AudioTechnology App Issue 15

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REGULARS

ED SPACE Emulating Growth Column: Mark Davie

Editor Mark Davie mark@audiotechnology.com.au Publisher Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au Editorial Director Christopher Holder chris@audiotechnology.com.au Art Director Dominic Carey dominic@alchemedia.com.au Graphic Designer Daniel Howard daniel@alchemedia.com.au Advertising Philip Spencer philip@alchemedia.com.au Accounts Jaedd Asthana jaedd@alchemedia.com.au Subscriptions Miriam Mulcahy mim@alchemedia.com.au

It’s the era of the emulation, but where are we on the curve? While on the one hand, every plug-in developer and his (physically modelled) dog seems to have a Pultec EQ emulation on offer, there are also whole genres using plug-in processes that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Are emulations killing our development or propelling us into the future?

THE CASE FOR

The classic gear being emulated is a big part of our audio engineering heritage. Great names like Oliver Summerlin (Pultec EQ), Burgess MacNeal and George Massenberg (Parametric EQ), Jim Lawrence (Teletronix LA2A Leveling Amplifier), Bill Putnam Sr (Universal Audio 1176 Limiting Amplifier), and so many more, saw an audio-related problem and developed a solution other engineers found useful. That usefulness grew into ubiquity for some, while others attained ‘unicorn’ status. By decreasing the cost of acquisition, emulations allow some of those unattainable esoteric pieces to become ubiquitous, allowing the generations that follow to have copies of tools engineers have long found useful.

Plus, some are just genuinely good sounding plug-ins because the developers have tried so hard to emulate a piece of gear that sounded good in the first place. Considerable development went into older circuits and many were built from scratch, often with good components (sometimes not), with no shortcuts on power supplies and other off-the-shelf ‘close enough’ parts. When your target is an 1176, getting most of the way there is still probably going to sound better than emulating a cheap hardware compressor.

Many of those units were designed to do a specific job a specific way, the limitations shaped the way you could mix — for example, an EQ that only features a handful of selectable frequencies to flick between, or a Teletronix LA2A Leveling Amplifier with its fixed attack and program dependent release. The limitations of the hardware are built-in for good reason, you pick the right tool for the job. Maybe having a 10-band parametric isn’t such a good idea, and there was a reason graphic EQs with fixed bands were invented.

History has shown we only need simple tools to make great records. Do we need more complexity than the past has already provided?

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THE CASE AGAINST

While emulations are undoubtedly closer than ever before, current computing resources still require design tradeoffs. Think about what Cytomic’s Andy Simper — who developed The Glue, one of the best SSL bus compressor emulations — had to say about it in Issue 100: “If you loaded a full schematic of a bus compressor into something like QUCS (Quite Universal Circuit Simulator), and then tried to process some audio, it would probably take you about 10 minutes to render a second of audio at a reasonable sample rate.” His point is not that emulations aren’t good — he was at pains to confirm that — it’s just there is an implicit tradeoff that requires developers to make their own decisions about how to reconstruct the essence of a piece of gear without sacrificing processing speed, or the original’s sound signature. It’s as much art as engineering.

Buying a plug-in based on its digital faceplate is not a guarantee it will perform like the original — and sometimes they’re not even close — as opposed to buying the hardware. You don’t have to purchase in good faith the gear you can touch.

On the flipside, while emulations may not be perfect, Simper can do things in software that are physically impossible: “I can cheat a bit, use a perfect op-amp which doesn’t saturate, is a perfect buffer and can deliver any amount of current without blowing up.” So, what else is possible when you’re not emulating gear beholden to physical limitations?

Hardware devices often have limited controls because the more controls you put into a device, the more it costs.

Software has no such restrictions. While I’m not advocating denser GUIs, having new ways of controlling and ‘seeing’ sound can render completely new results. And hopefully, new music. Floris Klinkert from Fabfilter places a high importance on interface design, saying plug-ins have to be, “fast to work with and nice to look at” if you’re going to be working with them all day, “we don't want you to act as if you’re not mixing in the box.”

Lastly, is this focus on emulating other people’s designs limiting the potential for plug-in manufacturers to make a name for themselves? A necessity if they’re to survive and solve new problems in the future.

What do you think? Email mark@audiotechnology.com.au

Proofreading Andrew Bencina Regular Contributors Martin Walker Paul Tingen Guy Harrison Greg Walker Greg Simmons Blair Joscelyne Mark Woods Chris Braun Robert Clark James Dampney Andrew Bencina Brent Heber Anthony Garvin Cover Image Mathieu Bitton Distribution by: Network Distribution Company.

AudioTechnology magazine (ISSN 1440-2432) is published by Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd (ABN 34 074 431 628).

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All material in this magazine is copyright © 2014 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process with out written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974.

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Mix Masters: Robert Orton on Lana del Rey’s Ultraviolence

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Beardyman: Building A Better Mouth Trap

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$18k Prizes: Winners Announced

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Electro-Voice ETX Powered Loudspeakers

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GENERAL NEWS

AUDIO-TECHNICA HOT FOOT IT Audio-Technica has engineered a range of seven mini microphones that bring the company’s extensive audio capture experience to DSLR, camcorder, iOS/ Smartphone, laptop and business recorder applications.

All seven models are outboard replacements for standard built-in microphones and make the process of radically improving audio capture as easy as plugging in a 3.5mm mini-jack.

iOS/Smartphone use. AT9902iS is a clip-on lapel for recording speeches and dialogue and AT9913iS is a mini mono shotgun for ENG interviews, lectures and other voice recording and includes a headphone output for monitoring recorded material in real time.

AT9946CM and AT9944 are electret condenser cameramount shotguns and come with fluffy windsocks for field recording. Whereas AT9944 is a conventional mono shotgun, AT9946CM is an MS stereo type and perfect for DSLR applications.

AT9903 is a mono unidirectional 13mm diameter lapel mic for presentations, interviews and on-camera dialogue. AT9920 and AT9921 are 2x180° stereo and 360° mono boundary microphones respectively, both ideal for recording meetings, two-way interviews and round-table discussions usually to laptop. All three come with an optional battery power supply for use with non-PiP powered recorders.

AT9902iS and AT9913iS are specifically designed for

TAG: (02) 9519 0900 or info@tag.com.au

ATC: NEW SOFT DOME ATC has updated its SCM20ASL active monitors and released a new passive model — the SCM20PSL Pro. Both models feature ATC’s hand-built drive units. Of note is the new SH-25-76S one-inch soft dome tweeter, the first to be designed and built by ATC, and the result of six years of research and development by Managing Director Billy Woodman and R&D Engineer Richard Newman (see our Last Word this issue for more from

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Billy). The cabinets are constructed from heavily-braced MDF. Highly damped, elastometric panels are bonded and stapled to the cabinet’s inner walls to suppress cabinet panel resonances, while the enclosure’s front panel is heavily radiused to reduce cabinet diffraction, improving the frequency response and imaging.

CDA Pro Audio: (02) 9330 1750 or www.cda-proaudio.com

RETRO RESURRECTS RAREITY The RCA OP-6 has been a go-to preamp for ribbon microphones for well over 60 years and Retro Instruments has now brought this vintage classic — with its endless headroom and thick, luscious tones — into the 21st century. The recreation isn’t a slavish clone, building some modern conveniences into the design, such as switchable impedance via the front panel using

a custom-wound input transformer. The new version also sports phantom power along with mic and instrument inputs. Retro promises that it’s retained the integrity of the original circuitry, size and performance of the RCA OP-6.

Mixmasters: (08) 8278 8506 or www.mixmasters.com.au

RACK ‘N’ ROLL Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave but you can’t deny the practicality of RackMac Pro. There are two versions: a single Mac Pro unit, leaving space for an optional second computer, and a second version optimised for two Macs. The unit features a steel outer enclosure lined with soft-touch padding to hold the computer firmly in place while safeguarding its finish.

RackMac doesn’t degrade the MacPro’s cooling/airflow.

RackMac extends each MacPro’s Gigabit Ethernet, USB

3.0, HDMI, and power interfaces to panel-mounted connectors on the back of the unit for easy external cable connection. A USB 3.0 interface and power switch are mounted on the front as well. Since panel-mount connectors for Thunderbolt cables don’t exist, each Mounting Module provides cable management tie-downs for securing all Thunderbolt cables connected to each Mac during installation.

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LIVE NEWS

K2 LANDS IN ADELAIDE Novatech has landed its L-Acoustics K2 rig. There’s a hefty 48 x K2 elements in the system, supported by 16 K1-SB subs. That’s a serious PA and the envy of many rental companies around the world, biting their nails waiting for their order to arrive — new stock won’t be available until late 2015 apparently. There again, Novatech has had a longstanding relationship with L-Acoustics and this is a deserved feather in the cap: “We have been working closely with the team at L-Acoustics since our original investment into their systems,” shared Leko Novakovic, Managing Director of Novatech. “We have been focused on and planning for the development of the K2 for some time and share

Y LINE GETS TO THE POINT Point source, or line source? Maybe you don’t have to choose. d&b audiotechnik’s Y-Series has been designed for any small- to medium-sized sound requirement.

Similar to V-Series, there are point source models (Y7P and 10P with the single-18 B6-Sub) and line source loudspeakers (Y8 and Y12 ) with a matched cardioid sub (Y-Sub). The Y8 and Y12 loudspeakers use the same rigging design as V and J, and share the same 80° and 120° horizontal dispersion characteristics.

The Y8 and Y12 can be suspended in columns of up to 24 loudspeakers with splay angles from 0 to 14 degrees with a 1° resolution. The Y-Sub houses a forward-facing 18-inch driver and a 12-inch driver radiating towards the rear, producing a cardioid dispersion pattern. Driven by a single amp channel, the compact Y-Sub can be ground stacked or flown atop a Y8/Y12 array.

National Audio Services: (03) 8756 2600 or www.nationalaudio.com.au

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in the excitement of its release. We are honoured to be considered amongst the world’s leading production companies and able to offer the K2 system to the Australian market”. Before the K2 system’s even been unpacked, it’s already been booked for several events at the end of the year. Novatech will be running a special industry event late in 2014 to celebrate their K2 system’s commissioning, when leading figures of Australia’s corporate, theatre, events and production community will be invited to Adelaide to experience the PA. Novatech Creative Event Technology: (08) 8352 0300 or www.ncet.co

REMOTE MIXING With the rise in popularity of iPad-style hybrid mixers, I guess it had to happen. How about the I/O and the DSP stays on stage and all the mixing occurs on your iPad without any mix hardware at FOH… in fact, FOH? Who needs FOH?! Based on the StudioLive AI-series engine and controlled with UC Surface software for Mac, Windows, and iOS (so run the software on any laptop, iPad, or Windows Surface, for example) the StudioLive RM16AI and RM32AI 32x16x3 rackmount Active Integration digital mixers do just that.

The 3U rackmount RM16AI provides 16 locking XLR inputs with recallable XMAX Class A preamps, eight XLR line outs, and three main outs (left, right, and mono/ centre); 32 internal channels and 25 buses; a 52x34

Firewire 800 recording interface; 96kHz operation; and extensive signal processing. The 4U rackmount RM32AI is much the same, only with 32 inputs. Both mixers offer individual +48V phantom power on all inputs; a +48V meters button displays phantom-power assignment on the input meter grid. The mixers’ front panel provides input signal-present and clip LEDs (16 for the RM16AI, 32 for the RM32AI) and provides stereo RCA tape inputs, a headphone output with volume knob and source-select buttons, a Mute All button, and a USB type-A jack that hosts the included Wi-Fi LAN adapter.

The rear panel contains optional slots for extra digital I/O, including Dante and AVB options.

National Audio Services: (03) 8756 2600 or www.nationalaudio.com.au

uMIX ABOUT TO DROP SM Pro Audio’s uMiX family of wi-fi remote controllable digital mixers includes and eight-, 16- and 24-channel version. uMiX models feature a pristine 56-bit double precision audio signal path with parametric EQ, dynamics, and digital FX available on all channels. All uMiX models include an on-board secure wi-fi and Ethernet router and remote microphone preamps, providing an out-of-the-box remote mixing solution.

Built for both desktop and touch devices, uMiX brings

remote access, multi-touch, key commands, and an intuitive GUI with the look and feel of a hardware mixer. All you need is a desktop PC, laptop, tablet or smart phone with a web browser. Simply join the uMiX network and take control. The uMiX16 and uMiX24 offer additional processing on the master outputs from Waves — MaxxBass and MaxxVolume adds drive, punch and polish to your mix while protecting the PA.

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SOFTWARE NEWS

NEW MIXING DIMENSION In the world of audio post production, Dolby (with Atmos) and Barco (Auro-3D) duke it out for supremacy in the world’s movie theatres to see who will win the immersive audio battle. This has been Dolby’s turf for decades and smart money would suggest it will prevail.

Then almost out of nowhere Auro is staking its claim as king of the living room, sponsoring music mixed in Auro 3-D. Regardless, whether you’re mixing for film or music you need a way of panning sound around in the third

(height) dimension. Minnetonka has good form in this area and has released a new suite of AAX-format tools for mixing and authoring Auro-3D audio. The Auro-3D Creative Tool Suite allows you to add immersive 3D sound to your existing workflow. The Auro-3D Authoring Tools now includes 3D panning and mixing, with support for all Auro-3D formats and various Surround formats, as well as encoding with the Auro-Codec.

