LIVE SOUND
6 From the Editor: Oh, to Be in New York City…
Current: Live Powers
United Pressing, RIAA’s Latest Stats
Photo: Steve Jennings
Photo: Jake Erland
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Current
From the Editor
Oh, to Be in New York City…
I absolutely love flying into New York City in mid-October. Nearly every year since 1989, I’ve done just that, dropping in from the West Coast for the annual AES Convention. The thrill never goes away. Whether from SFO to JFK or Oakland to Newark, the five-hour flight always feels a little bit like preparation for the Big Game, like I’m doing mental jumping jacks and hurdler stretches an hour before first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series. By the time I pop out of a cab in Midtown, I’m ready to go!
Forty years after first emerging from Penn Station at the end of a long train ride from Chicago, I still get excited simply by the sheer size and scale and cultural importance of… well, everything! I’m still in awe each time I visit, whether I’m walking by the Museum of Natural History, seeing a play on Broadway or simply looking up at endless blocks of 50-story buildings. One of the problems with living among individuals, institutions and cultural movements that exist on such a large scale, however, is that remarkable things can take place on such an everyday basis that they soon seem normal, that it becomes easy to miss the forest for the trees.
New York has a rich and varied, century-plus history of recording popular music, from the big bands in the 1920s to Broadway cast albums in the ’50s, from Sinatra to Dylan to Springsteen and Beyonce. But 50 years from now, when a future Ken Burns releases a nine-part series on The History of New York Music for PBSstream, the period from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s will be the highlight. That’s when the music industry went through a true seismic shift, and New York City was at the epicenter.
Since the birth of rock and roll, whenever a new “sound” emerges, one influential enough to nudge the direction of popular music, we identify it with a geographical place. The Motown, Muscle Shoals or San Francisco Sound; British Invasion, Southern Rock, Texas Swing, Minneapolis R&B and Seattle Grunge.
In the late 1990s, I interviewed a new San Francisco studio owner for a Mix cover story. He had just cashed out in the first round of tech millionaires and built a three-room, SSL facility just a few blocks from Union Square, with the intention of creating a “new San Francisco Sound.” While the studio was being built, he traveled to Seattle, Minneapolis, Athens, Ga., and Austin, Texas, talking to everyone he could in search of the magic formula. There wasn’t one, he found, but he did tell me that the one thing they all had in common was a vibrant live music scene, one where they all went to each other’s shows and would often move freely in and out of each other’s bands.
Now if we take this admittedly slim theory and apply it to the scale and energy of the music and recording scene in New York City, circa 1975-1985, it becomes so much more than the creation of a new “sound.” It leads to
the emergence of a completely new genre of music and spawns an entirely new style of record production.
The explosion of talent and inventiveness that came out of New York at the time was just ridiculous, and it stretched across all genres. Bruce Springsteen released Born to Run in 1975 and Devo appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1978. Donna Summer reigned over disco and later Debbie Harry brought the “Rapture.” Billy Joel and Paul Simon. Nile Rodgers and Chic. David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, the Ramones, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed. Disco and punk began to fade at the same time dance and new wave began to emerge. Rock was going through a period of confusion
Meanwhile, in the Bronx, hip-hop was quietly becoming a big deal. For the first six years, it remained largely a local phenomenon, featured at block parties and played live with two turntables and a mic. The first hip-hop recording, Rapper’s Delight by Sugar Hill Gang, didn’t come out until 1979. Of course, hip-hop, then mostly called rap, quickly swept the nation and poked its way into the suburbs. In 1986, the Beastie Boys, produced by a young Rick Rubin for his still relatively new label, Def Jam, released the multi-Platinum License to Ill.
That’s Mr. Rubin on this month’s cover of Mix. We’ve tried many times over the past 25 years, and a few weeks ago, he agreed to sit down for an interview with my co-editor, Clive Young. It’s an excellent piece, and while the focus is on his recent work with singer-songwriter Beabadoobee, I can’t help but read between the lines and think back to how those early years in New York, where he was exposed to such a wide range of music and a wide-open spirit of experimentation, helped form his unique approach to production and his massive influence on the music and recording industries over the past 40 years.
Once you’ve finished reading about Rubin, please turn to Lily Moayeri’s feature story on producer Arthur Baker, hailed as one of the pioneers of the 12-inch extended mix in the early ’80s, working with the likes of Afrika Baambaata and New Order and providing a link in the symbiotic relationship between hip-hop and the dance clubs. Tape loops, sampling and the ubiquitous Roland TR-808. It feels great to be back in New York City.
Tom Kenny Co-Editor
Current // news & notes
United Record Pressing Marks 75 Years
Music City may be the home of revered studios and legendary artists, but that glorious reputation would never have happened without the presence of vinyl pressing plants to export all that music out into the world. Chief among the region’s pressers is United Record Pressing, which marked its 75th anniversary in September, having been in operation continuously since 1949.
That journey began due to the over-the-top popularity of the Francis Craig Band’s “Red Rose/Near You,” a big-band record so popular that it spurred the construction of United Record Pressing’s first plant as an offshoot of one of Nashville’s first independent labels, Bullet Records. Over the next 75 years, United would go on to press everything from The Beatles’ first U.S. 7-inch (“Please Please Me/From Me To You”) to rare punk 45s by acts like Minor Threat, to new releases by modern-day musical heroes like Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift.
“The market demands on vinyl are at an all-time high, but United has kept the doors open through downturns, too, operating with as few as 12 employees in the ’90s,” says Cam Sarrett, United’s Director of Sales and Marketing.
While vinyl has undergone a remarkable 15-year-long comeback,
hitting $1.4 billion in sales last year, that rise has coincided with a growing consumer awareness of environmental concerns. Vinyl is not the most ecologically friendly format, and the pressing industry as a whole has been making strides toward achieving better sustainability. With that in mind, United became the first North American plant to earn a Sony Green Partner Certification last year, and the company additionally points to its efforts to recycle vinyl manufacturing scraps and shipping boxes, use unleaded vinyl and reduce its carbon footprint.
Today, United employs more than 120 people as it operates 64 presses—24 new Pheenix Alpha pressing machines in addition to 40 restored Lened and SMT machines—in a 160,000-square-foot facility. As a result, the facility now has the capacity to press more than 100,000 records daily. Lacquer cutting and electroplating are handled in-house as well, and the company is exploring how AI-powered technologies can detect plating issues before they affect production.
“Our ability to scale up to the size of our major label partners while staying accessible to independent artists and labels is something we take a lot of pride in,” Sarrett says. ■
RIAA Report Reflects Slower Revenue Growth
Steady streaming and vinyl numbers are behind the Recording Industry Association of America’s mid-year report that recorded music revenues totaled $8.7 billion in the first six months of this year, reflecting 4% growth—less than half of last year’s first-half record 9.3% increase. Streaming, entering its third decade in the U.S., held steady to contribute 84% of total revenues for the fifth consecutive year, but the rate of growth does appear to be slowing. Revenues from streaming services overall grew 4% (compared to 10.3% in H1 2023) at retail value to a record
high $7.3 billion. Total U.S. recorded music revenues are now in the ninth straight year of growth.
Paid subscription service revenues accounted for 78% of all streaming revenues, growing 4% (compared to 11% in H1 2023) to $5.7 billion or nearly two-thirds of the mid-year total. The average number of subscriptions has grown 3% to a high of 99 million, compared to 96.5 million in 2023.
Advertising-supported on-demand services like YouTube and the adsupported versions of Spotify, Facebook and others grew slower than in recent years, up just 2% to $899 million, contributing only 10% of total H1 2024 recorded music revenues.
According to the report, total physical revenues of $994 million were up 13% over the prior year.
Matt Bass, RIAA VP, Research, Gold & Platinum Operations, in a post on Medium timed to coincide with the new report, noted, “Vinyl records alone grew 17% this period and are currently on pace to again break the billion-dollar barrier by year’s end.”
Vinyl accounted for three-quarters of physical format revenues and outsold CDs in units (24 million vs. 17 million) for the fourth consecutive year. Revenues from CDs were relatively flat at $237 million in 2024.
Digital downloads continued their 14-year downward trajectory, contributing only 2% of all recorded music revenues in the U.S. for the period. ■
Current // news & notes
Live/Experience Sound to Power Pro AV Revenues to $422B by 2029
AVIXA’s 2024 Industry Outlook and Trends
Analysis has some eye-opening stats in this year’s edition. According to the IOTA report, Pro AV revenue will grow from $306.4 billion in 2023 to $325 billion in 2024—a healthy growth rate of 6.1%, but down from 6.9% last year. According to the organization, much of that will come from the live and experience sound sector. Office upgrades and evolution are underperforming while the experience economy returns to dominate growth in pro AV.
“Digging into the data, we see…technologies supporting conferencing and collaboration within enterprises are not performing as well
as those positioned for entertainment and events,” confirmed Sean Wargo, VP of Market Insight, AVIXA. “So, companies focused solely on collaboration may not be faring as well as those serving entertainment.”
Pre-pandemic, the experience economy had been one of the most influential trends in the live sound and installation markets, and now it has regained its strong position. From 2024 to 2029, global revenue for venues and events will grow to $57.2 billion, at a 6.3%, making it the fastest-growing vertical market.
If experience sound is ruling the day, that doesn’t mean the office upgrade market is stagnating. As pro AV’s largest vertical market, office spaces became a source of anxiety during the pandemic, but as trends have moved toward hybrid working, those concerns have diminished,
unlocking new market possibilities and renewed confidence in this sector.
Revenue from corporate spaces will reach $91.4 billion by 2029, according to the report,
fueled by new construction, more opportunities in conferencing and collaboration, expanding content capture and production, as well as security, surveillance, and safety. ■
Music
Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs
Former Heartbreaker Hits His Stride With Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits
By Robyn Flans
According to Martin Pradler, who tracked and mixed Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, the third album by the Dirty Knobs, the band comes by its name honestly. Some of the older equipment in former Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell’s studio, Hocus Pocus, like the 1970s-era Neve console, indeed has dirty knobs—which can sometimes render recording a mite challenging.
“I’d come in in the morning and it would be, ‘This tom mic is dead,’” Pradler explains. “It takes a minute to get everything back and work out the decades-old dirt. Every day is a little bit of a
crap shoot. But it’s exciting! And it’s a testament to the fact that the studio was built so long ago. It’s like a tank. When you get it going, it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s the sound.’ So I don’t care if there are a couple of dirty knobs; I’ll wiggle them a little bit.”
At the same time, George Drakoulias—who co-produced along with Pradler and Campbell, the same team for all three Knobs albums— declares that he’ll buck the freeway traffic into the Valley any day for the amount of joy that greets him in that studio. In fact, he says, it’s his favorite place to record.
“When I was 15, I dreamed of a place like
that,” Drakoulias says. “You walk in and it’s your teenage rock ’n’ roll fantasy. You have a beautiful, premier Neve console, you look to your left and there’s an awesome Gretsch, and two feet in front of the Gretsch is a Rickenbacker and everything is strewn about. It’s organized chaos, and everything you can think of is just there.
“The control room is big. The drum room is kinda small but has a high ceiling so it has a great sound,” he continues. “There’s an amp in the bathroom, one in the lounge, there’s an old EMT plate in the garage. There are chickens, pigs and turkeys in the back; it’s just the greatest place in
PHOTO: Chris Phelps
the world. He just set up a back room and there’s a guitar carousel where the guitars are hanging, like at the dry cleaners—and everything is always set up and hot, so if you have an idea, you can just chase it down.”
For Knobs sessions, Pradler says, all the musicians set up in the large control room except drummer Matt Laug, who unsurprisingly set up in the drum room. Campbell put his rig as close to the studio glass as possible to be near those drums, while guitarist Chris Holt and bassist Lance Morrison were positioned behind Pradler, listening to the mix going down.
