponent, Leigh Ryan.
*' WHAT’S ON Studio roundup, featuring DOMC Mastering and Megaphon Studios.
** PC & MAC AUDIO Martin Walker has grave concerns for DIY’ers walking over Intel’s new Sandy Bridge. Brad Watts, meanwhile, has high praise for the new App Store.
#* DRY SAILING Rick hops aboard the good ship Turtlerock and heads out to sea once more.
+* STAV’S WORD Stav explores the wide world of click tracks, and offers a few tips on ways to make playing with artificial control easier for the musicians rather than harder.
$& ON THE BENCH This issue, Rob Squire offers several ways to connect your various iDevices – iPods, iPads and laptops etc – to the external inputs of a studio or live production setup.
$+ PRODUCTION ABDUCTION James Wilkinson discusses what can happen when an album project becomes its own master.
)) NATIVE INSTRUMENTS KOMPLETE # VST Instrument Suite
#+ STEINBERG WAVELAB # Digital Editing Software
an SSL NUCLEUS Studio Control Surface
SEE PAGE #'
SUBSCRIBE & WIN!
TUTORIALSREGULARS REVIEWSFEATURES
CONTENTS !"
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YOUR WORDReaders’ Letters
REGULARS
HAPPY HOLIDAYS Dear AT
Just thought I’d shoot o! a photo to you just to show you how much I enjoy the mag!
Here I am (above) with the family on the way to Lake Eyre last week for a picnic. "e weather was terri#c but the water was too hard to get to so the rubber boat stayed in the car.
"e lake was amazing despite being down to 40%, but we had a ball regardless. All nine of us stayed overnight and slept under the stars, woke with the sun and ate with the wildlife. Could be a song in that!
Cheers.Martin (Woody) WoodwardRaymond Terrace NSW
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THE BIG PICTURERe: On !e Bench Issue 78. Hi Rob, Regarding the On the Bench article in Issue 78 about the monitor controller. Firstly, I’d just like to say I think it’s a great article. In fact, I’ve already started my own project so thanks very much for the step-by-step walk through.
I have a question though: do you have a larger version of the completed wiring picture that appears on the #rst page of the article – the one in the lower le$ hand corner on page 52? A larger photo would be a great help to me just for a reference to con#rm my wiring is correct, as I’m using slightly di!erent components.
"ank you kindly for your help.Mark EatonPerth, WA.
We subsequently sent Mark this photo, but also !gured there were a few other AT readers out there straining their eyes to see it clearly in the printed magazine. So here it is – bigger this time – for the bene!t of readers.
"en Mark wrote to us again:
Hi again guys. "anks for your assistance with the photo. It helped out my build project no end! I spent about 50 bucks on parts and re-used an old external hard drive case that was lying around in the shed for the casing. I don’t have any labels on it yet, but hey, I know what all the controls are!
Mark.
IMPRESSIONS OF BRUCE JACKSON:LEGENDARY INNOVATOR
KIM RYRIE writes:
As Bruce’s astonishingly unexpected departure was still sinking in, AT called to ask if I might contribute a few words about my dear friend Bruce Jackson, on our early teenage friendship as neighbours on Point Piper’s waterfront. I’d consider it an honour…
In retrospect, those early years with Bruce turned out to be a pivotal period for what was to come many years later, when, in 1975, Peter Vogel and I started a company called Fairlight Instruments, which developed the #rst computer-based sampler, synthesiser and real-time music sequencer. Bruce was to become a critical part of Fairlight’s success in America.
Bruce’s fascination with sound in particular may just have rubbed o! on me. I was riveted when I heard the Moog synthesiser for the #rst time, and talked my father into starting an electronics magazine called Electronics Today in 1970 – where one of Bruce’s inventions graced the cover of the very #rst issue. (I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I remember it was something that used a diode matrix (hardwired!) to make character displays on a CRT.)
My secret agenda was to use the magazine’s facilities to make my own ‘Moog synthesiser’, which we eventually published across 12 issues as a DIY project. My frustration with analogue’s inability to make natural sounds eventually led me to asking school friend, Peter Vogel, to help establish Fairlight in 1975 to, as I so con#dently put it: “make the world’s best synthesiser using these new microprocessor things.”
A lot of good luck and introductions to clever people, such as Tony Furse, followed. By the time the Fairlight CMI was ready for launch in 1979, Bruce had already spent many years in America, developing friendships with several of
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the world’s most talented musicians through his dealings with Clair Brothers. When he eventually saw the CMI, Bruce o!ered to “show it to a few people” in the USA, and the rest is history.
Bruce provided the essential ingredient to Fairlight’s early success – an introduction to the trendsetters of the industry, by someone they implicitly trusted and respected. Would it ever have happened that some of the industry’s leading lights would hand over $25,000 (1980-dollars don’t forget) to a totally unknown company from Down Under? Without Bruce’s imprimatur, I suspect not.
Despite his well publicised accomplishments, I will mainly remember Bruce’s unsel#sh spirit, his immediate willingness to help Fairlight and I for virtually no #nancial return, and his more recent interest in my new company’s technology, again with no thought as to ‘what’s in it for me?’
"ank you Bruce, I know I’m not the only one that’s going to miss you, with special thoughts to Terry and the family.
Kim Ryrie. Co-Founder – Fairlight Instruments
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TRAGIC LOSS OF A FAIRLIGHT PIONEERPETER VOGEL writes:
I’m devastated by the news that my friend and long-time Fairlight supporter, Bruce Jackson, has died in a plane crash. He was %ying solo over the Death Valley desert in California on the 29th of January when the plane crashed for unknown reasons.
Bruce grew up literally next door to the harbourside house where Fairlight started. Bruce, of course, is well known in the Australian audio industry for starting the PA and lighting company JANDS and then moving on to become an outstanding live music engineer – described by Barbra Streisand as “the best sound engineer in the world.” He was mixing for Elvis Presley when Elvis died in 1977, whereupon Bruce returned for a holiday in Australia and came to check out what Kim and I were up to. He immediately saw the potential of the Fairlight and o!ered to introduce us to some of the artists he had worked for. "e outcome: I quickly packed up the one and only prototype and set o! for a whirlwind tour of the USA.
Over several months, Bruce %ew the Fairlight and I back and forth across the country in his tiny Mooney aircra$, which had been a gi$ from Elvis. I demonstrated this #rst Fairlight to Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, Larry Fast, Bruce Springsteen, Carly Simon and too many others to recount. In record time, Bruce had put Fairlight on the map.
!A public memorial for Bruce Jackson is being held in the the Sydney Opera House concert hall on Feb '$, at %&am. All are welcome to attend.
Bruce returned to Australia a couple of years ago to head up a research team for Dolby Labs. Just two weeks ago I had breakfast with him at Dolby’s San Francisco headquarters, where (amongst other things) he told me – with great enthusiasm – that ‘the old Mooney’ was still operational and how much he enjoyed %ying around the USA.
"e world has lost not only a great innovator but a kind and modest man who was always happy to share his knowledge and good fortune with others. My heart goes out especially to his wife and four children.
Rest in peace dear friend.
Best wishes,
Peter Vogel. Co-Founder – Fairlight Instruments
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REMEMBERING A TRUE VISIONARYHOWARD PAGE writes:
I am shocked and very, very saddened to hear of Bruce’s death. We go way back to the beginning of JANDS and our career paths in both Australia and the US have intertwined ever since.
In the narrow #eld of live sound equipment design, Bruce was a true visionary. His audio equipment designs are revolutionary and have become the industry standard for most large-scale live sound systems. While a seemingly quiet, shy sort of guy, he was absolutely passionate and determined when it came to getting the vision of his designs realised. Working with him on a large-scale Clair project like Barbra Streisand was a joy as, like me, he was an absolute perfectionist – an average sounding show just wasn’t going to ‘cut it’ for Bruce. Nothing in his career was ‘average’. He was an amazingly creative, talented guy who made everything he did the ‘state of the art’. Our audio world will truly miss him.
Howard Page.Senior Director – Engineering, Clair Global.
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NEWS: GENERAL
TOM MISNER: THE $%&&M MAN
So, how does it feel to have $270m sitting in your piggy bank? Two hundred and seventy million dollars… $270,000,000… count the zeros. When I recently spoke with a relaxed and chipper Tom Misner from his home base in Oxford, he wasn’t quite sure how he felt. But he wanted to clear something up. "e reported $279m sale of his SAE empire was only the #rst payment and the total deal was well in excess of $300m…
Right. And, furthermore, the deal didn’t include any of the real estate the SAE colleges are sited on (Tom retains ownership of all that, on the whole). If it did, “the deal would be double” the $300m #gure. Tom also owns legendary pro audio manufacturer, Neve, as well as Australia’s highest pro#le recording studio, Studios 301. What about those?
“Neve has been sold…” but only coincidentally, and not to the SAE purchaser, Navitas [a leading Australian education provider], and it hasn’t actually been entirely sold – not exactly – and
Studios 301 hasn’t been sold – not in the least bit. In fact, there are plans for its expansion. Phew… clearly there’s a bit to cover here. But #rst, I had to press the point…
Christopher Holder: How are you feeling Tom? It’s a mind-boggling amount of money that we’re talking about.
Tom Misner: Yes, it’s mind-boggling. But you’re talking to the guy who has all the cars you can have. I’ve learnt how to %y a helicopter, so I now own a helicopter. I have my own private jet that I travel in. It’s a Falcon 2000 jet, the Rolls Royce of jets. So the money makes no di!erence to my life, as strange as that sounds.
My main drive has always been to make SAE bigger. People have said, ‘oh he’s only in it for the money’, and the money is nice but I make more money from selling shopping centres than I do from SAE. So I don’t know how it feels yet... but it’s interesting.
CH: Presumably it means you have the cash to turn your hand to anything…
TM: I’m negotiating to buy Abbey Road Studios, which you didn’t know about.
CH: Right. Crumbs. Because EMI [Abbey Road owner] isn’t doing so well these days?
TM: "at’s right, EMI is in trouble. On the other hand you never know with me, I might end up buying EMI as well, which I’m capable of doing now.
CH: You started SAE back in 1976. Selling up must have been like putting your #rst-born up for adoption?
TM: It was. But at this stage it’s like a semi-adoption. I’m still at SAE, I’m still the president of SAE global operations. I’m staying on, guiding and running the company with my team. "at was part of the deal, and that was the reason why the Navitas o!er was so attractive. I had 11 o!ers all up, from investment funds, banking funds...
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Text: Christopher Holder
Tom Misner has outlined the design philosophy for the Custom Series "$, now let’s take a look at the specs in more detail: The Custom Series "$ is designed to combine classic Neve %&"(/%&)% circuitry and modern circuitry in one console. The classic Neve circuitry has been painstakingly re-created, keeping faith with the original while taking advantage of modern assembly methods. For example, rather than running the length of the console, the voltage summing buses are only %$&mm long and are now balanced, resulting in lower noise and less crosstalk. Other ‘charming quirks’ of the original circuits – such as the level onto buses varying as more are
assigned from a channel – have been overcome. Improved BA(() amplifying stages and BA')( output stages combined with classic Neve LO%%** output transformers, sound ‘warm, defined and punchy’.Here’s the really ni,y bit: stereo buses are implemented in both classic (voltage summing) and modern (current summing) technology and the feed to these can be selected on a per-channel basis. The two buses are combined at the master fader then passed via (patchable) ''$+ compressors and an insert, to the stereo outputs. There are both modern (transformerless) and classic (transformer) outputs,
providing maximum flexibility of sonic ‘flavour’. Naturally, the AFL buses are also replicated for correct solo monitoring. The eight group outputs use classic circuitry, with the added bonus of stem outputs, inserts and eight dedicated faders to feed groups or playback to the stereo buses. A ('-channel console can mix a total of )& inputs to stereo.The '&)% in-line channel module features a blend of the best features of Neve’s %&"( and %&)% modules. The mic preamp and four-band EQ is straight from the %&)%, while the output amp is based on the %#"&s BA')(, single-ended, Class-A circuitry with a gapped core
BACK TO ’"'
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CH: Right, so you’ve built a new Neve…
TM: More than that. People traditionally like to record on a Neve and mix on an SSL. And the reason is: the Neve sounds richer and fuller while the SSL sounds tighter. So I thought: let’s put the two together. It’s the only console in the world that I know of that does current summing similar to an SSL – a tight, punchy sound – and the voltage summing of a Neve that gives you that warm full sound but not as tight. And you can get that with a push of a button. "at’s the unique feature.
CH: Who designed it and where will it be built?
TM: It was designed by Neve along with my design engineers – Bruce McBean and Steve Crane – 301 guys based in Australia. And it’ll be built in Byron Bay – it’s cheaper to build it in Australia than the UK.
CH: How much is it estimated to cost?
TM: About $39k for a 24-channel console. It’s a fully-featured console up to 64 channels and comes in buckets of eight.
CONCERNING $%"CH: What about the studios? You’ve got Studios 301 in Sydney and Byron Bay as well as a couple of international 301s, are they part of the SAE deal?
TM: 301 is de#nitely not part of the deal. In fact, 301 is expanding into Brisbane [a site in Newstead is currently being built on]. And I’ve got a new vision for 301. "ere’s going to be the mastering, of course, but it’ll soon be: ‘Recording and Rehearsal Studios’. "e Other 301s will stay where they are and rehearsal studios will be added where possible. But not at the Byron Bay 301.
CH: Why are you so excited about rehearsal studios?
TM: "e market is such now that 301 needs to diversify. You can’t just make money from recording and mixing alone. Mastering is one thing and rehearsal is another – you can get the band while they’re rehearsing and have them record and master as well – close the circuit, as it were.
CH: Presumably we’re not talking about an empty room with sticky carpet and chipped black paint?
TM: "ese will be fully-equipped rehearsal studios, and some will have a stage so bands can actually do their act live. In fact, we can retract walls and they can perform an unplugged session for people in the studio café. Needless to say the studios will have Custom Series Neves in them!
CH: Now you’ve sold SAE, can you re%ect on why the schools have been so successful?
TM: It’s a very good product. In Australia, in particular, there was a stigma about private education – the inference is: if it’s any good you
should get it for free. But SAE has a very good product.
Some students have become very successful, while other students haven’t been successful – they’ve been failures in their jobs or lives. But regardless, SAE gives you genuine knowledge and access to equipment.
CH: Does it irk you that there are still so many SAE naysayers?
TM: It is annoying. "e strange thing to me is that myself and SAE have huge respect in Europe and on a global level... but in Australia, it’s just ‘oh it’s him’, and the presumption is ‘he’s ripping everyone o! ’. Nothing’s changed in 38 years and nothing will. Now [a$er the SAE sale] it’ll be ‘oh he’s ripping somebody else o! by selling the company’! Whatever…
CH: Has some of your motivation been in proving the detractors wrong?
TM: It used to be the case in the ’80s, but not since. People have their set ways and they’ll stick to that until their dying day. I created the SAE concept and the phenomenon, as such. And from a global level I saved Neve from bankruptcy, and 301 in Australia from the same fate.
CH: How’s your own playing and recording going?
TM: I play in a cover band just for the fun of it. We play gigs down at the pub for $200 a night. "e band is called No Future – a bunch of 50 year olds in a cover band playing songs, what have you got? No Future!
CH: Classy! So can you exclusively reveal to AT readers what your guitar setup is?
TM: Sure. I use a Tele with open G tuning for "e Stones numbers. Otherwise I’ve got a Duesenburg guitar, with my own e!ects rig: a T-Rex Mudhoney pedal which has two distortion settings, a Cry Baby wah pedal and an Aldi Flanger.
CH: Aldi? From the deli aisle?