EQUAL TO THE TASK FabFilter’s Pro-Q2 is a major update to the Pro-Q EQ plug-in, with new features — such as full screen mode, natural phase processing, auto gain, Spectrum Grab, Gain-Q interaction, and slope support for all filter types. Pro-Q 2 has a completely redesigned internal filter engine, not only improving the existing zero latency and linear phase processing modes, but also introducing something FabFilter calls its ‘Natural Phase’

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mode — matching the analogue phase response without introducing noticeable pre-ring or a long latency.

Very steep filter slopes of up to 96dB/octave are now available and the update lets users change the slope of any filter type — not just the usual Low/High Cut filters.

This makes it possible to create super-narrow bell filters, very steep or gently sloping shelves, and more.

WALDORF RE-STRINGS NEW WAVE Waldorf has announced Streichfett String Synthesiser, bringing back to life the near-extinct new-wave sound of ‘80s string synthesisers with a modern-day twist.

Back in the ’70s and early-’80s, string synthesisers didn’t have the ability to create an authentic-sounding string, instead they used top octave divider technology to produce polyphonic pitching for each key played, which in turn, created a unique sound of its own. These distinctive-sounding string synths can be heard all over classic recordings by both electronic music innovators, prog rockers, and pop acts of the time — think French

synth showman Jean-Michel Jarre’s multimillion-selling Oxygene, or even adult movies of the time, such as German synth-meister Klaus Schulze’s soundtrack to Bodylove. This all changed when authentic-sounding sampling technology took hold. If you’re a fan of that distinctive sound (made popular by new-wave bands such as Ultravox, Human League, Visage and Japan) then you’ll be happy to hear that Waldorf has brought it back to life with Streichfett.

Audio Chocolate: (03) 9813 5877 or www.audiochocolate.com.au

SAY NO TO ESS Sibilance has been the bane of sound engineers since recording began. It can be caused by compression, microphone choice and technique, or simply a vocalist’s mouth. Generally speaking, sibilance lies anywhere between 2-10kHz, depending on the individual.

Unfortunately, any technique used for de-essing your recording can cause audio artefacts. Which is exactly where XILS DeeS, the latest plug-in from XILS-lab, comes into play. To use DeeS, all you do is tweak the

‘Detection Freq.’ knob and apply ‘Reduction’ as needed.

Detection can be applied quickly, combining with plosive detection to result in more natural voices. There’s a clearly labelled dual signal path with Solo buttons as well as associated sound sculpting controls for each channel — Voice EQ (colour coded in green) and Sibilant EQ (colour coded in orange). Additionally, there is a realtime frequency graph, showing four frequency bands sharing that same colour coding for instant correlation.

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WInnE

RS Our huge Remix Competition of The Occupants’ epic single, Wonderland, has a winner! Whittled down from hundreds of entries to a shortlist of 10 finalists, our judging panel of eminent studio producers — Forrester Savell, Tom Larkin, Francois Tetaz — have agreed on a victor. Congratulations Ben Allen! The spoils of victory are great — top notch Avid hardware and software, Røde Microphones and Event Opal monitoring — and doubtlessly we’ll catch up with Ben later in the year to see how he’s going with his new kit.

Congrats to all 10 shortlisted finalists. The breadth of skill and imagination was tremendous. We’re all heartened by the response and you can be quite sure there will be another AT Remix competition in the future.

Hear the finalists: Head to AudioTechnology’s SoundCloud page to listen to the 10 contenders and the three winners.

www.soundcloud.com/audiotechnology

Shortlist Ben Allen • Aaron Argent • Cameron Brown Dav Byrne • Dags • Darren Mullan Jesse Stewart Alston Lee Y • Ben Manuel Stephen Helman • John ‘Oxford’ Parker

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1ST Place Winner: Ben ‘Broadwing’ Allen Ben Allen (aka ‘Broadwing Music’) managed to pull off the perfect balance of radically reimagining Wonderland while maintaining the song’s DNA. Like all great remixes, it’s a standout track in and of itself; original yet clearly honouring the remix’s roots; sympathetic yet brave. The judges certainly thought so: “The use of strings, piano and new guitar parts added a great new dimension the song didn’t originally have, while at every stage there was still the obvious use of the original stems.” and “Very intelligently put together to provide an epic journey not unlike the original, yet completely different.”

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1ST PRIZE (WORTH $13,817)

2ND Place: Ben Manuel Ben Manuel’s production is rich, deep, lush and bristling with imagination. Ben changed the pitch and pulled a bunch of remix tricks out of his bag, especially with the treatment of Flynn Gower’s vocals. The judges loved how fresh it was: “Really enjoyed the upbeat energy this remix displayed,

2ND PRIZE (WORTH $3,465)

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giving it a really modern feel especially with the awesome use of vocal samples” and “reminded of a collision between the first Terminator soundtrack and Miami Vice, which always goes down well!”.

3RD Place: John Parker John ‘Oxford’ Parker deconstructed Wonderland down to a constituent nuts and bolts level and then set about reconstructing it. And, save for a couple of cymbal hits and the 8-bit Bass sound, everything in the remix was derived from the original stems. Kudos came from the judges (“would love to know how he put this together”) for its technical imagination (“some serious skills on display here”).

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AT 17

REGULARS

Which Knob?

Column: Brad Watts

I experienced an audio conniption recently. I was listening to a newly acquired album by a band called Turin Brakes; We Were Here. The opening track, entitled Time and Money, was causing some distortion in my right monitor.

Specifically, a floor tom was distorting. I immediately investigated potential problems with my monitors, swapping channels to be sure I’d not damaged a driver and auditioning the track on other monitors. The issue persisted. Was it an error in the MP3 codec (I always use 320kbps with no VBR or filtering and traditional stereo). Was it present in the CD copy? That presented the same phenomena. Was it an error in the recording I wondered, and sent the track to a few friends to confirm one way or the other. All three cohorts heard the same distortion on the same floor tom. I resigned myself to it being an error in the recording, which surprised me. Why would a folk/ rock act with eight albums under their belt let that one slip through? It didn’t add up.

I’d been auditioning three high quality audio interfaces at the time: the Apogee Symphony I/O, Prism Sound’s Titan, and referencing these against my Benchmark DAC1 — all highly specified convertors. All three exhibited the same issue with the floor tom. Then I realised something that had slipped under my audio radar. I was comparing these three devices via a unit to aid quick switching between each source — a monitor controller I’ve been using for a number of years featuring a big volume knob (and named accordingly). Not the highest end of control units but useful in situations where I need talkback and some monitor switching.

Normally I listen via the Benchmark DAC1 and switch monitors using the two sets of outputs it offers. So, I reverted to this method, eradicating the big knobbed monitor controller from the signal path. The distortion disappeared.

After some research and spec checking I realised the spec of the monitor controller was nowhere near the capabilities of the three D>A systems. The big knobbed controller had a harmonic distortion spec of >0.015%. To contrast that figure, the Prism Sound Titan sat at 0.00045% THD and the Apogee Symphony I/O sat at 0.00014%. Both had distortion AT 18

measured down to hundred thousandths, whereas the over endowed knob unit measured in mere thousandths. Such is progress in the world of audio.

From there my search began for an upgraded monitor controller. I checked the spec of various budget models and wasn’t happy with those. I tried out a couple of these and the quality was similar (if not worse) than the large knob thing.

I looked at the spec of high end controllers from the likes of Crane Song and Dangerous Music and noticed these units didn’t come close to equalling or bettering the spec of the D>A systems I was auditioning. Plus I’m not in the position to drop $3-4k on a monitoring controller. So what was I to do?

After a few discussions with Greg Simmons, who broached this topic many years ago in AudioTechnology, extolling the benefits of using a passive monitor controller consisting of a basic high quality dual gang potentiometer and some switching. Simmo advised me to call Rob Squire of Pro Harmonic and commission Rob to build something to suit — which is exactly what I did.

Shortly after, Rob had a unit in the post, which turns out is basically the same design Rob gave detailed instruction on how to build back in On The

Bench in issue 78 of AT. It’s a simple balanced unit allowing two sources, two stereo monitor channels, a switch for mono or stereo operation and a highish quality ALPS potentiometer. It transpires the pot is worth about $50, and by the time Rob had the unit built to my spec and delivered, the cost was way less than the other units I’d checked out.

These included the Central Station from Presonus, various locally designed units, of course my large knobbed thingamajig and one that came very close to staying with me; Drawmer’s new MC2.1 monitor controller. Of all these, the Drawmer came closest to the mark, and offers some excellent features such as individual trim-pots for monitor outputs and other active benefits should you require them.

But alas, nothing came close to the passive switcher and ALPS attenuation pot supplied by Rob Squire. My monitoring is now clear and robust, relatively distortion free with solid bottom and silken top end. Just as nature intended it via such highfalutin’ and modern D>A convertors such as the Apogee and Prism Sound. I’d encourage anyone needing such a device to go down this path before shelling out on active designs, and perhaps to read your AT collection more often.

The Drawmer MC2.1 was by far the best active monitor controller on the block.

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AT 19

TUTORIAL

Lana del Rey’s metamorphosis continues, but mixer Robert Orton assures the image is all of her own making. Orton mixed her latest hit record Ultraviolence completely in-thebox, and he wouldn’t do it any other way.

Story: Paul Tingen

Artist: Lana del Rey Album: Ultraviolence (2014)

AT 20

It surely must count as one of the most impressive artistic reinventions of modern times. In 2010, Lizzy Grant was flailing around in obscurity, having released an EP called Kill Kill and an album, Lana del Rey, that both flopped. A year later she had undergone a radical image make-over, as part of which she adopted the title of her debut album as her artist name, and released a debut single called Video Games that was taking the world by storm. Despite the song and video being widely lauded as atmospheric masterpieces, there was a lot of scepticism about the depth of her artistic authenticity and speculation she’d prove to be little more than a one-hit wonder. When her subsequent album, Born To Die also proved extremely successful, the sceptics moved the goal posts and declared del Rey a one-album wonder.

Then del Rey released Young and Beautiful, the pinnacle of her maximalist aesthetic, and perfectly suited to the excess of Baz Luhrmann’s take on The Great Gatsby. It was followed by del Rey’s own stab at filmmaking, Tropico, a veritable mini-epic in the scheme of music videos. But just as her star looked poised to settle on this impeccably-crafted horizon of grandiosity, del Rey has sidestepped her critics once more.

Her third album, Ultraviolence still features the mournful atmospheric pop del Rey made her mark with on Born To Die, but replaces the bombastic orchestral elements with a more limited and focused palette of alt-rock tremolo guitars, reverb-swamped vocals and drums, and trip-hop influences. It’s Lana stripped back, yet Ultraviolence still topped the charts the world over.

The album’s making featured a proliferation of heavyweight producers: The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Paul Epworth (Adele), Rick Nowels (Madonna), and Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen). But despite the share of influence the album as a whole is remarkably cohesive, suggesting del Rey was pulling the strings and further evidence she’s not the manufactured starlet her sceptics initially assumed.

This impression is confirmed by Ultraviolence’s principal mixer, Robert Orton, who mixed 10 of the 15 tracks, if you count the bonus tracks on various deluxe editions. Orton recalls that all 10 tracks were “mixed pretty much in one go, because Lana wanted to be present throughout the mixing.

So the timing was dictated by her schedule. It was great having her in the room, because she had such a clear vision of how she wanted the record to sound. Lana is very articulate and has great ears, so it was wonderful to get instant feedback as we tried out different ideas. It also meant there were very few recalls to deal with.”

HOT HANDS

Orton mixes out of his own room at Hot Rocks Studios in Los Angeles, where he moved about three years ago from his native London. The mixer started playing piano at age five, and as a young adult went to the London College of Music in Ealing in West London, where he graduated in Music Technology & Media Technology. Two big breaks followed soon afterwards. In 2000 he started

work as ProTools engineer for Trevor Horn, and two years later he ended up with engineering, mixing and additional production credits on the first western album by t.A.T.u., 200km/h in the Wrong Lane, which became a major international hit. Orton worked with Horn until 2008, amassing credits with Pet Shop Boys, Seal, Lisa Stansfield, Elton John, Texas, Celine Dion, Kelly Rowland and Macy Gray. Since going independent six years ago, Orton has quickly established himself as one of the world’s leading hit mixers, mixing songs and albums for the likes of Lady Gaga, Carly Rae Jepsen, Emeli Sandé, The Police, Flo Rida, Sean Kingston, Kelis, Ellie Goulding, Mary J Blige, Usher, and Robbie Williams, which led to him earning three Grammy Awards.

Orton is part of a new generation of hit mixers, and it comes as little surprise he wholeheartedly embraces the latest in digital technology.

Particularly, he prefers to mix in-the-box. “I think the quality of mixing in-the-box is every bit as good as mixing on a board,” he asserts. “You may get a slightly different sound, but it’s certainly not worse.

I actually feel I get a slightly more up-front sound from mixing in-the-box. Some people complain they don’t get the same air, but I find you can get perfectly airy mixes with HD audio and today’s plug-ins. Overall, I don’t think it’s that important

never turn out as well as it could.