LIVE IN THE CONTROL ROOM
With nearly everyone in the control room, any miking scheme was going to prove challenging. In the drum room, Pradler set up a Neumann U 87, EV RE20 and a Yamaha NS10 woofer on the kick, Shure SM57s on the snare and AKG 421s on the toms. He believes there was a Sony C-37 on the hi-hat, with U67s for room mics augmented by a vintage RCA 44-BX ribbon mic going through an old RCA BA-6A limiter. All the drum mics went through Neve 1073s. Campbell’s vocal chain is pretty streamlined: a Shure SM7 into a dbx 1066, through a UA 1176, then straight to Record. For a couple of songs, they may have used an AKG C12 in overdubs, but mostly Pradler sticks to the SM7. “We tend to punch into tracks way later for a word or a line here and there, and I need this to stay consistent,” he explains.
“For any piano tracks, it’s an SM 69 stereo Neumann,” he continues. “That, and some of the other overdub tracks like mellotron, pump organ or anything I need to grab a DI track from, lives in the Soundcraft Series 1600 console. We monitor mostly on Barefoot Sound MicroMain27s, and we have a giant curved TV acting as a monitor for Pro Tools ’cause we are all blind.”
Having described all that, Pradler maintains that his job is not all that complex. “The sound is doing its job,” he says matter-of-factly. “When it’s happening, they make what I do sound really good. It’s them; it’s not me. It’s all Mike’s sound. I’m not doing anything crazy. Here’s a couple of mics, run it through the Neve, come up through two channels to Pro Tools; okay, thank you. Then it’s just a matter of hitting Record.”
Campbell likes to record as live as possible, no click, though that wasn’t always the case early on with Tom Petty.
“When the Heartbreakers started out, we
were really young,” says Campbell, an original member. “We didn’t know much about overdubbing and editing, so we endeavored to play the songs live even right up to [Damn the] Torpedoes. The reason Torpedoes took so long is because we weren’t savvy enough to know, ‘We can cut this chorus into that verse… there’s a problem, we’ve got to do the whole song again, start to finish.’
“As we progressed, we worked with people like Jeff Lynne, who was a complete opposite of that and recorded one instrument at a time, which is equally as valid,” he continues. “I love that too, but I prefer when all the guys are in the room and they kinda know the song, but they don’t know it really well so little accidents and surprises can happen. That keeps it kinetic, which you can’t quite create when you build a track one instrument at
a time.” The Heartbreakers would return to the “more live” method of recording later in working with producer Rick Rubin and others. One of the cool surprises on this record, Campbell says, was the song “So Alive,” which wasn’t entirely written when they got into the studio and magically came together in a few takes.
STUDIO SPONTANEITY
The most satisfying moment of the production for Drakoulias was the fulfillment of “Angel of Mercy.” The band had attempted to cut the song for each previous album, to no avail. They decided to give it one more try after Laug took a break for his dream job with AC/DC. Drummer Steve Ferrone was brought in, which wasn’t too unusual as he had played the tune many times as an original club member of the Knobs (he
PHOTO: Courtesy of Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs
PHOTO: Courtesy of Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs
PHOTO: Courtesy of Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs
Tracking and mixing engineer Martin Pradler, left, with Mike Campbell at the Pro Tools station to the side of the classic Neve console in the Hocus Pocus control room.
Producer George Drakoulias
Campbell with drummer Steve Ferrone, who played on the track “Angel of Mercy.”
is still a member); perhaps it was locked in as a sense memory.
“It’s a tricky feel,” Drakoulias says. “It has a great riff. It’s got the 12-string, a vintage Heartbreakers vibe to it; it’s a barnburner, but we’ve tried cutting it at different times with different leans, and we finally found a good place for the vocal and the rhythm section. That was the hard thing— matching up the vocal with the rhythm section.”
The happy accidents for Campbell involved the guest artists, like Chris Stapleton on “Don’t Wait Up” and Graham Nash, who recorded remotely on “Dare to Dream,” a track Pradler uncovered while doing archival tape transfers to Pro Tools of Campbell’s past several decades of work. They kept the guitar part, but recorded over drums and bass. To Campbell, “That was really cool because it was like, ‘Present, meet the past.’”
“She’s very methodical. It’s very different from Mike, who is like, ‘Now, now, now,’ and with her it was, ‘Let me take my time because when I do it, it will be right.’ It was one take.”
Pradler and Drakoulias agree that Campbell is now coming into his own and growing into the
Stepping Out and Stepping Up
While Mike Campbell says that he feels his songwriting has grown, both musically and lyrically, and that with this album he’s turned a corner by capturing his live vibe onto record, he freely admits that his biggest challenge remains having confidence in his voice. Some might find this interesting, considering it sounds a lot like the late Tom Petty’s, which Petty himself mentioned after Campbell built up the courage to send him his initial recordings. After listening, Petty gave him a call, and Campbell today recounts the resulting conversation:
Petty: “What’s this?”
Campbell: “It’s just some songs I’m working on.”
Petty: “It sounds like me.”
Campbell: “I don’t mean to, but I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Petty: “Why are you doing this?”
Campbell: “I don’t know. I just thought in between tours I should be doing something with these songs. You can’t be doing all of them. I figured I should do something with them rather than put them on the shelf.”
Petty: “Well, what do you plan to do with it?”
Campbell: “I don’t know. Maybe in between our stuff, go out and play a few theaters. I’d have this little band and we’d go out and play bars.”
Petty: “Are the songs any good?”
Campbell: “I think they’re pretty good.”
Petty: “Well, if they’re really good, why don’t we do them?”
“So, there you go,” Campbell says with a chuckle. Campbell actually formed the Dirty Knobs to play clubs back in 2000, although their first album, Wreckless Abandon, didn’t come out until 2020, three years after Petty died. External Combustion was released two years later. All of which begs the question: Did being a part of the Heartbreakers keep Campbell from having a career earlier on? Hamper him in any way? Not
role of frontman. Drakoulias says one of his roles as producer in the studio is to nudge him just a bit to maybe do another vocal take, or to “help identify little opportunities” within the tracks. “What’s going to make this the best listening experience for someone at home?” he asks himself. “What is going
Nearly 30 songs were recorded for BMG’s Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, and Drakoulias helped distill it down to an album, setting up a kind of rubric: What does the song accomplish? Where does it fit on the album? Do we have three songs that say the same thing? Which is the best of those three songs? But as a producer, Drakoulias says, he also knows when to order food. And how to keep it fun.
“The most important thing is that we should be enjoying ourselves,” he smiles. “If we’re not enjoying ourselves, we’re doing it wrong.” n
at all, Campbell asserts, saying that he couldn’t do what he does today if he hadn’t had the full Petty experience first, and that everything is happening in the order it was meant to happen.
“Tom and I had a dynamic,” Campbell explains. “Tom was a very forceful personality, a leader. I was a very shy, introverted supporter. I was very good at being his foil and helping his songs come alive, and then bringing my songs to him. I’m a band person; I like that. When you’re in a band, that’s the most important thing, not anyone’s ego in the band, so my role with Tom was to support him because he was so dynamic. I put whatever ambitions and desires to do something aside.
“In a way, that may have stunted me a little bit, but I’m glad I made that choice and I was happy to play that role with Tom because we had such a deep brotherhood. Sometimes I feel a little guilty, that I’m too excited about what I’m doing now. I don’t look at it like I was being held back; I look at it as if it wasn’t my time yet.”
With The Dirty Knobs’ third album, Mike Campbell is finding new confidence in his voice.
PHOTO: Chris Phelps
M3 Phoenix Reborn and Ready for Atmos
Immersive Audio Is Coming to Live Broadcast, and Joel Singer Can’t Wait
By Steve Harvey
There’s no question that the coronavirus pandemic was a real stress test for the audio industry. Some companies closed and more than a few individuals quit or retired, but for those who chose to stick with it, adaptation became the name of the game. Broadcast organizations leveraged new technologies to stay on the air, while live sound companies and some recording studios pivoted to live streaming—anything to keep the lights on and meet payroll.
Post-pandemic, it’s a changed world, and while business has returned, it hasn’t necessarily been at previous levels, other than in live sound and, to an extent, record production.
But for anyone with the drive to survive, the current business climate does offer opportunities. Joel Singer and Mitch Maketansky, partners and cofounders of Music Mix Mobile (M3), are survivors. Singer, who is responsible for equipment choices and technical infrastructure across the company’s fleet of four remote audio trucks and various fly-pack mixing systems, notes that things got very busy post-pandemic, but have now slowed.
“We speak to many companies in the entertainment sector and all say the same,” he says. “Freelance A1s and A2s are not doing the same amount of work that they did in the last two years. It seems the only ones that are still doing well are the major touring companies.”
That’s not to say that M3’s trucks are sitting idle. You’ll still find them
at the bigger broadcast award shows—the Grammys, Latin Grammys and CMAs—as well as music festivals and events hosted by the likes of iHeart Music. But a recent call from a Danish production company got Singer thinking. “They called us and said, ‘We’re going to do a web stream in the U.S. Do you have an immersive truck?’ They don’t use the word Atmos in Europe; they use the word immersive. Then we started getting calls from other clients wanting to do immersive testing, also.”
PAST MEETS PRESENT
Two of M3’s trucks, Eclipse and Voyager, travel as a matched pair to the major live music broadcast events, mixing alternate artists in each based on the show’s running order. To provide everyone with the same platform, the two trucks need to remain identically outfitted. For Singer, Maketansky and staff engineer Peter Gary, that meant that the ideal truck to upgrade for full-time immersive work was M3’s appropriately named Phoenix mobile.
Singer got into the remote recording business in 2003, rolling out his OSR (OnSite Recording Services) truck soon thereafter. With the help of Nashville-based friends, he outfitted the truck with what may well have been one of the first Yamaha DM2000 digital desks and Aphex 1788 remote mic preamps in the country. His cutting-edge, all-digital OSR truck
PHOTO: Courtesy Joel Singer/Music Mix Mobile
The new fully loaded M3 Phoenix immersive audio remote recording truck, with custom Lawo console and unique 5.1.4+4.0 Genelec monitor system.
caught the attention of NYC’s Effanel Music, which had been having great success with its L7 Music truck and its very pricey AMS Neve Capricorn digital console. Looking to remodel Effanel for more modern-day, budgetconscious work, the company brought in Singer—and his new truck.
Singer later left the company to establish M3 with his founding partners, and when Effanel, which had been acquired by XM Satellite, closed its doors, Firehouse Productions bought all its assets. In 2014, on the brink of buying a new vehicle for M3, Singer phoned Firehouse to see if they happened to still have the old OSR truck body.
“Their answer was, ‘Come take it off the property, it’s yours!’” Singer recalls. “Firehouse was using it as a delivery truck and had taken the control room off the chassis. The box was still in great condition; belly carriers, AC units, the whole deal.” Singer then took the OSR box and a new chassis to M3’s regular truck builder, and, voila, with an audio tech rebuild, the reborn Phoenix emerged.
PHOENIX IN ATMOS
Over the years, M3 has standardized and continually upgraded much of its audio equipment, from desks to remote mic preamps to transport systems. At the heart of all the vehicles and fly-packs are Lawo consoles. “We own three MC56-2 systems, two with Nova73 HD cores and one with a Nova 73 compact core. We also have two MC36 systems,” Singer reports. He recently acquired another 73HD core with a 32-channel surface for an additional fly-pack system from two broadcast companies that were going out of business.
The Lawo desks and cores have been upgraded to ST 2110, as have M3’s
remote Dallis and PowerCore racks. “We can do network sharing, we can do SRC sharing; we can do a lot of different network-type things with these systems,” he says, noting that each truck’s preamp complement, 168 channels, is typically dedicated. “Network sharing of preamps in a recording environment is not our way to go, especially on bigger shows where keeping systems optimized for each act is essential, but utilizing SMPTE 2110 for what other benefits it offers is a game-changer.”
None of M3’s Lawo desks were the version that supported native immersive panning and monitoring without complicated outboard computers, so Singer consulted with the manufacturer and industry colleagues to find the best way forward. Choices were limited without expensive upgrades, so the optimum solution turned out to be configuring the Phoenix desk with a 5.1 bus, plus a 4.0 bus for the height channels. “We did a 5.1.4 configuration with one central monitor control, so everything still works as normal,” Singer notes. “We have proper centralized monitoring on the desk without the need for outboard monitoring systems.”
