MIX 539 - November 2021 by publications

Welcome to the NOVEMBER 2021 issue of

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FEATURES

20 Aron Forbes: Programming, Mixing and Collaborating with Billie Eilish and FINNEAS BY LILY MOAYERI

11.21 Contents

24 Switchfoot Calling Tony Berg: Search for New Sound at Sound City BY LILY MOAYERI

28 Sing It Loud! Dave Matthews Band Back on the Road, Packing the House BY CLIVE YOUNG

Volume 45, Number 11

MUSIC

TECHNOLOGY

AUDIO EDUCATION SPECIAL

10 ‘I Don’t Live Here

40 Tech Spotlight: Digital

32 New Studios to Welcome the Students Back

Anymore’: In-Studio With War on Drugs

Audio Workstations BY MIX EDITORS

42 Review:

BY BARBARA SCHULTZ

12 News & Notes: Old Meets New at Citizen Vinyl; Patrick Gleeson Masters Quadraphonic Vinyl; M3 Mobile at Central Park

Ocean Way Audio Pro3 Studio Monitors BY MIKE LEVINE

44 Review: Antares

Auto-Tune Vocodist BY MIKE LEVINE

12 DEPARTMENTS 8 From the Editor:

Podcasting Flourishes Despite the Pandemic

50 Open Channel: A

Musical Legacy, Or Slip Slidin’ Away? BY CRAIG ANDERTON

45 Review: Neold V76U73 Plug-in

BY MICHAEL COOPER

46 Mini-Reviews: PreSonus PD-70 Mic; SIR Audio Tools StandardCLIP; Sterling Audio SHA4 Headphone Amp

On the Cover: The Dave Matthews Band made up for 2020 by barnstorming the country, with production provided by Clair Global and a veteran sound crew. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

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Middle Tennessee State University • Weber State University • Occidental College • ‘Hey Audio Student’ Meets Telefunken • And More!

LIVE SOUND

PRESENTED BY

14 Avatar on Tour:

Bringing Avatar’s Death Metal to Life BY CLIVE YOUNG

16 News & Notes: Brooklyn Made Opens In… Brooklyn; Newport Jazz Festival Returns; Life is Beautiful Rocks Vegas BY CLIVE YOUNG

18 Milwaukee

Summerfest: The ‘Big Gig’ Returns BY MIX EDITORS

Mix, Volume 45, Number 11 (ISSN 0164-9957) is published monthly by Future US, Inc., 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10036. Periodical Postage Paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mix, PO Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853. One-year (12 issues) subscription is $35. Canada is $40. All other international is $50. Printed in the USA. Canadian Post Publications Mail agreement No. 40612608. Canada return address: BleuChip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.

MIX SMARTBRIEF Vol. 45 Number 11

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* A 5x/week snapshot of news from Mix, Pro Sound News and other leading sources. * Summaries of what matters to you, written by expert editors to save you time and keep you informed and prepared.

November 2021

mixonline.com FOLLOW US twitter.com/Mix_Magazine facebook/MixMagazine CONTENT VP/Content Creation Anthony Savona Content Directors Tom Kenny, thomas.kenny@futurenet.com Clive Young, clive.young@futurenet.com Content Manager Anthony Savona, anthony.savona@futurenet.com Technology Editor, Studio Mike Levine, techeditormike@gmail.com Technology Editor, Live Steve La Cerra, stevelacerra@verizon.net Senior Content Producer Steve Harvey, sharvey.prosound@gmail.com Contributors: Craig Anderson, Robyn Flans, Barry Rudolph, Barbara Schultz, Tamara Starr, Rob Tavaglione, Jennifer Walden Production Manager Nicole Schilling Managing Design Director Nicole Cobban Design Directors Lisa McIntosh and Will Shum ADVERTISING SALES VP/Market Expert, AV/Consumer Electronics & Pro Audio Adam Goldstein, adam.goldstein@futurenet.com, 212-378-0465 Janis Crowley, janis.crowley@futurenet.com Debbie Rosenthal, debbie.rosenthal@futurenet.com Zahra Majma, zahra.majma@futurenet.com SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE To subscribe, change your address, or check on your current account status, go to mixonline.com and click on About Us, email futureplc@computerfulfillment.com, call 888-266-5828, or write P.O. Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853. LICENSING/REPRINTS/PERMISSIONS Mix is available for licensing. Contact the Licensing team to discuss partnership opportunities. Head of Print Licensing: Rachel Shaw, licensing@futurenet.com MANAGEMENT Senior Vice President, B2B Rick Stamberger Vice President, Sales & Publishing, B2B Aaron Kern Vice President, B2B Tech Group Carmel King Vice President, Sales, B2B Tech Group Adam Goldstein Head of Production US & UK Mark Constance Head of Design Rodney Dive FUTURE US, INC. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10036