“With a ProTools rig and an acoustically correct room you can achieve anything you want if you know what you’re doing. Much of the gear I have is focused on achieving clarity in what I’m hearing: I have a variety of monitors I like to listen on, and Prism AD/DA converters which I love for their punch. My main monitors are soffit-mounted Ausperger speakers with TAD components. I also have some midfield Quested VS2108 monitors that I spend a lot of time listening on. Some of my favourite speakers are made by Quested. Roger is a wonderful speaker designer and I love his monitors for their incredible clarity and detail. I also have Yamaha NS10s and ProAc Studio 100s — although I don’t usually have both up at the same time.

ProAcs make a pleasant change when I get tired of the very forward mids of the NS10s. Another important aspect of my monitoring setup is my Crookwood monitor controller, which is super clean and transparent. All these things together help me feel entirely confident I’m hearing exactly what I should be hearing, without coloration.

Finally, I’m not a big fan of clocks or summing boxes, although I can see a case for the latter if you’re specifically looking for it to colour the mix a certain way.”

whether you mix in-the-box or on a board. What’s far more important is finding a way to articulate the message in the music using whatever tools you’ve cut your teeth on.

“I have a few pieces of hardware in my rack, such as some Empirical Labs Distressors, but I don’t find myself reaching for them too often.

There’s been an explosion of plug-ins modelling classic hardware in recent years, and as the technology has improved, so have the models. I’m a big fan of many of the UAD plug-ins because they sound so great. There have been plenty of attempts in the past at modelling the classic Fairchild 670, but the new UAD Fairchild is the first one that really made me sit up and think, ‘wow, this thing actually sounds like a Fairchild.’

Not only that, but you can have dozens of them in your session. Mixing in-the-box is the only way that makes sense to me, especially when you add in the flexibility it gives you with recalls.”

BOX OF TRICKS

Even a totally in-the-box studio needs some hardware to function. Elaborating on the most important bits of hardware in his studio, Orton explains, “The room I work in is really important to me because I need to know I can trust what I’m hearing from the speakers. Not only that, but it’s important to be able to work in a comfortable environment because I spend most of my life there.

My room here also has a nicely-sized tracking room, which is a useful thing to have access to.

The acoustic treatment of the room, which was designed by John Edwards, is one of the most important things to me because I can trust what I’m hearing and it helps with making correct decisions.

If you’re not hearing what you think you’re hearing, you have to work twice as hard and the mix will

It was great having her in the room, because she had such a clear vision of how she wanted the record to sound

Positioned at the crest of a wave of young, contemporary mixers Orton operates not only at the cutting edge of modern technology, but also has a fresh and different perspective on the perils of today’s fast-turnaround, low budget studio industry. Many mixers with roots in the big-budget analogue days complain they’re increasingly competing with rough mixes, which not only tend to be exceptionally loud (meaning they have to come in as loud, if not, louder), but more sophisticated than ever, because producers and tracking engineers also have all the mixing tools available to them. These mixers feel their creative leeway is continually reduced, to the point one big name mixer told this writer he feels all he does in many cases is just “bless the rough mix.”

Orton has a very different perspective: “It’s true to say rough mixes have become more sophisticated, but I don’t agree it places a limit on my creativity. If you’re not in competition with a great rough mix, then you can just as easily be AT 21

I actually feel I get a slightly more up-front sound from mixing in-the-box

in competition with another mixer. Just because everyone loves a rough mix doesn’t mean you can’t bring something new and exciting to the record, it just means you have to pay careful attention not to spoil the hard work already put into making the record. That often means you have to work harder, but the end result is usually a better record. Having said that, it’s nice when a client isn’t too tied to the rough mix. It’s liberating when you have complete creative freedom.

“I do agree that the lines between tracking, mixing and mastering are more blurred than they’ve ever been. As a mixer, my work is often being compared to released material, which has of course already been mastered, so it’s important my mixes stand up to that. I routinely use various mastering tools (EQs, limiters, etc) to make the mix sound as close to the finished product as possible.

That doesn’t necessarily mean making the mix as loud as possible, although some clients do want that, but it’s about getting every last bit out of the mix. Making a record is a collaborative process, and just as the artist, producer or engineer might speak to me during the process of a mix, I’ll sometimes speak to the mastering engineer too.”

ROUTINE RECALLS

Given that Orton has worked in-the-box for most of his career, there have been very few changes in his working methods as digital technology has progressed. “My working methods have remained the same for several years now,” he elaborates.

“I probably place more emphasis on laying out a session exactly how I want before starting a mix than I did in the past. That’s out of necessity because of the high volume of work I have. If you get everything organised well before you start the mix, you’re able to spend more time focussed on the things that matter, which makes for a better mix.

My usual routine involves starting around noon, unless there are pressing recalls to take care of, in which case I’ll start earlier. The session I’m working on will already be prepped so I just pull it up and start listening.

“I familiarise myself with the song by listening to the rough mix a few times and placing markers in the session to help me understand the structure.

AT 22

Robert Orton at the helm.

Ultraviolence was mixed completely in the box, bar Robert's collection of reference monitors.

Then I start working on the mix and keep going until it’s finished. Sometimes it doesn’t take long, often I work late into the night, but I usually finish a mix a day. If I work late, I like to listen to the mix the following morning, because it can be helpful to listen with fresh ears and a clear perspective. Maybe I’ll change one or two things and then print before moving onto the next mix. I don’t have a set routine for tackling recalls. When I receive recall requests, I sometimes work on them after I’ve finished the day’s mix because I don’t want to spoil the flow I’m in. Other times I might like a break from what I’m working on, so I work on a recall as I receive

the comments. Being able to swap between songs quickly and easily is certainly one of the huge advantages of mixing in-the-box.

“There wasn’t much jumping between songs when I mixed Lana’s album. Generally she and I would work on a mix until it felt right, then we’d listen to the mix in the car. Sometimes we’d go back into the studio for a few more changes and sometimes we’d pull up the session the following day, but usually when it sounded right in the car we knew the mix was finished. The two main singles from Ultraviolence that I mixed, Brooklyn Baby and Shades of Cool, were done this way.”

1

3 2

SHADES OF COOL Orton: “Lana’s records are all about her incredible vocals, so a great deal of time was spent finding just the right way to frame them. The vocal needed to soar in the choruses coming out of the verses. They were already quite wet in the verses, so I had to find a way that helped the record shift gear without becoming too saturated. The solution was a filter in the verses, as well as layering reverbs and delays together to change the texture and triggering some effects to catch particular words and phrases more than others. This worked particularly well because certain effects were included as part of the multitrack — for instance a reverb plate that Lana particularly liked when she was tracking. Altogether they contributed to the build up of layers.

“The vocal on Shades of Cool came in as a single vocal on just one track. One of the first things I did was separate it onto separate tracks for the verses and choruses so I could treat them differently. The verses required much more careful control over the lower frequencies than the chorus, so I used a Waves C4 multi-band compressor to catch any unwanted low frequencies. I set it carefully to react in such a way that it didn’t spoil the wonderfully rich tone of Lana’s vocals, something that can be difficult to do with EQ alone. The filter effect I used on the vocals in the verses came from the McDSP Futzbox. When the filter comes off for the chorus, the vocals open right up and that contributes to the soaring effect that’s so important for the song.

1

“As I mentioned, the vocal effects in all songs I mixed were often built up in layers and this was true for Shades of Cool as well. I used a Tel-Rey

delay going into a reverb, which comes in on the vocal on the choruses. I actually have two aux returns, set to the same input, each with a separate Tel-Rey with slightly different settings. I panned one of the auxes hard left and the other hard right which gives a much wider stereo effect and leaves more space in the centre for the vocal. Then, as you turn up the effect, it doesn’t swamp the vocal and wash it out.

“On the drums I used some parallel processing on both the kick and the snare. The kick has some distortion added to it, using Lo-Fi, but adding distortion can have a tendency to take away bottom end, so on a parallel path I’ve blended an undistorted signal, with a LPF just to reintroduce the bottom end I wanted to hear. The snare also has parallel processing that comes in on the bridge, where it needed a bit of help. I set up various parallel paths, one adds some lower frequencies for a bit of extra thud and another has some SSL compression for a snappier transient. I treated the overhead differently in the bridge too, with stronger compression to create more excitement. I used the Waves CLA-76 for this, which I love because it adds so much character to the sound.

2 “On the bass I had a UAD Fatso Sr with the ‘Tranny’ option selected. This is really cool for boosting lower frequencies so you can also hear them on small speakers, whereas they’d normally be impossible to hear. I have a hardware Fatso Jr, which I love, but I find myself using it less than I used to as the UAD plug-in sounds so great and also gives you more control over how the ‘Tranny’ settings take hold.

“The guitars on Shades of Cool all had great and interesting sounds, so they didn’t need a lot of work. Nearly all of the processing I did was because I was trying to either make space for them or get them to support the vocal more. One of the guitars had some distracting noise on it, so I used Waves Z-Noise to extract a portion of the noise and minimise it. I tweaked the tone of the guitar that plays though the whole track, using Avid’s Eleven plug-in, because it had some peaky frequencies in it that I felt rubbed against the vocal.

The re-amp plug-in did a better job of maintaining the character of the sound than simply EQ-ing would have done. On the wah-guitar that plays in the choruses, I used the UAD Studer A-800 to add some saturation which smoothes out the edges and makes the sound fatter. All of these things helped to create more space for the vocal.

3 “Finally, there were many Mellotron keyboards on this record, often in mono. I’m a big fan of carefully panning mono sounds to create an exciting stereo image, rather than having a lot of pseudo-stereo sounds which tend to sound less wide when you add a lot of them together. But, in this instance, there was an important Mellotron sound that was mono and I wanted to be able to mix it quite loud whilst not drawing attention away from the vocal. So, I used a UAD MXR plug-in with the doubler button selected to turn the Mellotron into a wide stereo signal and keep the centre of the mix clear for the vocal.”

AT 23

1

3

4

BROOKLYN BABY 1 Orton: “On Brooklyn Baby, as with Shades of Cool, there were some printed vocal effects in the session that Lana really liked. I found they needed a bit of help, especially when layered with the effects I added during the mix, so I processed them in a couple of different ways. Firstly, I set up a compressor, the Focusrite d3, keyed from the vocal, so that when Lana was singing, the reverb was effectively ducked. This has the effect of

making the reverb tails louder without making the lyrics unintelligible and washed out. Secondly, the

reverb was very wide and somewhat out-of-phase, but when I inverted one of the channels it lost much of its character, so I used the Little Labs IBP Phase Alignment plug-in to make a more minor adjustment and maintain the wideness while still correcting the out-of-phase problem.

2 “Regarding the guitars, one of the most important skills in mixing is how to recognise when to leave something alone, and the guitars on Brooklyn Baby sounded great to begin with. I grouped all guitars together to a bus and used the UAD Studer A-800 tape machine plug-in to add a little saturation and fatten them up. With the tape machine set to 7.5ips, the top end was smoothed out to leave a clearer space for the vocal.

3 “Using Altiverb, I also added some reverb to the two main guitars. This helped the guitars to sit better with the treatments already being used on the vocal. By using a different reverb for each guitar, I was able to create more separation between the parts and leave more space for the vocal.”

4 Orton also gave details of the general mix techniques at the heart of his approach, including VCAs in ProTools. Orton: “Once I’ve spent time working on the sounds of each track in the session and have a static balance that I’m happy with, I spend a lot of time writing automation. The levels of an exciting mix are rarely static and a lot of energy can be added by making small dynamic adjustments to the balance. I spend a lot of time on this in my mixes, and tend to use VCA faders to help simplify

AT 24

this process. Each part (or group of parts) that needs riding gets its own VCA and this allows me to make whatever automation changes are necessary without having to hunt around the mix window for the part I want to change. The automation written to these VCAs is separate from the automation I may have already drawn in on individual tracks, so it has the added bonus of making it simple to undo any rides that aren’t working, but without undoing some of the earlier work I’ve done in drawing more general volume changes.

5 “Finally, when it comes to the stereo mixes, I don’t have a go-to set of tools I use for processing the stereo bus, as each mix is unique. On Shades of Cool, I used the Waves Linear Phase EQ to make a small tweak to the bottom end. I also used the UAD ATR-102 set to 7.5ips, which significantly changes the character of the top-end. That’s a particularly unusual setting for me to use over a mix, but it seemed to fit really well for the song. I also used the Waves NLS over the stereo mix. I have the various tracks of the mix stemmed out to auxes, each of which has a channel version of the NLS on it, and the bus version of the plug-in is over the master.

“I use these plug-ins a lot as they allow you to alter the character of the mix in a subtle but pleasing way, either by selecting which ‘console’ you want to use, or by adjusting the drive. I also used Avid’s Heat to drive the mix and give it some colour too. The final process in the chain is an Oxford Limiter. I love the sound of the limiter and also the ‘Enhance’ feature it has, which is great for bringing certain harmonics to the front. As I mentioned previously, there were very few recalls on these mixes because Lana was present for the entire process. Once we had everything finished, the mixes were all sent off to Metropolis in London where they were mastered by John Davis. There was no interaction between John and I on this album, but he did a great job.”

5

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FEATURE

For a one-man band, DIY isn’t a weekend indulgence, it’s a mantra to live by.