This latest upcycling of Phoenix, 10 years after its first rebirth, also gave Singer an opportunity to revisit the choice of monitors. For the longest time, at the request of a former business partner, M3’s trucks housed M&K speakers.
For the new Phoenix 5.1.4 setup, Singer has returned to Genelec, his previous monitor brand of choice, installing 8341 LCR speakers, 8331 for LR/RR and four 8330s for the height channels. A 7360 sub handles the low end.
“We put them in with Will Eggleston from Genelec and, man, they sound so good, so clear and musical, and they have the sound pressure level that you want in the room,” he comments. A Stream Deck, integrated with Genelec’s GLM management software, allows an operator to switch bass management on or off, mute speakers and toggle between presets, which can be customized and saved for any guest engineers.
“We are also very excited to work with our plug-in partner, Waves, and the immersive possibilities in the current product line, and what may be coming down the pike,” Singer adds.
M3 already has some large immersive projects to its credit, capturing audio for Katy Perry, Alicia Keys, Luke Combs and others. “Now, with the Phoenix truck, we can capture audio for immersive release and at the same time preview for the client the possibilities of what this soundscape might sound like,” Singer says. “We are equipped and ready for live immersive broadcast.” n
PHOTO: Courtesy Joel Singer/Music Mix Mobile
Joel Singer in the original OSR truck, circa 2003..
Live
PRESENTED BY
Bugging Out with The Audio of OVO
By Clive Young
Cirque du Soleil productions have always been family shows cut from a different cloth. Sure, there’s acrobats, trapeze artists, tumblers, musicians and clowns, but they’re always presented in fresh ways, familiar yet exotic, reinventing the concept of a circus into something that delights anew—and that’s certainly the case with OVO, one of the company’s longest-running hits.
First launched in 2009, the touring production draws big crowds to this day with its simple story
of a gawky bug, The Traveler, who falls in love with a ladybug, and spends much of the runtime trying to woo her. Along the way, there’s pauses for big dance numbers, death-defying mid-air gymnastics, and lots more.
When it was first launched, OVO toured with its own big top in tow, but a massive overhaul in 2015 dropped the tent and took the show indoors, staging it as a massive arena production requiring a staff of 100, including the 52 performers, and a phalanx of 20 semi-trucks
to carry the show from city to city.
While the show sports some wild acts, it’s tied together not only by the story but also an insistent musical score performed live by seven musicians. Composed by Berna Ceppas, the percussion-heavy music draws from a variety of genres—bossa nova, samba, funk and electronic music among them— and that in turn keeps the four-person audio team (FOH, Monitors, PA and RF) on its toes throughout each two-and-a-half-hour show.
Keeping tabs on everything sound-wise for
PHOTO: Janie Mallet
Head of Audio Kevin Adkinson mixes the multi-genre score of OVO on an Avid Venue SC48 console.
OVO is head of audio Kevin Lorenzo Adkinson. A classically trained pianist, Adkinson toured with bands in his native Spain before becoming interested in sound—a pursuit that led to working in studios and live productions. When the chance to become a runner on a Cirque show came up, Adkinson literally ran away with the circus and never looked back. Four years later, he’s now with OVO and has been mixing front of house for the last 12 months.
The show’s sound design was originally created by Broadway sound designer Jonathan Deans, and when the production was reformatted to arenas, Deans modified it to accommodate the new surroundings, but was able to retain most of the existing audio system. Amazingly, much of that original system is still in use today—but not for much longer.
“It’s going to be refreshed in a little while [to better match] the needs and the technologies
featured singer is heard via a DPA 4266. Wysicom wireless systems are used for the performers, while some of the band members—violin, flutes, and accordion—who come on stage at different points use Sennheiser EM 6000 wireless systems. Most of the time, however, the score is performed backstage, so the monitor desk is located directly next to the musicians, who all hear themselves via IEMs. The instruments, ranging from drums to oboe, are all captured with a variety of Sennheiser mics.
Most insects have short lives ranging from a day to perhaps a week, but after 15 years, OVO looks likely to run as long as a termite queen (25-plus years!). While termites don’t bring people much joy, the long-lived show certainly has, and with its upcoming audio refresh on the horizon, all involved are looking forward to continuing that tradition for a long time to come. ■
An audio refresh is on the horizon for Cirque du Soleil’s long-touring OVO, which has been on the road since 2009.
of these days,” Adkinson reported. “We change arenas every week, so it’s quite a beaten kit.”
The tour sports a P.A. based around Meyer Sound MICA compact line array elements, bolstered by JM-1Ps used to cover seating on the floor, along with a variety of M’elodies, UPQ1Ps and M1Ds as well. “It’s very solid, and at the end of the day, it’s been touring with this show around 15 years and is still working,” he noted. In deference to keeping the system predictable and trouble-free, once OVO loads into an arena— typically for a four or five day stand during which there may be up to eight performances—the system is left on until it’s time to tear down.
Both the FOH and monitor positions are based around Avid Venue SC48 consoles; the house mix additionally has a Yamaha DM1000 desk used for surrounds and delays, though plans are afoot to revamp all that into Meyer Sound Spacemap when the audio refresh takes place. The show incorporates not only music and speech, but also recorded insect sounds such as crickets; used for ambiance and occasionally as music, the sounds are triggered through an Ableton setup at FOH.
The three main bug characters—who speak a language of nonsense sounds—are captured with DPA 4088 core headset mics, while a
PHOTO: Janie Mallet
A classically trained pianist, Adkinson moved into audio engineering and literally ran away with the circus.
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Sounding Off at Milwaukee Irish Fest
Milwaukee, WI—Milwaukee is known for its many breweries, and while Guinness isn’t one of them (the Irish brand’s U.S. outpost is in Baltimore), that doesn’t stop anyone from enjoying a good pint, traditional music, dance, food and more at the massive annual Milwaukee Irish Fest. This year’s event in August included a jaw-droppping 16 stages, presenting more than 100 performers in Henry W. Maier Festival Park on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Working with audio provider Clearwing Productions, American Music and Sound brought in Allen & Heath consoles for deployment at all 16 stages, helping bring acts like The High Kings, Lúnasa, The Byrne Brothers, and Screaming Orphans to the crowds. Avantis and dLive consoles were used to handle the audio requirements of the festival’s main stages at both front of house and monitor positions in order to manage the processing demands of the festival’s biggest acts, providing flexible bus configurations, allowing for buses to be reallocated as monitor mixes, groups, matrices, FX sends, and more.
For smaller stages, SQ and CQ Series consoles ensured that every
performance resonated with the crowds. The SQ mixers brought 48 channels of input processing to each of the festival’s mid-sized venues, while the CQs—the most compact digital consoles in Allen & Heath’s lineup—gave acts 20 input processing channels.
“We’re thrilled to support Milwaukee’s Irish Fest once again,” said Pat McConnell, Director of National Sales for Allen & Heath USA. “American Music and Sound, alongside Audio Biz and our partners Celtic MKE and Clearwing Productions, have proudly represented Allen & Heath at Irish Fest since 2016. Each year, the event dazzles tens of thousands with vibrant Irish culture, music and festivity.” ■
UltraSound Brings Panther to Outside Lands
San Francisco—For more than 15 years, Outside Lands has brought rock, pop, hip-hop and a bit of everything else to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and this year’s edition in mid-August was no different as the event hosted the likes of Chappell Roan, Post Malone, Sabrina Carpenter, Sturgill Simpson and The Killers on its Lands End main stage. Ensuring everyone could hear every note, the Bay Area’s own UltraSound once again provided audio, and it in turn fielded a P.A. based around Meyer Sound Panther large-format linear line array loudspeakers and 2100-LFC lowfrequency control elements.
While UltraSound has brought Panther to the party before—2023’s edition saw it deploy a Panther rig supplemented by 1100-LFC dual-18inch touring subs—this year was the first time the larger P.A. of eight Panther loudspeakers per side was supported by nine 2100-LFC control elements flown on each side, as well as a further 16 1100-LFC elements on the ground.
“Panther and 2100-LFC are an unparalleled pair, and we are so excited that they are making their debut together at the Lands End stage here at Outside Lands this year,” said Katharine “Katie” Murphy Khulusi, Meyer Sound’s director of loudspeaker development. “They are made to pair well together, but they also play well with our existing ecosystem. We think that because of the linearity and the high fidelity of the pair, they can be used on a system of any scale.”
That system was additionally supplemented by Panther first delays and Leopard compact linear line array loudspeakers on second delays, with Lyon line array loudspeakers in outer hangs.
While the Lands End stage was the clear main focus, Meyer Sound systems powered numerous areas throughout the festival, with Lina very compact linear array loudspeakers and 900-LFC compact lowfrequency control elements used at the Dolores open-air dance tent, a Leopard system in the main grandstand VIP cabana, UPJ loudspeakers in a VIP courtyard, and UPA loudspeakers distributed throughout the 200-foot-long, two-story VIP area in the Polo Fields grandstands. ■
An Allen & Heath Avantis console handled the Briggs & Stratton stage at Milwaukee Irish Fest this year.
Grace Jones took command of the crowd at Outside Lands with the help of a massive Meyer Sound Panther P.A. system.
Photo: Steve Jennings
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Spec’ing a Pearl Jam P.A.
London, UK—Pearl Jam is in the midst of its Dark Matter World Tour, which began in May and will see the classic rock band soldier on through late November, closing out the trek in Australia. Throughout the journey, the band is once again carrying audio production provided by longtime— and fiercely independent—audio supplier Rat Sound (Camarillo, Calif.).
Much as it has for decades, the band picked up a more local P.A. from U.K.-based Britannia Row for the June/July European leg; the audio provider fielded an L-Acoustics K1/K2 rig for FOH engineer Greg Nelson and systems engineer Andrew Gilchrest. Aiding in its use were Brit Row’s event support engineer Laurie Fradley and operations manager Tim Mole.
Getting the system in gear went relatively smoothly, according to Gilchrest: “The production for this tour is completely different to anything the band has done before—the addition of a massive projection screen meant the P.A. configuration had to be altered. It was moved 15 feet further downstage, and Laurie and Tim have been fantastic in helping with adjustments. I just send an L-Acoustics Soundvision file, and they put it together.”
For Nelson, the K1/K2 system was specifically what he had in mind for the band’s live sound. “There’s just something about L-Acoustics and how I mix that means I can achieve certain things with Ed’s vocal and the guitars that I can’t re-create with other P.A.s,” he said. “I try to hit the very front
row as best I can and achieve a ‘wall of sound’ with a warm, full range and a crystal clear vocal on top. Pearl Jam are an amazing band, and their fans are passionate and incredibly loyal, so I want them to have the best experience possible. They’re great musicians, and put so much energy into their shows, that I need to do the best job I can.”
Having the right tools to do the job is only part of the equation, however. A shared mindset on how to achieve the goal is key. Nelson explained, “Andrew and I have a similar ear; he hears what I hear, and I hear what he hears, so I trust him implicitly to run anywhere around the arena. I don’t have to double check.”
Gilchrist added, “I’ve learned what he’s looking for, what ‘good’ sound is from him. As a system engineer, I spend quite a bit of time walking around the venue making sure Greg’s mix is being translated to the rest of the crowd. It can sometimes be difficult, but I love the challenge and the fact that I can help make sure each audience member has an enjoyable listening experience.” ■
FOH mixer Greg Nelson and system engineer Andrew Gilchrest have tackled numerous Pearl Jam tours together.
FROM SHANGRI-LA
on the cover
MEGA-PRODUCER RICK RUBIN AND POP SONGSTRESS
BEABADOOBEE TEAM UP IN SEARCH OF TOMORROW
By Clive Young. Photography: Jake Erland
It’s a scorching August afternoon in Italy when Rick Rubin gets on the phone to New York.