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Current From the Editor

Podcasting Flourishes Despite the Pandemic When the pandemic swept around the world in early 2020, every industry was affected, but the situation looked especially dire for podcasters. While the on-demand audio format has been around since the mid-00s, it wasn’t until 2014 that podcasting exploded in popularity, thanks to its first ‘killer app’—the true-crime show Serial, downloaded 340 million times and counting. Since then, the number of shows, listeners and production companies has only risen by the day, but with the arrival of COVID, it looked like the party might suddenly be over. For many listeners, podcasts had become as crucial to their daily commute as an extra-large cup of coffee, and answering that demand, audio production companies large and small had sprung up to provide that content, with hosts and guests typically taping episodes together. The advent of lockdown changed those dynamics, of course, and podcast download numbers fell off a cliff. When society reoriented itself to a work-from-home world after a few months, however, listeners returned to their favorite shows—and had time to sample even more of them. Meanwhile, podcasters quickly adapted to remote production in order to meet that skyrocketing demand, often adopting and then soon outgrowing videoconferencing software like Zoom to record their shows. As a result, podcasts are more popular than ever and the format has proven itself as a content conduit that’s here to stay. According to Podcast Insights, as of July, 2021, there’s more than 2 million podcasts, which have generated more than 48 million episodes—a considerable jump from 2018, when there were only 500,000 podcasts. While Statista reports that 57 percent of American consumers over the age of 12 have listened to at least one podcast, a rising number of people have made the shows an integral part of their lives. MediaRadar has found 37 percent of Americans listen to podcasts every month, with a daily average consumption of nearly an hour. Of course, where there’s listeners, there’s money to be made, and podcast advertising rose nearly 24 percent year-over-year for the first five months of 2021, as advertisers spent roughly $222 million during that time. Further, the company predicts U.S. podcast advertising spend will grow 60 percent this year, and expects that it to hit over $2 billion in value by 2023. With podcasting now big business, the go-to stereotype of amateur hosts gathered around a kitchen table all yelling into one microphone is going the way of the Dodo. Top podcast houses like Stitcher and Spotify’s Gimlet have built state-of-the-art production facilities in major cities,

employing studio architect firms like Walters-Storyk Design Group to create multi-studio compounds that keep the episodes coming. The proaudio hardware and software matches the level of their surroundings, and those resources continued to be put to the test even during the height of the pandemic in 2020, with high-end mics, headphones and interfaces shipped to producers and hosts for remote recording. If their gear was high-end though, the soundproofing often wasn’t, giving rise to the brief trope of podcasters sitting on the floor of their bedroom closets, surrounded by soft, sound-absorbing clothes in an effort to sound as professional as possible. That said, amateur and enthusiast podcasters still exist, and the pandemic gave plenty of them time to get better at it. Part of the format’s appeal has always been the comparatively low cost of entry—a factor that has helped raise podcasting’s popularity, because there’s a podcast or five for almost any niche interest. As a result, proaudio manufacturers across the board have responded by offering better-than-entry-level gear that gets the job done for podcasters as well as their streaming/content creator brethren. In just September and October this year alone, Audio-Technica shipped its AT2040 microphone, TASCAM bowed both its Mixcast4 tabletop mixer and Podcast Editor Software, Røde unveiled its PSA1+ studio arm, AKG launched its Ara USB mic, Studio Technologies revealed its Model 209 talent console, and there’s probably a few other items I’ve overlooked. All of these companies are responding to podcasting’s increasingly specific needs with specialized gear that brings simplified features of the broadcast world to the masses, and moreover at price points that are reachable by individuals and organizations alike. With podcasting only continuing to grow in popularity, it’s easy to see why all involved, from the podcasters themselves to the audio manufacturers and service providers who work with them, are finding ways to make inroads into the burgeoning on-demand audio format.

Clive Young Co-Editor

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PHOTO: Shawn Brackbill

Music The War on Drugs, L-R: Anthony LaMarca, Dave Hartley, Charlie Hall, Robbie Bennett, Jon Natchez, Adam Granduciel

I Don’t Live Here Anymore The War on Drugs Find Beauty in the Journey By Barbara Schultz

t might never occur to the casual listener that the War on Drugs’ latest Atlantic Records release, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, took years to make, as it has a spaciousness and relaxed vibe that seems to take off from the band’s previous album, the Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding (Best Rock Album). But I Don’t Live Here Anymore was three years in the making because achieving that critical balance of intention and laid-back isn’t as simple as it seems, and this band can’t be rushed. Frontman and principal songwriter Adam Granduciel will keep rearranging, rerecording, remixing and even rewriting up until the vinyl is nearly pressed. Shawn Everett, the band’s engineer and co-producer, is all-in with

Granduciel’s MO. “Adam likes the paint to still be wet throughout the process so that he can keep working on a song until after the very end, and that’s what’s so great about him,” Everett says. “He is not precious about anything, but he cares about all of it. Songs that I think are done, he will come in a day later and he will have upped the game on the melody—pulled more emotion from it—in a way that I could not have foreseen. Some people I know might push back on that, but that’s my favorite thing about working with Adam, that kind of experimentation.” Sessions for I Don’t Live Here Anymore began soon after A Deeper Understanding was released, with Granduciel inviting a couple of bandmates

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to join him at Outlier Studio in upstate New York. “I just booked a week of time to get things started,” Granduciel says. “It’s a great studio. It’s pretty remote, but you can stay on the property as an Airbnb. I just went up there with Dave [Hartley, bass player] and Anthony [LaMarca, drummer]. Anthony is a songwriter in his own right, as well as a great drummer—a great everything. “We spent about a week up there demoing stuff,” he continues. “We would sit in a circle, and I would either play guitar or this Kurzweil piano they had. Then we might get a little bit deeper and overdub some percussion or synth ideas. It was just supposed to be a time when there were no rules. Let’s not try to have 10 songs done or even one song done. If something