Beardyman walks us through his quixotic musical quest from beatboxer to instrument curator. Turns out a big mouth will only get you so far…

Story: Andrew Bencina

AT 26

Darren Foreman earned his stripes when he won back-to-back UK Beatbox Championship titles in 2006-07, but more importantly gained a creative identity for something he’d always been — a vocal chameleon with a pathological fixation on the structure of sound and music.

“I had a stammer when I was three,” said Foreman. “It wasn’t that I had the compulsion to say the words again, it was that I needed to explore different ways of saying each phoneme — I couldn’t decide which way was the best. I remember saying ‘eye’ and thinking, “Hang on; ‘ahh’ turns into ‘eee’. How does it get there?

AHHHHHEEEHHHHEEEARRREERRRHEEE’. Does it pass through all of them? Does it do it faster or slower? What’s the curve?”

I remember thinking this stuff and it came out as a stammer. I was a weird kid!”

With more than a pinch of the stand-up comedian, Foreman’s more familiar Beardyman persona has funny-walked the line between novelty and music artist — people were naturally drawn to his Kitchen Diaries YouTube experiment, which went viral almost immediately.

While it might have been easier to trace his childhood debt to Police Academy’s Michael Winslow, it’s his religious devotion to often-overlooked composer and synthesiser pioneer Raymond Scott (mentor to Bob Moog and inventor of the analogue sequencer) that is far more revealing of the musician behind the mouth. “Scott is my spiritual hero,” eulogised Foreman. “I have a little plastic figurine of him that sits on top of one of my speakers. Any time it falls off I feel like I’ve dropped a sacred relic. He had this unachievable dream of being able to sit on a chair in front of an audience, place electrodes on his head, and just let everyone hear the music inside.”

Funnily enough, Scott’s fantasy comes pretty close to how Foreman has always made music. He may not have cracked the critical psychic bridge converter (yet) but a microphone, his mouth and a fertile musical mind have taken him a long way. Like Scott’s imaginary ideal, it’s always just been a question of speed; not from studio to master, but from brain directly to audience.

“I can produce close approximations of any noise I want with my mouth,” reckons Foreman. “I can think of and perform them instantly, without ever having to page between presets. From there it’s just a case of finding a faster way of putting all the ideas together.

I knew you could overdub notes into a MIDI file, or layer sound on top of itself on a tape machine, but the lightbulb moment for me was when I discovered loopers.

“I was listening to dance music and it was just one thing added to another, then one part dubbed out, and another taken away with some simple filtering. I thought it should be achievable live with a small collection of loopers, but as far as I knew I was out there on my own.

“Soon after, I was holidaying in Graz, Austria, and found myself deep in a side cave burrowed into a mountain in the middle of the city.

There, with stalactites and water dripping from the ceiling, was Tim Exile and his Mark 1 Reaktor beast. It was mental. He was creating

the most insane breakcore I’d ever heard and in a way that sounded so organic. So I pushed my way to the front. Everyone else was going crazy and I’m behind the rig staring and thinking, ‘This is just the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!’

“I’ve never made any secret of how much I’ve been influenced

by Tim. He’s very much my mentor in terms of that dogged determination to build the instrument of your dreams. Almost every instrument has been built by a musician who couldn’t quite achieve what they wanted. You can’t separate the musical inventor from the musician.”

ENTER THE BEARDYTRON MKI What followed this euphoric moment of inspiration has been a difficult and drawn-out gestation for an instrument light-heartedly christened the Beardytron. Foreman: “From the start I knew that computers were evil; a gateway to a world of chaos and despair. I really wanted to stay the hell away from software.”

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As a result the infant Beardytron was more Frankenstein’s monster than Stradavari. The earliest incarnation relied upon the Looperlative LP1 rackmount looper and external MIDI controllers.

Despite a heavy price tag and impressive functionality, the boutique solution never played well with its controllers. As newer mass-market products became available, a modular system evolved. The Korg Kaoss Pad and later the Kaoss Pad 2 were combined with a Line6 DL4 and Boss RC-20 to maximise the number of looping layers, the length of possible loops, and the different ways these loops could be manipulated.

Foreman: “You could do some interesting stuff, but there was no sync between anything. Then the Kaoss Pad 3 came out and I instantly recognised its potential as a micro looping workstation. So I bought one, and then two… and then three, only to realise that having three things in series meant that you had to constantly work from the end back to the beginning. I added a TC Electronic Studio Konnekt 48, which I used standalone for its DSP AT 28

and routing capabilities, and yet another Kaoss pad.

I did a lot of iterating on the structure of the signal path until I found something that really worked.”

By the end of the cycle Foreman had also added a large rackmount MIDI splitter, a Kaossillator, a Korg MicroKorg XL keyboard, some other pedal effects and a tour manager to help lug around the two large flight cases of gear and cabling.

Foreman: “The Beardytron MkI was a

much less available. There was no iPad and no

workstation made up of lots of MIDI controlled,

iPad apps. No huge ecosystem of apps specifically

MIDI synced, off-the-shelf hardware… and it

designed to control things. The Lemur was very

sucked! You could just about do a really impressive

hour with it, but there would be points where the technology was letting me down. I was still relying on cover versions to provide that moment of lift for the crowd when my technology just wasn’t impressive any more.”

CHAOS & DESPAIR

Foreman: “In the background to all this, I’d bought a Windows laptop and downloaded Circular Labs Mobius. For several years, from 2008, I desperately

worked at home trying to get Mobius to work inside Plogue Bidule with a MIDI controller, in such a way that it would be useful to me. I was going to use two computers and a Lemur touchscreen controller, maybe two, and a bunch of MIDI button boards — of which there were still only a few on the market.

“It was only six years ago, and yet there was

expensive and so I was always trying to find people who used it and could help me script for the thing.

I was committed to Mobius, but even if I stabilised the rig, I couldn’t individually record out all the different loop layers. I was getting really pissed off with my life, the music I was making and the equipment I was trying to use to make it. I had taken three to four months off from touring with the Beardytron MkI just to work on this new setup.

I’d say, “I am going to get this done this time!” In the end I realised it wasn’t a special computer I

Almost every instrument has been built by a musician who couldn’t quite achieve what they wanted. You can’t separate the musical inventor from the musician

CAPTURING THE CHAMELEON Darren has increasingly explored the use of additional instruments when it best serves the music but his primary sample source remains his voice so he’s pretty particular about microphone choices. After a long search, he originally settled on an adapted DPA directional head mic but has very recently switched to an Audix OM7 dynamic.

Foreman: “The DPA has incredible frequency response and I’ve literally never had a feedback problem with it. They’re designed to be flimsy and light and sit on the side of your face but I needed it in front of my mouth to beatbox. I had to build my own pop shield so I bought a mesh grille; cut out a little oval and backed it with foam; attached it to a 3mm mild steel rod with two-part epoxy; strapped it to a headmount I’d made myself; and wrapped the whole thing in electrical tape. It was brilliant but the maintenance on a self-built apparatus was more trouble than it was worth. As I’ve refined my interface system I’ve cut down on the amount of head movement required and so I’ve moved away from head mics. Audix makes great mics and the OM7 was super directional, delivered good gain before feedback and provided both an excellent, crisp top-end and meaty low-end.”

needed, or different equipment, it was coding nous.

“I was out of my depth and started to search for a mentor. I found Sebastian Lexer, one of the best Max/MSP guys around. Sebastian lectures in Max and interface engineering at Goldmiths University and is an avant-garde composer in his own right.

He used to tell his students, ‘the first rule of this class is do not try and make a looper. Everyone always wants to make a looper in Max, but don’t try it!’ Then for some reason, he met me and decided to try and make a looper — I guess he wanted see if it was actually possible.

“I wrote a detailed spec and we spent the next three years working on it. Within that time, the iPad came out, the Novation LaunchPad was released and there were more solutions for controlling things in different ways. There were already so many iterations of my setup no one had ever seen, and I was facing the unbearable possibility that it might be happening again. We’d successfully fulfilled the looper spec and things seemed stable but when we tried to implement the

effects part of the system it just wouldn’t work.

“Around this time, Sugarbytes released the Turnado plug-in. I realised straight away it was going to be a really lightweight CPU option to achieve an all-in-one multi-effects solution. Its linear morphing mechanism gave it a unique structure of control and made it very easy to change many parameters on the fly. Unfortunately, once we inserted a number of instances of Turnado into the Max patch, it broke. Seb tried some really innovative solutions that should have worked but we only succeeded in uncovering shortcomings in Max that Cycling74 were quite ashamed of. Once again, while my R&D had developed working prototypes for my techniques the third-party solution failed to accommodate the degree of compositional complexity I was imagining. It was really at that point I snapped.

“Looking back, I could have kept the Looperlative setup from four years previous, and just found a different controller. I didn’t know until much later that the fault lay with the particular

Novation MIDI controller sending erroneous NRPN messages. I could have tried to use Mobius within Max, or even kept my new Max looper environment and developed a custom audio engine to run within it. While making my first album [I Done A Album, 2011], with Emre Ramazanoglu, we even put together the world’s most insane Ableton Live rig, made of LaunchPads and an Akai APC40.

However, with the best will in the world, we just couldn’t get it to work. The native looper didn’t allow for the impact of plug-in delay compensation.

Every time you’d overdub to your loop you simply missed the mark. All of these options had possibilities but either lacked the CPU efficiency or compositional flexibility I was chasing. It felt like we could always achieve something with hard work, but that something was falling short of the music in my head.”

NOT LONG… MONTH OR SO

Foreman: “In the end, I decided I had to have the whole thing coded as a standalone application in C. I approached a friend of a friend, Dave Gamble, and pleaded with him to work with me. Dave is an uncommon maths genius who thinks in code. He makes some of the most incredible DSP stuff in the world [DMG Audio]. Luckily, he’d been a fan, liked what I did and thought it’d be fun. He thought it’d only take a couple of weeks to make the looping engine which was music to my ears. I said, ‘Wow! That’s brilliant. Knock us one up then would you?’

He coded something up in C and after a couple of iterations it worked. So then I asked, ‘How hard would it be for you to make an iPad controller app and house this looping engine in something that could also host VSTs?’ He said, ‘Not long… a month or so.’

“In retrospect, we both cringe at his time estimate because it ended up taking six or seven months of his life. It was all very well Dave doing this stuff for me but that wasn’t his dream, it was mine. He’d begun to sway from his true calling, making some of the greatest DSP algorithms that have ever been created, and all I was offering was an infinite hole of development. I had to reach out to more people, but it took a long time because good C++ coders are very rare and generally like to work for themselves. After a desperate and fruitless search, Angus, who runs FXPansion, directed me AT 29

BEARDYTRON 5000 MKII WHAT IS IT? The Beardytron shouldn’t be understood as one piece of software. It’s a combination of OSX audio application, iOS apps, custom plug-ins, third-party effects and synths, and a bespoke network protocol to link the disparate elements.

Foreman explains: “The funny thing is, what the Beardytron does is nothing special. It’s groundbreaking because it does loads of things other devices do, but all at once, and manages them in a CPU-efficient way.

“It’s four things really: It’s a very complex and fullfeatured looper; a VST host and channel router that fastidiously compensates for the latency of each of the different plug-ins used; it features four multitouch iPad interfaces to manage critical performance controls; and has its own network protocol.

“Really, it’s a very bespoke data stream — the messages going backwards and forwards only make sense to the looper. They’re not OSC, they’re not MIDI, it uses NSC which is a very vanilla network protocol. We’re sending waveform data, so I can see the waveform of the loop I’m recording to the laptop via the control interface on the iPad and then manipulate that loop on screen. It’s a godsend.”

LOOPER Foreman: “The Looper’s function wouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone. You have five available loop channels, preassigned to preset processing chains for drums, bass, pads, etc. There’s a constantly running input buffer and the way the engine works is to window the relevant part of that buffer and copy it into whichever loop you’ve selected to record. You’ll press a square on the screen to determine when you start and stop recording. The Beardytron is always interpreting when you meant to press in relation to the existing tempo or previous loops you’ve made.

If you have an idea, you can start recording at any time. You never have to wait for the next cycle to come around.

You can take any loop, or a section of any loop, and copy it over, or insert it within any other. If they’re different lengths, it compensates for that, which took some thinking. A bit like Ableton Live has rows, you’ve also got sections or layers in each loop but they’re able to play back concurrently and with different phase relationships to the original loop. You can even use the waveform view to perform quantised time shifts or freehand drags of the loop alignments to reconfigure how each loop relates to any other on the fly. There’s also a lot of very complex memory management. It’s a time machine! It does things no other looper can.”

HOSTER Foreman: “The actual name of the program is Hoster.

It has a bespoke multi-threaded audio engine, which is nuts. Without it, the whole thing wouldn’t have worked.”

The Beardytron relies heavily on Sugar Bytes’ Turnado plug-in for most genre-specific EDM effects, but also makes use of Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig on the input stage, Rob Papen’s Delay for Kaoss Padstyle effects, and Dave Gamble’s DMG Audio suite for workhorse mix processing.