“It’s kind of late in the day here and it’s super hot, so I’m trying to just lay low,” he chuckles— which means it’s a perfect time to talk about the latest album to come out of his studio in California. The record in question is This Is How Tomorrow Moves, the third album by singer/songwriter Beabadoobee (referred to as Bea), who traveled across the Atlantic from her home in London to record at Rubin’s fabled Shangri-La in Malibu.
“Bea’s delightful to be around, she sings really great, she was extremely hardworking,” says Rubin, thinking back to the six-week session last fall. “I don’t think I would’ve predicted that the
SHANGRI-LA NUMBER ONE
album would sound like it did. It’s probably much more of a rock album than I would’ve guessed… but it was not an intentional decision, at least not on my part, to push it in that direction. It just went where it wanted to go.”
Of course, where everyone involved really wanted it to go was the top of the charts, and a few weeks after the conversation with Rubin, that’s exactly what happened. This Is How Tomorrow Moves, a showcase of assured, mature songwriting that recalls Crowded House one minute and turnof-the-millennium dream pop the next, debuted in mid-August to strong reviews, and a week later entered the UK’s Official Albums Chart in the top spot—her first Number One.
For Bea, it’s a long-awaited but hard-earned victory. The English-Filipino singer has been gaining momentum ever since she took the first song she wrote on guitar, “Coffee,” and posted it to YouTube in 2017. “It’s quite funny,” she says now. “I was actually recording with a really crappy mic; any odd mic with a sock on top of it. That’s how I was recording all my songs.”
If the audio quality was questionable, the musical talent was not. “Coffee” went viral, more home recordings followed and six months later, Bea, then only 17 years old, was signed to indie label Dirty Hit. A string of increasingly successful EPs and albums followed over the next few years, amassing more than 5 billion streams in the process, and that in turn paved the way for opening a dozen shows last year on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.
“Bea’s had an incredible journey,” says Rubin. “She recorded one song in her bedroom, put it up, and was instantly recognized from the first thing she ever recorded…. I loved hearing the story because I’ve never been around artists who have come up that way.”
Of course, Rubin’s been around virtually every other sort of artist during his own oneof-a-kind career, founding both Def Jam and American Recordings, working as co-president of Columbia Records for a time, and producing a who’s who of popular music: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Black Sabbath, Johnny Cash, Slayer, Jay-Z, Mick Jagger, Public Enemy, The Cult, Tom Petty, Sheryl Crow, Run-DMC, System of a Down, Kesha, Coheed and Cambria, Metallica, Beastie Boys, Poison, Linkin Park, U2, Weezer, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Eminem,
The
Chicks, Imagine Dragons, The Strokes, Neil Young, Travis Scott, Smashing Pumpkins and the list goes on and on.
Rubin worked with many of those artists at Shangri-La, and it was there that Bea and longtime collaborator Jacob Bugden found themselves last November, far from home but determined to make an album that would take her career to the next level.
THE ROAD TO SHANGRI-LA
Deep in Malibu, just above Zuma Beach, the 1.74-acre plot that became Shangri-La had a colorful history long before it became a studio. Built in the late 1950s, the main house first
belonged to film actress Margo, who named it Shangri-La Ranch as an allusion to her supporting role in the 1937 classic, Lost Horizon. As the years wore on, it became a filming site for the 1960s talking-horse sitcom Mister Ed, and later, according to The Band’s Levon Helm in his autobiography, a high-end bordello catering to Hollywood.
All that changed in 1974 when The Band, fresh off the road from a joint tour with Bob Dylan, leased the site, aiming to create a place to hang out and record 1975’s Northern Lights –Southern Cross. Producer Rob Fraboni was hired to convert the master bedroom into a 24-track studio (he later bought the facility in 1976), and soon fellow rock royalty like Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton started showing up to chill out. ShangriLa became a magnet for musicians looking to kick back and unlock their creativity; music began pouring out of the place, interviews for Martin Scorsese’s classic concert documentary The Last Waltz were filmed there, and Dylan himself took up residence in a teepee on the lawn (his former tour bus, abandoned behind the house, is now a secondary studio space).
“I can remember the first time I was there with Neil Young,” says Rubin. “We were sitting in the control room, and I asked him, ‘Did you ever get to come here in the ’70s?’ He pointed to the live room and said, ‘The day I wrote “Cortez the Killer,” I came here, sat in that room, played it for Bob and that was the first time I ever played it.’ It was just like, ‘What?!’ It’s so much to process that these things happened there—it feels like it gives it a sense of a holy place, like a church of music.”
Josh Groban, The Avett Brothers, LL Cool J, Lana Del Rey, Ed Sheeran, Santana,
Dixie
Shangri-La’s wellstocked mic locker includes Neumanns and more.
Shangri-La and neighboring Zuma Beach inspired a new song, “Beaches,” written in the studio.
Elaborating, he explains, “With these places, if artists come to the same place for a long period of time, it’s almost like, energetically, there’s some draw where it just feels good to be there. So much great music has been made there over the years that when you go there, even though it’s relaxing and beautiful and peaceful, you still know this is where serious stuff happens.”
Rubin was completely unaware of ShangriLa’s legacy, however, when he first booked a few Weezer sessions there in the mid-2000s. By then, the studio had changed hands a few times and fallen into disrepair; bookings had grown scarce, and the facility was on the verge of shutting down like so many L.A. studios during that era. “It was just a convenient place because I was living in Malibu, it was close to home, and Rivers Cuomo said, ‘I found this studio,’” Rubin recalls. “It was really run down and depressing—but then the things that we recorded sounded really good and it just grew from there.”
By the time Rubin acquired Shangri-La in 2011, it was in desperate need of renovation, but the opportunity to reinvent the studio came as the producer was starting to rethink some of his own
approaches to life. That philosophical change soon influenced the facility’s new direction.
“It started with the way I was living,” he says. “I lived in this big, old 1920s Hollywood house filled with antiques and stuff, and I thought that was the way I would always live. Then when I got my house in Malibu, it started as an empty space and I really liked that. Instead of moving all of the stuff to Malibu, I just lived in the empty house for a long time—years and years and years. I liked it, and it felt good for the creative process mentally to not have any distractions. When I ended up buying the studio, I just took the way
that I was living in the house and adapted the same sort of Zen empty-space feeling to the studio.”
Today, Shangri-La is minimalist to the max— all walls and floors are painted white, and there’s a pointed absence of typical studio trappings like awards, memorabilia, televisions and so on. While there are big windows looking out at nature, there’s not much in the way of furniture, and what little there is gets covered in white tarps to help maintain the visual neutrality. The result is that musicians find themselves working in an adamantly diversion-free environment.
Bea, video director Jake Erland (center) and co-producer Jacob Bugden made the most of the focus-centric studio.
“When artists come, they love it and don’t want to leave,” says Rubin. “It wasn’t premeditated, but in retrospect, I realize, ‘Oh, I see why people like this. I know I like it, but I see why other people do, too, and how different it is from their normal experience.’”
BEA HERE NOW
One artist it was different for was Bea, who arrived in Malibu well out of her element, but game to make a great record. “It was an opportunity that I would have been stupid not to take,” she says. “At times, I feel like I tend to settle a lot, and I feel comfort in making music at home and recording in studios back in London—but I felt like I needed to be pushed, so going to Shangri La was a big step for me. It was very daunting; working with Rick was intimidating at first, but I think within the first 24 hours, I came to realize this was the best decision I could’ve made.”
Some of that initial concern came from the supernally white surroundings. “I’m a maximalist in the way I like my house and like things aesthetically,” says Bea, “so walking into the studio, it was, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a blank canvas!’ I soon realized, ‘Oh, this is perfect for what I need right this second.’ All you have is your creativity, all you have are your thoughts, and you want to fill that space with the music.”
Music was something Bea had a lot of, having spent two years writing at home and on the road as she chronicled moving on from a difficult breakup. While Bea and Budgen were excited to share their painstakingly recorded demos, however, Rubin caught them off-guard with a request.
“My first suggestion was to go in and record all of the songs stripped down—solo guitar, just her or Jacob playing, and her singing,” says Rubin. “I wanted to hear the strengths and weaknesses of the songs, because sometimes you can use a production trick that’s really exciting and get fooled into thinking that the song is better than it is when really the production is what’s carrying it. The best is when the song carries itself and then the production makes it the coolest record.”
While the request came as a surprise, it turned out to be the moment that changed everything. “Playing the entire album acoustically—which is basically how I wrote it in my bedroom—was when I found confidence in my own songwriting, which I’ve always really struggled with,” Bea says. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, minus the instrumentation and all the beautiful production sounds we made, this is still a
song that I could potentially release like this. There is a beginning, middle and end—and I love this song.’”
Bea and Rubin also found a common middleground in their unassuming approaches to music. “I think what I really go off with, and what Rick really goes off with, is what you feel and the vibe and what you hear,” says Bea “I can’t play piano and find the key of the song; the way I play guitar, every time I play with a session musician, they’re like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What chords are you playing?’ They’re always like, ‘It sounds pretty, but that chord does not even exist!’ I don’t really follow any rules.”
Rubin, for his part, is similarly modest, remarking, “Yeah, I don’t know if ‘professional’ would be the word I would use for anything I’ve ever been involved in. I come from a punk rock background and have made some of the most, let’s say, naïve-sounding recordings that you can find.”
While Rubin downplays the professionalism of his recordings, he has a track record—not to mention a literal Shangri-La of enviable vintage gear—that says otherwise. Although there’s a second studio on the premises in a chapelshaped bungalow called, yes, The Chapel, the main studio, where Bea and Bugden recorded, still has the original API 32 x 48 console first installed in 1975. The desk is surrounded by a playground of often vintage gear, ranging from API 550A EQs and Neve 1073 and 31102 mic pre’s to Fairchild 660 and 670 tube compressors, an RCA BA-6A limiting amplifier, old-school LA2A and LA-3A compressors, Pultec EQs, a 1960s EMT 140 plate reverb, Roland Space Echo and Binson Echorec delays, and lots more.
Vocal mics on-hand include likewise vintage Neumann U67s and RCA 77-DX ribbon mics, but not everything in Shangri-La is old; playback is through ATC SCM25A studio monitors, a pack of Audio Kitchen stompboxes are at hand for re-amping instruments, and a Tree Audio Roots Senior console is used for its tube pre’s on drums and bass.
As might be expected, numerous cool guitars stand at the ready, and there’s also a rare Chamberlin keyboard, a precursor to the Mellotron, that lets users essentially play samples on tape.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rubin finds the vibe or feel of instruments and gear far more important than their pedigree. “I’m pretty flexible with equipment,” he muses. “If something doesn’t sound good, I might say, ‘Well, what did we use last time that sounded good,’ but that’s as far as it goes technically. It’s nice when there’s a really good-sounding piano in the studio; that seems to matter a lot.”
WE DIDN’T SETTLE
Throughout the recording process, Bugden was a crucial element; in addition to co-producing the album, he provided backing vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, programming and drums throughout, and engineered every track with Jason Lader and Callum Waddington. As recording progressed, Bea, Bugden and the rest of the team fell into a routine of hitting the studio around 10 a.m. and working on and off for the next 12 hours, breaking regularly to swim in the November waters of Zuma Beach. “It was like a cold plunge!” says Bea. “Every time
The To-Do list that kept everything on track.
vibes were kind of getting low in the studio, we all just jumped in the sea, and then we could work for even longer, which is amazing.”
The serene surroundings inspired a new song written in the studio, “Beaches,” which alludes to the calm and focus found at Shangri-La: “Days blend to one when I’m on the right beaches / And the walls painted white, they tell me all the secrets.” Still, the arrival of a new tune didn’t push anything else off the To-Do list.
“I strongly believe in recording everything,” says Rubin. “I can remember with one or two songs in particular, she said, ‘These are not as good as the newer ones; let’s not record them,’ and through the recording process, they became some of her favorite songs—but you don’t know that in advance! I think accepting the fact that we know so little about what makes something good gives you a great ability to try things freely. [It’s about] taking all of the ego out of it and starting with, ‘I don’t know what’s good until I hear it, and when I hear it sounding good, then I know it’s good.’ Thinking about what’s going to sound good doesn’t really tell you anything.”