PHOTO: David Hartley

Adam Granduciel at Outlier

PHOTO: Dustin Condren

starts feeling cool, let’s throw more stuff at it and see what happens. We had my friend Nick Krill there recording everything, so we could just concentrate on the songs.” A couple of Granduciel’s ideas from those initial sessions made it onto the record: the tender song “Change,” with pretty, subtle shades of Petty, Pretenders and others; and the intricate “I Don’t Want to Wait,” with percussion, synths and guitar sounds that seem to pay homage to Peter Gabriel. “Some of the keyboards from those sessions are on the record,” Granduciel explains. “I ended up pitching them down to meet the new key: We tracked that in F, but I rewrote it in D, so I Melodyned the synths. The patch I had was made up of a lot of white noise, but it ended up sounding really glitchy and weird. That was an amazing happy accident.” Everett joined the production process for fullband sessions a few months later at Electric Lady in New York City. “We did some live band tracking there,” Everett says. “Most of the remaining songs started with a full band track.” Everett captured everything to tape through Pro Tools, and he says there was “tons of tape manipulation.” “There’s one song [‘Victim’] that was actually called ‘Tape Jam’ for almost the whole time we were making the album,” Everett says. “I had gotten really into tape loops and the ways you could build an arrangement with that. I’d read about how the Talking Heads had done that with Brian Eno back in the day, where they would record these 24-track tape loops and create an arrangement using all the different parts that you might need for a song on one piece of tape. And then when you run the tape loop through the machine and when you play the console, you

PHOTO: Jon Natchez

Dave Hartley and Anthony LaMarca work face-to-face at Vox

Engineer/producer Shawn Everett at Vox

can create an arrangement. “We did that with a drum loop that Adam had done on his own, where we had this enormous 24-track tape loop running around the entire studio on mic stands and all the tracks coming up through the console. We overdubbed drums onto the loop, and then bass parts, and Adam did all these different passes where he would turn the faders up and down. It was such a cool, sort of handmade way to do it because it creates all these anomalies and weird moments—little slowdowns and odd pauses and breaks and tape stutters—that are all accidental but become important parts of the arrangement.” Further sessions for the album took place at Studio G in Brooklyn—which Granduciel booked time from time to time, to brainstorm and record with Robbie Bennett—and in bandmembers’ personal studios. Time was also spent in Southern California at Sunset Sound, EastWest, Sound City, and Vox, where Everett says he captured the one song on the new album that includes almost 100 percent of a full band take: the opening track, “Living Proof.” However, Granduciel later added an inspired acoustic guitar intro that now seems inseparable

from Bennett’s sweet piano part. The album’s other nine songs were all reimagined, rewritten and/or remixed multiple times over the course of three years—even to the point where, once the album was “final” mixed, and mastered by Greg Calbi, Granduciel realized that he wanted to take two steps back and revisit the mixes of several songs. He and Everett then holed up in Everett’s studio and did a 12-hour remixing marathon on several tracks, and then remastered those songs themselves. “We basically mimicked what Greg had done to the other songs at that point,” Granduciel explains. “It’s definitely no criticism of the work that Greg does. He’s excellent. It was honestly that I realized I didn’t like the songs. Fortunately, with both Greg and Shawn, there’s no ego about, ‘I did it, so it’s done.’ Just something wasn’t right, and Shawn and I needed to finish it our way. The changes we made in those last 12 hours were really significant to the sound of the record.” The bottom line is, Granduciel, his War on Drugs bandmates and Everett are not done until a song says what they want it to say, musically and emotionally. “Shawn obviously lends a huge amount to it by getting great sounds, but beyond the engineering side, the ownership he takes in the process means a lot,” Granduciel says. “I have this way of working that could be considered exhausting, but with him, it’s never an issue because he’s always searching, too. Like on the song ‘Change,’ the drum sound on that song was like his white whale. He spent literally a year trying to get it. That can be maddening sometimes because you want to be moving forward, but in the end, we had to do it our way.” n

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Music // news & notes Old Meets New at Citizen Vinyl Citizen Vinyl’s focus is on vinyl pressing, but the business, located in a historic building in Asheville, N.C., includes a recording studio featuring a Rupert Neve Designs 5088 mixing console. “When we first looked at the building, the studio was days away from being demolished,” reports Citizen Vinyl’s founder and CEO, Gar Ragland. “It was in this very room, as WWNC radio station, that Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys had a residency in late 1939, where America was first introduced to his new ‘bluegrass’ sound. So the opportunity we had in taking over this space was just too good to be true. “It was originally built in 1939 to accommodate our city’s two newspapers, The Citizen and The Times, and the papers were printed here on site in the basement, so it has a long history of manufacturing,” Ragland adds. Citizen Vinyl also houses a vinyl-themed craft cocktail bar, a farm-to-table café called Session, and a store called Coda: Analog Art & Sound, selling vinyl records and local screen-printed art. Ragland had prior experience working on a vintage Neve 8068 console at nearby Echo Mountain Recording and notes that this became

Patrick Gleeson Masters Quadraphonic Vinyl at Bernie’s Synth pioneer Dr. Patrick Gleeson has mastered FOUREVER, his new album exploring the edge of minimalist jazz in Quadraphonic sound, at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Los Angeles. Grammy-nominated Gleeson, who holds a Ph.D. in 18th Century English Literature, commemorates Miles Davis’ 30th Anniversary memorial with this ambitious new Quad release. The 86-year-old Gleeson also released an 86-copy limited edition that includes quadraphonic vinyl, a large-format book and two CDs featuring a catalog of Gleeson’s past work, including collaborations with Herbie Hancock, Jim Lang, Bennie Maupin and the prolific avant garde visual artist Bruce Conner, whose pen and Patrick Gleeson holding the first ink drawing adorns the album cover. issue of Mix magazine, from 1976, All versions of the release are which featured on the cover his encoded using dublab’s Quadraphonic Different Fur recording studio in San Francisco. Universally Accessible Resource Kit (QUARK). QUARK enables semibinaural (2- or 4-speaker listening) via Involve Audio hardware decoders, vintage Regular Matrix quadraphonic receivers, Dolby Pro-Logic II receivers, or any multichannel, audio interface– equipped computer. The specially formulated quadraphonic vinyl was pressed and one-step plated at RTI using a process featuring Neotech’s low–surface noise, semi-transparent VR900 compound. n