TM: I walked into Aldi one day to buy groceries – as you do – and I saw a package of #ve e!ects pedals for $100. So I bought them and the Flanger is actually really good! Apart from that I’ve got a TC multi-delay system and I use two Vox AC30s.
CH: Sounds like you’re living the dream.
TM: I’m a musician. And for $200 a night you too can book me.
So for the next couple of years SAE will keep its team in place. What Navitas does a$er that is up to them, but it wouldn’t be in their interests to change things – there’s nothing ‘broke’ about SAE.
CH: How does it feel to work for someone else a$er so many years as your own boss?
TM: I don’t know yet! I’ll let you know soon.
CONCERNING NEVECH: What’s the deal with Neve?
TM: "e sale of Neve is a di!erent deal that just happened to be at the same time. "e management approached me for a buyout, led by [Managing Director] Mark Crabtree. I wasn’t interested in owning Neve any more. It achieved what I wanted it to achieve in the last #ve or six years and that was to promote SAE. It was big news then and helped SAE reach the next level. I’ve sold all the Neve IP and the factory, the tooling etc., but what I’ve negotiated is the rights to maintain the manufacture of a mixing console called the Custom Series 75 (see below).
It’s a new analogue console. Neve didn’t want to make a non-automated analogue console, but I believe the market is ready for it. People use automation in ProTools or Logic but they’re no longer using console automation that much. What they want is a clean recording path and a clean mixing path – they want the sound for that.
CH: A Neve sound?
TM: "at’s right. It’s a genuine Neve – the only product [a post-Rupert Neve] Neve has ever made that uses the genuine Neve transformers, pots… Neve everything, including the circuitry of the preamps and EQ – it’s the sound of a genuine Neve.
transformer, as used in the %&"( and ''$+. Five auxiliary sends, fader swap and a choice of either classic or modern channel output circuitry are provided.Two ''$+ compressors, four stereo reverb returns, eight recallable scenes, monitoring of up to %' sources simultaneously and comprehensive ".% monitoring are just some of the features found in the master section.Available in a %*-, '+-, ('-, +&-, +)-, $*- or *+-module chassis, the Series "$ is flexible and able to suit a variety of studio applications from broadcast to music and even film production.Typical pricing: !+(,&&& for a %*-channel console.
Custom Series !": www.customseries!".com
!Subsequent to this interview, Citigroup has taken ownership of EMI Group after its previous owners defaulted on more than !$b in borrowings. Abbey Road is no longer for sale… at least for now.
AT %&AT %&
IN BRIEF
AT %&
The Wharfedale Titan %' speaker can be used as a floor monitor, an array, or mounted on a stand. The cabinet is moisture-resistant, making it ideal for outdoor gigs and festivals, and the side handles sport a rubberised coating to avoid slippage in the wet.The Titan series even provides basic mixing functions; with a variety of direct line/mic and RCA input options, with overall balance and tonal controls. The amplifier supplies '$&W RMS or $&&W peak to the woofer, while a more conventional Class-A/B amplifier, rated at $&W RMS or %&&W peak, drives the tweeter. Price: !"##.
LSW: (#$) %!&% #''' or www.lswonline.com.au
Finding ways to streamline the different aspects of designing, transporting and setting up complex audio systems is a constant challenge for sound companies. ATK Audiotek in the US handles events such as the Super Bowl, political conventions, the Grammy Awards and the Academy Awards, and recently instituted a new system design approach revolving around a single type of power amplifier to drive all types and brands of speakers. To bring this design strategy to fruition, ATK purchased +$& <<Powersoft>> Digam K%& Aesop-equipped amplifiers to drive its inventory of JBL VerTec speaker systems, amongst others.
JoeCo has announced the arrival of its Blackbox Player. Able to replay '+ channels of audio at up to '+-bit/#*k, the BlackBox Player is the first dedicated multi-channel playback device specifically developed to replay backing tracks or multiple surround stems for live shows. It can be triggered using timecode, with a footswitch or Qwerty keyboard, or controlled via MIDI commands, giving the live engineer, installation sound designer, musical director or artist full control of the show at all times. Audio files can be stored on a standard USB' drive, or Flash RAM drive.
JBL Professional has introduced the latest suspension hardware accessories for its VerTec subcompact line arrays. The VerTec hardware enables quick assembly of variable curvature vertical or modular constant-curvature horizontal line arrays. In addition to the standard VT+))*-AF array frame – for suspending up to '+ boxes – and the VT+))*-UB and UB%, the line of equipment now includes the VT+))*-SF short frame, the VT+))*-HB horizontal bar, and VT+))*-DF)) and VT+))*-DF)# downfill frames. Application flexibility ensures VT+))* and VT+))( elements provide effective sound design tools for performance audio facility system designers.JBL also has a new active loudspeaker – the EON$%$XT
– which extends the reach of the current EON technology by lowering the noise floor and adding user-selectable EQ control. The two-way EON$%$XT incorporates a JBL '+%+H high-frequency neodymium compression driver, a %$-inch JBL '*$F-% Differential Drive dual-voice-coil woofer and a Crown Class-D amplifier. Input sensitivity has also been increased by %&dB to benefit electronic instruments and DJ mixers.The EON$%$XT offers two 1/4-inch TRS inputs, one combination XLR/TRS input and an XLR output, for connecting another EON or for routing to external devices.
Sting’s well into his 50s and I dare say has a bob or two by now. Embarking on an arduous world tour is therefore not something his bank manager or a tribe of Amazon Indians is pressing him to do. Sting is a muso and he clearly enjoys himself on stage. And when Sting phones and asks you to come on tour, he can be a very persuasive man. At least, that’s what Australian live sound veteran and Senior Director of Engineering of the world’s largest rental company, Clair Global, Howard Page found out recently. As a rule, Howard doesn’t tour anymore. But Sting wouldn’t take no for an answer.
"e Symphonicity tour is e!ectively Sting singing with an orchestral backing group. Forget about other rock band/orchestra tours – and from Metallica to Elton John there have been a few – where the orchestra plays second #ddle (so to speak) to the rock band; Sting’s vocal is like a solo instrument in a large ensemble.
With this in mind Howard Page mixes the Symphonicity shows like an orchestral gig, with the emphasis on detail and dynamics. AT magazine caught up with Howard at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne to #nd out how he keeps 86 channels under control:
“You take a lot of time at the beginning with the structure of the mix – that’s the way you mix any big show. "at way you have an absolute ‘reference’ mix to always fall back on. Before we toured we went into Abbey Road Studios in London – a totally closed, controlled environment – with the real FOH system and that’s where I spent – under ideal conditions – plenty of time setting the gain structure and formulating my reference mix. If you look at my board [Howard favours the Studer Vista 5 SR] you’ll see that every fader is absolutely ruler %at for most of the night. "at’s because I’ve got the ideal optimised gain structure on all the mic pres.
“In the old days there was good reason to believe you should get as much gain as possible out of every mic pre. And the faders ended up where the faders ended up. "ose days are long gone. "e noise %oor on the modern state of the art mixing console is so low that the ambient noise of the stage just sitting there is way higher. All those traditional rules are out the window.”
And what about miking?: “In the old days when you did shows like ‘Opera in the Domain’ (in Sydney) we needed area mics to get the ‘real’ violin sound because the close mics weren’t
providing that – they accentuated the screech and the bowing, not the body of the instrument and unfortunately it ended up sounding like a pack of squealing cats. I’ve spent a considerable amount of money on the right – the best – bud mics: the DPA 4099. If you position them correctly, they give you the real string sound with virtually no EQ at all. Which means you’re not constantly #ghting to recover the real sound of the instrument. Here every stringed instrument in the orchestra has a 4099.”
"ere were some truly sublime moments at the Myer Music Bowl this night, with Sting’s well-preserved vocal sitting e!ortlessly above a highly nuanced orchestral mix. Howard takes his cues from Sting’s vocal delivery – contemplative songs are mixed whisper quiet, while more raucous songs still retain detail, with every member of the orchestra individually represented through the Clair i5 PA.
We’ll hear more from Howard Page next issue as he takes us through mix and PA tuning techniques. In the meantime, head online to the AT website for a look at the Abbey Road Symphonicity rehearsals.
NEWS: LIVE
STING & STRINGSText: Christopher Holder
AT %%
Audio-Technica’s new stereo condensers, the BP4025 & AT8022, introduce an innovative space-saving capsule
design. In a compact, elegant housing, each offers the pristine sound quality & spatial impact of a live sound !eld.
Whatever your broadcasts & performances demand, experience more. audio-technica.com
In this second instalment of Gareth ‘Gigpiglet’ Stuckey’s Brooke Fraser US tour diary, AT gets the low-down on what makes some of the best
(and worst) US venues tick.Text: Gareth Stuckey
FEATURE
AT %(
LONDON TO LA
Tuesday 30th November: "e last few days have been good times: a couple of great days o! in Chicago, my
#rst "anksgiving dinner and some sightseeing, including going to the top of Willis Tower – the tallest structure in the US. "en it was o! to London for a one-o! show at the Scala. I was mixing there not a month ago for Tim Finn so I knew what I was in for. Weirdly, it was nice to be around some whinging poms again for a couple of days. Back to reality, I guess! "en, no sooner had we acclimatised to the sub-zero temperatures (sure! I’ll never acclimatise to that) than it was back to LA for more shows.
It’s funny how 10 hours on a plane can bring you back to the reality of your life – one day it’s all fun and games and the next you #nd yourself sitting on a %ight, doing your tax, writing this article and counting how many days you’ve slept at home this #nancial year (less than 10 so far). Once we touch down in LA, we’ll have another two days ‘o!,’ so to speak. "at will be nice. I have some people to see, meetings to attend, friends to catch up with… but is it really a day o! if you’re in a hotel on Beverly Blvd and home is in a di!erent time zone?
THE EL RAY – LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA!ursday 2nd December: Now this place is an institution. "e El Ray was a theatre in the ’50s, and a live music venue for nearly 20 years. It’s not on ‘the strip’ but I’ve seen a video of Metallica playing here (on their Ride the Lightning tour I think it was – the house guys remember it) so the place has certainly got some vibe about it.
We bump in from the street, and all our freight arrives from Chicago and London on time. I know what to expect here: PM5Ds at both FOH and Monitors, while the PA is a RATtrap – a bit of an LA staple. Dave Rat started the company in the ’80s, looking a$er bands like Black Flag before moving onto the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam. Like a bit of a Lee Conlon/Revolver Audio type scenario in Australia, Dave designed and built the equipment himself back in the ’80s when a lot of the gear simply wasn’t available. "e RATtrap was one of those products borne of necessity, and I can see why it did so well in the ’90s. It was loud – like sledgehammer loud – with a similar amount of #nesse. While the show this night sounded #ne, I could never get the details out. "e drum reverbs didn’t seem to work (they sounded like they were either ‘on’ or ‘o! ’ – but didn’t seem to have any decay or tail. "e vocal delays either couldn’t be heard at all, or seemed to jump o!ensively out of the mix. By halfway through the set I resigned myself to this fact, opened another beer and mixed a ‘loud dumb’ rock show!
A$er the show I got to thinking about just how far PAs have evolved since the RATtrap was built, and how much our expectations have changed in that time (both as engineers and punters). What was #ne in the ’90s – big and loud, and if you could hear the vocal, then that was great – is now the absolute bottom rung of our expectations. People expect studio quality sound all the time nowadays, and it’s fair enough too. We have the technology, so why shouldn’t they? It does, however, mean that PA companies, venues and engineers have to keep up!
RIO THEATRE – SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIASaturday 4th December: From the beginning Dave is lovely, and when I say Dave, I mean all of them. "ere are four Daves here... the FOH and monitors techs, Lighting
Designer (LD) and venue rep are all named Dave. What are the odds of that? One of these Daves (I’m not sure which one) recognises me from a past gig in Australia. He usually tours with the Polyphonic Spree, and we recount a particularly di&cult show at Playground Weekender earlier this year.
I was there tour managing "e Cribs (as my buddy Johnny Marr was playing with them). What ended up happening as the stage fell apart was that I became the monitor engineer, patching guy, and all-round make-it-happen guy… Bjorn Again played before us, and Polyphonic Spree a$erwards. Simply put, the stage was a mess. No one really knew what was going on, and I eventually stepped in when the systems monitor guy couldn’t get lead vocal to the centre send… “Really?” I said. “It’s metering on the console, it’s metering on the crossover, it’s metering on the amp, so it’s pretty well got to be a speaker cable, yes? Get me a speaker cable now and run it straight to the wedge.” And then, lo and behold, it worked! Who would have thunk it? Troubleshooting is one of the most important skills you need as a live engineer. But I digress…
"e PA today is some local proprietary thing… it sounds okay. But then I walk down the front and it sounds completely di!erent. I walk over to the side of the auditorium and it sounds di!erent again. Everywhere I walk it sounds di!erent. "e coverage is so uneven it’s embarrassing.
What I would love to see here is the PA li$ed up in the air. "ey have rigging points for the job: there’s a front bar for lighting; they have six boxes a-side (well actually it’s four a-side and then some strange stereo in-#ll set up that I choose to mute), and all the boxes have rigging on them. Nearly every PA in the world sounds better if it’s hung. If you can get the boxes above people’s heads and shoot down at them, whether it’s a line array or a point source, you get more direct coverage to everyone. Each person’s ears have a more direct line of sight to the PA: if you can look up and ‘see’ the PA, you can hear it too. Conversely, if it’s buried behind a whole lot of heads, then that’s what it will sound like too.
CAFÉ DE NORD – SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIASunday 5th December: Oh dear…
I was here in the early 2000s with Paul Kelly and I remember it was horrible back then. And it truly is. In fact – I don’t think anything has changed since then. Correction… perhaps it’s a little worse.
"ere’s an Allen & Heath GL3300 at FOH that also controls the monitors, and sports my favourite thing of all time: channels that don’t work. "e Presonus dynamics rack has Channels 1, 3 and 6 taped over. I presume that means they don’t work… so the eight channels of gates and compression we have on our spec is actually only #ve. "anks for that. For a little club gig (and we are talking little; this is maybe 250-cap) the place is #ne apart for some basic issues. If only someone #xed these we’d be rolling. My list of ‘easy-to-#x-if-the-house-guy-gave-a-shit’ complaints are, in no particular order:
1: Your FOH boxes are meant to sit upright. Don’t chain them to the roof on their side to give you better sight lines. Speakers have feelings too – you can only hang a box on its side if it has a horn that you can rotate, and then you have to make sure you actually do it! Otherwise the 70x15-degree
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(or whatever it is) dispersion is smashing into the ceiling and %oor, and not getting to the audience at all, basically making your already shit PA sound even worse.
2: If monitors are being run from FOH, put the graphics at FOH too. What is with the thought process that puts the monitors graphics at the stage, when there’s no monitors console? I mean really, what am I meant to do, run down there when something feeds back? Why are you pretending that you have half a monitor rig, when really you don’t have one at all? I’d be much happier having a bit of average gear that I can reach to control, than nothing at all.
3: Label your stu#. If there are a couple of delay boxes running through matrixes 1 and 2 for the back of the room, let’s see those labelled on the console, and likewise on the dodgy DOD graphic that feeds them. At least if I know what it is I can try and make it sound okay.
4: Why, in a 250-cap room, do I need to be on a two-foot riser, so that everything sounds completely di!erent to me than the rest of the audience?