Many of the songs kept evolving throughout the six weeks at Shangri-La. “I remember with a song called ‘One Time,’ Rick came in and there
was this one bass note that was really sticking out for him,” says Bea. “It was sticking out to him so much that he had to leave the room! So we stayed in the studio and ended up doing a bass riff, and it brought ‘One Time’ to life with this groove that it didn’t have before—so I always think the way he works like that is very interesting.”
Elsewhere on the album, “Girl Song” was recorded twice, first as a full-on rocker and then as a stripped-back piano ballad. “It sounded really good as a big rock song,” says Rubin, “but the emotion of the piano-based version was just more interesting—and we had no idea about that in advance.”
The important thing, he says, is that no stone was left unturned: “Sometimes you make it better and sometimes you can’t…and that’s great, too, because we know we did the work. We weren’t lazy about it. We didn’t settle. I remember the first song we mixed for [Tom Petty’s] Wildflowers was ‘It’s Good to Be King,’ and we did a rough mix in Mike Campbell’s studio just to get a sense of the song. In the whole process of mixing the record and going to better studios, it never was better than that first quickly done rough mix, which ended up being on the album.
“You never can tell which is the one that’s
“I think accepting the fact that we know so little about what makes something good gives you a great ability to try things freely,” says Rubin.
going to speak to you. I think one of the things that you learn from doing this for a long time is that just because you work on it longer and just because you put more time or money into it, that doesn’t make it better. It can, but also it doesn’t mean anything. At the end of the day, if you blindly listen, whichever one speaks to you, that’s the one to share with the world.”
And now the world is discovering the songs that speak to Bea, Bugden and Rubin. The recording process left them certain that This Is How Tomorrow Moves would work, but debuting at Number One? It’s a turn of events that the artist herself can’t quite believe when Mix catches up with her on the day the UK chart is released. To say she’s ecstatic is probably underselling it.
“I actually found out yesterday, and they gave me the award yesterday, and I couldn’t tell anyone, and then I had to go and play a show, and all I wanted to do was just tell everyone how much I appreciated all their support on the record, but I couldn’t, so I just cried on stage,” she blurts, laughing. “I was like, ‘I wish I could tell you why I’m so happy,’ and then I just started crying during ‘Beaches.’” More laughter down the phone line. For Bea, tomorrow is going to move just fine. n
Modeling Demystified
A peek behind the scenes at how software developers simulate, re-create and emulate classic analog gear for modern workflows.
By Mike Levine
In the world of DAW recording, digitally modeled plug-ins are everywhere. If so inclined, you can start a project recording through a modeled mic connected to a modeled preamp. You can track your guitars and basses through pedals featuring modeled amps and effects or record them DI and later create their amplified sounds with amp-modeling plug-ins.
You can track your keyboard parts via MIDI and trigger sounds from modeled emulations of classic synths. When you’re done recording, you can mix the project using modeled channel strips from classic analog consoles or individual emulations of compressors, EQs, reverbs, delays, tape machines and even digitally modeled tracking rooms from world-famous studios.
During the mix, you can monitor through plug-ins that model the sound of the high-end monitor systems in specific pro studios; there are even dedicated headphones for that. Finally, you can master using modeled mastering EQs, compressors and more.
It’s been more than 20 years since digitally modeled plug-ins of analog gear were first introduced, with Line 6, Bomb Factory and Roland among the pioneers. Many in the pro audio industry did not take them seriously at
first, questioning their sonics and capabilities. However, as developers gained experience over time, that began to change.
A crucial inflection point occurred a little more than 10 years ago as most pro engineers began mixing “in the box,” which motivated them to turn to plug-in versions of LA-2As, 1176s, 1073s, EQP-1As, CL 1Bs and other classic processors, which, in analog form, had long been part of their workflows. The stamp of approval from well-known engineers lent legitimacy to the modeled plug-ins and created more demand.
In the early and mid-2010s, hardwareaccelerated systems, most prominently those from Universal Audio, allowed users to run multiple modeled plug-ins without significantly taxing their computers. With the constant improvement in processing speeds, today’s native computers have enough horsepower to handle numerous, simultaneous modeled plugins, though hardware-accelerated systems—with their lower latency and higher track counts— certainly remain advantageous.
MODELING: WHAT IT IS
In the simplest of terms, digital modeling involves translating the workings and sound of
an audio hardware unit, amplifier, room or other physical target into digital data, which is then converted to algorithms and computer code.
When plug-in developers embark on a digital modeling project, they have several options. One is to partner with the manufacturer of the target hardware, which adds authenticity in the eyes of potential customers and provides another crucial benefit: “We try, whenever we can, to work with the hardware manufacturers, to get schematics, inside design information, and sometimes hard-to-find hardware units,” says Will Shanks, who has worked on modeling projects at Universal Audio for 24 years.
Universal Audio, Waves, Softube, Plugin Alliance and others produce quite a few plug-ins in cooperation with manufacturers. UA’s catalog includes the quintessential models of many classic processors, including the 1176 and LA-2A. The company is uniquely positioned with those plugins and others because it’s also the manufacturer.
Another option is to collaborate with an artist, engineer or producer, focusing on one or more of their personal hardware units. Waves is a leader in this area, having joined forces with luminaries such as Chris Lord-Alge, Jack Joseph Puig, Tony Maserati, Greg Wells, Eddie Kramer
and Manny Marroquin.
Working with the manufacturer is not a prerequisite, however. Many developers do an excellent job modeling a piece of gear without getting the “official” stamp from the hardware maker. An independently made plug-in offers the developer more flexibility to add, subtract or merge features not on the original hardware. This can streamline the user experience or expand the unit’s capabilities. The developer might not always have that leeway in a collaborative project (see “Above and Beyond”).
KIT Plugins is in a unique situation because most of the modeled processors the company has released so far come from Blackbird Studio in Nashville. “Blackbird is our anchor partner,” explains Matt Kleinman, CEO and co-founder of the fast-growing company. “John [McBride, coowner of Blackbird] is a co-owner and co-founder of the business, so the mission from day one was to build plug-ins out of John’s equipment.”
Once a developer has identified a unit to model, the next thing it looks for is one or more pieces of the target hardware that are in good condition. A unit must perform up to spec, which isn’t always the case with older analog hardware.
“There are listening tests and measurements
of the units to ensure that they’re functioning properly—running signal through them, doing listening sessions, then taking the hood off to get the unit back to the intended operation like the day it was built. The idea is that you have a near perfect unit to use as a benchmark, as that ‘golden unit,’” says Shanks, noting that UA often takes measurements from more than one unit in a modeling project because the performance of analog hardware can vary from one to the next. “The goal is getting our plug-ins within a spread. We still use one unit as the benchmark, but ideally, our reference unit falls right in the nominal zone of unit-to-unit variation.”
Getting a schematic that shows how the
device works internally is critical. The developer can then decide which modeling technique to apply only by looking at the schematic and testing the unit.
METHODS OF MODELING
“Signal modeling” is one way to go. It’s based on measurements from the input and output using a variety of input levels, sources and knob settings. It doesn’t try to re-create the internal components, which is why it’s also called “black-box modeling.” The more knobs and switches on the hardware, the more variables that need measurement.
“A good example of where that is problematic is big analog EQs, because there are so many
Softube’s Kim Larsson preparing to test components in a Tube-Tech SMC2B Stereo Compressor during a modeling project.
Above: Waves collaborated with Jack Joseph Puig to model processors from his collection, including the Pultec EQP-1A and MEQ-5 equalizers.
Right: This KIT Plugins BB A5 models a channel strip from the API Legacy console at Blackbird Studio in Nashville.
Universal Audio’s Studio 610 Control Room 1, featuring some of the company’s “Golden” hardware, is one of the studios used during modeling projects.
controls,” says Arvid Rosén, Vice President of Research and Development at Softube, a company with nearly two decades of modeling experience. “If you have 20 knobs, the number of control combinations [to measure] is just astronomical.”
“It’s a useful technique and has its place,” says Shanks of signal modeling. “We have used it ourselves when it makes sense, but its limitations are that it cannot fully and accurately represent a complex system with multiple and interdependent nonlinearities.”
Shanks is referring to the fact that an analog signal gets saturated when overdriven, and the complexities of where the points of saturation come from are a critical part of what makes analog audio sound the way it does. Whether it’s the distortion of the tubes in a guitar amp interacting with a transformer or the way the bands of an EQ may be interdependent, the plug-in version should be able to replicate it.
“Circuit modeling,” sometimes called “whitebox modeling,” has proven the most accurate way to reproduce an analog device digitally. It involves creating a mathematical model of the circuit and each component in the hardware’s signal path and then digitally reassembling the elements to match the original design.
“Almost everything UA does related to emulations is circuit modeling,” says Shanks. As an example, he compares UA’s original UAD-1 1176 plug-in, one of the company’s first modeling projects, to its more recent UAD-2 emulation. “When we did the first version, it focused on the most important part of the 1176, which naturally is the compression circuit—the compression detection and its time constants, and this is a ‘focused’ circuit model. Then around 2012
or 2013, we expanded that to be what we call an ‘end-to-end’ circuit model that also takes into account the transformers and amplifiers, the nonlinearities of hitting the input and everything else.”
Hybrid projects that feature a combination of techniques are also common. “My goal for KIT Plugins is to build what we call real-world models,” Kleinman says. “‘How do I get the same feel, sound and creative effect that the piece of gear has in the studio in a plug-in?’ So, for some of our plug-ins, particularly our channel strips, we lean more on algorithms tuned to match the output [black-box modeling]. The more complicated the gear, the more we’ve leaned into component modeling.”
Some developers have started integrating AI into the modeling process. One of the leading companies in this area is Neural DSP, which uses neural networks—an AI technology that allows a computer to predict what will happen at an output based on changes at the input—to create blackbox models of guitar amplifiers. To overcome the challenge of capturing data from an exorbitant number of control combinations, Neural DSP built a proprietary data collection robot called TINA (Telemetric Inductive Nodal Actuator).
The company describes how it works: “TINA figures out what control positions need to be recorded, plans the schedule to turn the knobs while minimizing wear-and-tear, and finally returns to you with a collection of recordings annotated with the related control positions.”
Kleinman says that KIT is also integrating AI engines into plug-in development: “I think using AI in the way we do, to replace DSP, is a big part of the future.”
UA’s original 1176 model from 2001 (top) focused on compression-specific features, whereas its UAD-2 versions (underneath) feature end-to-end circuit modeling that includes models of the transformers and amplifiers.
ROOMS, AMPS AND MICS
Depending on the type of hardware being modeled, several other techniques are often necessary in addition to those used for modeling a unit’s electronics. If speakers and/or room acoustics are part of the equation, as is the case with amp modeling and room simulation, developers might employ convolution, creating impulse responses (IRs) that describe the acoustics of a given space.
The limitation of an IR is that it’s a snapshot, so it’s a static representation of the sound in the space it was recorded. To add additional realism, Universal Audio developed a technology it calls Dynamic Room Modeling, which emulates how microphones are physically repositioned in a live room or reverb chamber.
Rosén says that Softube often uses a different type of convolution involving Infinite Impulse Responses (IIRs)—also known as recursive filters—in conjunction with conventional IRs for speaker modeling. “It’s much more CPUefficient,” he explains. “IIRs are usually not
TINA, Neural DSP’s data-collection robot, uses AI to automate the measurement process for black-box modeling.
Measurement mics set up to capture data in the Blackbird Studio A reverb chamber for KIT Plugins BB Chamber A plug-in.
accurate enough on their own, but a useful tool in combination with other techniques.”
Microphones are yet another type of hardware that requires multiple techniques to emulate. Developers must factor in polar patterns, mic distance, distance of the source to the mic, off-axis response, and properties of the materials used in the mics. As a result, modeling a mic requires many additional physical measurements, convolution integration and, of course, a lot of math.
ABOVE AND BEYOND
Modeled plug-ins can claim an advantage (depending on your point of view) over the
original units in that they have the ability to add features that are only possible in the digital domain. In the early days of modeling, developers often hesitated to make such additions because the goal was typically “absolute authenticity.”