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“not only the gold standard but the norm” for the way he wanted to work and the sound that he expected from his projects. “The 5088 is elemental,” he says. “It does what it does extremely well, better than anything else out there. It really focuses on the principles and the fundamentals of audio recording in the best way possible, and that’s how I work, that’s how I think—there’s really no other alternative for me. I feel like Rupert Neve Designs is where old meets new. It really encapsulates the whole ethos of this project.” n

M3 at ‘We Love NYC’ When New York City held We Love NYC, a late Summer, all-star Central Park concert, Journey, Andrea Bocelli, Santana, LL Cool J, Jon Batiste and Jennifer Hudson wowed the crowd, but then Hurricane Henri crashed the party with a downpour and lightning. Barry Manilow’s set was cut short (alas, he didn’t make it through the rain), and headliners Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Patti Smith and the Killers never got to hit the stage. On hand to capture the event—if not lightning in a bottle—was remote recording/mixing/broadcast audio services company Music Mix Mobile M3’s Eclipse and Voyager trucks (M3), which fielded both its Eclipse were on-hand at Central Park for and Voyager trucks, with veteran TV the We Love NYC all-star concert. event engineers Jay Vicari and Eric Schilling mixing in them. Outfitted with Lawo MC562 48 surfaces, M&K 5.1 speaker systems, Avid/Apple-centric recording systems and more, the trucks have been busy recently, capturing the Global Citizen Festival, iHeartRadio Music Festival and Fiesta Latina, and Coldplay’s opening concert at Seattle’s new Climate Pledge Arena, while the CMAs and Latin Grammy Awards are on the docket for November. “With major entertainment productions like these, you still need services to be on site, especially if there’s music going on,” says M3 cofounder Joel Singer. “People want to be able to walk into an environment, sit down with the engineer, talk and listen and play with it. It’s tough to do that remotely, so we’re extremely fortunate we’ve been able to carry on and weather the storm.” n

Swedish death metal faves Avatar hit the U.S. for seven weeks this fall, tearing through 2,000-cap rooms and festivals along the way.

Bringing Avatar’s Death Metal to Life By Clive Young

n the 20 years since it was formed, Swedish death metal band Avatar has built a fervid fanbase around the world that has only grown with the release of each new album. Currently touring behind 2020’s Hunter Gatherer, Avatar hit the U.S. in September and October for a seven-week jaunt full of festival appearances and 2,000-capacity rooms, each packed with fans anxious to see the group’s latest theatrical show. Along for the ride was Erik Rogers, doubling up as both FOH engineer and tour manager. “My preference is mixing front-of-house only, but coming back from this pandemic, if somebody

offers you work and you turn it down, you’re foolish,” he said. “I’m glad to work, and tour managing isn’t that difficult—I’m meticulous about record keeping and I like yelling at people.” All jokes aside, as the tour manager, Rogers had to deal with keeping his artists and crew safe while on the road—a task sometimes easier said than done. “If you think about it, the most dangerous positions on a tour are Front of House, lighting director, a photographer and a merch person, because they go out into the audience. For instance, I always have my front of house with a good eight feet between me and the barricade, so it’s like my little island—I love

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it. Then the other day, some guy leaned in, he didn’t have a mask on and he started yelling to me. I couldn’t hear him because of all the noise, so I signaled ‘I’m sorry, can’t hear you’—and he let himself into front of house! I’m like, ‘Dude, get out!’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s okay; I’m vaccinated.” I don’t care; it’s not okay—it’s just not. I’m usually pretty welcoming and I like to hang out with people, but honestly, I’m looking at the whole audience like I’m the only guy in The Walking Dead who’s not a zombie.” Throughout the run, Rogers mixed on a control package provided by Clair Global (Lititz, Pa.) that centered around his console of choice,

PHOTO: Paris Visone

Live

PRESENTED BY

PHOTO: Paris Visone

a DiGiCo SD12-96. Giving the mix a little extra warmth and presence, all subgroups were sent out of the DiGiCo SD Mini Rack at FOH into a Neve 5059 Satellite Summing Mixer, where drums, bass, guitars and tracks were summed to Stereo A and returned into the SD12 in a “Band” group, while main vocals, background vocals and vocal effects were summed to Stereo B and returned into the SD12 in a “Vocal” group. “I put a little Silk Red on the vocal and a little Silk Blue on the band…that’s about it,” he said. The FOH position was also equipped with a Waves server that was put to good use. Waves plug-ins used on the show included the API 2500 compressor on parallel drum groups; a F6 floating-band dynamic EQ on group buses and main mix; Waves Primary Source Expander, C6 multiband compressor and API 2500 on vocal mics; and the CLA-3A compressor/limiter on bass guitar. Diving deeper into vocals, they were also treated with a H-Reverb for reverb; Abbey Road Reel ADT for vocal doubling; and H-Delay for vocal delay effects. “This band is very active in managing their show,” said Rogers. “Every day, when I do a virtual playback for my own tuning purposes, all five of them will come out and listen intently to what’s going on. They want to make sure that the show’s being presented exactly how they want—in some ways, they want it to be just like the record, but louder. A record, of course, is very sterile and there’s some cool live stuff that happens, so I have a lot of flexibility in that, but it needs to stay true to the record as much as possible.” That “cool live stuff” happened right from the start, as the band opened the show huddled together mid-stage in a near V-shaped formation with drums played for the early songs on a

A DiGiCo SD12-96 at FOH and a SD9 in monitorworld were provided for the run by Clair Global.