5: We have 31 mic inputs, but today make that 24; that’s all that was available via the multicore (yes I can do without a bass mic and snare bottom, and even run keyboards in mono in small rooms – thanks for asking) but when we line check and three of these lines don’t work either, we’re now down over 10% on the channel count! It’s just not good enough. When I agreed to 24, I meant 24. I
didn’t mean 21. Where did this confusion come from?THE DOUG FIR LOUNGE – PORTLAND, OREGON
Tuesday 7th December: It’s cold in Portland – hell cold – and raining. And the load-in is a good distance around the corner from where the bus is parked. Portland is such a cool music city though. Actually, it’s just a cool city in general. It has art, it has culture… and food (probably the best food scene in the USA). I have always thought that Portland is like Sydney: it’s very multicultural, the restaurants are amazing, nothing is open on a Monday, and there are lots of hippies. If Portland is Sydney, then I guess the Doug Fir is perhaps "e Civic (in Sydney’s CBD). It’s all rather classy: there’s a bar and restaurant and a band room downstairs in the basement, the space is really well looked a$er, the décor is great, load-in is horrible, and the PA is ‘state of the art’ (even though it’s 10 years old). It really could be the same place!
FOH consists of a pair of EAW650Zs each side – at least they’re the Z-series. (Whatever the mod was with the Z made a huge di!erence.) "ere are some subs under the stage (which we hate), but worse than this they’re also raised o! the %oor on car jacks? What? Not sure what they’re trying to avoid here – maybe some bottom-end coupling into the %oor… of the basement? Monitors are also EAWs, controlled from the FOH console, which is a Midas Verona.
Everyone has a different way of tuning a PA system. It’s one of those processes that has no ‘right way’ as such – if you get the result you need to mix the band well, then you’ve succeeded. Lots of guys use their lead vocal mic patched into a channel at FOH and perform the old tried and true ‘check one two’ technique and from there work on the graphic. Others use pink noise and Smaart software (or similar) to analyse a room with something other than their ears. I find neither of these approaches really works for me. I like to use a CD (well, an iPod strictly speaking these days). I play a particular song – it’s not always the same song but one of a couple of options, depending on the artist’s style of music, to get a ‘feel’ for the PA. I’ll walk around the room, see if there are any big changes in particular places, then make any broad changes on the crossover gains, or system processor (Lake Processors or whatever is there) or onboard parametric EQ in a digital console. Then I’ll skip the track back to the top, and make any fine (or not so fine) adjustments on the graphic. Sometimes this involves next to nothing, sometimes I hack into nearly everything. I have a belief here that it doesn’t matter what your graphic looks like, it only matters what the PA sounds like. So don’t be afraid to boost and cut like crazy if it sounds right.When I end up with the PA sounding like I want it to, then I can pretty well guess my EQ starting point for most instruments, and just do a line check for gain. By using this method, I find that I really don’t need a soundcheck – if the PA sounds exactly how I want it to, and all the lines are there gained up, then I should be starting from where I always start.This is a great way to treat a festival for instance, where you don’t really have any control – you can’t be ‘check one two-ing’ away for the whole '&-minute changeover. Line-check the band, roll your intro music, and EQ the system while the band are coming on stage!
SYSTEM TUNING
Nolan Rossi (Monitors) Troy Welstad Brooke Fraser Sean Cimino
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Nolan [the Monitors engineer] and I do the usual console dance; we have it pretty well down by now. We use a couple of Y-splits to double Brooke’s vocal channels into extra input strips so that Nolan can have complete control over her in-ears. I let him run the soundcheck and set gains etc to suit. Even if you aren’t touring a monitor engineer, a couple of female-to-2x-male XLR Y-splits are a really good thing to have in your kit. It’s a simple and small thing to keep around, and can really save your skin when you rock up to a venue that has no monitor console.
THE TRIPLE DOOR – SEATTLE, OREGONWednesday 8th December: "is place is another one of those odd ‘dinner and show’ setups… it’s all tiered levels, consisting of tables, chairs and booths. I certainly get the sense from a fan’s perspective that I would like to see a show here, but as an artist, I don’t think I would like to play it. "e things that makes it a great gig to go and see as a punter – excellent food, good service, bottle of wine on the table – are the very things that make it a di&cult show to play (and mix). "ink: "e Basement in Sydney, only twice the size… and, of course, a much better PA. "ere are JBL Vertec boxes, six-a-side, some delay and in-#ll speakers, and the awesome (albeit outdated) Yamaha PM1D at FOH. "e console is set up such that the second layer consists of duplicates of all the channels, and a tablet PC then controls monitors on stage referencing these channels. All we share is gain, and everything else is independent. Good enough for me, even
if mixing monitors from a touchscreen tablet sounds like some evil detention task set by a sadistic teacher at sound school. I’m sure Nolan will be all over it this night.
I have never been a huge fan of the PM1D – I guess as a band FOH guy I’ve never really had the need to be. "e ability to do almost anything (or multiples of anything) has made them a favourite among monitor engineers and live theatre types (I think it’s still the only console out there that can do 48 mixes). Yamaha has only recently discontinued this console, which immediately led to a conversation about them replacing it. If they made another console of this style it would be in direct competition with the Midas XL8, but I guess that’s always been the battle line in the live console market hasn’t it: Yamaha or Midas? So I guess it’s almost inevitable that they’ll develop something new, but how big is the market that the PM5D doesn’t already cover I wonder?VENUE – VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLOMBIA
!ursday 9th December: We get back on the tour bus and head over the Canadian border again. As I mentioned last issue, I do like Canadians. "ey’re just friendlier, more laid back – on re%ection, I think they just remind me of Australians more. "ings seem easier to do here. We pull the bus up in the back alley to load-in direct to stage. "e house crew are in there putting the monitor system and FOH console in. I guess on the weekends this place is a ‘dance
club’ where they pack the place out on Friday and Saturday nights with a bad DJ and try and make some money (at someone else’s risk), with live bands on the other nights. Hey, it really does remind me of Australia!
"e PA is typical club fodder: JBL Venue series, which isn’t really that bad. But what’s strange here is that there are three cabinets a side. And rather than being stacked three wide, they’re %own, in a ‘line’, namely, curved and everything, just like the guy who installed it would have seen at all the big concerts. "is box has a dispersion of 60 degrees (horizontal) x 50 degrees (vertical) so hanging a line of it is never going to work, is it? Sure enough, the room sounded just like it looked: really uneven coverage, phasey weirdness at a couple of points, and lots of dead spots. I spent half an hour with a CD track playing – I like to tune systems with a recorded track [see the ‘System Tuning’ box item to #nd out what this is all about] – but didn’t really get anywhere. I feel like I could have done a better job if I could have accessed the crossover, but it was an Ashly digital unit, all locked out and behind a panel. So I resorted to doing a broad tune with the amp volumes… not ideal I know, but with no parametric at FOH (the console was an A&H GL3000) and no access to the crossover I didn’t have a lot of choice. Subs and high-mids both got wound back to 50% before the system sounded listenable… and then I laid into the graphic.
"is is the kind of show where I was happy (and relieved) to have my vocal outboard chain with
“I mean really, what am I meant to do, run down there when
something feeds back?
”Live at Lincoln Hall
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What do you watch when you’re touring the US in a bus? Rattle and Hum of course.
me, which consists of a Midas XL42 preamp/EQ, followed by a BSS402 comp/limiter/de-esser, and a Klark-Teknik DN3030 graphic EQ. I wouldn’t have stood a chance here without this gear (especially the graphic on Brooke’s vocal). As it turned out, once I did a nasty system tune, everything went quite well. Monitors were run on a Soundcra$ Spirit, which I haven’t seen for a while. It had one aux not working, which meant that Brooke’s in-ears had to be in mono, so Nolan was having a harder time than me. We got there though, blundered through soundcheck with everyone happy. "is night was a real rock show – I remember thinking to myself: ‘It will be loud, and a bit dirty, but soon it will be over’.
THE CASBAH – SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIASunday 12th December: "e last show! It feels like I’ve been writing this article forever! "e Casbah is a real San Diego institution. Opened back in 1989, this place has seen the likes of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Ben Harper, Death Cab for Cutie, "e Arcade Fire and countless others. It’s a proper West Coast dirty rock club: the carpet sticky, the ceiling low.
"is show sees some added di&culties for us, mostly because it was added on to the end of the tour, so the logistics are a bit strange. "e tour bus, for instance, is still driving back from Canada, so we %ew out to LA. "is means we’ve had to hire a backline from SIR, which shi$s the goal posts a little. It’s a small room – 200 capacity – but the PA is decent, a Soundcra$ GB2 for FOH and Monitors and an EV XLC array (though with only one box per side it’s not really an array is it?). I actually really like these boxes – they have a lovely clarity about them (even if they hiss a bit) and for acoustic-style music they work really well. I #nd their ‘presence’ really works nicely for vocals and acoustic guitars.
So the show rocked, everyone had a good time, we had to turn the aircon o! in the quiet songs because it was so loud (yep – that’s how quiet she sings), but apart from that, we had a ball.
YAHOO PROMO & THE FLIGHT HOMEMonday 13th December: we drop by the Yahoo o&ces to do a quick bit of promo: record three songs acoustically in their ‘music room’ – which consists of two mics and a Zoom four-track recorder. Awesome! It really shows where consumer music is at right now… Even a multinational company doesn’t seem to see the bene#ts of spending money on audio. Incredible. As long as it gets recorded and comes out on the net, then it’s seen as a viable product.
Sitting on the plane home and re%ecting on the tour, the thing that stands out most is just how good it was. "e production values across the board were pretty damned good, and aside from a couple of simple things, most of the venues were really well equipped for their size. "e tour has reminded me once again that the task of making engineers and bands happy at venues always involves the simple things. Every decent touring party can be %exible with specs to a point, as long as the gear is clean, organised, and in good working order. Point being, if a cable doesn’t work, put it somewhere separate from the rest, and get it #xed. If a channel or output on a console doesn’t work, get a tech in to sort it out. If a mic gets beaten up, buy a new grille for it etc.
"is leads me to one #nal point. "ere’s a bad attitude that’s rife in Australia at the moment: “It’s just the house gear,” they say, so consequently it doesn’t get looked a$er. Worse than that, this is somehow becoming regarded as a default standard that’s almost to be expected. Venue owners don’t spend any money on it “’cause it just gets wrecked!”. One big plus to the unionised system in "e States is that everyone is working for someone, and has a job to lose. So they have to do it well, with pride and respect. I feel like the freelance system here means that no one is accountable, and therefore nothing is accounted! Let’s turn this around shall we – and it starts with the engineers. Look a$er the gear, clean up a$er yourself (even as simple as pulling o! the tape and zeroing the console). If something doesn’t work, complain about it and if it’s not #xed the next time you’re back, make a big deal of it. Let’s li$ the standard so that when American engineers come into our venues we aren’t embarrassed!
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Walking in o! the street through the razor wire fence into a car park that seems big
enough to host go-cart races – which I later discover it occasionally does – you might be forgiven for thinking the industrial premises you’ve just entered manufactures car parts or poker machines or something. Either that or it’s a drug cartel that’s none too keen on visitors. You’d certainly never pick it as the home base of one of the world’s biggest rock bands.
Just over the back fence is a frenetic eight-lane freeway and all around you in nearby businesses, semi-trailers back into giant warehouses, with little regard for people in cars. It’s not exactly tranquil. But hey, this is Oakland, the industrial sister city of San Francisco. If a car comes crashing through the back fence I wouldn’t be surprised.
Right up the back of the warehouse is the #rst clue that all is not as it seems behind these impenetrable tilt-slab walls. Painted on the modest doorway is a gra&ti-styled mural of the guys from Green Day – with all three members pictured sitting down like they’ve just stepped out of the warehouse for morning smoko.
Buzzing the door prompts a quick response. Suddenly the band breaks up – or at least the mural does. Billie Joe and Tré Cool disappear behind the opening door and Mike Dirnt is le$ on his lonesome wondering what happened. Standing next to him in real life is Chris Dugan, the band’s engineer.
“Come in man,” Chris motions politely. “I’m just in the control room doing some editing.”
With that I enter the Jingletown ‘clubhouse’, the
inner sanctum of Green Day’s world, replete with motorbikes, sur'oards, more instruments and amps than you can poke a fretboard at, and three studios (at least two with their own control room). If you’re a Green Day fan this is Mecca. One room in particular is #lled to the ra$ers with literally hundreds of guitars and drums – it’s an impressive sight, and immediately my mind is drawn to how complicated the decision must be about which amp to use with which guitar and for which overdub. "e options must be paralysing at times for Chris and the band. I had to ask…
Chris Dugan: Actually, not really. Billie [Joe Armstrong] sits and listens to guitar amps for hours on end and he basically knows all his instruments back to front. He has this crazy ear. It’s the same with the other guys in the band. Tré [Cool] sits and tunes his drums like a madman. He knows what heads to use and always wants his drums to sound awesome. He’s fastidious… and a very heavy hitter. "e same goes for Mike [Dirnt]. Nothing gets past these guys in terms of their sound. When we get going in the studio all the sounds are already dialled up; I don’t have to worry about any of that stu! really... it all comes from the band. Everyone knows their gig – you don’t really have to say anything to them. As an engineer it’s hard to make sure everything sounds good sometimes – especially instruments – so having fantastic players and great instruments to mic up makes my life just so much easier.
Andy Stewart: Would you say the band and their raw instruments are essentially ‘the Green Day sound’?
CD: Absolutely, it’s what you bring to the table
and how you play your instrument that matters most. And they’re so on top of all that stu!. "ey can play a song in the studio and just nail it, just like they do every night when they’re on tour. But they’re also equally as comfortable cutting tracks individually. Either way, they’re still gonna knock every song out of the park.
TRACKING GREEN DAYAS: What’s a typical Green Day recording session like for you in terms of tracking. How do songs kick o!?
CD: Usually the guys have already worked on a demo at home, so most of the time they’ll come in with an idea already developed, show it to each other, jam it out, play it, and then, if it’s something that they want to proceed with, we’ll have a crack at it. On the last record [21st Century Breakdown] it was kind of a mix of both, whereas on the previous record [the smash hit American Idiot] we were essentially living in the studio for a while and at one point or another everything got miked up: the B3, the pianos… everything. "at way it was easy to record anything, anytime. "at’s the best thing about having your own space too, of course: we can just set the whole show up and leave it.
AS: Are things fairly set-and-forget once they’re set up or are you constantly moving things around and changing things?
CD: It depends. "ese guys have a di!erent approach to each instrument, depending on the song. Having said that, for the most part it’s guitar, bass and drums so we’ll generally cut those #rst, starting with the drums. While we’re doing that, Billie’s always laying down a scratch guitar track. When the drums are #nished we
Green Day’s ‘clubhouse’ in Oakland, CA has been a secret warehouse hideaway for the band for some time now. But a new (second-hand) SSL console recently
changed all that and now the place is a full-blown studio.Text: Andy Stewart
welcome to jingletown
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usually remove everything, then typically go back and knock out guitars.
AS: Does the band ever track whole takes together?
CD: Yeah, we do. Although, we’re now getting into the habit of going back and getting right into recreating unique sounds at that point anyway. So o$en the original guitar performances aren’t used. A$er we listen back Billie will o$en say, “Hey you know what? I think I might use the other amp for that.” So yeah, even when the band tracks as one, most of the time we still re-cut Billie’s part again anyway.
AS: You never run several amps together so you have choices later?
CD: No, we’ve never really done that. But that’s not to say we won’t in the future! "e guys have this little side project band called "e Foxboro Hot Tubs and on that record we did everything completely live in the studio. "at was really cool and spontaneous. "e guys basically wrote the songs right there and then and tracked them live, which was a blast.
AS: "ey’re all obviously great players. I can’t imagine that they couldn’t just get in there and nail most things pretty easily.
CD: "ey can and they do. "ey absolutely do.