“To this day, we are adamant about creating the models, warts and all,” Shanks says, “meaning with all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the sound and the hardware experience. Basically, what you see is what you get. For example, our original 1176 plugin gave you exactly what the hardware provided; no bells and whistles such as parallel mix or sidechain filtering like the current versions.”
Now, he says, UA is more flexible in its viewpoint, and many of the company’s plug-ins
include “digital only” features that expand the functionality. “For example, on Hitsville Mastering EQ, we added the ability to turn it into a mid-side EQ,” he notes. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t think impacts the unit’s integrity.”
Rosén says that Softube is also open to adding features that are not on the original hardware. “It would be stupid to say, ‘No, we will not put a stereo side-chain in this unit because the original was mono,’” he says. “Some things are very reasonable to add because you use the units differently in a digital workflow compared to analog.”
KIT Plugins has yet another philosophy. “John and I try to take an approach somewhere in the middle,” Kleinman explains. “We want to capture the magic of the original gear, and we both agree that one of the things that makes analog gear magical is its limitations, like on a 1073. You have to work within the limitations of that piece of gear, so you find a different way to get your answer. But at the same time, we are building a digital version of a product, and there are certain annoyances or problems in the real world that we want to fix. For example, analog noise. We include the noise in our plug-ins, but you can turn it on, control its volume, and turn it off to get pure digital silence when there’s no sound playing.”
LISTEN UP
Along with all the measuring, data collection and math, listening to the modeled processor compared to the original is a part of the digitalmodeling workflow that leans a bit more toward the artistic side.
“When I finally sit down after the first pass of the algorithm is complete, I’m side by side with a piece of hardware and my software, listening back and forth, doing signal analysis and spectrum analysis to see if it matches in every way,” Shanks says.
“There’s always A/B testing,” Rosén adds, “and that can be a long, tedious process. A/Bing is more difficult than you might think because there are so many factors that can screw up the test.”
At KIT, there is a simple yardstick for knowing whether a model passes muster: They do a blind A/B test with John McBride as the judge. “The threshold for us to release a piece of gear,” says Kleinman, “is that John has to be fooled in the blind test. When a studio professional with intimate knowledge of the modeled gear can’t distinguish its output from that of the plug-in, it’s safe to say that the modeling project has been a success.” ■
Amp-modeling plug-ins like Softube amp room require not only models of the amplifier’s electronics, but of the speaker cabs, microphones and effects.
UA’s Will Shanks inside chamber 2644 at Hitsville USA in Detroit during the research phase for the company’s Hitsville Reverb Chambers plug-in.
Arthur Baker is holed up in what looks like a freshman year college dorm room in his adopted hometown of Miami. There is a semi-made bed with an open cardboard box on it. A rolling office chair is loaded with clothes. A few short bookcases are choking with vinyl. In contrast, multiple pairs of speakers are strategically placed, and framed gold records decorate the walls.
These last two elements are in keeping with someone of Baker’s music innovator status. You would expect the 69-year-old producer/songwriter to be living large in a lush oceanside mansion. Seeing him in this modest setting pulls the nearmythical figure back to Earth. Baker sits on a folding chair, keeping it low-key, but his phone doesn’t stop dinging. He is, after all, Arthur Baker.
The ’80s was Baker’s decade. A Boston native, he transplanted to New York City, where his percolating ideas were finalized in the latterday disco song “Happy Days,” under the name NorthEnd. “Happy Days” was a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s Disco Top 80, the first of many chart-
THE ARTHUR
He got his start as a DJ, was there at the birth of the 12-inch, owned the 1980s, learned how to be a big-time producer, went through some down years, and now it’s all come full circle—back to the clubs and the energy of live performance.
By Lily Moayeri
toppers for Baker. The song was performed by live musicians, notably the late DJ/drummer Russell Presto, who was a frequent collaborator on Baker’s early productions.
“The drum sound on ‘Happy Days’ is still, to this day, one of the best drum sounds I ever got,” Baker says. “We put a wallet on the snare to deaden it a bit and miked the bottom so it had a nice attack. We would listen to Earl Young [The Trammps] and Tony Thompson [Chic] and compare. We wanted that sound. Once we had it, we had to cut more
tracks because it was so good.”
Live playing is a cornerstone of Baker’s legacy, where he is frequently namechecked for his groundbreaking production work on Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s 1982 smash, “Planet Rock,” which kicked off the electro genre. Kraftwerk’s beats were the spark for “Planet Rock,” and many drum machines were listened to before landing on the Roland TR-808. Legend has it that Baker found an ad in the Village Voice for a fellow with an 808 who charged $20 a session. Baker had
him program the drums for “Planet Rock” based on Kraftwerk’s “Numbers,” with the break based on Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm.” The melody line was borrowed from Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express,” and the creation was at Intergalactic Studios.
The space housed a Neve console, Studer 24-track tape machine, Lexicon PCM41 digital delay, Sony reverb and a Fairlight. Every piece was used, with Bambaataa’s signature electronic vocoder vocals attained through the Lexicon,
Decades after bursting on to the music scene in the early 1980s, Arthur Baker, seen here in 2019, is still finding ways to wrangle new sounds out of classic gear like the Roland TR-808 drum machine.
Photo: Jason Nuttle
BAKER REMIX
which provided all the effects on “Planet Rock.” Everything was played, rather than sequenced, by musician John Robie on a Micromoog and Prophet 5.
“Planet Rock” went Top 5 on Billboard’s Dance/ Disco Top 80 and Hot Soul Singles charts. It was quickly certified Gold with a half-million copies sold, and it cemented Baker’s reputation. He had more Top 10 dance hits with his projects Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk” (which made use of some leftover material from the “Planet Rock” sessions) and Rockers Revenge “Walking on Sunshine.” Additionally, the Baker-produced “I.O.U.” by Freez was a chart-topper in the U.S. and the UK.
SONGWRITING AND PRODUCTION
Songwriting has been a constant for Baker, who sees himself as a producer in the tradition of
Gamble & Huff or Norman Whitfield, where you produced what you wrote. “Ideas for songs would come in my head, and I’d tape them on a cassette player,” says Baker, who spent a significant amount of time in the early part of his career pre-planning recording sessions, not in small part because studio time was expensive and budgets were limited.
“There was no way I could write a song without at least a keyboard player,” he adds. “I needed access to musicians to collaborate with. I would play records to an arranger and say, ‘I want horns to be this vibe. I want the beat to be that vibe.’ He would write the parts out. We had charts. It was proper sessions with a band.”
By 1984, Baker had his own studio, Shakedown, on the middle level of an eight-story office building. In the evenings, he would set up drums in the stairwell and have drummer Keith LeBlanc
play. “We would mike the entire stairwell, and the drum sounds we got were insane,” recalls Baker. “We got the best drum sounds ever by miking way at the top. During the day, we couldn’t do that, but we had a rehearsal room that used to be a photo studio with all-white curved walls. We would put a speaker in there, mike it, send the drums out and get really explosive sounds. John [Robie] would sample smashing glasses and throwing things. It was all about capturing your own stuff that was unique, that not everyone else could do.”
Those types of inventive approaches brought mainstream artists to Baker for his remix touch. His high-profile reworks of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” “Cover Me” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia” took the art of the remix to another level. Baker’s
Baker, seen here with ex-wife
Tina B., spent much of the 1980s creating inside his New York City studio, Shakedown Sound, which centered around a Trident Series 80 B console.
Photo: Shakedown Sound
insistence on live playing carried over to his remixes.
While he never took music lessons, Baker did take an engineering course, which helped him with communication and terminology used in the studio. Hands-on ability came with practical time spent recording. At the desk, his approach was more like that of a reggae remixer who employs live takes and passes— stopping, editing and creating as they go along. Says Baker, “It was like being a DJ at the mixing board. Now, with access to all these effects, you can do things live in a DJ set that I was doing at the mixing board in the studio.”
PRODUCER MEETS DJ
The synergies between producing and DJing went both ways. DJs would take multiple copies of a record with the same, or different, versions of a track and extend it for their sets, arranging, or rather, rearranging live, building a new version in the process. This extended edit was also happening in the studio, resulting in the birth of the 12-inch remix.
The impact of Baker’s remixes (and his original productions), particularly on the dancefloor, caught the attention of New Order’s Bernard Sumner, who spent many a late night into early morning stimulated by New York club energy. The group enlisted Baker to produce “Confusion” and co-write “Thieves Like Us.” The former became a Top 5 hit for the group on both sides of the pond, and Baker shared writing credit as well. He later remixed New Order’s “Touched By the Hand of God,” “1963” and “Jetstream.”
“I had a problem going in with bands if I wasn’t involved with the writing of the songs,” Baker admits. “Doing an album with a band, if you don’t love the majority of the songs, it’s going to be hard work. That’s why I didn’t do a lot of album projects. It would bore me.
“If I could sing and play keys, I would have been a solo artist,” he continues. “I have a lot of song ideas. I know how they should sound in my head. I know how the singing should be. A lot of the early tracks I did, I would coach singers with my horrible voice, to lead them into what it should sound like. With Al Green, you don’t have to tell him how to sing, but you give him
the melody. And if he didn’t get the melody on a track, I’d go, ‘I love the feel, but can you sing that melody?’ You have to have some confidence in your songs.”
Club DJs served as inspiration for Baker’s songs. It wasn’t unheard of for him to have a tape recorder in hand at the club and record a rhythm he liked. It was distorted and garbled, but it was enough for him to take to the studio and try to create something like it.
“If I don’t have an idea from being out in a club, then the DJ was shit,” says Baker. “Paradise Garage, Danceteria, Funhouse, all those clubs I used to go to a lot. I’d hear something, I’d see people react and I’d be like, ‘I gotta try that.’ Or, I would test my works in progress out and see how people reacted. If they didn’t react a certain way to a certain idea, I would change it. I do it to this day.”
Labels at the time hired DJs to consult on how a song should be structured. An observer of this phenomenon, Baker made records that didn’t require a remix for the dancefloor. Baker didn’t concern himself with keeping his productions to jukebox length. His original mix was the extended dance mix. In this way, Baker was not unlike his predecessors, producers like Gamble & Huff and Whitfield, who would just let the band continue playing and record them.
BROOKLYN FUNK ESSENTIALS
In 1993, in a hodgepodge of unused recordings of different musicians, Baker found a bit of material played by saxophonist Maceo Parker. He felt it would be a good fit for a jazz project he was working on with songwriter, producer and
Brooklyn Funk Essentials, a diverse collective of jazz, funk and hip hop musicians and vocalists.
“I was still in my drug phase,” says Baker of the original session with Parker. “I played him a track that was nine minutes long that my drummer Keith [LeBlanc] had done in the stairwell. We got that great drum sound. I had to explain to Maceo what I was looking for. We did a couple of tracks. It wasn’t an easy session. But it was fun for me to be in with Maceo because I was such a fan. I remember thinking, ‘I wish I had better stuff for him to play on.’ I felt like it hadn’t been used to its best, so we used that on ‘Blow Your Brains Out.’”
Of BFE’s origins, Baker says, “It started out as programming and samples of live playing, then Lati put a band together and we started overdubbing. Once they started playing live, it became a whole other thing. They played a lot of gigs, so they were playing the songs really well. The album came out in the UK on Dorado, but when we put the album out in America, we rerecorded a lot of the stuff live. If it had remained programmed samples, you wouldn’t be hearing about the band now, 30 years later.”
To mark the 30-year anniversary of Brooklyn Funk Essentials’ debut album, Cool and Steady and Easy, there are reimagined versions of two of their classic songs, “Blow Your Brains Out” and “Brooklyn Recycles.” Kronlund was again in the producer’s seat on the former, with UK singer/ songwriter Alison Limerick on vocals.
Steadfast in his affinity for live performance, Baker says, “There are so many acts that started as samples that could have done it live, but didn’t. What’s special about Brooklyn Funk Essentials is that Lati actually did that. He’s super-anal, super-specific. He had perseverance. He’s the exact opposite of me.”
musician Lati Kronlund. That was the seed for
Baker, seen here in June with producer Cutman LG at the Tribeca Film Festival’s 40th anniversary screening of Beat Street, is now working with Nas to adapt the film into a stage musical.