standing kit of kick, snare, toms and cymbals. “It’s not a jazz quintet playing downstage,” he chuckled. “Everybody’s full roar, and it’s a big challenge to ensure the drums don’t bleed too much into everything else. The second song, they break free—the background vocal mics go away and the singer starts moving around the stage, so the show evolves and develops. After the third song, we go to the primary kit and it’s a full-on rock show from there. Halfway through the show is ‘Going Hunting,’ which is the new single, and that’s when it gets pretty intense: The backing tracks come into play and we’re looking to re-create that record vibe, but also do it theatrically. There’s dramatic intros, heavy verse, heavy sound in the chorus, and the bridge is melodic—and keeping all that under control is a pressure situation.” Keeping track of it all at FOH engineer/tour stageside was engineer Jonathan manager Erik Rogers Winkler, tackling the band’s dealt with the PA du monitors on a DiGiCo SD9 jour with Rational Acoustics Smaart and and sending those mixes to the a Lake LM 44. group’s Ultimate Ears IEMs. Across the stage, the band was captured almost exclusively with Audio-Technica mics, with an AE5400 RF on the main vocal, wired AE6100s for background vocals, Radial JDIs, and guitars coming out of Kemper amps. While the standing drum kit was captured mostly with ATM250s

and 350s plus an Audix D6 and Shure Beta91a in the kick, the primary kit was outfitted with four AT2500s on the double kick drums; ATM650s and 450s on the snares; 350s on toms; 450s on cymbals; and AT4050s on overheads. At the other end of the signal path, the band used local P.A. at each stop, so Avatar was variously heard through systems from L-Acoustics, Meyer Sound, d&b audiotechnik, EAW, Bose, Sound Bridge and more—which was fine with Rogers: “It’s my job to make it sound good through any system there is. I carry my Smaart rig and a Lake LM 44, so I don’t even get into the house processor; I just ask them to leave it flat and not touch it. Every day, I meet the local audio tech, we exchange names and then they spend the rest of the day in their chair, enjoying an easy day. I don’t like the drama; we just like to come in and do a good show. If something’s routed wrong or there’s a box not functioning properly, then of course I ask for help, but for me to play pink noise, measure a P.A. system, slide some EQs and change the delay times? It’s not that big of a deal.” The end result each night was a show that met the high expectations of both the band and the crowds, allowing all involved to forget the pandemic for a while and instead dive into a maelstrom of metal. “The show is almost two hours long,” said Rogers, “and every night, the fans are so ready for it. These kids haven’t seen a show in a year and a half, so it’s the best two hours they’ve had in 18 months!” ■

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Live // news & notes // presented by Brooklyn Made Makes Good By Clive Young

Brooklyn Made opened in New York City at the end of September with two sold-out shows by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

Photo: Scott Heins/Gothamist

ew York City is a tough place to start an independent venue. The city that never sleeps offers a thousand entertainment options at any given moment, and when it comes to live music, most of the best places to see a concert are already aligned with major promoters like Live Nation or AEG. Anthony Makes knows—he’s worked for both companies, most recently as the president of Live Nation’s New York office. Now out on his own, Makes and partner Kelly Winrich of the Americana band Delta Spirit just opened Brooklyn Made, a brand-new, 500-capacity venue, at the end of September. Winrich and Makes purchased the former warehouse site in January and gutted it with the aim of building the ultimate artist-friendly venue. “Kelly has toured the world for the last 15 years, and there’s a couple of places he thinks are awesome,” says Makes. “He knows the way acts feel about playing those venues, so we wanted to create that in Brooklyn.” When tours land at Brooklyn Made, they’re greeted by a venue with its own private pool, an artists’ apartment on the second floor, four green rooms, a deck with Manhattan skyline views and more. Of course, amenities are nice, but money talks—and artists get that, too, says Makes: “We give the whole gross of the ticket sales to them,

A d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system is employed throughout the 500-capacity venue.

and find other avenues to make money on.” Those other avenues include an on-site bar/restaurant, Connie’s, that’s open until 4AM regardless of whether there’s a show, and starting next year, Standing Room, a breakfast café that will become a tapas bar midday until late at night. With artists and crews covered, the team put equal emphasis on ensuring audiences have a good time, too, working with integrator Technical Arts Group to install a house audio system spec’d by Kevin Winrich, Delta Spirit’s FOH engineer (and, yes, Kelly Winrich’s brother). “When I first walked into the venue, the first thing I noticed was how wide it is compared to its depth, which presents a particular challenge for a front-of-house engineer,” said Kevin Winrich. “I started thinking, ‘Okay, we’ll need a left-right line array, but also side line arrays, and then maybe a center cluster…’ and that got very crazy very quickly. More importantly, the venue doesn’t have the highest ceilings—if you hang a four-box array, you’re immediately blocking half the line of sight for the audience, so that wasn’t going to be acceptable.” Based on experiences he’d had with different P.A. systems while on tour, Winrich called Mike Kurcab in business development at d&b audiotechnik. “He’s the one who suggested Soundscape as a solution because it gives you a consistent stereo image no matter where you are in the venue, which it hurts my brain to think about, but it does it,” said Winrich. “It can localize the band to their positions on stage, so it