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, (BANG!)AS: Can we talk a bit more about your typical recording process for a Green Day song, assuming there’s such a thing? For instance, do they usually start with click tracks etc?
CD: Yeah, I mean if it’s a song they know the tempo of, we’ll usually setup a click… feel it, li$ it up or down a few notches and get it right. A lot of stu! on the recent record [21st Century Breakdown] was played to a click track, but not right the way through ’cause the tempo o$en changed in the chorus. Butch Vig [who produced the album] had a little metronome app on his Mac that was really cool. He would just sit and tap it while we were playing the core tempos for di!erent parts of the song.
AS: So how do you record the famous Green Day drum kit? Do you have a re#ned approach by now or is the sound of it still open to interpretation?
CD: I don’t really go for ‘a sound’ but perhaps what you’re referring to – what you’re hearing – is just Tré beating the drums the way he does. He’s got the heaviest hands I’ve heard in my life. "ere are certain drums we just can’t use because he hits so damn hard, which is a good thing and a bad thing… bad for his snare drums that’s for sure. We use Dunnett drums these days that are just amazing. "ey’re perfect for him. My general approach to the kit is simply to capture it as a whole.
AS: With conventional mics and setups?
CD: Pretty much. On the recent 21st Century
Breakdown record I double-miked the toms, which was certainly di!erent to what I’d done before. It was an experiment really, just to see how it sounded. Turned out I absolutely loved it. I’ll probably continue to run with that idea for a while.
AS: Keeping the bottom skins on I assume?
CD: Yep, Tré’s a big double-head kind of guy, so they were all miked much like you would a snare drum. You just %ip the phase. "e di!erence in the double-miked sound was particularly noticeable on the %oor tom. It was just huge sounding, almost too big – so much more sustain, particularly when the drum was in tune. Actually, in reality, it was a bit of a problem because the note was o$en too long for the speed of the song. "e %oor tom was just going boooooom and by the time the sub #nally calmed down it was like, “Wow, that’s a lot of low end!” No need to EQ-in extra bottom-end that’s for sure.
AS: I guess it’s the same sort of mentality as two mics on a guitar amp, where you can pretty much EQ the amp with just fader positions…
CD: Exactly, and that’s how we do the guitars too. If there’s no reason to use EQ, I don’t. On guitars, I’ll always put an SM57 up. It’s my standard reference mic, like NS-10s in speaker land. I just put it on and go, ‘Oh okay, if I put a [AKG] 414 or a [Sennheiser MD] 421 on this I won’t have to touch a thing!’ I typically do that with the snare drum too just to get going.
ROOM TO MOVEAS: Does Tré’s drum kit get miked to hell in terms of room mics?
CD: Certainly on this last record I kind of went overboard because we had the space. We were at Ocean Way in LA. It was my #rst time working there so I sel#shly put up more room mics than I #gured we’d ever need. It was more about me listening to the room really than needing the ambient channels, but I didn’t go completely nuts. But funnily enough, when I eventually gave Chris [Lord Alge] the three stereo pairs to use in the mix, I think he used all of them in the end. For fun we %ew some RCA ribbon mics way up in the air just for an e!ect, which was kinda cool.
"e main recording space at Ocean Way is deceptive – where you put your mics in the room isn’t where you might expect. It’s a great drum room, almost the perfect room. It just sounds so good – live and big. "e funny thing about it is, listening to the drum kit, I almost got caught o! guard because it didn’t initially sound as big to me as it did later. My #rst reaction was to stick my mics at the back of the room, against the advice of my assistant who was going, “Umm… I don’t think you want to go that far.” He was right… the #rst setup sounded god-awful – just too big. About halfway into the room was the sweet spot.
AS: Were the mics always facing the kit?
CD: All apart from the two RCAs that faced
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sideways, with their nulls facing the kit.
AS: Do you compress the kit while you’re tracking, or is Tré more of a Dave Grohl-type drummer, where there’s so much consistency in his performance you don’t need to compress things much?
CD: "at’s exactly what it’s like. I used to try to compress the kick and snare drum but there’s actually no need to at all. "ere were a couple of slower songs on 21st Century that we compressed for e!ect, but only a$er the recording. For the most part, given the nature of Green Day’s songs, Tré plays like a machine so I tend to just let the drum kit do what it does.
AS: What about signal chains for the kit? I noticed a Neve BCM10 in the other room earlier… is that ever called into action?
CD: BCM10s are usually involved, for sure, whether it’s here or at Ocean Way. Let’s see, on the last record I used a Vintek 1073 preamp for the snare drum, the kick drum chain was just a Chandler TG channel, overheads were 1073s run through these crazy solid-state Pultec-styled EQs called Lang Peq-2s. Toms were all API pres. Room mics were all through 1073s.
AS: Why APIs on the toms?
CD: "ey’re punchier – at least that’s how I hear them – and they’re nice and clear. I know everyone’s got their own take on all that stu!, but with Tré, because his performance is usually dominated by hi-hat, kick, snare and a lot of
cymbals for a good portion of the songs, when they’re hit, the toms need to be absolutely crystal clear.
AS: How do you control cymbal spill into other mics during the recording – Tré seems to be really smashing some of that stu!. Does that ever pose a problem? I’m presuming you’re not putting fake cymbals up or anything like that?
CD: No, though it would be fun to try that with him. But it works out. Tré – and this goes for all the guys – really cares about the process, so if something hinders it or crosses the line I’ll typically say something like, “Hey, I think that cymbal’s just too hot,” and he’ll go, “Cool, I’ve got a quieter one… try this.”
Again, like the guitar collection out there in the next room, Tré’s cymbal collection could quite literally #ll this room, and in all honesty and on a very serious note, he’s got a reason why he buys each one and he knows how each one sounds. He’s got quiet cymbals and even quiet hi-hats, which he needs because when he plays he generally murders them, and they used to get into the snare mic constantly.
I found a really great mic to eliminate the hi-hat spill though, which you should try yourself: the Telefunken M80. It’s a vocal mic: it’s super tight, it’s bumped on the top end – though not in an obnoxious way at all – and it’s nice and smooth. We did a shootout one day and Tré was like: “Hey let’s try this one with the fancy grille on it.” It
“If the phase isn’t quite right in your two mic setup, my trick is to nudge the cabinet around. It’s easier than messing with your mics all the time.
”
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was the obvious winner on the day and I haven’t looked back since…
Generally I #nd spill is less of a problem when you don’t try and close mic everything too much. I know that sounds ironic, but my general approach with his kit is not necessarily go for a very close mic sound where everything has got its individual sound and you have to worry about bleed. I tend to go a bit more aerial with my mics and overheads become more like spot mics. If you hear him playing, he’s taking all these weird contraptions and forming a balanced sound from it, and that’s really what I’m trying to reproduce – a balanced sound.
AS: What do you do with that remarkable kick drum of his?
CD: I do an inside mic (a Shure Beta 52) and an outside mic (a Neumann U47FET) – pretty standard stu!. I also use one of those Yamaha [SKRM-100] sub-kick things… the 47 is usually back about four and half feet from the kick drum.
AS: Four and a half feet?
CD: Yep, and with no ‘tent’ protection or anything like that. It works out #ne. "e kick drum Tré used for a great portion of the last record was this big 24-inch Gretsch, with no front head. I’m not a fan of doing that; I love front heads on kick drums. I like the resonance they produce. But this particular drum just had this magical quality. It was enormous sounding.
BILLIE JOE’S GUITARSAS: What about guitars? Some of the sounds you and Billie get are pretty huge. Is there a lot of complexity to what you do to them?
CD: No, I don’t do much. "ere’s no science behind it – nothing weird going on as you’ve probably surmised by now. It’s all about his amps. "ey’re amazing. He’s got these old Marshalls that we’ve been running of late: a 100W cab and a 300W cab. On the 100W cab I’ve been running a [Shure SM] 57 and a Royer 121 together, right next to each other, doing what we talked about earlier; blending the two together to get the tone we wanted. On the last record I was also summing the two of these together to tape. And those two were going through the Chandler Germanium stu!. Bitchin’ EQs those.
On the other cab were a C-414 and a 57 amp’ed through Neve 1073s, and on that particular cabinet I lucked out. I didn’t have to use any EQ, just the two mics. "at was it. "e sound was bigger and heavier… I used to look at guitars when I was younger and think, ‘you’ve gotta shape the sound and stu! ’. "at’s what got me in trouble in my early recording days. When I listen back to that stu! now I go, “Oh, what was I doing?” I was overcomplicating a sound to try and achieve something.
Basically, if the amp’s good enough, all you’ve got to do is make sure you’re hitting the speaker right, capturing the notes right and getting a big sound. I certainly don’t want to take what Billie plays and make it sound smaller. You just want to recreate
Chris Dugan: We always track with cans. We did a funny thing with U' at Abbey Road once. U' – as you probably know – like to record with wedges, which was completely different for us. We tried it but quickly discovered that we’re definitely die-hard headphone fans. It just was a very odd experience for the guys. They weren’t into it at all! Live they now use in-ears too, so wedges are completely off the scene for Green Day… the last world tour was the first time everyone wore in-ears and they loved it.In the studio they’ve got little mixers but to be honest I’m not too sure who likes what in their cans now. Billie likes a lot of guitars, I know that much, and lots of drums. It’s usually up way too loud for me to even put their cans on my head.
RECORDING IN CANS
The ‘Trident’ control room has lots of toys including a ProTools HD rig with Apogee converters, Focusrite, Neve, UREI, Langevin, Altec, Avalon and dbx gear in the racks, and Ampex and Otari tape machines. There’s also an immaculate Neve BCM *# (pictured left).
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an amp’s sound without colouring it. Just capture it with a blend of two mics – works for me. And one thing, if the phase isn’t quite right in your two mic setup, my trick is to nudge the cabinet around. It’s easier than messing with your mics all the time.
AS: Do you compress Billie’s guitars much?
CD: Not at all. Chris [Lord Alge] might during mixing, but I certainly don’t. I’ve never really been a fan of it. I know some people do and totally love it. A good easy reference for me is when you’re able to look at the tracking in ProTools and see the waveform of the guitar amp sitting there chugging along and it’s all solid level. Mostly I don’t see or hear the need to compress, and I don’t want to make anything even remotely smaller than it should be. When a song’s slower and mellower we might only put compression on the guitars as an e!ect to create a neater sound. On the big, distorted, heavy sound though there’s no real need to. It’s the same with drums. Unless it’s for e!ect I don’t use any.
BASS MIKEAS: What about bass? Is this yet another example of a pretty straightforward setup?
CD: Mike has a very unique sound. He’s got a tough gig man – he’s gotta cut through all those guitars and a wall of drum kit, so he likes a lot of bite.
AS: He seems to like to almost pull the strings o! when he plays, from what I’ve seen…
CD: He likes a lot of 1 – 2kHz.
AS: Is there a lot of distortion work going on or not?
CD: It’s funny, when we demo I distort his bass, but when we track a record, I don’t. CLA [Chris Lord Alge] told me he’s got this really cool trick he does to Mike’s tone where he runs it %at through a 1073 for some extra bite. I’ve heard it soloed out during the mix and it’s never really distorted, but it ends up working.
What I try to do is never go too far; that’s always my concern. So I play it kind of on the conservative side. We’ll always have a miked cabinet and a DI – a Vintek – and both these channels typically go through a Distressor. "e amp usually has a Neumann U47FET and a [Sennheiser] 421 on it. Normally I don’t use a two-mic setup on Mike’s bass cabinet but on the recent record it worked. "ere were a lot of phase problems with those two mics though. It was tough getting them set to go.
AS: Because the 421’s capsule is set back from the grille?
CD: Yeah exactly, it’s a little deceptive… the 421 has this big housing but the capsule is actually set back a bit. I had to pull the mic apart to #gure that out! When we #nally got it right, it sounded great. Again, like how we perceive API gear to operate; that 421 has gotta capture that bite, that clack and clatter. I’m using the U47 to capture the nice warm tone. It worked out perfectly on 21st Century.
AS: Does Mike have much distortion in the amp sound itself?
CD: Not really, no. He overloads his preamp through an SPT, and he’s got this old P-bass that’s super hot – a very loud bass. I make sure the DI channel is as clean as possible; I certainly don’t add to the distortion levels. He could be overdriving his preamp naturally ’cause he plays really hard in fast songs. "e guy’s forearm is the size of my calf, he picks so hard for so long. Live he runs through a little booster pedal in parts where it does get a little crunchy.
AS: It sounds like the band doesn’t really require much in the way of preamp gain anyway!
CD: We use a lot of pads!
VOCAL CHAINAS: What about Billie Joe’s vocals? What does he sing into generally here?
CD: On this last record he sang into a Neumann U47 going through a Chandler LTD-1 and the Retro 176.
AS: My favourite compressor at the moment...
CD: Yeah, and I’ll tell you, since this record – and we did this on another project too – I run bass through it… I’m gonna forever run bass through it, they’ve sold me on these.
&"ST CENTURY MIXINGAS: Chris Lord Alge mixed 21st Century. Did you converse or have much to do with him before he got hold of it?
Chris Dugan at the J-series SSL.
The Neve BCM *#.
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American Idiot tour. We were just kinda all living here at that stage and the Trident console that’s in the studio up the hall replaced an SSL 4k. In the control room we’re in here there used to be this tiny little digital board.
AS: So in terms of this place, is it your job to organise what gear goes in here?
CD: Yeah, pretty much. "e guys have the ultimate say, of course – they’re the owners of the place a$er all. Anything that we get or install I put to them #rst and they say yes or no. We try and not go crazy, but again it certainly helps that they’re into the recording process – they love this place! You #nd some artists who really don’t care about the geeky stu! but we can geek out and talk about this stu! for hours!
AS: You mentioned the other day when we #rst spoke here that you’re going to open Jingletown to the public? I imagine that will change things a bit.
CD: Yeah! I’m pretty excited about it to be honest.
AS: What prompted that idea?
CD: Well, when the guys are on tour for 18 months at a time, and then take a break to decompress for a while the place basically sits idle. "e option this time around was to either shut down the power, turn everything o! and lock the place up again, or open it and, you know… let our friends from the Bay Area have access to it. "ere was a time when we were tracking the last record in LA that some friends of ours needed a studio but unfortunately we just weren’t set up. "ere was stu! everywhere
CD: No. I don’t know what he likes actually, and frankly I don’t want to know. "at way I can just do what I do, you know? "ere’s enough pressure knowing it’s going to him already! It’s like, ‘Shit, I’ve gotta make this sound good; I’m not gonna skimp on anything’. To know that he likes a particular mic on something would only drive me more nuts.
I was there for a lot of the mixes and hung out with him. I was doing some last-minute editing while they were mixing in the other room and he’s a fun guy to work with and talk shop with – like we’re doing now. I thought maybe I’d given him too many room mics – too much of the same thing – but he was really into what I gave him. He likes what I do, so it’s worked out great.
JINGLETOWN’S EQUIPMENT LISTAS: Are you mostly recording straight into ProTools here?
CD: Yeah. Although the plan is to hopefully start using tape machines again [Jingletown has at least two Otari MTR-90 MkIIs]. We did on the last record with mixed results. It’s a funny thing; I’ve always been a fan and always wanted to utilise tape but on this last record we did a shootout and everybody chose the digital recording over the tape. I think the preference changes depending on the song too. "ese were fast songs where we needed transients and de#nition. On the slower stu! we ended up using tape for the drums and bass.
AS: When did you get the J-Series SSL?
CD: As soon as we got o! the road from the "e
here basically – amps and fancy guitars and stu!… that you don’t really want other people particularly having access to. It’s your own personal stu!, you know?
So we were sort of kicking ourselves at the missed opportunity for them and us. It would have been great to let our buddies in and use the place and get something out of it.