While he had his own studio in New York, Baker went wherever he needed in order to complete a track, such as Intermedia Sound Studios in Boston. Photo: Arthur Baker
Photo: Johnny Nunez/Getty Images
KEEPING IT LIVE
For the last decade, Baker’s productions have started in a Wi-Fi-less laptop with a screen that’s falling apart running Logic 9. He has a plethora of plug-ins, including the Waves suite, and he works on headphones. “The control I have over my own creation is more than I’ve ever had,” he says. “Once I got acquainted with programming and sequencing, I was able to go from the club to home and start doing a track. Five or six years ago, when I was in Ibiza, I would go out every night, and during the day I would write a track from the vibe that had inspired me the night before.”
While Baker’s ideas start in the box as a solitary endeavor, he continues to work with live musicians and a select few engineers for mixing. He draws from Miami’s wealth of music talent, including keyboardist Gene Perez and DJ Le Spam and his disco funk jazz band, The Spam All-Stars.
“[Perez] has a great studio, [DJ Le Spam] has all the synthesizers and a Trident board where I record live,” says Baker. “The younger guys love having analog equipment, which is good, because I kept a few things, but I don’t use them at all with how I’m set up. It’s easier for me to create this way. It’s about how quickly you can
put an idea down before it’s gone.”
In the last year, Baker has done two key remixes—“California” for French superstar Myléne Farmer and “The Trench Coat Museum” for UK up-and-comers Yard Act. Farmer only provided Baker with an a cappella, around which he built a new track in the box, then had Perez play on it; MSTRKRFT’s Al-P did the final mix. Yard Act sent Baker all the parts, from which he chopped bits of the vocal, then had Perez add new keyboard parts.
“It’s about getting songs that inspire you,” he notes. “Going back to live performances makes a difference. Most of my remixes have a live element to them. Adding one or two human elements on something, you can really feel the difference.”
Coincidentally, it was Tom Moulton, informally known as the creator of the remix in the disco era, who released some of Baker’s earliest recordings, albeit in a roundabout way. Baker recorded a Philly soul album with live musicians, funded by himself, which caught the ear of Moulton’s brother. They bought the music from Baker, rerecorded it and released it as TJM on Casablanca Records in the late ’70s.
Much of Baker’s taste, which was molded by the early ’70s radio DJs on Boston’s WBCN and WILD, was reflected on what became TJM. The music Baker heard on those stations ran the gamut of genres, from rock to soul, jazz, funk, vocal groups and everything in between, playing varying styles back-to-back.
“You were able to see the connection between Cream and Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin,” Baker recalls. “Hearing everything gave me my education. That was lifechanging for me.”
Baker follows that ethos on his weekly Sirius XM radio show, Baker’s Revenge, broadcast on Studio 54 Radio. He shares his influences, his own music, material from his vaults and current sounds that catch his ear. “It’s a lot of my own stuff,” Baker says. “I do a thing called ‘Sleeper of the Week,’ which is something of mine that came out that no one ever heard. But I also play Led Zeppelin. My friends from Boston say it sounds like BCN back in the day.”
Baker’s Revenge is a great platform for the producer and songwriter who began his career as a club DJ and insists that he wasn’t good at it, at least the mixing part, because he never practiced. But he knew how to pick songs, and he always had a DJ’s mindset, understanding how a track could work on a dancefloor.
This past summer, Baker had a string of club dates, where, true to form, he tested out a lot of his new material. “When I DJ now, I only play my own music, and I play a lot of things that no one’s ever heard. If you can get people to dance on things that aren’t even finished and that they don’t know, you know it’s cool.” ■
Baker is still recording to this day, such as a recent session at The Bridge studio in Miami.
Afrika Bambattaa & Soul Sonic Force’s “Renegades of Funk” and New Order’s “Thieves Like Us” are just two of the classic early-Eighties releases Baker was involved in.
Photo: Lisa Leone
Tech // reviews
Wolff Audio Freq Equalizer
Four-Band, Proportional-Q
By Barry Rudolph
500 Series Module
The Freq Equalizer 500 Series Module from venerable designer Paul Wolff offers a unique take on the four-band proportional-Q equalizer. He calls it an “everything EQ,” useful in all equalization applications, from subtle and very smooth tonality changes, to a precision tracking EQ for solving problems by using deep, 1/3-octave, hi-Q notches, or for when you’re looking to apply more “colorful” boost/cut effects.
The Q of a proportional-Q equalizer tracks the amount of boost or cut applied. Big boosts/cuts cause the width to narrow, while lesser boost/cut will widen out. All four bands are proportional-Q equalizers, with the high- and low-frequency sections switchable to very low-Q bell-shaped curves, Wolff’s version of a shelving EQ.
The Freq Equalizer uses a custom Cinemag blended nickel/steel core output transformer; it’s specified at +28 dBu maximum output. The makeup amplifiers driving the transformer are a custom quad power circuit using four OPA2134s, which can be modified with discrete op-amp modules, if preferred. Freq has a bypass switch mounted between the 1/3-octave switches on the High Mid-range and Low Mid-range sections. All switches on the Freq trigger relays for extended life—goodbye forever to noisy, crackly switches.
Freq’s front-panel controls are familiar to any engineer/producer who has worked with single-slot 500 Series modules, with its four continuous frequency controls and four boost/cut knobs.
Starting from the top is a high-frequency shelving-like EQ section that is variable from 2 kHz, at full clockwise, to 20 kHz at counter-clockwise, with up to ±15 dB boost/cut. The companion low-frequency section EQ, also with ±15 dB boost/cut, has a frequency range of 25 Hz at full CW and up to 700 Hz at CCW. Both high and low bands are 1/3-octave wide, with boosts/cuts up to 15dB.
I like that the boost/cut controls on all four bands have solidfeeling center-detents at 0 dB, and selecting the desired frequency, from high to low, gives the same assurance. This consistency makes these controls easy to find and adjust in the dim lighting of the studio. In my control room, I have them in an eight-slot Wolff Audio Bucket rack at arms-length from the mix position, making them easy to adjust while I remain between my monitors.
WIDE MODE
One of the Freq’s unique features involves the blue-lit Wide buttons for both the High and Low EQ sections. When switched
in, those sections’ proportional-Q EQs become 2.5-octave-wide, fixed-Q, bell-shaped equalizers. You can instantly audition between a wide peaking equalizer and a proportional-Q EQ at the same frequency. I found this feature to make Freq an excellent tracking unit when recording drums, keyboards and vocals. You have options!
In Wide mode with a fixed Q, big boosts or cuts are gently rolled off starting at the EQ’s center frequency. This prevents unwanted boosts (using a traditional shelf) of super-high or super-low frequencies from clipping Freq’s output, and/or the following processors in the chain after it. You may not immediately hear this distortion.
The midrange frequencies are split into two sections that overlap both the High and Low sections. The High Mid-range section sits just below the high-frequency section and has a range of 350 Hz to 10 kHz. Directly below is the Low Mid-range, which goes from 75 Hz to 2 kHz. Both sections have their own fixed-Q 1/3-octave switches, with the default position (switch not lit) being proportional-Q.
When the 1/3 notch buttons are engaged on either midrange section, the Q changes to a fixed 1/3-octave, making them useful for setting a notch at a specified frequency. Because the two midrange sections overlap each other, as well as the Hi and Low EQs, it is possible to cut one frequency and at the same time boost the same frequency, the cut being narrow and the boost being wide. This is like an old Pultec EQ trick familiar to veteran engineers.
IN THE STUDIO
I first brought up the Wolff Freq Equalizer for a kick drum track in a mix. The drum did not “mesh” well with the bass guitar, which was double-tracked with an octave-up fuzz bass. I wanted the kick to have more subsonic push without sounding boomy.
On the kick track, I boosted 2 to 3 dB at about 30 Hz using Wide mode, and then also in Wide mode, in the HF section, I added 2 to 3 dB at 5 kHz for a little brighter, beater attack. I followed Freq EQ with a UREI 1176LN with fast Attack and Release and a 4:1 ratio, its meter reading about 3 to 5 dB of max gain reduction. The biggest help came from the Freq’s Low Mid-range section, where a deep, 1/3-octave 10dB notch at 1.2 kHz cleared out some space to allow the bass’ fuzz tone to be heard. I could “tune in” this notch easily as it sliced through the kick drum’s cardboard sound.
The Freq Equalizer uses a custom Cinemag, blended nickel/steel core output transformer specified at +28 dBu maximum output.
Next, I wanted to see how Freq handled lead vocals. I used two Freqs on the lead vocal track and another on a copy (multiple) of the same vocal. One of the problems was to figure out the big tonal difference when the singer switched from a natural male vocal range, which sounded dark in the verses but tended to be shrill when he went to full voice in the choruses. After the verse and chorus vocals were moved to individual tracks, I roughly automated levels and the channel-switching.
For the choruses, Freq #1 HM section in Wide mode was excellent in locating a pesky, harsh midrange peak frequency in the choruses, and then switching it to a 1/3-octave notch at 3 kHz. I also added +2 dB starting at 10 kHz Wide, just above the “S” area using Freq #1. But I could not leave that EQ setting on during the verses.
Freq #2 was for the dark-sounding verses, where
PRODUCT SUMMARY
COMPANY: Wolff Audio
PRODUCT: Freq Equalizer 500 Series Module
WEBSITE: www.wolffaudio.com
PRICE: $787 MSRP
PROS: An equalizer that packs a lot of versatility and power into a single-slot 500 Series module.
CONS: None.
I kept the 10 kHz Wide boost but less of it. I used the LF section for a high-pass filter starting at 200 Hz set to -2 dB. The dark sound was solved by using the two midrange sections, with the LM section cutting about 1.5 dB at 500 Hz and the HM section boosting about 2 dB at 3 kHz.
All this processing might sound excessive, but by using broad, low-Q peaking EQs and minimal wide boosts, the result was a new clarity and a forward-sounding lead vocal that could take on a following compressor or limiter.
ON THE STEREO BUS
Finally, I wanted to try setting u p a pair of Freqs as a stereo bus equalizer. For me, a stereo EQ on the stereo bus is a sacrosanct position, with the responsibility of finalizing and shaping the entire mix’s sound. I usually insert it before the stereo compressor, especially when readying a mix for mastering, streaming or mix approval.
A well-mixed song with good performances and well-recorded instruments needs only subtle polishing. The Freq’s four bands could start with gentle high and low proportional boosts. The two midrange sections are useful for scooping out or bringing up the midrange or boosting frequencies with very broad bell-shaped EQ curves. Paul Wolff’s Freq Equalizer 500 Series Module is the Everything EQ, and I would recommend a pair of them at any time to anyone n
KIT Plugins KIT Drums - Connor Denis
One Player, One Kit and a Wealth of Features and Sonic Flexibility
By Mike Levine
KIT Plugins, developers of the renowned line of digitally modeled gear from Blackbird Studio in Nashville, recently released KIT Drums - Connor Denis, its first virtual instrument. The versatile, high-quality drum plug-in was created in collaboration with Connor Denis, a Florida-based touring and session drummer best known for his live work with Beartooth. The drums are sampled from his Gretsch USA Custom Kit.
The Drum Kit page, one of four selectable screens that also includes the Mixer, Groove and Mapping pages, depicts an animated version of the kit, which features five sampled drums: Kick, Snare, High Tom, Mid Tom and Floor Tom. It also includes hi-hats, a ride and two crash cymbals. Although the plug-in only includes one kit, many of the kit pieces have multiple variations, which you can access via contextual menus.
You can switch between 22-inch and 24-inch kick versions. For snares, you get Gretsch, Craviotto, Phosphoric Bronze and Keplinger 6.5 x 14-inch and Q Aluminum and Q Copper 5.5 x 14-inch versions. The Crash 2 cymbal can be toggled between 19-inch and 20-inch versions, and the ride between Zildjian A Custom Sweet Ride 21-inch and Zildjian K Light ride 24-inch versions.