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Foreman: “I’ve actually had Turnado adapted for me by Robert at Sugar Bytes. I started a dialogue with him at least four years ago and he’s made somewhere between 50 and 100 changes for me — that’s a lot of changes for one user. With just a few fingers I can create the key structures of dance music. What started out as a ‘fuck shit up’ device now responds like a multi-effects solution capable of a range of carefully composed musical gestures (builds, dropouts, re-entries, filter sweeps etc).”

The Hoster also incorporates custom-designed VST plug-ins, Instant Sampler and Instant Drum Machine. Going beyond the Looper’s reproduction of performed lines, Instant Sampler traps lightning in a jar — for instance, a sung note can be magically transformed into a Farfisa Compact organ patch.

Foreman: “I just press a square on Maschine and it instantly samples and trims that performed moment into that pad. I can immediately play that back and manipulate it in all kinds of ways. It’s become a really interesting sound design tool, just because of the immediacy of it.”

Used in combination with a range of input-stage effect macros he’s able to produce all of the percussion and sound effect samples he could ever need and the vast majority of bass and keyboard parts too!

Foreman: “I had Instant Drum Machine built for me by a coder called Cyril, from Barcelona. It’s costing me several thousand pounds to make and arguably I could have used any number of other drum machines to trigger things, but I wouldn’t have been able to switch between patterns as easily or in the way I wanted.

This thing’s been in my head for a long time and took inspiration from a couple of presets on the Kaossilator. There was something like it on Steinberg’s Groove Agent 3 but they discontinued that project.

Something similar again in BFD, but it’s not exactly what I want, even though it is really good. There’s even something similar in Avid’s auto-drummer Strike. It’s going to sequence all of my beats live and I’ll be able to cross mix between different sequences. It’ll revolutionise what’s possible in live production.”

KEEP IN TOUCH Beardyman now performs with four iPads. One controlling the Input stage, one on Looper control, one to control the Instant Sampler VST, and one for the Instant Drum Machine. Add to that a custom-scripted JazzMutant Lemur to manipulate an Ableton Live synth rig on the second computer.

Foreman: “Everything is very accessible on the interface at all times. Before the iPad, I would have needed about two square metres of controller button space because the gestures I’ve designed and had implemented are what’s most special. What people don’t realise is the touch gestures I’m using don’t exist in any other application. You can’t even really script Lemur to replicate what the Beardytron is capable of. The iPad interface is tactile in a way that I’ve never seen in a controller. There’s this internal logic to the way it works and I just can’t say what that is. Suffice it to say, after years of designing and testing, I found a way to control thousands of variables and looping methodologies all within one interface.”

Music technology is just such a fertile area… when all it takes is code and a few decent controllers to completely change what’s attainable, the possibilities are limitless.

BEARDYTRON HARDWARE The Beardytron currently runs on two laptops and is controlled by four iPads (and counting), a Native Instruments Maschine MkI controller (soon to be replaced by more streamlined KeithMcMillen QuNexi, Korg Nanokontrols and Steinberg CMC modules), JazzMutant Lemur via IK Multimedia iRig (“to resolve some of the Lemur’s weird MIDI over wi-fi dropout bugs”), Alesis Q61 keyboard controller and a few yet to be determined MIDI pedals routed via an instance of Bidule into the Looper. It’s still a leviathan, just a more friendly and compliant one — think Monsters Inc. rather than Frankenstein.

Audio and MIDI I/O duties are handled by an RME Fireface UFX and MOTU micro lite, with the RME also taking care of stem recording duties via its DURec, Direct USB Recording. With all the years of software development behind him it’s perhaps a surprise to see any additional outboard left in the equation but you’ll still find a TC-Helicon VoiceLive and Eventide PitchFactor in his input chain. Some complicated internal routings are required to manage the capture of vocals, guitar and synths into different streams of the system but when he performs live Darren keeps things simple for his engineer, with a single stereo mix output. With the entire system running at 16-bit/44.1k, the Beardytron is still taxing on CPU.

to a couple of people he knew who really saved the project over the last 12 months. If you don’t include Sebastian Lexer and his assistant, there have now been a team of six people who’ve worked on this generation of the Beardytron.

“In my situation, I’m reliant on coding geniuses to help remove creative barriers. It would be better if I was the person who was changing things on Max. But for me, Max is every bit as difficult as coding in C++. If I want to get more features put into this thing it’s always going to cost me. There’s a Japanese aesthetic theory that says, ‘Nothing lasts. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is ever finished.’

It’s very tempting to endlessly refine to achieve incremental increases in stability, but if the show isn’t good it doesn’t matter. I’d sooner it crashes halfway through a show, and I was doing amazing things. That’s clearly bad project management, but I’m just here to realise my musical dreams.

“While what we’ve achieved feels unprecedented, I’m not alone. The brilliant Imogen Heap has

spent orders of magnitude more than me on her development team. I’m in awe of her drive and determination. People like Tim Exile continue to use far more sophisticated granulation and audio processing and there’s a guy called Onyx Ashanti, who is off-the-scale Sun Ra-mental. He’s got a 3D printer and crazy ideas and is working with this fractal synthesis rig that he made himself in Pure Data. He’s turned himself into a cyborg.

“People like Tim and Onyx Ashanti are geniuses, utter geniuses; but they are encumbered by having no division of labour. I have to remember that the Beardytron is a song-writing tool, that’s why I made it. It exists so I can let my ideas flow freely.

Every single track on my new album was started on the Beardytron. The more you can get done in that moment — when your brain is exploring the narrative path it’s on — the better. When the music stops you come back to earth. You blink, look around… and you’re home. You can’t get back where you were.”

While the battle to build the Beardytron 5000 MarkII has been a testing and very expensive quest, Darren hasn’t run out of windmills at which to tilt. For him, configuring custom instruments isn’t a future for the few mad enough to indulge their creative dreams, it’s the present for all of us.

Foreman: “Any time anyone performs with Ableton they’ve built their own instrument because as it comes, Live is just a blank canvas. People now have Pure Data, AudioMulch, Plogue Bidule, Max, Max for Live, Ableton, BitWig and even SynthEdit.

There are so many controllers available and there’ll only be more interesting and esoteric options to come; especially with the iPad. Music technology is just such a fertile area. The rate of change in material science is increasing apace and when all it takes is code and a few decent controllers to completely change what’s attainable. The possibilities are limitless.

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FEATURE

In concert, all eyes are on the star. But it’s not all about Lorde.

Story: Christopher Holder Performance Shots: Marty Philbey

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Untamed: That’s as best as I can describe Lorde in concert. In an industry where even ‘punk’ rockers have good teeth and a tightlycontrolled image, Lorde is disarmingly ‘out of the box’. Her voice is deep. Not necessarily low (although she does have great range), but deep in ‘another dimension’ deep. And her on-stage antics are primal, unrehearsed and mesmerising.

So the trick was not to take this other-worldly creature and put the proverbial ‘backing tape’ behind her.

Lorde’s debut album, Pure Heroine, epitomised by her breakthrough, Grammy-winning hit, Royals, is brooding, spare and electronic. There was never any talk of hitting the road with electric guitars and a brass section. To do the album justice, the live sound would need to be true to the studio production in many ways. But not safe. The sound should be dynamic and exciting. Oh, and the low end should keep those trousers flapping.

“One of the first question I put to Ella [aka Lorde] was what do you want the FOH sound to be? Like a CD? Loud? Dynamic? Or a little more subdued and compressed like the record? She said to me, ‘no, I want it big, loud and dynamic, like a rock band’. So we’ve opened things up and put some more dynamic moments in there between verses and choruses. When the big sounds hit or the bass in the chorus drops, the level difference is dramatic; probably louder, and more dynamic than I normally would venture to go.”

Philip Harvey had recently come off a My Bloody Valentine tour (“It’s been nice to give my ears a break!”) and hand picked by a high-profile, UK-based management team to mix sound. He worked with Ella in the lead up to the tour, and quickly learnt to dispense with any preconceptions about her needs, preferences and vision.

BETA BEST

VOCAL CHAIN

Lorde’s vocal chain starts with a wireless Shure Beta58 handheld. The sensitivity of the mic and transmitter are all set to zero. From the Avid stage rack it gets to Philip Harvey at FOH, who runs into a Waves C6 plug-in. Philip sets the C6’s two floating bands to squeeze some low mids (around 155Hz) when Ella is really projecting. The other band is deessing at around 8.5kHz. After that, the vocal gets an overall tightening with a Waves API 2500 compressor plug-in.

Settling on the best vocal mic was Philip’s first surprise: “She’s using a Shure Beta58. I love the SM58 as a go-to mic but I’ve never been a huge fan of the Beta58. But it suits her voice best.

“Very early on in the piece, after learning she didn’t have a ‘favourite’ mic, I lined up a bunch that had worked for me over the years on various artists. We tried the Telefunken M80, a mic I’ve had great success with; the Sennheiser MD431, another great vocal mic; and the Heil PR35… all brilliant mics. But none of them fit. And during a European promotion run prior to the tour — where we’d do TV and radio spots — Ella would keep wanting to return to the Beta58 and I had to agree; it provides the most open sound for her voice.”

UP FRONT ABOUT BACKING

After settling on the best mic, Ella dropped another bombshell: she doesn’t like her vocal mixed too loud.

“That’s a big part of her approach,” noted Philip Harvey. “She doesn’t want her vocal to sit on top of everything else in the mix. Case in point: the level of the backing vocals. When most people are trying their best to hide the fact they’re using backing

tracks for BVs, Ella wants them to be almost as prominent as her own vocal. Her approach is to weave her level in and out of the BVs — she’ll duck her level a bit and let the BVs take over at times and then she’ll project to be over them in other parts.

It’s a big part of her sound.”

But not something easily accepted by most engineers more accustomed to pushing the lead vocal right out front.

“Usually it’s the most important thing, right?

Ride those vocals high. Especially on radio or TV, where the vocals are normally right up so you can hear it through a three-inch mono speaker. During that promo tour I had to keep asking the broadcast engineer to mix her vocals lower. ‘But it’s too soft!’

‘Don’t worry she’ll push herself over the mix when she wants to.’

“And it remains Ella’s biggest pet peeve: ‘I’m so disappointed. I listened to the TV program and the vocals were mixed too high.’

“The same thing can happen at festivals where, increasingly, bands are multitracked and an audio guy you’ve never met before will try and get a happening broadcast mix on the fly.”

We’ve opened things up and put some more dynamic moments in there between verses and choruses … probably louder, and more dynamic than I normally would venture to go

EAR TO STAY

Ella’s in-ear mix is equally idiosyncratic, according to monitors engineer Brett Taylor (who was deputising for Marcel Cacdac on the Australia leg).

“When you think of a lead singer’s mix, often times they want a lot of themselves — ‘more me’. But there will be times in Ella’s mix when her vocals are almost underneath the backing vocal tracks.”

Ella uses Sensaphonic in-ear monitors, as do the other two band members, James Mac (keys) and Ben Barter (drums). James and Ben supplement their ears with a d&b M2 floor monitor each. Minimal.

“We had sidefill in the recent US leg of the tour but we didn’t use it. It was more as a failsafe. So if Ella takes an ear out, she’s really only hearing house sound. And with the reliance on loops and playback, there isn’t even a guitar stack or a bass player she can take cues from. She’s got to have a good seal — no two ways about it.”

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Big Hit: Ben Barter’s kit is minimal. His role is to trigger samples via Roland SPD drum pads as much as to play acoustic drums. The microphone complement includes a Shure SM52A on kick, a Sennheiser e904 clip-on mic for toms, a pair of AKG C414s for overheads, Shure SM81 pencil condenser on hats and a SM57 on snare. Philip Harvey: “The samples take precedence, and the acoustic kit is there to support those sounds.”

KEYED IN

Keyboardist James Mac auditioned for the tour with unusual results: “I actually auditioned to be the drummer. I didn’t get the gig, but management wondered if I’d be interested in keys. I’m a drummer. So I said ‘sure’. I didn’t know anything much about Ableton Live, and hadn’t played keys before, but I did a crash course. I now know… don’t play the black notes, bad things happen!

James is being modest. The keyboard role is more about triggering sounds and loops than occupying a traditional performance role. So rhythm is more important than being able to duel with Stevie Wonder.

“The rig is based on two MacBook Pros running Ableton Live. I’ve got two identical Novation 61-key Impulses that control what’s mostly samples and loops prepared by Joel Little for the tour. The pads on the Impulse are triggering vocal samples, sirens, etc, while the keys are sometimes playing drum racks on Ableton, or soft synths from the Arturia synth pack, or NI Massive. As you’d expect, it’s all automated, so when the chorus drops, for example, the program change hits and the chorus sounds will click in. I have a third mini keyboard up there that we use for loops during the occasional break between songs. The keyboards go through a MIDI merge and into both laptops — an A and a B system for redundancy’s sake. The audio is processed through the UA Apollo interfaces.”

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PA SPEC

Avid Profile console for FOH & Monitors JBL Vertec VT4889s for PA main hangs Double-18 floor-stacked Subs Shure UR Wireless Mic System Sennheiser G3 IEMs Dolby Lake Processors d&b M2 Floor Monitors FOH Engineer: Philip Harvey Monitors Engineer: Brett Taylor JPJ Crew: Guto Montiero JPJ Crew: Harley Honeyman

Philip Harvey at FOH. Avid Profiles are used at FOH and monitors. An Apogee Big Ben is used as the main clock source.