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provides this consistent experience, which, to me as an engineer, is the end goal. With Soundscape, we can achieve the same or an even better result with point source boxes horizontally oriented and relatively high up on the ceiling, allowing us to maintain that line of sight but also provide plenty of coverage.” Further d&b systems are expected to be deployed in the loft apartment and in a courtyard shared by the venue and eateries. Also key to the house system are two Avid VENUE S6L-24D consoles sharing head amps through a VENUE Stage 64: “We recently did a support tour with Nathaniel Rateliff, and the whole run I had an Avid Profile, but then the last three shows we had at Red Rocks, they gave me an S6L and the difference was mind-blowing. They’ve improved their preamps, their A/D; everything is so much better. At Brooklyn Made, we’ve also included Waves SoundGrid in our system with the Pro Show bundle, which is every plug-in you could ever want on an S6L. Engineers walking in, I want them to be like, ‘Oh, my God, I never get to use this, this and this, all in one venue.’” So far, the plan to make artists and audiences want to come back soon is working. The opening month alone saw Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, The Budos Band, Nathaniel Rateliff, Band of Horses, Jesse Malin, Trombone Shorty and others grace the new stage—an opening lineup that is a testament, says Makes, to the venue’s approach. “We built this place to get a lot of underplays, and I think that’s going to continue to happen.” ■

Live // news & notes // presented by Newport Jazz Festival Returns

NEWS BRIEFS

Arguably the best-known jazz festival in the U.S., the Newport Jazz Festival returned this summer albeit at a COVID-required 50 percent capacity. The festival wasn’t the only thing a little bit smaller; a number of performers on the lineup showed up with Allen & Heath dLive CTi1500 and C1500 consoles in tow. Andra Day, who closed out the festival, was mixed by FOH engineer Monitor engineer Jorge Pardo-Denning mixed Khruangbin on an Caleb Morris via a CTi1500 and Allen & Heath C1500 console at the Newport Jazz Festival. DM0 MixRack combo. Meanwhile, Khruangbin opted to go with a C1500 at monitors, handled mixing 15 MSI wedges and various as well as a CDM32 MixRack, a gigaACE card for comm/production functions as needed. Wong’s FOH engineer Jake Hartsfield noted, a digital split to FOH, a Waves 3 card and Waves Impact Server for additional outboard effects, and “dLive is the perfect solution for our needs. On tour, I am mixing FOH and monitors on the Shure PSM1000 IEMs. Grammy-nominated guitarist Cory Wong same engine, with the channels split between (Vulfpeck, Dave Koz, The Fearless Flyers, Ben 1-56 for FOH and 57-112 for monitors. Then I’ve Rector, etc.) had FOH and monitors both mixed got the last 16 channels open for utility needs. 128 on a CTi1500 paired to a DM48 MixRack. channels are more than enough to handle most Outfitted with a Waves 3 card for virtual bands in this configuration. Our entire touring soundcheck and a superMADI card for key rig, which includes 20 channels of wireless, fits broadcast sends, the CTi1500 rig additionally in two Pelicans and two 12-space racks.” ■

Masque Returns to the Muny St. Louis’ The Muny, America’s oldest and largest outdoor musical theater, returned this past summer for its 103rd season, staging five free musicals for 1,500 people nightly with the help of Masque Sound. Sound designers John Shivers and David Patridge moved the wireless system to Sennheiser EM3732II high-end receivers with up to 184 MHz switching bandwidth. They also began using software monitoring tools from Wavetool, and Masque Sound additionally provided a DiGiCo SD7T console with a Quantum engine upgrade.

Life is Beautiful Festival Rocks Vegas QSC Rolls Into Gibson Garage PHOTO: Life is Beautiful / ALIVE

Mid-September saw the return of Las Vegas’ Life is Beautiful Music & Art Festival with performances by Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, A$AP Rocky, Green Day and more than 100 additional acts, all of who were heard through audio systems provided by Solotech. Key to Solotech’s strategy for the festival’s three main stages was a passel of Meyer Sound PA systems. The main Downtown Stage and Bacardí Stage were anchored by Meyer Sound LEO and LYON linear line array loudspeakers, augmented by 900-LFC and 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements, while the Huntridge Stage featured a mix of medium and wide-pattern LYON loudspeakers and 900-LFC low-frequency control elements. The team used Meyer’s MAPP 3D system

design and prediction software to design both gradient and end-fire subwoofer arrays in order to manage low-end patterns. “There was a combination of gradient flown subs on the main stage, plus we’ve done gradient stacks as well with 1100-LFCs,” said Mike Smeaton, Solotech’s U.S. director of Operations. ■

Gibson has opened Gibson Garage in Nashville, a retail destination centered around a concert stage ringed by retail spaces. Systems Innovation installed a complete QSC solution at the site, including a Q-SYS Core 110f processor to distribute audio. The stage sports K12.2 and K10.2 loudspeakers with KS212C cardioid subwoofers. and can receive audio from the Core or an on-site TouchMix-30 Pro digital mixer. In parallel, the Core feeds satellite rooms via an eight-channel CX-Qn 4K8 power amp driving numerous active and passive QSC speakers. Attero Tech panels provide input to the entire system, making audio independently controllable in each room.

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Live // news & notes Summerfest: The “Big Gig” Is Back After a hiatus in 2020, Milwaukee’s Summerfest, traditionally held over 13 consecutive days from late June to early July, returned for three weekends, three days each, from September 2-18, 2021. Also continuing with tradition, local production house Clearwing Productions provided audio, lighting, video, backline, rigging and staging for the 12 venues, each sporting JBL VTX A12 P.A. systems. “Summerfest was a blast this year,” said Matthew Stevens, FOH engineer for Better Than Ezra. “It felt great to be back out playing big shows again after the past year. There was a lot of positive energy leading up to the show, so when we arrived and I saw the JBL rig there, it put my mind at ease. The VTX A12 has the clarity and plenty of volume, and the new B28 Subs had enough low end to shake the crowd.” The rest of the story we’ll tell in pictures, with photos provided by Clearwing Productions. ■

The BMO Harris Pavilion P.A. included (20) VTX A12; (4) VTX A12W; (29) VTX B18; (24) VTX A8; (2) VTX F35; (12) VTX M22; (7) VRack 4x3500; and (2) VRack 120 00. Inset: View from FOH.