Before this place became a full-blown studio this was just our clubhouse you see. "at room next door had probably twenty motorcycles in it, two of which were dismantled. "e other room out there was the jam room and we even had cars out the front that we were working on. Now that we actually use most of the space for recording it’s a bit more of a business in here. "at’s not to say it won’t turn into that again at some point…
Prior to us moving in here and setting up the clubhouse – when we were in here working on American Idiot as clients – we kind of commandeered the place. We got so comfortable here in fact that we even had go-kart races in the carpark... it was pretty insane.
AS: What?
CD: "e go-kart races were amazing. You’re so close to the ground: you’re fast, you’re sliding… even the owner got involved. He’d bring all his interns out and make everyone move their cars and built these elaborate tracks.
Since it became Green Day’s clubhouse, we’ve always included some sort of fun into our work – some sort of release. We’re still doing that in here now with the motorcycles and everything. Everyone’s got a bike…
The main recording room at the rear of the complex is tied to the ‘Trident’ control room (which is behind the photographer). Here, drinks are served at the bar under the stars and stripes.
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Sometimes you wonder if you’re an idiot, and other times it seems by o&cial decree
that you’re dumb as they come. I (being a Libran) am always weighing up the two alternatives with much consideration, but a$er completing a recent project the votes are in and it’s a clear majority. I am a Wally.
You can try to be smart: plan, research, discuss and make decisions based on experience, but o$en it’s not until later that you realise just how wrong and misguided you were. I recently recorded an album where each of these so-called considerations combined to build a ‘thing’ that grew and grew until eventually it was out of control. Sometimes the sum of the parts #t together to make a creature that behaves beyond the force of your will. “It’s alive!”
In my teens the humble four-track portastudio was a sophisticated device and it took my remedial brain some time to comprehend how four tracks of audio #tted on to a compact cassette. To the naïve soul of a genuine adolescent, unquanti#able joy was possible by committing your genius – in the form of verbal expletives – to tape, ejecting the cassette, turning
it over and then listening to what you’d just recorded backwards. Now that was a revelation.
Dropping in and out, bouncing down and mixing using the primitive EQ amongst a sea of hissing tape noise was (and still is) a complicated, focused and high-risk operation. Decisions were permanent – there was no turning back. No undo function. Many an urban classic was ruined when, in a con%icted synaptic understanding of the technology and what was happening musically, all or part was erased by that #nal overdub. And sometimes the machine literally chewed the tape. Recording on a four-track recorder was serious stu! and sometimes it meant the life or death of your music!
NO GOING BACKBy comparison, today’s digital audio workstations o!er vastly more tracks, a whole range of options with which to edit, manipulate and automate your material, and in doing so give a much broader framework for the creation of recorded music. But is all this liberty a good thing?
Let’s get one thing abundantly clear: I’m not here to propose that ‘young people of today have too
This is what can happen when the music and the medium take over…Text: James Wilkinson
PRODUCTION ABDUCTION
TUTORIAL
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many audio recording choices and they should learn to cut their teeth recording local church sermons on a Fisher Price cassette recorder with one hand tied behind their back’. Not at all. Rather, I’d like to simply relate a recent experience of what can happen when a recording starts to grow beyond your capacity to manage it – let alone mix it – in the hope that others might learn from my mistakes.
TO INFINITY & BEYONDFor the obsessive type, driven to attain his or her own unique standard of achievement, the world of digital recording, with its ability to in#nitely #nesse a performance or sound, is a powerful and sometimes dangerous proposition. Around the planet, as you read these words, there are solitary types hunched over laptops, scrutinising, dreaming and constructing elaborate works of art that no-one will ever hear, engulfed in a process that enslaves them to work and rework their idea forever and ever and ever. I for one support these individuals in their quest but there’s a juncture where the technology of composition becomes the platform for addiction, and anything addictive is potentially unlawful!
A recent experience of mine illustrates just how easy it can be for an engineer or musician to get tangled in the digital recording process – what follows here is a re%ection on a recent project where I was employed to record, edit and mix an album of 13 songs.
NO-LIMIT ‘'%s"e artist is a friend of many years. He studied classical music in Australia and overseas, releasing a double CD of his work a few years ago – one written for contemporary classical ensemble and the other a piano concerto – which I helped to edit and mix. "e current album is a collection of original pop tunes, some of which were written a decade ago, inspired at times by "e Beach Boys, "e Beatles, Stereolab and others. "e music is positive, elaborate and densely composed with many additional instrumental and vocal parts built around a six-piece band. His recordings (although acoustic in nature) are subject to a lot of re-interpretation by computer. "e brief was to engineer the recording at a studio a$er which he’d take it home to audition and edit the takes, followed by more studio overdubs and then mixing. Simple!
As the musical inspiration was albums mostly recorded in the ’60s we went for an approach that drew upon these recordings, choosing a studio that, in addition to being able to track the band live, had recording equipment similar to the era concerned. Plans to use a multitrack tape machine were swi$ly ditched when it broke down, and the entire album was recorded instead directly to ProTools HD. Being able to employ a large session band (like "e Wrecking Crew as "e Beach Boys did) wasn’t an option #nancially, so all additional parts, except the string arrangements, were done as separate overdubs.
For overdubs the approach was to record each instrument with both near and ambient microphones, and use the natural acoustic to blend the ensemble by controlling how near or far the instrument sounded in the soundstage. My intention was to fabricate an ensemble and its surrounds using only my genius and ProTools HD, the only problem being… I am no genius.
To counteract the limitations of 64 simultaneous tracks in ProTools 8 LE (which the composer used at home), each multitrack recording – from the original tracking to
overdubs – was done in a separate session. A stereo mix of the completed parts and a click track were used as the basis for recording all the additional overdubs, and to keep things clearly de#ned, three ‘groups’ were established to separate the di!erent elements: Band, Orchestra and Vocals. Dividing the musical elements into these categories made it easier to work on; it also meant that there were three overdub sessions associated with each of the 13 songs, or in all, nearly 40 independent sessions. When it came to mixing, these three overdub sessions would then be merged into one on a ProTools HD system.
GROUP SESSIONS"e #rst tracking session involved #ve days recording with the musicians playing together in the studio. "e band consisted of drum kit, electric bass, two electric guitars, two keyboards, vibraphone and guide vocals. A$er recording the ensemble and some basic overdubs, roughly 36 tracks for each song had been recorded in ProTools, or 468 separate audio tracks for the album.
"e second session was all about vocals. "e songs had been auditioned and edited into shape by this point, to which we recorded lead vocals, vocal overdubs and a choir of #ve singers. "e largest total of tracks for the vocal session on one song was 32. Now we were sitting at around 780 separate audio tracks for the album… and climbing. (I would have le$ the vocals till last, given the complexity of the music, but the main female vocalist was leaving the band so we had no choice.)
Session 3 involved overdubbing guitar, keyboards, piano and percussion, using at least two tracks for each individual part. Total in all: around 24 tracks per song, bumping us up to four #gures – over 1000 tracks for the album.
Session 4 was recorded over two days and it was big – with clarinets, saxophones, %utes, piano, percussion, vibraphone, trombones and trumpets all tracked separately. A #ve-piece string ensemble sounded fantastic using a Blumlein pair of ribbon microphones, but again, no less than two mics were deployed and recorded for each instrument, with the total track count for the larger songs for this session alone comprising over 60 tracks. Is anyone adding all this up?
"e #$h and #nal session was arranged to re-record some bass parts with the band’s new bass player, backing vocals with the band’s new keyboard and vocalist, and other sundry instruments. On average about 16 tracks were added to each song during this session, and in total the album now consisted of about 1500 individual tracks.
I know it might sound a little weird to be adding the track counts of each song together to create one large number like this, but that’s just the point. I wasn’t, and that was the problem. I was aware that the sessions were getting large but I was also determined to see my original concept carried through regardless, rather than change tack mid-course away from what was an ever-increasing track count and workload.
LOSING TRACKIn total all the larger songs were pushing 170 tracks, which although well within the 200-odd track limit of a ProTools HD2 system, were certain to generate a major time crunch given there was only one person to prep them into shape – me. If, for example (as was pointed out later during the mixing sessions) only one minute was spent on each track – and let’s face it, who only spends one minute on a track
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– just editing and auditioning all the tracks on one song would take about three hours to cover every element in the mix. Add to this, fades, edits, beat correction, re-pitching and anything else that might be an issue, multiply that by the album’s 13 tracks and it was going to take a minimum of three days just to review the material we’d recorded, and in reality, more like a week! We set aside two weeks to compile and pre-mix the sessions, but even this turned out to be a gross underestimate. At the end of 12 long days I’d only addressed the fundamentals, i.e.: is everything in order and ready to go? And what hasn’t been conveyed thus far makes these technical issues at hand even more complicated.
HOUSE OF CARDSIn making an album, the prospect of success or failure most o$en hangs in fragile balance. From experience the themes of money, creativity and personal relationships are central to any project’s success. If one or all of these elements are missing it’s not uncommon for everything to be compromised or, at worst, laid waste. "is project took over two years to complete, and two years is a long time to keep up the momentum of a record, as a lot of unexpected things happen in that time. When it came to do the majority of the editing and mixing, not surprisingly a lot of the sessions had become ‘creative works in progress’. "e composer had re-worked some of the music into sound collages using and e!ecting material from di!erent sessions, and as a result there were now two new songs on the album (making a total of 15). "ere had also been a lot of doubling of parts using di!erent takes (which pushed one song to 275 tracks!) and various versions made of the same session with less than explicit names. Files were missing or spread across four di!erent hard drives and Audiosuite processing had overwritten the original sessions’ regions. Politely put, it was a total mess.
For better or worse, the logic that underwrites computers is not always conducive to the needs of the creative artist, and simple things – like what you name your session – can sometimes be the di!erence between mistakenly deleting or keeping your work; every bit as dangerous as those old four-track cassettes. But when you’re in the thick of a creative mood, #le management is not always at the forefront of one’s creative mind.
Tape machines have time and track limits and musicians can only play for so long, but theoretically you could press record on your computer and, provided there was the disc space, keep it rolling until the end of time (except that there would of course be no-one le$ to do the overdubs). Tape degrades. Musicians die. Meanwhile a recording made on a computer will exist in its pristine state – in theory –
forever. So how do you say: “stop, it’s #nished!” when the digital medium perpetually promotes your unbridled desire to keep recording, improving upon and revising the last improvement of an improvement?
With a ProTools system at home, my friend could audition, edit and add to any of the album’s parts throughout the project’s development, and rightly so – it’s his music! But, from my end, as the engineer, what this added was a great amount of uncertainty as the process became completely %uid – what you’d just completed could well come back with new parts to include the next day. Add to this the analogue domain of large format mixing consoles, dynamic processing and e!ects – i.e., mixing in a room of non-recallable devices – and the romanticism and ‘amazing sound’ of a classic analogue studio quickly becomes irrelevant in the face of just dealing with the immense amount of work at hand.
In addition to the unforseen issues, my desire to recreate an ensemble using close and ambient mics was also problematic and short sighted. Not because of how it was recorded or some other technical issue – the overriding factor was that there simply wasn’t enough time to mix! Instead, other elements needed time spent more urgently, and a similar result could have been achieved by summing the ensemble parts as they were recorded, saving time on mixing later.
MIX MAYHEMHaving lots of stereo recordings was di&cult to include in the mix too. With so many tracks and layers of sound in the arrangements, #nding a place to put something between the two speakers was surprisingly challenging. It had a lot to do with the arrangements, but how many glorious full-range stereo recreations of a piano can you have when there are three of them all playing together? And if they’re also competing with another #ve stereo keyboards, what then? Next time I’ll be recording in mono and mixing in stereo.
In retrospect I’d mix the album completely on a computer and forget about mixing in the analogue domain given what I now know of my friend’s process – although in this case a four-track portastudio would have imposed appropriate limitations! It suits him to be able to redress anything, anytime and continue to review until he’s satis#ed. For a while there I thought the process and its deadlines would limit his urges to keep #nessing the music, but like any true creative, he just kept on keeping on making the record he wanted to make, and who am I to tell him how, for the true success or failure of the work lies only with those whose music it is. "e rest is incidental.
"e moral of this tale is not so much about song arrangement and artistic limitation, it’s really about simply understanding the process and learning from your mistakes. Mine were several and varied, but possibly the greatest single mistake I made was to let the channel count climb rapidly without any real understanding of how much work it would present later. I also misread the appropriate application of technology given the needs of the artist, and that digital multi-tracking’s many choices would provide us options to the point of paralysis. De#ning sounds during the tracking session and printing them to a minimum of tracks might sound like an old fashioned and limiting concept to some – it did to me at the time – but ironically it’s turned out to be more relevant now than ever before!
“ How do you say: “Stop, it’s finished!” when the
digital medium perpetually promotes your unbridled desire
to keep recording!
”
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AT ventures into the world of beats, rap… and megaphones. Brad Watts talks to hip-hop exponent, Leigh Ryan, about the making of his latest collaboration.
Text: Brad Watts
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Recently, I dropped in on Australian hip-hop producer, Leigh Ryan, more commonly (and no doubt
more a!ectionately) known as ‘Plutonic Lab’. "e reason for my visit: a nicely cra$ed hip-hop album that arrived on my desk a month or so ago that’s a collaboration with American hip-hop artist, Garrett Dutton, a.k.a. G-Love (the frontman for G. Love & Special Sauce). "e talents of the pair combine old-school hip-hop with G-Love’s even older-school slide guitar and harmonica in%uences. It’s a potent yet refreshing hybrid; a bit like the Stereo MCs sleeping over at the White Stripes’ house for the weekend (even though it sounds like the Stripes just broke up). "e album is dubbed Moonshine Lemonade, and should be available right about the time you’re reading this.
LEMON AIDBrad Watts: What’s with the “lemonade” backing vocals on Party [track two on the album]? "ey’re brilliant.
Leigh Ryan: Oh yeah, G-Love’s got a history of throwing lemonade into the crowd at gigs you see. He had an album called Lemonade, and a track called Lemonade, so while we were brainstorming titles for the album we came up with that. "ere were some real shockers in there, but as soon as I saw the Moonshine Lemonade title I was like, “"at’s the shit, we should do that.” So it was just inevitable that we’d have ‘lemonade’ BVs at some point.
And that little skit at the end of the song there [Leigh pointing out the last bit of track two]: G-Love sent through a bunch of di!erent skits not knowing if they’d #t in – I just sampled that little thing in a$er the track.
BW: How long did it take you to put all this together Leigh?
LR: I reckon we were hand-balling stu! around for #ve or six months. I’m normally a bit quicker than that, but G-Love was on tour constantly, which slowed the process up a bit. If I’ve got someone in the studio with me I’m usually pretty quick ’cause we can just go hard. "en again, I’m also always juggling di!erent projects simultaneously. About the time I #nished the G-Love record, the following week I went into the same mastering suite and #nished another album with a guy from Sydney called Dialectrix, which was more of a traditional hip-hop record. We’re all label-mates from Obese Records you see. I’m sort of their in-house producer for all sorts of di!erent records now, as well as doing my own thing. "en I’ve got a group called Muph and Plutonic – we’ve done a few records together. "at project is the main act that gets me out on tour and lets me do fun stu! like festivals. In the meantime I’m always working on recordings.
BW: How o$en are you on the road?
LR: It all depends. For the Muph and Plutonic stu! we’ll do spot shows when there isn’t a current release. When there is we’ll do a 34-date tour for that record. It depends on the lifespan of the record. At the moment I’m doing a lot of di!erent things: I’m doing the Good Vibrations Festival, which has Erykah Badu playing at it, and I’m playing drums for Koolism – I’m doing that national tour in February. "ere’s always something. I’m trying to keep my #ngers in a lot of pies I guess.