MICRO MIXING

For both Philip and Brett, mixing isn’t about flamboyant gestures or frantic cycling through mute groups and snapshots. Mixing is an almost forensic exercise.

“It’s half a dB here or one dB there,” confided Philip. “Let’s not forget, the record is sparse. The confronting thing during production rehearsals and early shows was realising that if an element is too low in the mix then it’s painfully obvious.

So the challenge was to take all those elements and pull it into a big, dynamic mix, rather than replicate the CD.” During the show, Philip will keep half an eye on his MacBook which hosts Metric Halo’s real-time analyser, Spectrafoo. He knows the areas where low and low-mid buildup can occur and keeps a watchful eye.

BIG BOTTOM

Ah, yes, the low end. Anyone who’s heard any of Lorde’s hits will be familiar with the album’s enormous bottom end, thanks to Joel Little’s production. The live show was always going to have that hip-hop sensibility to the low end. In reality, it’s far more palatable than some of the overbearing sub flabbiness you’ll often hear at a hip hop gig. It’s tight. Credit must go to JPJ’s system set up, to Joel Little’s fastidious preparation of the samples, loops and sounds for the tour, and to Philip Harvey’s careful treatment of the low end in the mix.

For a look at how Philip Harvey has set up the Lorde vocal channel and James Mac's explanation of his keyboard rig and playback, check out our YouTube channel for more. youtu.be/ugBtKCOGcnc

Harvey: “Joel Little painstakingly took the album’s samples and stems, and worked with the keyboard player James to load them into an Ableton Live project to be recreated in concert.

Those sounds from Live come to me via two UA Apollo 16 interfaces and two Radial rackmount DIs. The Apollo sounds great. And Joel’s sounds are amazing to begin with.

“Probably my only ‘secret weapon’ in opening up the lows is to feed the subs from an auxiliary send.

The likes of the acoustic kick, floor tom, and the various stereo drum loops and bass drops will get fed to that aux send.

“It means I can maintain a complementary mix of low information sent to the sub and adjust the aux master bus song to song. For a song like Royals, the aux master is set to unity, loud and proud, while for a song like Swingin’ Party, it’s 6dB down.”

On the night, the pitch was just right. Festival Hall in Melbourne, as well known as a boxing venue as a concert venue, responded well to JPJ’s JBL Vertec PA. Big, dynamic and exciting.

AT 37

REGULARS

STUDIO FOCUS:

Story: James Dampney

SAE SYDNEY OPENS DOWNTOWN SAE has spent the best part of 40 years building a reputation as the world’s biggest audio engineering school. Starting in Sydney with one humble studio way back in 1976, SAE now boasts 53 campuses across 27 countries. Yet it has just taken its educational facilities to a whole new level, courtesy of its stunning new Sydney campus.

The previous campus was spread over two buildings in Surrey Hills, but the facilities no longer suited the school’s needs, so the decision was made to relocate to the CBD. “We think it’s a great location,” SAE campus manager Radovan Klusacek said. “It’s very easy to access, a nice environment and, importantly, an opportunity to build a school from scratch.

“We were given one-and-a-half floors in a shell building. An open space where we could do whatever we wanted. For someone trying to build recording spaces, recording studios and so on, it’s a godsend, rather than being stuck trying to work into something that was already there.”

Klusacek spent 15 years in music composition, composing and producing music for the film, television and music industries before moving to AT 38

Australia and linking up with SAE. Starting off as a studio supervisor, he then became a lecturer, an academic director and now general manager of the campus.

Naturally, Klusacek was heavily involved in the design and construction of the new premises. The pick of the gear survived the relocation with an impressive array of new kit to bring the facility up to a truly professional standard.

“We had the opportunity to design the studios the way we really wanted,” Klusacek said. “Because of the space available, we wanted to blur the boundary between a studio and a classroom. The studios are large enough to accommodate the students so that the lecture delivery is happening in there. The students are in the studio at all times.

“While everyone understands we are an educational institution, we also wanted to have the studios up to the quality of a professional recording studio. Striking the balance between an educational environment while giving the students the best possible experience was very important for us. That comes down to hiring a high-end acoustician to deal with the acoustic environment and making

STUDIO 1

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STUDIO 2

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STUDIO 3

sure not just one, but all the rooms sound great. So we could record anything from a single vocalist to a very large ensemble.”

The school boasts just over 600 students and offers degrees in six disciplines – audio production, film production, graphic design, game design, animation and interactive technologies.

It houses the latest Avid recording systems, but Klusacek was also keen to maintain full analogue facilities, including a 24-track analogue recorder.

SAE is designed to arm students entering the workforce with the best preparation possible.

“What we’re looking at, and we’re very particular about this, is the environment the students will be in once they transition out into the real world.” Klusacek said. “One way we do this is by structuring our course delivery into studio units.

It’s an environment where students engage with each other just the same way as they would other people in the industry. Collaboration and real life experience is what we’re trying to create.”

Taking a tour through the SAE campus, it is a well designed space that flows from studio to studio and is sound proofed throughout. Featuring seven control rooms, it also boasts a huge green screen studio, edit suites and industry leading software.

AT 40

The aim is to give students both the training and the belief they can make their dreams into reality.

“I would be the first to argue that we need to support the desires and the vision the students have,” Klusacek said. “It doesn’t matter how slim the chances are, if you really, honestly believe you want to be the next big hip hop producer, we should support that. We’ll give you all the other skills as well, so you can make a living and pay the bills by doing something related to what you want. But I’m not going to tell you that’s not realistic. That’s not our place. We’ll support you by how we teach, what we teach and what we use to teach so you can be whatever you want to be.”

And it is having the desired effect.

“For the new students, who had never seen the old facilities, they think it’s impressive,” Klusacek added. “But the students who are transitioning are simply blown away and quite frankly, I was too.

“For months and months I saw the studios on a plan and my only real concern was if it was going to be big enough. When I walked in for the first time, I realised it was amazing.

“I’m delighted – and I’m a very hard person to please.”

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For dealer listing, please visit www.federalaudio.com.au/dealers AT 41

REGULARS

STUDIO FOCUS:

GIGPIGLET RECORDINGS’ NEW NEVE It’s winter time, and Gareth Stuckey, aka Gigpiglet, is halfway through his annual fixerupper jobs. The two main jobs on his list were to install a Neve 55 series console in his studio, and a new kitchen at home. The desk is in, so the rest of the winter will be spent agonising over benchtops and faucets.

Up until recently, the studio was home to a DDA DMR24 console purchased from Alberts. But in 2011, with help from Brendan Gallagher, Steffan Johnson, Damien Herbert and Jeff Faraday a large control room was built, an iso booth, control room and a second recording space; and Gigpiglet Recordings started to shape up into a real business.

Things kept going well: A B Room was added with audio and Avid video capability; and this year, a C Room was tacked on for broadcast and live recording work. Just as things were settling down, Stuckey happened upon a Neve 55 series broadcast console up for sale, and the DDA’s place began to look doubtful.

The provenance of the board — as best as Stuckey and co. can put together — began at Radio 1 in Dublin, then it was shipped over to be the backup broadcast board for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The IOC was a bit hesitant about moving to a Euphonix digital console, so the Neve was analogue insurance, the output of which never AT 42

went to air.

Tom Misner gobbled up most of the Olympics gear after the closing ceremony. The Neve was torn down, perfectly packed into original Neve boxes, and sat in his shed for 14 years. While all the modules were meticulously packed, everything else was missing — patchbay, ribbon cables, EDACs, anything that linked the console together.

Peter Holtz ‘found’ the console under a bunch of tarps when Studios 301 built the new studio.

And after Rob Squire flew up and gave it the ’give it a punt’ tick, Stuckey bought it and Rob got to work rebuilding the veins and arteries of the beast from scratch. It wasn’t an easy job, the audio path is pristine, with all the monitoring tapped off the central backbone. Rob put in more than 100 hours in Adelaide refurbishing the channel strips, and Stuckey did about the same wiring the console up in Sydney, with help from Gary Dryza, Todd Dixon and Travis Keir. Then it took a week to connect the work together. “Normally if you decommission something, you recommission it a month later and know where everything goes,” said Stuckey. “But we couldn’t even figure out how things like the power modules were physically supposed to attach.”

In all, Stuckey fully loaded three of the five buckets, making a 48-channel console with 32 preamps, plus a master section, and used the final

bucket to integrate a patchbay. He also had the surrounds redone in wood, binning the horrible white lino that made the whole thing look like a “’70s Russian spaceship,” said Stuckey. “It’s hardly NOS, but for 40 years old, it looks pretty brand spanking. The difference is positively noticeable. It’s been interesting to change just one section of the studio, because then you really notice it.”

Because Rob and Gareth had to completely rewire the desk, it meant they weren’t beholden to anyone’s previous patching setup, and could completely reconfigure the studio’s headphones system. The Neve’s Studio Loudspeaker System (SLS) has been recommissioned as a general monitor mix. And, with the addition of Rob’s custom-made four channel headphone amplifiers, musicians can now flick between a custom aux mix and what’s coming off the SLS, as well as mute the signal or switch it to mono. It means engineers don’t have to tailor separate monitor mixes if they don’t need to, they just get a mix going on the SLS. Stuckey also upped the overall quality and consistency of the system by adding Beyerdynamic DT770 headphones throughout, and furnished all the studios with new Apple computers.

Gigpiglet Recording: (02) 9698 9292 or www.gigpiglet.com.au/recordings

AT 43

REVIEW

SOFTUBE CONSOLE 1 Softube’s Console 1 isn’t just another control surface, it’s an SSL console disguised as one.

NEED TO KNOW

Review: Brent Heber

Price $1650 Contact Sound & Music: (03) 9555 8081 or info@sound-music.com

AT 44

Pros Tactile feel & build quality is superb Ease of operation Sound quality & flexibility

Cons No support for non-Softube plug-ins Doesn’t follow your selection inside your DAW Re-naming channels is arduous for a decent-sized mix

Summary Softube’s Console 1 is a great first step away from keyboard and mouse control. Not only because it feels right, and works well, but because the engine it’s driving is a serious beast.

Softube's Console 1 surface is simply laid out with all you would expect from an SSL 4000 E channel strip, with a little more flexibility. Re-route the three main sections any way you choose, and sculpt your sound to the nth degree with the combination of Shape's ADSR transient shaping, the four-band EQ and SSL compressor. At the end of the chain you can choose how far you want to drive each channel for extra harmonics.

I’m a bit of a control surface nut, as some of you may know: ICON specialist, C24 enthusiast, Artist series owner and thrasher, and automation junky. So consider me intrigued when Softube — manufacturer of some darn lovely plug-ins — announced what looked to all intents and purposes a proprietary control surface, only to read time and again that it’s not a control surface.

My first impression on removing it from the box was that it’s surprisingly heavy (so it must sound good). Metal construction and knobs that are soft to the touch, but firm when turned. Slightly sepia yellow LEDs and warm colours and tones give an industrial meets retro feel. I ran the installer, plugged in the USB cable and ‘hey presto!’ I got my first glimpse of the pop-up window that shows the Console 1 SSL 4000 E plug-in.

HOW IT DRIVES

In order to integrate its hardware into multiple DAWs consistently (the system works in VST, VST3, AU and AAX formats) Softube elected to use a ‘plug-in within a plug-in’-type architecture — ie. you load the Console 1 effect inside your DAW of choice, and are confronted with a nearly blank deffault GUI. The plug-in can be driven with a mouse but the whole idea of this combo hardware/software system is to ditch your mouse and keyboard and embrace console-style mixing that so many lust after.

Consequently, inserting the plug-in creates a link to the hardware, which has 20 numbered buttons running along the top telling you which instance within your DAW you are currently operating from the ‘surface’. Basically, you load up instances of the Console 1 plug-in across your tracks and then hit button 3 on the hardware to access plug-in 3 on channel 3 in your DAW, simple and very quick once you get into the rhythm of it. You can use unlimited banks of 20, depending on how much juice your computer has.

If you want to see the user interface for the plug-in you can either hit the Display On button and arrange it somewhere on your desktop permanently, or use the latching Auto button next to it — in the latter mode, any time you turn a control on the hardware the Console 1 interface pops up on your computer screen to provide visual reference beyond that on the controller. Console 1 currently does not display your DAW track names in its onscreen display, but Softube is working on it with select manufacturers. In the meantime you can retype your track names into the software to make it easier to operate rather than relying on numbers alone. This comes in handy if your

preferred mixing template has a few submasters throughout it, VCAs, or channels you don’t want to run the Console 1 plug-in on. By naming the channels, it prevent things getting confusing and out of numerical sync.

SOUND ARRANGEMENT

The actual Console 1 plug-in that the system controls is a top notch addition to any in-the-box mixer’s arsenal. Not only does the sound so closely emulate the famed SSL 4000 E that SSL is happy to be associated with it, but the features take the SSL channel strip to a new level of flexibility.

Console 1 has three main sections: Shape — with a gate and transient shaper to adjust attack and sustain; a four-band parametric EQ; and a Compressor. And the signal flow can be switched three ways; between EQ-Shape-Comp, Shape-EQComp and Shape-Comp-EQ. Also, if you happen to own any other Softube EQ or compressor plug-ins, those can be substituted into the Console 1 channel strip, making it significantly more flexible.