The Generac Stage P.A. included (20) VTX A12; (4) VTX A12W; (24) VTX B28; (4) VTX A8 – Front Fill; (5) VTX B18; (2) VTX F35; (12) VTX M22; and (8) VRack 4x3500. Inset: The Generac Stage FOH position, with downtown Milwaukee in the background.

The ULine Stage JBL P.A. featured (20) VTX A12 ; (29) VTX B18; (12) VTX A8 – Fro nt Fill & Out Fill; (2) VTX F35; (12) VTX M22; and (7) VRack 4x3 500.

the monitor A view from e. e ULine Stag th on n io posit

A familiar sight three to five days before the festival: Load-in begins. Next, flying the speakers. Finally, up go the lights.

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Aron Forbes Is More Than a Music Director

Programming, Mixing and Collaborating with Billie Eilish and FINNEAS By Lily Moayeri

Music director Aron Forbes in his Logic-based, Los Angeles studio.

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ver the past 20 years, the role of a music director has evolved from onstage conductor to behind-thescenes programmer. Aron Forbes is comfortable in either position. For the last decade-plus, Forbes has skillfully music-directed a number of artists, from Olivia Rodrigo and BANKS to Conan Gray, Harry Hudson and, most notably, Billie Eilish. His work for Eilish extended to her recent documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry (Apple TV+), for which he received two Emmy nominations, in the categories for Outstanding Music Direction and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction or Reality Program (Single or Multi-Camera). Forbes’ relationship with Eilish and her musical partner and brother, FINNEAS, extends back to the siblings’ early days recording at their parents’ home. At the time, Forbes’ wife was taking aerial silks and lyra lessons from the young artists’ mother. A friendship developed, and later Forbes met FINNEAS at a show featuring the latter’s then-rock band. At the same time, FINNEAS was working on music with Eilish. The two did some writing sessions with Forbes, out of which came “Bored”—to date the only released song that features an outside collaborator with the siblings. When time came for the two’s first live shows, Forbes was on hand to assist in taking the bedroom recordings to the stage.

because every time he hits it, it’s a different sound, which is really wild. The programming side of it is deep. [Marshall] is so meticulous. He’ll chop up samples and say which ones he will play. I’ll go through my session and replace every one of them with versions that I mixed for live. So much of our rehearsal time is programming. There are days where you have six hours of programming, and you walk out of the rehearsal and your brain is absolutely destroyed.” In addition to the sonic component, Forbes also pays particular attention to what the performance looks like, and what is the most fun

SETTING THE STAGE “The first thing I remember is being in their garage with an old P.A. mixer they had,” says Forbes from his studio in Los Angeles. “Back then, it was just the two of them on stage. FINNEAS and I are both Logic users. I set them up with Ableton and created a playback session, providing an infrastructure for them to build upon.” Forbes started in Ableton Live’s Arrangement View, the most similar to Logic’s interface. Once their drummer, Andrew Marshall, was added to the live performance, Forbes switched to Clip View, only going back to Arrangement View to make edits. “If [Marshall] has the opportunity to play something, he will play it,” says Forbes. “We have it set up where all his pads are excessively deep drum racks. They’re going on the timeline in Ableton, and all his sounds come out of the playback computer. There are songs where you can see the chain jumping around on every beat,

for FINNEAS to play at any point in time. The shifts between performed sounds and playback sounds happen seamlessly, creating a smooth experience for the audience. MIXING TO PICTURE For The World’s A Little Blurry, director R.J. Cutler and the team of filmmakers tapped into Forbes’ longstanding relationship with Eilish, as well as his extensive experience, to provide the best version of songs and best quality of sound to best match Eilish’s overall aesthetic for the documentary.

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“Piece-by-piece I took the crowd noise out of her vocal mic, then the drums out. I had to figure out how to carve her voice out, and our sound team had to figure out how to put some of the audience back in.” “Being around their family for so long, it’s years of tons and tons of data based on taste and what’s important to them,” Forbes explains. “I now have this huge file cabinet of information. It only makes sense that in going into a documentary, something so music-focused, that I be there and be an advocate for all of this information that I hold for [Eilish].” SELECTING THE SOURCES The World’s A Little Blurry includes footage from Eilish’s mother’s iPhone over many years, a GoPro that was permanently set up in FINNEAS’ bedroom while they were recording, as well as the cinema verite–style filming that Cutler and his team captured over the course of a year while

Aron Forbes helped bring Billie Eilish and FINNEAS from the studio to the stage as musical director/programmer/tech support.

PHOTO: Ryan Tuttle

Forbes in a reflective onstage moment.

accompanying Eilish in every aspect of her life. The audio from numerous live performances, which includes the sounds of Eilish’s famously loud choral audiences, the mono recordings from the casual footage, and the professionally captured audio from the production all had to be reconciled by Forbes in post. “One of the unique things was how difficult it was to go back to archived years of recordings and track down performances [Cutler] wanted to use,” says Forbes. “All our live shows are recorded off of the consoles into Logic, but we’re taking source material that is completely uncontrolled. We started with only nine multitracks in the beginning. I pulled in our monitor tech and our front-of-house engineer and went through our

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PHOTO: Ryan Tuttle

“There are few roles that are as important as being the director of a documentary,” says Forbes. “For [Cutler] to be selfless enough and put ego aside to bring me in to help with the music, because he knows it’s going to serve the artist well, was really cool. I can’t overstate how cool it was to have conversations with a director who was valuing my input because he knew that I was speaking from a place that would reflect [Eilish]’s perspective. I’ve worked with them for so long, I know their music on a really intimate level. I can look at the whole musical experience of the documentary and reflect all the things about what [Eilish] likes.” These conversations with Cutler helped Forbes understand the storyline and help in the decision-making process for sound sources, going from performance to album recording to making everything work together. This was not dissimilar to what he does for the live shows in choosing between playing or backing tracks. Working on a film in this capacity, however, was a first for Forbes.