BW: A shrewd policy.
LR: Yeah, when I was drumming in bands I’d be working with all these di!erent heads. But then shit would suddenly fold and you’d #nd yourself back at square one again. A$er you do that a couple of times you realise you should start building a production career instead of going from one band to the next.
MASCHINE CONTROLBW: Can you show us the inner workings of your studio – it seems pretty well set up? What’s the usual work%ow?
LR: "ere are a few di!erent ways we make tracks here. Lately I’ve been relying on Native Instruments’ Maschine. I’ve had that for a year or so and it’s become a bit of a nerve-centre for me.
BW: Were you doing the Akai MPC thing before Maschine came along?
LR: Actually no. I came from using Ensoniq ASR-10s. I never did get into MPCs even though I was obviously aware of them. I was more into keyboard samplers. I don’t know why that is ’cause I’m a drummer, so it doesn’t really make sense. But the ASR was great. One of the things I liked about it – and what I tried to keep doing when I moved to computers for sampling – was being able to map a sample across the whole keyboard range quickly. I’ve made tracks where I have a single sample, but I make the entire song by using it in di!erent ranges and triggering it in di!erent ways. Before, I’d chop up things solely on the ASR. On other things I’d do some of the drum programming #rst and then put live kit over it for #lls and cymbals. In fact, with most programmed drums I’ll put real hats over the top just to give it a more human %avour.
With this track for example [Leigh plays me a track from Moonshine Lemonade] the template of the song was based on the bass line. "en I added a guitar part, some Wurlitzer and we were pretty much there. My go-to instruments are usually bass, guitars, Wurly, and some synth – either from samples or real synths. It’s easier now I have a decent bedroom setup.
BW: I notice the Allen & Heath ZED-R16 console there with the Firewire connection. "at looks like a much easier proposition than the console and audio interface scenario.
LR: Yeah, everything’s patched in and ready to go. "en, because it’s a Firewire desk, anything I have running can automatically be patched to Cubase for recording. It saves me heaps of setup time. Plus, I can send back to the desk from Cubase for mixing on the board. For example, I have the [Empirical Labs] Fatso Jr permanently patched into it. So with vocals I can run them through a send in Cubase back into the desk, and then back into another Cubase channel. Even running the EQ section like a plug-in is really useful. It’s so versatile.
BW: I assume all your outboard is patched in too?
LR: Yeah, the [Roland] Space Echo and the [Emu] SP12 are patched in and ready to go. I just have to turn them on and they’re immediately there on e!ects sends. With the Space Echo in particular, because that’s coming back in on a channel, it gets recorded on its own channel so I can capture little manipulative delay things. "e Avalon in the rack there [Leigh points to the VT-737SP] is used mainly for vocals, and the Universal Audio LA610 for pretty much everything else – it’s even my guitar amp.
BW: Do you use the Emu SP12 much?
LR: Yeah, but mainly as a sound shaper. I don’t sequence on it anymore. I just feed stu! into it from records or whatever to get that crunch, and then put it back into Maschine and sequence from there. It’s got that characteristic 12-bit sound – much the same as the SP1200, which came out a couple of years later. It’s all there to get that gritty quality happening.
BW: And Cubase is your DAW of choice?
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LR: Yeah, Cubase is the guts of everything, whereas Garrett uses Logic and GarageBand. Maschine runs as a plug-in inside Cubase so it’s not like having an MPC where I’ve got to bounce it all. It can just run as a plug-in and if I need to change anything I don’t have to re-bounce anything; it just happens in real-time. But for #nal mixdowns I do end up rendering stu! from Maschine so I can do more editing of that audio.
BW: How #nnicky do you get with your editing of samples?
LR: I’m pretty fussy. A lot of it doesn’t look that fussy on-screen because I’ve bounced most stu! into stems, but yeah, I’d say I’m quite fussy. It still has to be pretty tight. Internally – within Cubase – I can get really exacting with my edits. I can then add stu! like the UAD2 e!ects. "e Mac is a quad-core and the UAD is just a Solo card but it’s doing the job nicely.
BW: Which Universal Audio plug-ins do you tend to call into action #rst?
LR: I use the Fairchild compressor a fair bit, which is great, and the Neve EQs get a solid workout too. I’m also using the plate reverb – the 140. I use that a lot if I’m not using convolution reverbs… especially for the Moonshine Lemonade record. I tried to use a lot of springs and plate reverbs on that album to give it more of a gritty, guitar echo-box %avour.
BW: Is all the guitar on the record played by Garrett, or yourself?
LR: G-Love plays the guitars. I’ll usually send him a framework of samples and drums and he puts a song over the top. I’ll work with that and edit it down or whatever… at other times I’ll just send stu! that’s already had guitars played onto it and he raps over it.
FILE EXCHANGEBW: Tell me, when you guys are sending stu! to each other via the web, how do you condense it down so you can easily swap #les… you mentioned Garrett’s working in Logic and GarageBand?
LR: Yeah, he’s o$en working on multiple projects, and during this record he was laying stu! into GarageBand in hotel rooms. Some of these recordings were great, especially some of the harp tracks – really gritty. We liked them so much in fact that we initially tried re-recording them, but of course that nearly always ends up losing its %avour completely! Consequently, a lot of the takes are straight from GarageBand, and here we’d swap straight stem #les. "at way you can’t really go wrong. One stem was pretty much guitar, vocal and harmonica all together. I had to go through and automate anything that was jutting out, to tame it a little bit, but even then I started feeling like a control freak. So I let a lot of stu! go for the sake of the performance, rather than just polish everything till the soul has been sucked out of it completely.
BW: And they’re all his vocals on the record?
LR: Yeah, I did some back-ups myself but it’s pretty much all Garrett. "e vocals were sometimes recorded in a studio using Neumanns and at other times it was just him in his hotel room using the MacPro laptop mic, which sounds amazing. I’ve even heard dudes record drum breaks through those mics and they’ve de#nitely got a cool sound to them. Actually, a friend was telling me recently they’ve stu!ed it up with the new MacPro laptops – apparently they’ve put the microphone right next to the fan. But I think the older ones – even up to as recently as a year ago – sound great.
BW: And the megaphone you’ve been using?
LR: Yeah, it’s just something I picked up; I thought I might be able to use it for something. It’s pretty di!erent. I keep suggesting to vocalists: “maybe you could go on stage with this?”
ATTRACTION TO HIP-HOPBW: What de#nes your attraction to hip-hop?
LR: Well, it’s not just the beats; it’s a lot of things. Using whatever’s at hand to make new music. "e MC’ing and DJ’ing are further elements, which begins to move toward rap. "ere’s de#nitely some very #ne lines there, but I can still consider what I’m doing with G-Love to be hip-hop mainly because of the way I’ve gone about putting it together.
We’ve a few copies of Moonshine Lemonade here. Join the AT Forum and mention the album and we’ll send you one!
Hard Wired: Leigh Ryan in the hot seat .
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REGULARS
"ey say that, ‘In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’, and nowhere is
this more appropriate than in the realm of the DIY Audio PC. In Issue 78 I discussed some of the ways your PC could be ‘throttled’ by an inappropriate BIOS or operating system setting designed to save energy, but which could also bring audio performance to its knees. Musicians can be excused for not automatically knowing such things, but what I do #nd hard to understand is how many think that building an audio PC is simply a matter of getting hold of a suitable list of parts and spending a couple of hours bolting them together.
I’ve lost count of the number of forum threads I’ve followed worldwide that start with a request for such a parts list, plus request for advice on how fast the processor needs to be, how much RAM is needed, how many hard drives, and so on. Remembering that the vast majority of forum posters are relative strangers to each other, it’s amazing that people are prepared to spend so much money on the advice of comparative strangers whose music-making requirements may be quite di!erent, especially since so many of these ‘internet experts’ have probably only built a single PC for themselves during the last couple of years.
"e reality for the professional audio PC builder is rather di!erent. Whenever a potentially desirable new CPU range appears they generally try at least several di!erent motherboards to partner it, in search of the one that’s most widely compatible with audio hardware and so$ware. Other components such as the PC case, PSU and graphics card are specially selected for their low acoustic noise contributions, while RAM is only sourced from the most reliable component manufacturers.
However, this is only the start. Once a new model in their range has been assembled, it’s torture-tested to weed out any weak components (you don’t want to #nd out you’ve been sent a faulty RAM stick halfway through an important project now do you?). During these tests CPU, graphics card and hard drive temperatures are also monitored to ensure they stay within safe
limits, while the cooling fans and their speeds are carefully adjusted to ensure this happens with minimum acoustic noise. I recently spotted one DIY builder complaining that his new PC was haunted, since it switched itself o! a$er an hour or two – in reality his CPU had probably overheated and powered itself down to avoid long-term damage.
Windows tweaks are no longer quite as critical as once they were to ensure best possible low-latency audio performance, but BIOS tweaks are becoming increasingly vital to avoid audio clicks, pops and glitches, particularly at low latency settings – they can make all the di!erence between disappointment and joy on a new build. "is is largely because mainstream computers are being designed to be ever more energy-e&cient. For the majority of users this is welcome news, but for musicians it means attempting to bypass increasingly more sophisticated schemes that change CPU frequency and voltage behind the scenes and result in short audio clicks during each changeover.
SANDY BRIDGE"e reason I mention all this now is that the battle#eld has just become a lot more complicated with the arrival of Intel’s new ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor range. A$er months of build-up this new 2nd generation Core i7 processor range is #nally here, and what a frustrating situation for the musician! O!ering huge potential improvements over its predecessors, and with a new socket and chipset to support them, initial reports showed excellent audio hardware/so$ware performance for the price, particularly from the Core i7-2600K model with four cores running at 3.4GHz (there was even more excitement when samples of this were easily overclocked to 4.4GHz!)
However, things went pear-shaped when it was discovered that this audio performance was very system-dependent – while one system worked extremely well from day one, many others managed worse audio results at lower latency than the previous #rst-generation Core i7 range, despite extensive low-level BIOS and driver tweaks. Even worse, my professional builder friends tell me
that low-latency audio performance can change radically between BIOS revisions, and not always for the better – sometimes an excellent audio performance can plummet when a ‘new and improved’ BIOS update is released.
Performance with well-established PCI audio interfaces has also been particularly badly hit on some motherboards, the reason being that the Intel P67/H67 chipsets found on new Sandy Bridge motherboards lack native PCI support, so motherboards manufacturers have been #tting their own choice of PCI Express to PCI Bridge chips. Rumours are already spreading that Intel is trying to kill the PCI slot by force. "e new P67/H67 chipsets o!er tighter integration with graphics cards, so further problems are half expected as video card manufacturers #nd new ways to optimise their wares at the expense of audio performance.
Sadly, making music is very low down on the ‘desirable’ list for PC component manufacturers, if at all, so although some specialist PC Audio companies have contacts within motherboard manufacturers so they can point out current audio problem areas and hopefully encourage future BIOS revisions that bene#t us all, just at the moment it looks like being a particularly rocky road for the Sandy Bridge DIY builder. You not only need to know which components work well and which don’t, but also the most appropriate BIOS revision, critical BIOS settings...
Overall, the Sandy Bridge o!ers huge potential for the musician, with excellent audio performance at low latency on some machines, but lack-lustre performance on others. If you’re thinking of building yourself a new PC for making music, I recommend you either do a lot more research than normal, and prepare for the occasional hiccup – such as Intel last month #nding a %aw in the four 3Gbps SATA ports on the Sandy Bridge chipset that may require all Sandy Bridge systems to be returned under warranty – or point your credit card at the professionals who have already successfully navigated their respective ways through the mine#eld and emerged grinning, if exhausted, on the other side.
PC AUDIOIntel’s new Sandy Bridge processors offer great potential for the musician, but they seem to be making life a lot more difficult for the DIY PC builder.Text: Martin Walker
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90211_ZEDad_AT.indd 1 26/5/10 9:21:58 PM
AT (*
It happened and it’s here. January 7th saw Apple inevitably bring point-and-click application
purchasing to OSX – a scenario that was previously the exclusive bastion of the iPhone/iPad/iPod/iOS platform. App Store is exactly what the name implies: a shopping mall of Mac applications. Like the iTunes Store that originally vended music, later expanding to include applications for the iPhone and iPod, App Store keeps a watchful eye over the applications you’ve downloaded. If an application needs updating, App Store lets you know, and like iOS applications, Snow Leopard-compatible applications downloaded from the App Store are inextricably linked to the machine they’re downloaded to. I discovered this purely by accident when I forwarded everyone in the o&ce a free virus checking application I’d downloaded using App Store (VirusBarrier Express). When VirusBarrier Express needed updating, my cohorts had to sign into the App Store with my Apple identi#cation in order to upgrade it. Hey, I was merely attempting to save a little bandwidth, but as it transpires, that free application was tethered to my machine.
WHISTLING DIXYWhile it may seem like Apple is pulling a swi$y and locking you into the apps you purchase (either those that cost money or the freebies), it makes a lot of sense for Apple and OSX so$ware developers. You see, if you cast your memory back to when the App Store didn’t exist, one could easily buy an application, then ‘lend’ it to somebody else with another Mac and nobody would be any the wiser – most especially, the application developer and vendor. "e practice became somewhat alarmingly known as ‘so$ware piracy’.
"e resulting impact of piracy is that so$ware manufacturers are forced to sell their wares at a price that will make up for the pirated copies that slip through the net (as it were). "is creates a vicious cycle in itself: the so$ware is expensive so more people ‘lend’ their friends a copy of the version they originally bought. "en, before you can say ‘Bit Torrent’ the so$ware manufacturer is out of business, your application ceases to be developed, and you can whistle it goodbye at your next operating system upgrade.
App Store could well be the answer to this tail chasing. Why? Well because the applications on App Store are linked to your Apple ID so you can’t disperse it amongst
your mates. Immediately the so$ware developer knows how many people have bought the application, and knows there are far less – if any – pirated copies %oating about. "e developer can then keep the price of that application much lower. It’s a win/win in anybody’s book. "e developer makes a living, and the users get so$ware they can a!ord. "is is the theory anyway.
LONG-LIFE APPSSo, as you might tell, I’m all for the App Store, primarily because I’m all for owning great so$ware and not having it reach a use-by date all too quickly. And just to keep this Apple advocacy on an ‘audionomic’ keel, I’ll point out just a few of the applications you’ll #nd on the App Store that will make your sound producing lifestyle a touch more productive.
A$er you’ve downloaded App Store (you’ll need Snow Leopard 10.6.6), head to the categories and choose ‘Music’. Yes, I’ll agree there’s some rubbish in there: Burp and Fart Piano for example (then I do love playing the Mission Impossible theme with fart noises – and ‘burp’ is really taking me places). On a more serious front, apps like Sound Converter will convert more sound #le formats than I knew existed for a scant $12.99, and if you’re into playing MP3 #les in public, Cadence BPM Analyzer Pro is excellent at a negligible $13.99. "en there are some weightier audio tools such as the Redmatica stable of audio helpers such as Auto Sampler – an app that will automatically play through a synth’s entire set of sounds, multisampling patches for use in the EXS24, Kontact, Structure, or Reason so$ samplers. And Keymap One – a brilliant instrument editor for EXS24, Kontact, Structure, and Reason. "is is a must-have app, especially if you keep sound libraries in varied formats. "ere are some great tools for creating beat-synced DJ sets too. MixTape Pro lets you drop #les straight from the desktop or iTunes into an arrangement window, beat-matching and syncing them perfectly for your private mix CDs – ideal for the not-so-talented record selectors amongst us (myself included). Hell, there’s even GarageBand for $18.