Importantly, you can bypass each section, and when turned off they all save on processing power. CPU usage in ProTools 11 was very light, and by default the plug-in instantiates with all sections bypassed.

Bookending the main sections at the input end are High and Low Cut filters (switchable to the compressor’s sidechain), phase toggle and pan controls. On the output side there is a pot for volume control in addition to Softube’s Drive, allowing the SSL’s modelled sound to be enriched even further. The Drive section also has a character pot, so the tone of the saturation can be adjusted from smooth to aggressive depending on the results you’re after.

The compressor section has a handy wet/ dry control for easy parallel processing. And the combination of the filters and four-band EQ, the Shape section with its ADSR abilities, and the Drive section’s bite mean you have tremendous control over your material in a mix. It certainly does enough sonic sculpting to minimise reaching for a mouse to operate alternative plug-ins in your DAW. CONTROL VS CONSOLE

Any sort of hands-on control is good in my books. The Console 1 has a simplicity of operation that makes it very quick to learn and fast to use, particularly if your automation needs are quite simple — as in broad brush strokes of automation coupled with complex editing, which has worked for many in our industry for years and makes for great ‘craft’.

Personally, having used more complex control surfaces in a post environment I found the Console 1 a bit limiting in a couple of ways. For only $350 more I have an Artist Control sitting on my desk which, rather than forcing me to work the way Softube wants, is extremely flexible, with user-definable touchscreen and layouts.

And the EQ and Dyn mode allows any plug-in in your DAW to populate the eight pots. The Artist Control will also follow your track selection within your DAW, making the 1-20 buttons on the Console 1 redundant.

On the flip side, the Artist series can be quite flakey and the feel of that controller doesn’t give you much confidence it would survive a trip in a bag compared to the Console 1, which feels very robust. This feel difference is most obvious when it comes to actually turning a knob to control a parameter. Softube has done brilliant work on the ballistics of the Console 1 knobs and the responsiveness of its software — you really can imagine you are turning the black topped EQ that this system is based on. It’s an illusion that would quickly fall apart if you were using an Artist Control with its plastic-feeling little knobs. Also, there’s no sexy SSL E series plug-in included with the Artist Control, and communing with both the Softube and SSL eco-systems is after all a very pleasant state of being.

WORK FLOWS ON

The Console 1 will almost definitely change the way you work. The proprietary nature of its integration means you’ll likely use Softube’s plug-ins for all your EQ and dynamics requirements just to use your hardware controller. Only your reverbs, delays and go-to creative plug-ins will reluctantly drag you back to mouse control. It’s fairly straightforward to think of these processes as two different stages in the mix, firstly pulling the dynamics and tone of individual elements together quickly using Softube’s system and then switching over to your mouse and DAW for the more macro job of mixing all the elements together, adding space and interest to finish your mix. After a few hours it’s easy to see past the limitations of only using Softube’s plug-in on the surface precisely because it works so well doing what it does.

Currently the Console 1 only works on OS X, but Windows users are assured that support is on its way. If you’ve never used a control surface of any kind and are looking to shift away from mixing on a keyboard and mouse to something more left brain, I heartily recommend checking this system out.

AT 45

REVIEW

Electro-Voice ETX Powered Loudspeakers Getting bored with the current crop of powered portable speakers? EV’s ETX range will update those expectations.

Review: Mark Woods

STRONG LOOKS

NEED TO KNOW

Designed and assembled in the USA, the boxes are made from 18mm 13-ply birch plywood. EV is owned

by Bosch and the drivers are sourced from their hi-tech facility in Mexico, with amps and DSP from EV in Germany. The cabinets are finished with a semimatte, textured surface called EVCoat that looks good on stage, but I found it gets marked quite easily.

The attractively-patterned, wrap-around front grille feels very strong and gives the boxes an understated but professional look.

Price ETX-10P: $1849 ETX-12P: $1999 ETX-15P: $2149 ETX-35P 3-way: $2599 ETX-15PS sub: $2499 ETX-18SP sub: $2599

AT 46

Contact Bosch:: (02) 9683 4752 or boschcomms@au.bosch. com

Pros Good DSP + physical design make great sound Double the power of previous generation LCD screen could be the new standard

Cons No top handle

Summary EV’s ETX range could be the next step for portable powered speakers. High power, great sound and design, and a screen-accessible DSP that makes one box go a long way.

The current wave of portable powered speakers have seen good service — in fact, they’re everywhere now — but Electro-Voice reckons it’s time to update expectations for this hotly-contested, prosumer class. It’s all about value, and $1500, give or take, seems to be the comfort zone. By combining components from its high-end products with some clever design, and powerful DSP, EV’s ETX range may well be the new wave in the next set of portable speakers.

The range consists of three full-range two-way boxes: the ETX-10P with a 10-inch LF driver; the ETX-12P with a 12-inch driver; and the ETX15P with a 15-inch. A single full-range three-way speaker — the ETX-35P — has a 15-inch LF driver and 6.5-inch mid-range driver. All of these use EV’s DH3-B 1.25-inch titanium compression driver for HF reproduction. Two sub-woofers are offered: the ETX-15SP and ETX-18SP that use 15-inch and 18-inch LF drivers respectively.

The drivers themselves are from EV’s industrialstrength EVF installation range.

So far, pretty normal. It’s the arrangement of these drivers behind the grille that really makes the difference. The two-way cabinets have been designed so the front of the horn flare hangs over the top of the LF driver. This means the horn waveguide can be quite large (for better pattern control) and the gap that’s created cleverly carves out a bass port. The diaphragms for the drivers are as close to each other as possible and physically aligned for phase coherence.

SCREENING TALENT

Advances in both driver and cabinet design have been matched by improvements in DSP and how it’s accessed. In the ETX range, FIR-Drive digital filtering is given the credit for removing nonlinearities in the driver’s response. It means — in concert with the phase response attributed to the physical design — they sound great straight out of the box and allows the designers to shape the response to optimise performance for different speaker placements and applications.

A big feature of the ETX range, and one I expect will become standard issue, is the screen for accessing DSP functions. It’s a good size, easy to see, with a big clear master volume display in the centre, all controlled by a push-button rotary controller — pretty simple. The master level control will turn the speakers down to off, or provide up to 10dB of gain. And if you hit the rotary controller too hard it goes all the way up to… well, I won’t give it away, but it’s heartening to know a sense of humour can be part of speaker design.

Practical control options within the DSP include preset function modes for Music, Live and Speech, as well as settings that optimise the speaker’s response in different physical locations.

General settings include up to one second of delay and options for using the boxes with subs, including a variable HPF so they can be used with any old subs… or specific settings for matching the ETX full-range speakers with specific ETX subs. The three-band semi-parametric EQ section is down the list and correctly labelled Room EQ. If

Traditionally, powered boxes have erred on the side of simplicity. But as sound quality improves, the more users appreciate finer control

the Function and Location settings are correct for your purpose then you really shouldn’t need any more EQ. The screen display is dominated by the master volume level, surrounded by some handy information. I appreciated the input level meter, with overload indication, for each channel. The reminders on the screen about selected Location presets and sub/HPF choices are also helpful, but an indication of which Function is selected is missing, as is an indication of any EQ being used.

Both of these can have a big effect on the sound coming out of the speaker and it would be better if these were displayed, especially because the ETX speakers power up on the same settings they were powered down with. It’s worth being aware of this as there are enough options for the inexperienced to get confused… and it will store any weird or experimental settings. On several occasions I found the Reset Factory Defaults option was the quickest way to get back to the start.

Traditionally, powered boxes have erred on the side of simplicity. But as sound quality improves, the more users appreciate finer control over the sound — as long as they’re still easy to use for professionals in a hurry, or school gym teachers nominated to get the PA going. Despite the relative complexity of the control options, you don’t need to use the screen at all to get the ETX speakers working. Plug a mic into one of the two input sockets, raise the gain for that channel and it works. The factory default settings are normal with the virtual master gain starting at 0dB. The simple menus combined with one-knob turn/ push navigation make the DSP easy to drive and it’s refreshing not having to deal with those little switches that litter the back panel of last decade’s powered speakers.

POWERFUL RANGE

In use, I found the ETX speakers to be versatile and powerful. Driving the drivers is a 2kW Class D amp. That’s a lot of power considering the current breed of powered speakers was proud to boast 1kW. The controlled frequency response, even coverage and high power made a good initial impression.

The horn might sound a bit bright first thing in the morning but it won’t by the end of the soundcheck and it’s particularly smooth across the 1-4kHz

high-mid range. The slightly exaggerated response above 6kHz is a little tizzy up close but gives some good sparkle for live shows. The low mids sit nicely without boxiness or bark — out the front anyway.

As usual for this type of speaker the low-mids are quite prominent coming off the back of the cabinet.

The LF response varies according to the model and the Location preset. The ETX-10P is somewhat bass shy with not much energy below 100Hz. The bigger and heavier ETX-12P is a lot fuller. The three, single-woofer full-range models can all be used as floor monitors and selecting the Monitor pre-set in the Location menu rolls off the bottom end to remove unwanted LF energy and helps avoid coupling with the stage.

The difference in LF response between the different full-range models is less noticeable when you add one of the subs. The subs have the same overall build quality, steel grille and good looks as the full-range boxes. The screen is the same, the amp inside is 1800W… and they transform the speakers into ground-shaking beasties. The sound from the subs is punchy and well-controlled. The response is nice and even between 40-160Hz and they stay tidy at high levels. Instantly you’ve got a PA, and even one full-range speaker plus one sub per side would make a neat little front-of-house system for the right-sized act or venue.

BIG SUB OPTIONS

In another spin-off from EV’s high-end concert systems, if you have two or more subs per side they can be stacked for a cardioid pattern (rather AT 47

NO LOCK ON POWER

Connections are made via two combo XLR/jack input sockets, each with its own gain control, and a mix out for linking to other speakers. RCA inputs are an obvious omission, not the most professional connector, I know, but convenient for connecting CD players. Power connects via an IEC (kettle) lead. Some prefer more secure PowerCon style connectors as IEC leads can be pulled out easily if someone trips over the lead. But with a locking power lead the tripper may pull the speaker over on its stand — a worse outcome. And, of course, if you forget to pack the leads bag, a kettle cord will always be easier to find in the field.

WEIGHING UP HANDLES

They feel solid and resonance-free so it’s not surprising they weigh a little more than average for this type of speaker. The ETX-10P weighs just over 20kg; the 12P nearly 24kg; and the 15P is nearly 28kg.

Good-sized handles help with carrying; the ETX-10P only has one side handle, the others two. None of them have handles on the top. It’s not a big thing but I like handles on the top of powered speakers and use them often; getting them out of the original packing boxes for a start… or lifting them out of the back of a ute.

than the natural omni pattern) by pointing one backwards and selecting Cardioid in the subwoofer options. The DSP takes care of the technicals. EV claims this can provide up to an impressive 30dB rejection at the rear of the stack and is intended to reduce the amount of bass on stage or behind the speakers.

The only practical problem with the subs is the size; they are efficiently designed but they’re still a lot bigger than the full-range boxes, especially with their wheels on. For bands or self-contained acts, using subs is another level of commitment compared to turning up with a couple of powered boxes on stands. One ETX-15SP sub can be packed into the back of a wagon by one person if he’s feeling fit but you’d need a van at least to move a whole PA. The (removable) wheels located on the back of the cabinets are professional 100mm roadcase strength items that would be right at home being wheeled down a ramp out of the back of a truck (rolling the 15SP into the Theatre Royal made me think of Martin Phillishaves) so maybe the subs are best left for super-keen bands, production companies or installations.

This brings me to the ETX-15P full-range speaker. They’d be used as part of a PA or AT 48

installation because they’re louder and punchier, but they can work for mobile acts too. I have a pair of 15-inch speakers I don’t always use because they are a little awkward to carry and a little precarious on a cheap stand, but if you’re mixing a whole band you can get a bit of deep bass and kick out of them.

With 12-inch boxes or smaller, you can’t get as much low-end as having a sub, but it’s often enough and they will fit in a wagon with all your other gear.

IN ACTION: NOLL & STONEFIELD

Shannon Noll at the Theatre Royal was a good chance to try some of the ETX boxes on the stage.

I used an ETX-10P on top of an ETX-15SP as a drum monitor and it kicked butt. No EQ, plenty of fat kick, easy vocal level… and you could hear it clearly half-way down the room. For powered speakers they have a good long throw. At the same show I gave Shannon one ETX-12P for foldback. It’s a good test; I’ve done his sound before and know he likes it fairly loud. It sounded like there was plenty of clear volume when I was setting it up for the soundcheck but I did notice the rather narrow horizontal coverage. Dedicated floor monitors with a wider coverage or speakers with a rotatable horn would be better in this

regard. Also the 40 degree recline is a tad low, 43 degrees seems standard, so I had to chock it up for Shannon. That said, it certainly worked. Up loud it needed a couple of spots of EQ but got the big thumbs up at soundcheck and didn’t get changed through the night.

The week after that was a pub gig with thin rockers Stonefield. The ETX-12P was great as drumfill on the small stage with good punch from the kick, a strong vocal level and not a hint of feedback. The ETX-10P was just as good at the centre vocal position. This was a loud rock show; these speakers work.