As is typical on a virtual drum kit, any drum or cymbal can be auditioned by clicking on it. When a kit piece gets triggered by a MIDI note, you see the hits on the appropriate drum or cymbal in real time.
The 24-bit samples sound excellent, but those sonics come at the cost of high RAM usage. When open, the plug-in takes up slightly more than 6 GB of RAM. I compared it with Toontrack Superior Drummer 3, NI Kontakt 7 Modern Drummer, and the Drummer instrument in Logic, and they all were in the 2 to 3 GB range. Fortunately, clicking on the 24-bit indicator near the top of the screen switches the plug-in to 16-bit samples, which still sound quite good and only use about 3 GB of RAM.
The instrument includes both a plug-in and standalone version. The functionality is virtually the same in both.
IMPRESSIVELY ARTICULATE
The sonic flexibility of KIT Drums - Connor Denis is one of its top selling points. Clicking on the Advanced button on the Drum Kit page opens up additional windows for tweaking various performance parameters. Clicking on a kit piece on the screen makes it active for editing. On the left side of the GUI, a long vertical window appears in which you can adjust sliders to change the level of the available Articulations for each kit piece.
An Articulation is a type of hit for a specific drum or cymbal triggered by its own MIDI note.
The Kick, Toms and Crashes have one Articulation each. Snare has three: Center Hit, Rim Shot and Side Stick. The ride has Bell, Edge and Bow Tip. The hi-hat offers 12 Articulations.
At the bottom of the Articulation window is a Pitch knob with a checkbox next to it that says All Artics. By default, it’s checked, which means a change in pitch gets applied to all Articulations for the selected drum or cymbal. If you want to get creative, you can uncheck All Artics and apply separate pitch changes to each.
In Advanced mode, the Instrument Options Panel is on the right side of the Drum Kit window. It facilitates adjusting Level, Pan and Reverb Send for the built-in Reverb for most of the kit pieces— but not the ride and crashes.
The Drum Kit page with the Advanced features showing.
The Articulation Velocity panel, just below, is where velocity ranges can be set graphically for a selected Articulation. Below that, Instrument ADSR allows for changing the volume envelope (Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release) for either the whole kit or on individual channels in the Mixer.
MIGHTY MIXING
The versatile Mixer is a significant contributor to the plug-in’s impressive sonic variety. It features channels for Kick, Snare, Hi Tom, Lo Tom, Hi-Hat, Crash 1, Crash 2, Ride, OH (overhead), Room 1, Room 2, Reverb (return) and Master.
Each channel is equipped with a long-throw volume fader. The drum and cymbal channels, except for the Crashes, feature horizontal Pan sliders. Crash 1 and 2 each have a Swap button, which inverts them in the stereo field.
The stereo channels OH, Room 1, Room 2, Reverb and the Master channel sport Stereo/ Mono sliders, which you can use to make the drums more focused and punchy in the mix, or even go fully mono for a retro sound.
All the channels have Solo and Mute buttons, except for the Reverb return channel, where the Solo button is grayed out, and the Master, which has neither. The individual drum and cymbal channels are equipped with polarity flip switches, a Preview Pad that triggers the kit piece for auditioning adjustments, and a Blend button.
Pressing Blend opens another window containing separate channels for each mic used to record the selected drum or cymbal. Each sub-channel has its own Volume, Mute and Polarity Flip control. There are three kick mics and two on the snare, which provides plenty of flexibility in shaping the sounds. The others each have one mic. It’s also possible to adjust how much a kit piece will bleed into the Overhead and Room mic channels. Reverb send and Pitch knobs are included.
The plug-in can be instantiated either for stereo or multiple (16 stereo) outputs. For the latter, you can set individual output assignments from any mixer channel.
MIX EFFECTS
At the top of the Mixer page are controls for the Saturation, EQ and Compression effects, which can be applied separately for drum or cymbal. Saturation, which can range from subtle to heavy, is handy for altering the character of the drums in the kit. In addition to an On/Off button, it offers controls for Gain, Mix, HPF (high-pass filter) and LPF (low-pass filter).
The four-band EQ features semiparametric low and high bands, two fully parametric main bands and high- and low-pass filters. The Compressor sports Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release and Mix controls, plus a knob labeled Body, which allows you to boost a low-shelf filter centered at 250 Hz. Reverb, which becomes visible when you select the Reverb channel, features controls for Pre-Delay, Size, Damping, HPF and LPF. It’s a nice-sounding reverb with a smooth decay tail.
The generous collection of factory Mixer presets does an excellent job of showcasing the range of sounds the plug-in can produce— everything from a tight, dry kit to an electronic kit to a stadium-style rock kit. Near the top of the plug-in, a Perspective Switch changes the kit from the drummer’s perspective to the audience’s. I haven’t seen this on other virtual drummers, and it’s handy.
MIDI GROOVES AND MAPPING
The Grooves window handles MIDI drum loops. The plug-in comes with a small groove library that’s a little tricky to install, but once loaded, you’ll see that it contains four songs, each with multiple loops for parts and fills and a full song option. The collection is narrow from a genre perspective, with the songs labeled either Punk or Metal.
Fortunately, you can import individual MIDI files (Type 0) into the plug-in by drag-and-drop. Files show up in the Grooves window under User MIDI. For any loaded MIDI loops, you can apply
PRODUCT SUMMARY
COMPANY: KIT Plugins
PRODUCT: KIT Drums - Connor Denis
WEBSITE: kitplugins.com
PRICE: $49 introductory price for a limited time; $69 regular price.
PROS: Excellent sounds. Well-designed GUI. Built-in Compressor, EQ, Saturation and Reverb. Adjust levels of multiple mics on Kick and Snare. Easy to import MIDI files. Comprehensive MIDI mapping features. Excellent value.
CONS: Grooves are limited. Loading grooves can be confusing. 24-bit samples use over 6 GB of RAM.
the Humanize effect, which offers four choices— Natural, Tight, Rushed and Lazy—and a slider that goes from 0 to 100. Even at 100 percent, the effect is pretty subtle, but still useful.
MIDI loops can be exported from the GUI by dragging and dropping them into a DAW track. Loops exported that way will include any Humanize effect you applied. The Grooves window has a Play/Stop-Start button, and there’s also one in the plug-in’s top section.
The other main window is called Mapping. Here, you can change the MIDI mapping to fit imported grooves that use other mapping formats. Supported formats include General MIDI, 2-Box, Toontrack, Roland, Slate, XLN Audio and Yamaha. If you want to create custom mappings, it’s pretty easy: Click on an Instrument Type (kit piece), and when the Articulations appear in a center window, simply drag one onto any note in a large keyboard display showing the current mapping.
If the note you’re moving it to already has an assigned sound, the keyboard will read Multiple. You then must delete the previously assigned Articulation for that note unless you want to create a custom sound layer. You can layer up to 10 Instrument Types on a MIDI note.
On the far right is another “Advanced” window, where you can adjust the velocity curve for each Articulation. It offers presets, or you can drag graph points to set a custom curve. You can also edit Control Change settings from there.
Kit Drums - Connor Denis is an impressive drum instrument with plenty of well-thoughtout features and excellent sound, and it competes well with more expensive virtual drummers. It would be nice if it were more RAM-efficient when using the 24-bit samples and if the groove library was more varied, but overall, this is a first-rate plug-in and an excellent value. I look forward to more instrument releases by KIT. n
The Mapping page offers significant control features.
Open Channel
Vanishing Voices
By Craig Anderton
The only reason we know about ancient Mayan culture is because as the conquering Spaniards destroyed it, they documented it—on paper that’s almost 500 years old. Our knowledge of the Sumerians comes from thousands of stone tablets. And Egyptian hieroglyphics, written on papyrus scrolls and other physical objects, tell us about their culture. Fortunately, centuries from now, historians will have no problem playing back our 21st century musical artifacts. Despite CDs and tapes becoming unreadable by then, it won’t matter—historians will be able to stream the fruits of our artistic genius from the cloud!
Yeah, right.
Seriously, though, there’s an even more challenging problem in the future than playing back dinosaur formats. By that time, vast amounts of our audio heritage will likely have been destroyed, not by natural disasters but by the self-inflicted wounds of greed, carelessness, ignorance and apathy.
In this first part of a three-part series, we’ll cover what we’ve lost, and why we lost it. Next month, we’ll delve into the race against time to preserve our shared musical legacy. Finally, we’ll analyze the daunting topic of what to do next—how to preserve the past, and how to handle the yottabytes of data being generated now. Not to mention the brontobytes on the horizon…
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY?
Record companies and multinational corporations have not always been good stewards of our musical heritage. Perhaps they took the transitory nature of pop music as a permission slip to be careless. But as Ral Donner sang back in the ’60s, “You don’t know what you’ve got, until you lose it.” Those working on the music of their time probably didn’t consider that one day, record companies would frantically search for multitrack tapes and masters so they could use improved technology to revisit older music.
The most famous example of music literally going up in smoke was the Universal Music Group fire of 2008. According to The New York Times Magazine and other sources, it’s estimated that the losses involved half a million song titles, including masters from 50 Cent, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Beck, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Duke Ellington, Elton John, Eminem, Eric Clapton, Etta James, Fats Domino, Iggy Pop, Janet Jackson, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Garland, Les Paul, Loretta Lynn, Louis Armstrong, Merle Haggard, Neil Diamond, Nirvana, No Doubt, R.E.M., Ray Charles, Sheryl Crow, Soundgarden, Steely Dan, Steve Earle, The Eagles, The Mamas and the Papas, The Roots, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Tupac Shakur, Yoko Ono—and that’s just a partial listing.
UMG is not alone. In the late ’50s, Sun Studios in Memphis sent
some early Elvis masters to the landfill. A 1978 fire at Atlantic Records’ New Jersey warehouse destroyed master tapes by John Coltrane and Ray Charles, as well as unreleased masters, sessions and alternate versions recorded between 1948 and 1969. All told, the fire destroyed an estimated five to six thousand reels of tape, many of which had not been copied.
In 2011, a fire at the Sony Music warehouse in London destroyed mostly stock, but also masters from independent labels that stored their assets in the warehouse. Some of Adele’s early recordings were lost, as were Chemical Brothers masters.
But fire hasn’t been the only enemy. Tape is bulky, expensive, heavy, prone to deterioration over time, and takes up a lot of storage space. After recordings were made from the mixed tapes, keeping the originals was not a priority. Due to tape shortages and limited storage, for example, the BBC erased many early recordings—including music by the Beatles and David Bowie—so that the tape could be reused. And of course, the very earliest wax cylinder and acetate recordings simply couldn’t handle the ravages of time.
BEING DIGITAL
But let’s circle back to UMG. Pushing back strongly against the Times article, UMG disputed the severity of the fire. Then again, according to an article in Billboard magazine, UMG claimed originally that, “We had no loss, thankfully.” A subsequent UMG statement said, “While there are constraints [presumably, legal ones, this writer is guessing] preventing us from publicly addressing some of the details of the fire…the incident—while deeply unfortunate—never affected the availability of the commercially released music nor impacted artists’ compensation.”
I’m not here to pass judgment on UMG, so I’ll just presume the last part means, “Yes, the masters and multitrack tapes burned up, but copies exist, the recordings were released into the world in digital format, and we keep track of sales and royalties. So, does it really matter?”
On one hand, I’m inclined to agree that if the music was released in a digital format, it hasn’t been “lost” in the sense of “no one will ever hear this again.” However, there are situations where something has indeed been lost forever, like for artists who want to release remixed or remastered versions (e.g., Steven Wilson’s XTC remixes hit a roadblock when tapes for English Settlement were missing).
Or consider companies that want to mine vaults for alternate takes, and those who believe the original masters—which in many cases were almost certainly one or two generations removed from the digital copies—are precious artifacts from our musical history.
Still, trying to locate older media, their inevitable deterioration, and proper restoration are all vexing issues. You have to ask yourself, “Are some problems intractable?” Stay tuned for Part 2 in next month’s Open Channel. ■