Download App Store and have a look. As more developers come on board it’s bound to become a bit of a one-stop shop.
REGULARS
MAC AUDIOMorsels on sale for a song at the App Store.Text: Brad Watts
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The Game Has Been Changed
COMING SOON...
Prepare to be Amazed
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JOECO BBR" BLACK BOX RECORDERThis unit will happily record all your gigs, even the disastrous ones!Text: Gareth Stuckey
I love live recording, and I’ve tried most of the methods out there. In my ‘Masters’ cupboard I have
most of the careers of Machine Gun Fellatio and George documented on all kinds of formats. Back in those days I was tracking to MiniDisc. I recorded My X-Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Has Got a Band for MGF’s platinum selling Paging Mr Strike live to MiniDisc at the Hopetoun in Sydney, before George bought a CD burner and I moved over to that format. Next came the Tascam DA38s, and finally the pinnacle – my Tascam MX2424.
I bought the first of these machines when they were the new cool thing. It’s served me well for 10 years and I’ve recorded countless shows and broadcasts with it: Make Poverty History, Thirsty Merc for Austereo and Nova, DVD releases of George, Dave McCormack and Lyrics Born, and generally punished it in every way possible (if airline baggage handling isn’t punishment I don’t know what is). Unfortunately, the MX2424 is getting to the point now where it’s just too far behind current technology. Even though they might work well and sound great, who has time to deal with SCSI discs and an unsupported GUI?
This is why I’m so excited about the new Black Box Recorder: it’s current technology, it’s small and light – as a portable rig should be – and the hard-drive is external to the unit, making the need to transfer files out of it a thing of the past.
NO BULLThe ‘Joe’ in JoeCo is none other than Joe Bull of Sadie fame – so from the outset there’s an implicit understanding that the Black Box Recorder should at least be half decent. And so it is.
The Black Box Recorder is aimed directly at the niche market of live recording. And having spent so much time doing just that, I’m well aware just how niche this market really is, and how specific its needs are. Sure, other manufacturers have units that can be used for live recording, but this is the only device I’ve seen that’s specifically designed for it.
WHAT IS IT EXACTLY?The BlackBox Recorder is a 24-track, 24-bit/96k recorder. To be clear – this unit is designed as a live recording unit only. It’s not a standard multitrack recorder, nor is it a DAW in any shape or form. There’s no overdubbing
capacity, you can’t punch in and there are certainly no onboard editing facilities. The unit just records tracks – from beginning to end – so you can import them into your DAW of choice afterwards and do with them what you will. The unit intentionally trades away complexity for simplicity – rare in this day and age – and with that trade-off comes a massive reduction in physical size. It’s 1RU only, and weighs just over a kilogram – extraordinary. There are no bells and whistles so consequently it’s rock solid – I left it recording overnight on more than one occasion, and came back to a full disc with no issues each time. On one occasion I even pulled the power on it a couple of hours in, just to see how it behaved – flawless – recording up to the moment I pulled the cord. Tick box.
The unit I’ve had with me on the road is the balanced version, the rear panel of which is comprised of six D-sub connections: three for the inputs, three for the outputs. There are other versions available too, offering digital inputs (in a variety of formats) and an unbalanced version that ships with looms so you can use the insert points on your console to record feeds from your FOH preamps. This allows for things like clubs offering an in-house live recording service the ability to have the setup patched in permanently, or for bands to perform a ‘virtual soundcheck’. The idea here is: record a short soundcheck, play it back off the machine through the insert return and continue tweaking to your heart’s content after the band’s left the room.
FAT $& DRIVESThe BBR1 runs with FAT32-formatted drives for the simple reason that it’s the only format that’s easily read by all computer systems. Drives connected to the Black Box will almost certainly be passed around to multiple users at some point so it’s vital everyone can read the data. The unit records Broadcast Wave Files (BWAVs) direct to your disk. You can choose the sample rate and bit depth, and then it just gets to work. One very cool point to note, given that live recordings are often lengthy, and DAWs like ProTools, for example, have a maximum file size limitation, the Black Box is smart enough to keep every file under this maximum. Even if you recorded all day, the unit just does some fancy maths and keeps starting new files when it needs to. You wouldn’t even know it was doing it, but when you later plug the drive into your ’Tools rig – it sees all your complete files without any problems. Smart.
Price!++##
Contact National Audio Systems (&() #"*% $$"" [email protected] www.nationalaudio.com.au
ProsLightweight and portable.Simple and uncomplicated.Headphone monitoring.Records until the drive is full!
ConsHeadphone output on the rear.Transport controls take some ge-ing used to.
SummaryThe JoeCo Black Box Recorder is something the world of live recording has been hankering a,er for years. Simple in its functionality – which is a good thing – and exceptionally lightweight, the unit does one job well: it records gigs.
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One thing I do find a little tedious about the JoeCo unit are the transport controls. First there’s the illuminated data wheel – which doesn’t move, but rather responds to touch… just like your iPod! This sits beside two rows of ‘buttons’ and transport controls. All of these are touch-sensitive – the idea being that you simply have to place your finger on them to operate the unit. The upper row carries the Back, Mark, Loop and Menu/OK functions, while the lower row features the main Play, Stop and Record layout. (Fast Forward and Rewind are accessed by holding down the Stop button and ‘turning’ the data wheel in the appropriate direction.) This all sounds great on paper and perhaps works with an iPod when you’re holding it in your hand, but rack-mounted at a show (or for that matter in the studio) with sweaty fingers – they’re pretty hard to use. More often than not I found it took several attempts and a few incorrect commands to achieve my initial intention. I can see what the designer was aiming for here – the setup is modern, easy to use and familiar – but in a rack-mounted situation it’s difficult to use. A simple stop/play/record button setup – that you could confidently press (in a hurry) would have been much more appropriate for a unit intended for the live environment.
SIZE DOES MATTERTaking the BBR1 out on an event and running it as the redundant backup for the Tascam MX machine, it was almost comical to see the two sitting next to each other – 4RU and 25kg vs. 1RU and less than 1kg – knowing they were doing the same job. The rack space saving alone on the BBR1 makes the JoeCo unit invaluable, especially in cramped confines like broadcast trucks etc. There are very few differences in the units as far as functionality is concerned; the main standouts being that the Black Box only has a very simple (and undefined in terms of calibration marks) metering system: Green/Yellow/Red. More significantly, the BBR1 boasts a built-in headphone amp. With this facility you can monitor individual pairs of tracks – odd in your left ear, even in your right – solo tracks in mono or listen to a ‘rough mix’ of all the inputs dumped out to the headphones. While this is not the ideal monitoring situation, it’s a big step up from the other recorders on the market… that offer nothing at all! Even if you had your full-blown ProTools rig out at a show, you’d still need to add some sort of monitoring system (ProTools HD interfaces don’t have headphone outputs). Another thoughtful feature – the headphone output is routed through an automatic gain control so quiet signals can be heard during a concert. This does not affect the recording at all, mind you, only the monitoring level, and this is adjustable in the Setup menu. I did find it a little odd, however, that the headphone output was located on the rear. While at first this seems almost bizarre, it may save your skin one day. One of the easiest things to do at FOH is trip on a cable and having these connections in the back makes this scenario unlikely, even if it is a tad annoying.
AFTER THE SHOWIronically, after the show is where the Black Box Recorder really shines. I used to spend full days transferring files from my MX machines. With the Black Box Recorder I now simply connect the recording drive to a ProTools rig (you can use any system) and import the audio straight into a new session without a hitch. 10 minutes later the files are copied and I’m away. Let’s face it, studio time is money, and not having systems and studios tied up doing file transfers is a big advantage. Even better, if a client has only contracted you to do a recording (i.e., not deliver a mix) you can simply hand them the drive at the end of the show. How easy is that?
The bottom line with live recorders is that they need to work! And the BBR1 does just that. It’s fast to set up, easy to get recording (and keep recording), it sounds great and files are dead-easy to transfer after the fact. With the exception of the touch buttons – and even these may be something you’d eventually get used to – the Black Box ticks all the boxes. Will I be looking at updating my live recording racks with these machines in 2011? You betcha.
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REVIEW
KORG MONOTRONKorg has a history when it comes to analogue synthesis. Some of that legacy has now been crammed into a handheld box.Text: Brad Watts
These little monsters have been kicking about for a while now, but I’ve only just managed to get my
mitts on one. It seems the stock disappears as quickly as it arrives in the country, and I can see why. The Korg Monotron is a fabulously neat bit of synth kit. Many will no doubt pass the Monotron off as an insignificant toy, and sure, it does look like one, but there’s absolutely no reason why this mini analogue synth can’t stand on its own as a bonafide electronic instrument. I’ll admit, when I first looked at these units online I was skeptical, but now that I have one in my hot little hands I’m happy to concede the Monotron is a whole bunch of fun. So now you’re aware of my position on this teeny-weeny synth, let’s have look at it.
PUT IT IN YOUR POCKETIt’s small – about the size of a mobile phone, perhaps slightly larger. Okay, about the size of an iPhone in a hard case – a fit-it-in-your hand kind of doo-dad. The entirely plastic unit runs on two AAA batteries – which Korg supplies – and which provide about eight hours of use. The rear panel has a headphone/line output, an input for routing audio through the filter – both are 1/8-inch jacks – and a volume control wheel, much like you’d find on an old ‘transistor’ radio. There’s an additional potentiometer accessible with a small Phillips-head screwdriver, which adjusts the ribbon controller’s range. Audio is also delivered via a built-in speaker, so you needn’t be tethered to any ‘outboard’ amplification.
Across the top panel are five pots and a three-position power switch. The switch slides from standby (off) and on through two modes of operation for the ribbon (keyboard) controller. The first offers pitch modulation via the LFO, the second position provides modulation of the filter cut-off via the LFO. The five mini potentiometers provide control over pitch, LFO rate (backlit so it pulsates according to the LFO rate), intensity of the LFO, filter cut-off, and a rather aggressive resonance control (labelled ‘Peak’). Winding ‘Peak’ up to its maximum puts the little tyke into complete squeal mode.
AURAL MODULATIONThe only oscillator available is a saw wave, as is the shape of the LFO modulation envelope (albeit an inverted saw).
The LFO oscillates between excruciatingly slow through to hummingbird fast, so there’s a stack of effects you can glean from this right down to electro kick drums with four-on-the-floor repetition. Sure the controls and modulation options are quite limited, still, the array of tones you can squeeze out of the Monotron is surprising. Combined with the continuously variable ribbon controller – i.e. the pitch being continuous, with the printed keyboard acting as a guide – it’s remarkable how expressive the Monotron can be. In fact, one clever modulation method going around the traps involves holding the Monotron to your face with the speaker pointing into your mouth, then waggling your mouth cavity around the speaker – jaw harp style. You’d have to mic it up of course. Incidentally, if you find your fingers are too big for the ribbon controller, you can use a stylus of some description on the faux keyboard. Even a pen with the nib retracted will do the trick.
MOUSE THAT ROAREDNow while the Monotron sounds fairly undernourished via the internal speaker, plugging it into some decent sound reinforcement lets this little mono synth shine. You see, this is a real analogue synthesiser, with a real voltage controlled oscillator and filter. Korg claims the filter is the same design as the legendary Korg MS-10 and MS-20 units released back in 1978. The MS-style analogue filters were a force to be reckoned with back then, and if you’re after that same smooth and emotive filtering, the Monotron will certainly deliver.
Like I’ve mentioned, many people will write off the Monotron as a plaything, which is admittedly very easy to do given the plastic housing, the tinny speaker, the ‘keyboard’ printing on the ribbon controller and indeed, the Monotron’s diminutive size. The impression is of a 21st century version of Rolf Harris’s Stylophone from the late ’60s. Even the one-trick Stylophone made it into David Bowie’s Space Oddity and Kraftwerk’s Pocket Calculator. The bottom line is: the Monotron is a lot of fun, and well worth the paltry asking price, even if you only ever use it to filter external material.
ProsA real analogue synth. Audio input to the analogue filter. Goes anywhere for immediate analogue squelching.Sounds great.
ConsPlastic case may not enjoy a drop on the pavement.
SummaryFor such a teeny li-le synth, the Monotron really does pack a wallop. Analogue goodness doesn’t come any cheaper than this. For a superb li-le synth and a very useful voltage controlled filter, Korg’s Monotron has to be the best value instrument on o.er to date. We hope Korg builds the same analogue circuitry into a bigger version this year.
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QUE AUDIO SNIPER KITAustralia’s Que Audio is kitting out location sound.
Text: Jon Marsh
As a professional audio engineer for the last 42 years, the first thing I thought when confronted with Que
Audio’s Sniper Kit was: ‘This is an interesting-looking toy’. It didn’t take me long to realise that its sound really does belie its size. What’s more, its diminutive stature allows it to go places that bigger, more traditional location mics wouldn’t dream of going.
The Sniper Kit is very well organised, light weight and compact. It’s crying out for everyday use: pop it in the boot, bundle it in your carry-on luggage, or toss it in a suitcase.
Inside the leatherette pouch is the phantom powered mini-shotgun microphone, a telescopic boom (that can be adjusted anywhere up to nearly 1.5m,) a shockmount, table stand, a rubber mount to insulate the microphone even further from vibration, foam wind gag and furry wind gag that the makers are calling a ‘Wombat’ – yet another gag! There are various audio adapters to suit numerous audio devices such as video cameras and digital recording devices and a cold shoe to suit video cameras, a two-metre straight lead and an optional curly lead that comfortably expands to one metre. All of this comes in a carry case that measures only 42cm x 20cm x 6cm with enough room for extra spares.
The many adapters allow the Sniper to slot into almost any circumstance and I would envisage its use by both amateur and professional filmmakers alike. The microphone can be mounted on the camera and the audio directed to the camera or a separate recording device, or even fed to an optional wireless device, should you wish. You can also mount it on the table stand for more intimate interviews without all of the clutter of larger microphones. The small size and light weight make it unobtrusive and easily handled in tight situations, making it easy to keep the equipment ‘out of shot’. This kit would also be very useful for journalists and interviewers for the same reasons – even with the Sniper in the shot, its impact would be subtle compared to its much larger cousins. I could also imagine drama or music students using the Sniper to video and or record their rehearsals and performances for later self-appraisal or criticism.
HEARD BUT NEVER SEENThat’s the Sniper package, but how does the mic sound? This microphone, despite its small physical size performs excellently. Recorded dialogue is clear and crisp, and
background atmosphere is smooth and non-intrusive. The first test I conducted was to set up the microphone in my home studio a mere half-metre from the speakers and subject it to a 1kHz tone at normal listening level. By rotating the microphone 180° I found a remarkable 20dB of rejection. Next, I recorded a short interview in my back garden, which is very close to a busy arterial road in Sydney. Again, the voice was very clear and the rejection of traffic noise from the road was excellent – in fact, most of the extraneous noise came from the reverberations from surrounding buildings. Next, I tried mounting the Sniper on an old video camera using the shockmount, rubber insulator and cold shoe, and this arrangement was very effective at reducing noise from the camera motor. Finally, I set out to find the mic’s distortion threshold. I subjected it to various extreme noises, from shouting in close proximity to hitting metal bars with a hammer, and found it quite difficult to make the microphone distort or square the waveform – so loud noise applications, such as a crowded media pack or at major event such as a sporting arena, are well catered for by the Sniper.
Only time will tell how robust the Sniper Kit is when subjected to the rigours of location work. At first glance, the cables and connectors seem somewhat flimsy but with due care they seem to stand up to the job. I definitely wouldn’t leave home without a spare cable. There again, I’ve never left home without a spare heavy-duty XLR microphone cable (I’ve had many a dry solder joint and even XLRs disintegrate in my hands over the years).