The EV ETX range raises the standard for this class of speaker by offering quality components with clever design, more power and more control. Highlevel sound at a mid-level price. Top of the class.

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REVIEW

ARTURIA BEATSTEP

Arturia has managed to bring back sequencing in a way that will appeal to the masses, not least because it looks, feels and operates like a pad controller.

Review: Mark Davie

Beatstep is yet another sign Arturia is right on the money with its product development… literally. The low end of the controller market is full of useful devices, but most aren’t very smart. Their buttons, knobs and flashing lights don’t advocate for your creativity, and often are made as cheaply as possible.

Beatstep reuses the hardware developed for Spark, and its metal construction, quality pads and detented encoders are well out of character for a controller in this price range. And importantly, it’s more than just a good-looking dumb surface, there’s some real smarts behind the looks.

IN THE RIGHT SEQUENCE

NEED TO KNOW

Sequencers have existed in modular synthesiser communities since the ’70s, but outside of drum machines, haven’t really made a dent in

Price $159 (expect to pay $149) Contact CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or info@cmi.com.au

AT 50

mass market hardware. Beatstep exists because Arturia’s VP of Product Management, Glen Darcey, wanted to bring step sequencing back in a big way. And the only way to do that was by making it small, accessible, and disguised in a form factor users had become more familiar with — pad controllers. The Beatstep, as its name suggests, is intentionally a hybrid device — half a pad controller, and half a step sequencer.

Darcey’s original drawings were more aligned with a traditional step sequencer — a pitch control knob directly above each pad.

Thankfully the cost of PC board layering prevented the design. Because, although the 2 x 8 pad layout isn’t the more standardised 4 x 4 configuration, at least having them bunched together lets you have the best of both worlds — playing pads, and step sequencing.

Pros Amazingly flexible control for a small/ cheap pad controller Quality hardware derived from Spark Editable architecture for future improvements CV/Gate Out for modular synths

Cons No display, but for the price…

Only 16 steps No velocity control

Darcey obviously had a mind to keep the resurgent modular synth community happy too, with not only USB/MIDI in and MIDI out, but also CV and Gate outs on the side of the unit.

It uses 1V/octave, so will happily interface with standard Eurorack fare.

LIGHT UP YOUR MODE

Beatstep flips between its two states using the CNTRL/SEQ button. Lit up red in CNTRL mode, the pads work as normal velocitysensitive drum pads, and the 16 encoders can be set up to control any collection of MIDI parameters. I’ll dig deeper into how later. By holding shift and turning the large encoder, you can transpose the pads up or down in ±24 half steps.

In SEQ (Sequencer) mode, the button and pads light up blue, with blue representing the

Summary Beatstep brings hardware sequencing to the masses while still playing the part of a quality pad controller. There’s nothing in this price range that does this much.

‘on’ state of steps in the sequence pattern, and the corresponding encoders now adjust the pitch of each step. By flipping back to CNTRL mode while the sequence is playing, you can adjust filters, etc, with the encoders and play the individual pads.

The start/pause and stop buttons control the sequence, but while the pattern is stopped you can grab any encoder and adjust its pitch. As long as you’re turning the encoder, the note continues to play. You can also transpose the whole sequence up or down in ±24 half steps by holding SHIFT and turning the large encoder. Turning the encoder without holding SHIFT adjusts the rate of the sequence.

While the encoders offer a range of control possibilities, with a few button pushes, the pads have some unique onboard features too. Users can store and recall up to 16 presets/patterns, which are assigned to each of the pads; there are eight selectable scale settings, including a user-defined scale, which limit the range of notes a step can be pitched at; you can change the playback orientation of the sequence between forward, reverse, alternating and random; and adjust the step size between 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32. You can also readjust the sequence length by hitting SHIFT+CHAN and selecting an end pad, but every time you adjust a pattern length or the step size, the sequence restarts. It would be nice for this to change after each pattern ends.

THE BRAINS

While you don’t have to use it, Arturia’s MIDI Control Center software gives the user full control over every parameter, scale note, pattern pitch, global pad velocity, knob acceleration and MIDI setting with a really simple GUI. You can also recall and store those settings in the 16 memory locations on the device. Beatstep also syncs backwards with Control Center, so any creations you generate on the fly can be stored as templates in the software too. You can store unlimited templates, which means you’re not limited to 16 patterns.

I say you don’t have to use the software because Arturia has already been updating the Beatstep’s firmware to include control over some of the global parameters from the unit itself; specifically gate, swing and legato modes. Now you just hold SHIFT while in SEQ mode and turn the first three knobs to edit those parameters.

There are a few limitations to the Beatstep, as you’d expect. One is that it’s only a 16-step sequencer — no flicking between A and B sections; there’s also no current way to adjust the velocity of the notes in a sequence; and there’s no tap tempo or initial BPM setting for different patterns if you’re not hooked up to a computer.

At the moment, for live use, if you don’t sync it up to an external MIDI clock or DAW, the potential for your whole song to go AWOL is pretty high. And it’s easy to miss a detent while tuning up between steps, or miss a pattern start if you’re changing step size.

Some might also be confused by the name and assume Beatstep would make for a great rhythm sequencer. But for drum machine sequencing

you’re going to have to go for something more tailor made like Arturia’s Spark controller. You can’t simultaneously run multiple sequences assigned to different pads, the sequencing is more suited to melodic instruments.

While there are a few limitations to Beatstep, they’re mostly harsh criticisms for an extremely flexible controller. And Arturia has already shown a willingness to continually expand the controller’s horizons with firmware updates. Most people’s issues with the unit can be solved this way, the only omission in the hardware that would have been really useful is some visual reference of the pitch — even if it’s just the number of half steps you’ve deviated from the original pitch.

Overall, Beatstep is a great controller, at a great price. It’s a no brainer for any Eurorack owners looking for a cheap, capable sequencer. And if you’re on the lookout for a pad controller, adding a sequencer for the same price might just up your creative ante.

Arturia’s MIDI Control Center isn’t solely for Beatstep. You can edit all your other Arturia devices’ MIDI options here too. As well as editing scales and patterns, you can assign MIDI controls, adjust global settings and store and recall templates.

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REVIEW

JBL 3 SERIES Monitors & Sub JBL’s entry level 3 Series monitors have ridden the flagship M2 monitor’s waveguide right into the sweet spot.

Review: Mark Davie

LIGHT WORK

NEED TO KNOW

The ridged waveguide is obviously the looker on the front panel, but the subtle blue/white light and piano black woofer surround are nice touches that really give the 3 Series a lift.

Price JBL-LSR305: $249 each JBL-LSR308: $449 each JBL-LSR310S Sub: $649 Contact Jands: (02) 9582 0909 or info@jands.com.au AT 54

Pros Huge sweet spot Tonally consistent in the stereo field Plenty of power Musical sub notes

Cons A bit of upper-mid resonance Would be nice to have a ‘sub defeat’ switch

Summary JBL’s 3 Series monitors have benefited from the flagship M2 reference series’ development. These two-ways may be down the price range, but get a lot of upper class tech.

The sub is also a worthy addition to the range, and will be the secret sauce for some.

CONNECT ALL ROUND

On the rear, the 3 Series caters to both professional and recreational markets, with switchable input sensitivity between +4dBu and -10dBV; there are also XLR and ¼ -inch jack inputs; separate low frequency and high frequency trim with a range of -2dB/0/+2dB; and a detented volume knob. The port is rear facing, and has a double flange to reduce the turbulence of exiting air.

JBL’s development of its M2 Master Reference Monitor became like an in-house space program. Mimicking the trickledown effect of a concept car, the rest of JBL’s monitor range is slowly benefiting from the tech breakthroughs first built for its flagship; most noticeably, the waveguide.

The reverse pillow appearance of the M2’s Image Control waveguide is designed to give a sweet spot like no other. The sort of sweet spot you could park a car in, or more practically, move from rack to rack without losing the detail from either side. It’s odd to have that much freedom of movement. It feels intrinsically like you’d have to make a sacrifice somewhere else — say, precision panning — for it to work. But in practise, the imaging is precise, with the added benefit of not having to hold your head still like it’s clamped in a vice.

The 3 Series is the first range to get the M2 touch up. They’re at the lower end of JBL’s monitor range, but you wouldn’t know by looking at them. The waveguide technology is on full display, with slight differences as the same equations are solved for different dimensions and hardware specs.

There are two monitor sizes in the range, a fiveinch and an eight-inch — both two-way designs.

The waveguides on the 3 Series have a rectangular form — as opposed to the square shape of the M2 — presumably to make the dispersion wider in the horizontal plane and render them more suitable to desk/console-top use. Also, the four uninterrupted surfaces of the M2’s waveguide have been broken up by central ridges on the 3 Series variation, which apparently helps the high frequencies stay on track.

Undoubtedly, these monitors have the widest sweet spot of any I’ve heard, and the phantom centre, while wide, is always in the middle. Even the detented level knobs on the rear manage to give a very accurate balance between the two sides.

Sometimes these are imbalanced depending on the quality of the rear volume pots, but the 3 Series had no such issues.

THE BIG GUNS

I had the LSR308 eight-inch, two-way monitors on review, as well as the companion LSR310S 10-inch powered sub. The 308s themselves are what you’d expect in size, but not weight. For an eight-inch monitor, they’re quite easy to handle — probably aided by the lighter-weight moulded plastic fascia.

Both drivers are physically aligned, so you don’t get any odd phase discrepancies that have to be compensated for out of the box.

The 308 is biamped, with two 56W Class D amps giving plenty of oomph (112dB SPL, C-Weighted) and eliminating the need for a heat sink — which helps keep the cost down and the weight too. The 305 has a little less power, but still biamped with two 41W Class D amps.

Even without the sub, the 308s had a satisfying amount of low end. My first impressions of the speakers were that they tended to bring out the ambience in recordings more than my other monitors. I was listening back to some room Royer drum room mic recordings, and they sounded much more ambient than my Dynaudios, which seemed like a combination of good high-end detail with a wider sweet spot.

On kick drums, they had a much more instantly satisfying scooped sound, but compared to all my other speakers and headphones, they seemed to miss a bit of the low end shell resonance — it was mostly thump and click.

SWEEPING THE SWEET SPOT

The LSR part of the model name stands for Linear Spatial Reference, which is JBL speak for ‘we take loads of measurements, from everywhere’.

The purpose is to make sure you get consistent response characteristics from the speaker no matter where you’re standing in a room. Obviously it depends on how linear the response of your room is, but you’re not going to get massively inconsistent frequency spikes or drops if you happen to move across the soundstage.

And indeed, satisfying the LSR design criteria and delivering a super-wide sweet spot courtesy of the M2-inspired waveguides makes these very consistent monitors.

Tonally, there seemed to be an overall mid resonance centred around 800Hz that made things seem a little boxy at times. The frequency response is quoted as relatively flat, but if you put your finger on the front fascia you can feel minute vibrations in the plastic, which makes me wonder if it’s a mechanical effect rather than tuning preference.

Again, I checked it against a number of other monitors and on a wide range of material, and it was obvious it was peculiar to the JBLs. The tonal effect was that snares lost a bit of woodiness as ringing was emphasised, and guitars were generally more present.

BOTTOMS UP

Adding subs to monitoring systems opens a can of worms. Control rooms and home studios aren’t often designed to handle sub frequencies very well, mainly because you have to invest a lot to adequately absorb them. That said, I fired up the LSR310S and found it to play nicely in my space.

It’s not overpowering, and keeping the level dials consistent between monitors and sub seemed to be the right balance.

I’ve found other subs to be lacking in musicality; rendering little more than a badly tuned fart, or consistently the same note. The JBL was pleasantly musical, and gave that little extra extension. It’s

nice to have, even just to hear if you’re in the ballpark or not.

You have three crossover settings in the sub that feed outputs to your left and right monitors: a standard crossover at 80Hz; an XLF (Extended Low Frequency) option, which boosts the output of the sub relative to the total output; and an External crossover setting, which also cuts the thru outputs to your monitors. The standard crossover was natural, but if you want to get a sensation of what your tunes are going to sound like pumped up in a club, a flick to XLF every so often wouldn’t hurt.

There’s also a 180° phase switch if you need a bit of leeway in positioning. One thing I would have loved though, would be a switch for dropping the sub in and out; allowing you to flick between subassisted and full-range monitor settings.

The 3 Series is a very capable entry- to midlevel monitor choice. They render detail and ambience well, and are tonally consistent across their enormous sweet spot and beyond. While you don’t need the sub — especially if you’re running the eight-inch two-way monitors — I enjoyed having that low end extension, and it is a musical addition.

These JBLs are worth considering if you’re in the market for some monitors, especially if you spend a lot of time away from a central position. Great for anyone that tracks in their control space and monitors through speakers.

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UR-Series

USB audio interfaces for any application Class-A Mic Preamps

24-bit, 192kHz Audio Fidelity +48V Phantom Power MIDI In & Out Includes Cubase AI Rugged Metal Chassis USB2.0 Buss Powered

UR22 2x D-PRE mic preamps, 2 line outputs

UR44 4x D-PRE mic preamps, 4 line outputs, DSP effects processing

UR824 8x D-PRE mic preamps, 8 line outputs and ADAT digital i/o, DSP effects processing

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