This kit is now be part of my repertoire. I’m still maintaining a larger shotgun, a dynamic and a cardioid hand microphone in my general setup for particular circumstances, but thanks to the sound and portability of the Sniper I’m confident it’ll suit a great deal of my needs – I’ll certainly keep it packed in my car for that unexpected opportunity.
The Sniper Kit sounds good, and is a well priced, well-appointed, lightweight, compact and easily transportable option. I’ve no doubt anyone – from the seasoned pro, such as myself, to the novice – will find it very attractive. Yes, microphone technology has generally improved over the last few decades but this is the only one I’ve seen of this power, size… not to mention the price.
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SummaryPrice is now no longer a barrier to high-quality professional location sound. The Sniper Kit will suit countless circumstances and everyone from the rank amateur to the pro.
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"e English language can be a confusing beast, particularly when you don’t spell it properly. Take for
example Native Instrument’s ‘Komplete’ 7, a bundle of instruments and plug-ins. What exactly does the company mean by calling it complete… sorry, ‘Komplete’? Is it claiming that it’s all you’ll ever need in your studio – the complete package? Or does it simply mean that when you buy Komplete 7 it practically cleans out the store at NI?
Dunno, but if you have a host DAW that o!ers reasonable channel strip plug-ins, Komplete 7 is such a large and diverse range of applications it’s possible you won’t need anything else for about 10 years. It’ll take you that long to #gure out Reaktor 5.5 alone. As for diversity, you couldn’t get more poles apart than ‘"e Finger’ electronica plug-in compared to the fully-sampled Viennese Grand Piano.
WHAT IS IT?Komplete 7 is a suite of NI so$ware comprising 23 di!erent products, plus a few utilities like Kore Player 2 and Controller Editor. Of these, seven are big-ticket items that can operate as standalone instruments, like Kontakt and Battery 3, while the rest are add-ons that either function
inside Kore Player 2, or require these seven acting as host. So for example, the aforementioned Viennese Grand Piano has to be run inside Kontakt, and the fabulous Re%ektor convolution reverb is a Guitar Rig e!ect, and so on.
Some of the seven host applications have been around awhile and I don’t want to go over old ground for too long, so let’s get them out the way #rst shall we. Despite Native Instruments displaying a blatant disrespect for certain consonants, I’ll begin alphabetically:
ABSYNTHWhich brings us straight to arguably NI’s most in%uential virtual instrument, Absynth, now at version 5. I doubt there’s been a spooky television or #lm musical score that hasn’t used an Absynth sound since around the late ’90s. Although there are plenty of core (sorry, Kore) samples like piano, bass and other real instruments behind many of the Absynth patches, it specialises in atmospheric, evolving kinds of sounds that o$en aren’t really playable with a melody, but are musical nonetheless. New features in Absynth 5 include additional #lters: the new Aetheriser e!ect and a Mutator, which are supposed to provide simpler ways of altering the
NATIVE INSTRUMENTS KOMPLETE #This VST instrument offers a wealth of instruments and effects that should keep you satisfied for years to come..Text: Graeme Hague
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sounds without needing to really understand the synth engine under the bonnet. I’m sorry to tell you, you’re still going to have to experiment a lot and read the manual before you’ll get your head around these gadgets. With a huge library of 1800 presets chances are you’re not going to dabble too much anyway. You’ll probably keep sur#ng for something better from the lists. "e names of the presets sometimes provide a clue to what they’ll do, like “Distorted Piano” while others will make you shrug and think, ‘okay, I just do not get that’. Some were obviously chosen by hurling a copy of Lord of the Rings across the room and seeing what page fell open. "e browser #lter, which is common to several NI synthesiser instruments, works well though. Learn how to use it and you won’t spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the right patch. A really interesting trick is that Absynth can be used as an audio e!ect across any DAW channel. A lot of the patches are e!ects in their own right and worth layering on a vocal, for example, to create something really di!erent.
BATTERY $Battery 3 was released in 2006 and has been graced with a few signi#cant updates since, but is still basically the same drum sampler. Five years is a long time between makeovers in the so$ware world which suggests that either NI doesn’t particularly care about its development or that it has tremendous faith in the product’s longevity – I’d say it’s the latter. I reviewed Battery 3 when it came out and I still reckon it’s the programmer’s drum sampler. "e sounds are great, the kits diverse and the level of manipulating each drum sample can be as complex as you want – but Battery 3 won’t play or mix drums for you. "at’s up to you.
FM(FM8 emulates the classic FM synthesiser keyboards of the ’80s and ’90s, then adds a big lump of 21st century tweaking to give you a choice of both vintage and modern sounds. Use the browser to #lter out everything except synths and pads, and the resulting presets displayed have got Je!erson Airplane’s entire back catalogue #gured out. "e patches have a lot of variety and are almost all very playable as an instrument. FM8’s arpeggiator is well executed and takes a lot of grief out of creating rhythms. Really, I reckon FM8 is the #rst go-to virtual keys instrument in the Komplete 7 suite for dialing up a quick, usable patch.
GUITAR RIG )Guitar Rig 4 copped a fair amount of stick from the GR faithful when it was released in late 2009. NI had bitten the bullet and done a lot of revamping which included some big departures from GR3 features, in particular the snapshot facility. New ampli#er models and a control room module seemed to be ignored in preference to whining about the dropped GR3 stu!. Regardless of the negative comments you’ll
#nd on forums, Guitar Rig 4 o!ers a wide range of high quality ampli#er and e!ects sounds. Whether or not the patches are authentic replicas of the equipment they’re supposed to represent has become a moot point as all plug-ins like GR build reputations based on their own merits, with the module descriptions becoming a guide rather than a promise. From screaming metal lead breaks to twanging country rhythm, GR4 has got them covered.
KONTACTKontakt, like Absynth, made a big impression when it #rst arrived on the scene and subsequent versions have carried on the good name. Kontakt is so versatile that you’d be forgiven for asking why you need anything else, but when you use it in conjunction with other NI so$ware you can see more clearly Kontakt’s place in the synth hierarchy. It caters for the genuine, natural samples like orchestra, pianos and acoustic instruments. A new Choir library provides very good male and female vocals, plus extra instruments add up to another 10GB of samples for a total of 43GB (Komplete 7 is 90GB altogether). If it needs to be real, you’ll be reaching for Kontakt.
MASSIVEConversely, Massive is a synthesiser that specialises in speaker-shredding phat sounds, sub-bass tones that will shi$ full pints of beer across the bar and aggressive, in-your-face lead tones. It’s an acquired taste that mostly suits serious dance club styles of music – but not necessarily, of course. Massive is the go-to synth for practioners of genres demanding extreme LFO #lter gymnastics such as DubStep and Crunk, thanks to Massive’s %exible modulation matrix and Performer step envelope facilities.
A nice convolution reverb, Reflektor nestles inside Guitar Rig ' as a plug-in, but is definitely not just for guitar patches. Talking of which, see Rammfire below it – serious, neighbour-annoying grunge.
“Some [preset names] were obviously chosen by hurling a copy of Lord of the Rings across the room and seeing what page fell open
”
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Devotees of these kinds of massive sounds will no doubt, #nd something unique and exciting in Massive. Meanwhile, a lot of Komplete 7 users who don’t care for techno may wind up leaving Massive on the virtual shelf.
REAKTOR *.*Reaktor 5.5 isn’t an instrument – it’s a ‘modular studio’. O!ering a huge amount of sounds and textures, it has 70 of its own internal synthesisers, sound generators and e!ects that can be combined into a limitless number of patches. Reaktor’s GUI has also been substantially overhauled, providing for more intuitive operation, and now features a brand new synthesis facilities o!ered by the Modal oscillator block. "is brings Additive synthesis capabilities to Reaktor, which lends itself well to creating physically modelled instruments. "e Modal block makes possible the new synths (‘Ensembles’ in Reaktor-speak) included for Komplete 7: Laser Bass, Reaktor Spark and Reaktor Prism. Overall, the emphasis is strongly on synth-type sounds with rhythmic grooves and the ability to create precise patches. Not surprisingly, for those wishing to build their own synth and e!ect ensembles from scratch, the learning curve is steep, and it may take a while for you to con#dently #nd a place for Reaktor in your studio. I’d expect a lot of Komplete 7 purchasers will also put Reaktor to one side for a rainy day (unless they speci#cally wanted Reaktor and consider the rest of Komplete 7 the bonus), but this is to ignore its versatility. With the 70 included factory Ensembles in addition the the 2800-strong library available for download, Reaktor is the gi$ that keeps giving.
Now we can start looking at the extra plug-ins and e!ects that come with Komplete 7.
MORE KOMPLETE THAN EVERI used to work with a piano tuner, a kindly old Austrian gentleman called Adolf – unfortunate for a chap of his generation and geographical roots. Adolph could chat for hours about famous pianos he’d tuned and how the only
other professional tuner in town wouldn’t know his A-sharps from his B-%ats. Adolph was always talking about the subtle tones and performance characteristics of individual pianos, something I couldn’t really appreciate. If you’re like me, you’ll struggle to get too excited over the four di!erent pianos included in Komplete 7. "e Upright Collection can have obvious applications, but otherwise the Vienna, Berlin and New York Grand Piano packages o!er distinctions that only dedicated enthusiasts will care much about. It’s hard to imagine someone leaping outraged to their feet a$er hearing a studio mixdown and yelling, ‘You fool! You used the Berlin Grand, when it should have been the New York!” Still, people have been outraged by less.
"e grand piano add-ons run inside Kontakt 4, as do several Komplete 7 components, some of which cater for exacting musical tastes. "e Scarbee Clavinet/Pianet is a pair of classic ‘electrophonic’ and ‘electro-mechanical’ (respectively) keyboard instruments used in the late 1960s. I’m all for being sentimental, but if you’re not trying to recreate exactly that music, chances are these won’t get a lot of track time. More useful, Vintage Organs has a choice of three Hammond organs – surprise surprise – a Vox Continental and a Far#sa Compact… we might have to take NI’s word for it that these last two are classic instruments and not just dragged out of the basement and dusted o! for the sake of it.
Also from Scarbee, the Mark I and A-200 Electric Pianos add-ons are instruments that should certainly make it into your DAW’s VST Favourites menu. "ere are always occasions when an electric piano is the only piano patch that will cut through a mix and both these instruments not only sound great, they truly have that classic tone. A lot of sample-based virtual instruments will o!er some kind of electric piano and even come close, but these two instantly make the grade.
Finally from Scarbee, the MM Bass gets a guernsey in
Abbey Road ’)#s Drum kit inside Kontakt: Great-sounding and well laid out drum sampler, plus a pretty-picture-type of GUI, if the nuts and bolts style of Battery ( doesn’t appeal.
ProsA wealth of instruments and e.ects that should keep you satisfied for quite some time.
ConsFull install requires #&GB of HD space. Even these days, that needs some planning.
SummaryAlthough there’s bound to be someone out there with a list of reasons why Komplete " isn’t complete, this is one hell of a VST instrument collection. It’s a lot to take in and you’ll need time to appreciate all that it has to o.er, but once it’s all installed and happy, and inside a good DAW, you’ll have everything you need plus a few things you probably don’t.
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Komplete 7. A bit like MIDI guitar tracks, bass playing simulators are usually treated with much distrust unless you’re a$er that extremely annoying, Seinfeld sound. But the MM Bass really pulls it o!, albeit in a ’70s funk and disco style that might not lend itself to more modern genres. It’s kind of alarming really – being a bass player myself – how well MM Bass comes across. Now I know how drummers feel…
Standing alone as the only add-on that uses just the Kore 2 player, Acoustic Refractions (yes, with a ‘c’!) has a sample base of everyday sounds like washing machines, car doors shutting, alarm bells… you get the idea. AR twists these into musical notes to be played as an instrument and the e!ect is quite clever, if a little bizarre. NI mentions the term ‘sound design’ in the blurb, which pretty much sums it up.
Back we go to Reaktor 5.5, since the next three add-ons work inside it. Just when you’re starting to overload on bleeping, ringing, pad-like sweeping piano synthesiser sounds Reaktor Prism and Reaktor Spark provide di!erent textures yet again. Could you achieve these in Absynth or FM8? Maybe, or at least you’ll come close, but herein lays one aspect of Komplete 7 where some duplication in the actual sounds is unavoidable, despite which synth is responsible. "ese would be useful add-ons, if you only owned Reaktor.
GIVEN THE FINGERNext, you have "e Finger. Yes, it’s complicated… and simple at the same time. "e Finger allows you to stack and layer complex combinations of ‘performance e!ects’ across your MIDI keyboard, and is aimed at DJ performers. For instance, you could trigger four samples to play together and your next key-press tells them to keep looping. A huge, layered dance sound can be built... but I’m guessing if you buy Komplete 7 for those three grand piano samplers, you just lost interest in this review.
While we’re cutting a swathe across the dance %oor, Traktor’s 12 is included in Komplete 7. "ese are 12 of the best crushing, slicing, mashing e!ects from Traktor Pro, but whereas Pro is designed as live performance DJ so$ware, Traktor’s 12 is for bringing those e!ects into a DAW environment. Again, if you’re not a fan of techno then Traktor’s 12 might not get a run, but there’s no reason why it can’t be applied to other genres. To do this, Traktor 12 needs to work inside an instance of Guitar Rig 4.
It’s not the only one.
Ramm#re is a new guitar ampli#er simulator based on the personal setup of the impressively named Richard Z Kruspe of the band Rammstein, who apparently make Metallica sound like Air Supply having a nap. Usually, in my never-so-humble opinion, a lot of amp sims get worse the heavier they are, sounding more like a computer ripping zero’s and ones apart than overdriven valves and circuits trying to destroy a speaker cone. But Ramm#re is an exception. Somewhat miraculously the quality of distortion in this simulator stays realistic. If you’ve ever thought the metal content in GR4 lacking, check out Rammstein.
Also residing inside GR4 is Re%ektor, the #rst convolution reverb boasting a ‘zero latency’ algorithm. A lot of us use convolution reverbs, and many of us only have a rough idea how they work, without really grasping what’s going on. What many of us do know is that many of them sounds great, and aside from it being slightly perplexing to require GR4 – a guitar amp simulator – to host a reverb, Re%ektor is excellent. "e interface is simple – that’s a good thing – you get a good sense of what you’re doing and I was particular pleased with the drum room settings over my Battery 3 outputs.
Lastly – and talking of drums – Komplete 7 also has the Abbey Road ’60s Drums collection for Kontakt. A quick story here – "e Beatles were asked at a packed press conference if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. Lennon quipped back, “He’s not even the best drummer in the room.” Mention Abbey Road and drums in the same sentence and you’ll instantly think of "e Beatles, Ringo Starr and despite their notoriety – why would you want them? Fear not and forget Ringo, this is two ’60s drum kits meticulously sampled in Abbey Road and the scope of that sampling, plus the way it’s presented inside the Kontakt GUI, make this a really cool instrument. Variations on how the kit pieces are hit (o!-centre, centre, etc) maybe aren’t so innovative, but the on-screen display greatly helps in programming diverse strikes that add realism. "e kits overall aren’t stuck in the ’60s either. "e only slight snag was the 400MB+ of RAM the kits swallow.
Phew, that’s it. All 23 di!erent – and maybe not-so-di!erent – components to Komplete 7. Is it complete? Will you need anything else? Well, some people are never satis#ed, but Komplete isn’t a bad start. I know it’ll be a while before I start looking for other VST instruments.
Reaktor ".": A modular studio, not just a plug-in. Bring your pilot’s license.
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