hard drives to see if we could find more multitracks of these performances so I would have ammunition to make the film sound incredible.” Forbes spent two months mixing the music in Logic at his home studio prior to heading to the dub stage, where he worked with Elmo Ponsdomenech, Jason Gaya and Jae Kim. “It was a staggering amount of work to get the audio to play down like a story in the same way of the storyline you’re seeing,” Forbes says. “What I would consider one of the greatest voices ever, singing like she does, softly into a microphone, in an arena with 20,000 kids screaming louder than she is, I have to get that vocal to be out in front and sound like a recording. I did automation and Audio Suite processing in Logic, making chains so I could take out bottom end. Piece-by-piece I took the crowd noise out of her vocal mic, then the drums out. I had to figure out how to carve her voice out, and our sound team had to figure out how to put some of the audience back in.” Getting the mono sounds on the same level as the rest of the film was a completely different challenge. The sounds are augmented with rooms and space, making use of the Dolby Atmos immersive format to boost them from their mono state and have them sit next to a 60-track audio segment without any sonic dips. Says Forbes: “Being a music director to an artist, and going over these years of growth, then the world shutting down, and then being brought in to work on a documentary that revisits all of the years as a music director of that work, is really heavy and super-cool and real. I have to pinch myself because it doesn’t get much better than that.” ■

Switchfoot Calling Tony Berg San Diego Rockers Search for New Sound at Sound City

ony Berg is giving a tour of his studio space at the famed Sound City. The longtime producer, musician, sometime music manager and A&R executive smiles widely as he enters room after room, knowing that his extensive and jaw-dropping collection of instruments and gear is exactly the kind of thing that gets any musician who works with him inordinately excited. This is Zeitgeist Studios, which for 35 years was located in the backyard of Berg’s home in Los Angeles. Berg and his partner, musician and

producer Blake Mills, leased Sound City a few years back following the famed studio’s closure. Now, the legend of the location combined with the legend of Berg makes recording with him a destination experience. Switchfoot, the 25-year-strong five-piece from San Diego, was not aware of any of this when they approached Berg to produce their 12th album, Interrobang. But, they had heard his award-winning work on Phoebe Bridgers’ most recent album, Punisher, and its predecessor, Stranger in the Alps, as well as on a project by their

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By Lily Moayeri

tourmates, Phantom Planet’s Raise the Dead. “We had a full record of great seeds of songs that we could, in a couple of weeks, finish,” says Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman, who, like his brother Tim, the group’s bassist, is an accomplished songwriter and producer in his own right. “The year completely unraveled, and none of those songs felt at all relevant or important anymore. We’re always looking for a chance to grow. You don’t grow without some form of pain, some challenge, some difficulty. We were thinking, ‘Who is the person that could

GETTING TO KNOW YOU “Are you sure you mean me?” was the first thing Berg asked Switchfoot when they reached out to him. Once the group confirmed it was, in fact, him they wanted, they sent the producer 100 songs for consideration. Some were years old, forgotten on old computers and drives. “None of this album would have been created in a normal year,” Foreman says. “When we had

so much time home, we started cleaning the studio, finding hard drives and dusting them off. The irony is, a song that was written 15 years ago carries the exact sentiment that I feel right now, maybe more so than anything I wrote in the past two years. It felt essential, not novel.” Berg listened to every single one of those 100 songs all the way through. He pulled out 14 that he felt were great. “They wanted not to sound like previous records,” recalls Berg. “That was easy for me because I’ve never heard them. I still haven’t. I approached Switchfoot as a debut

band.” Berg went to Switchfoot’s studio in Carlsbad, Calif., for a few weeks of pre-production, which he calls “rehearsals.” It was at these sessions where the most growth and change happened for the group. “They hadn’t recorded as a band in the longest time,” Berg explains. “Jon is the source of the bulk of the material. He plays every instrument really well. Tim, likewise, does everything. They had gotten used to creating stuff together, then presenting it to the band to overdub. When I

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PHOTO: Eric Frost

teach us at this point in our career?’ Tony Berg was at the top of that list.”

PHOTO: Eric Frost

Playing to a massive crowd in Warsaw, Poland.

heard the band rehearse, I thought they were great players and should be a more democratic unit, allowing each voice to be heard and feel that symbiosis in the room.” Most of the songs were far along in arrangement and production, but Berg asked Switchfoot to approach the material as if they weren’t. A seasoned arranger and multiinstrumentalist, Berg was able to not only discuss, but demonstrate, his ideas to the band, song-by-song. Says Berg: “Some of it was quite contrary to the way they normally do things. But I said, ‘Try not to hear your parts as individual parts but as parts of a larger whole.’ As soon as they started to think that way, and they heard counterpoint and counter rhythms and what the intricacies of an arrangement can bring, they became excited. I think it was revelatory for the whole band.” There was a certain amount of surrender and giving up of control to Berg on Switchfoot’s part that came with the decision to put him in the producer’s seat. Similarly, moving operations from the comfort zone of their own studio, where they recorded their four most-recent albums, to Sound City put the group in a different headspace, not to mention physical space. “To find a new sound, we really had to push in a new direction,” says Switchfoot drummer Chad Butler. “[Berg] challenged us musically, but also lyrically. He’s very opinionated. He can raise the temperature of the room because he’s very direct. The conversations about lyrics were sometimes intense. He’s got this different lens that he’s viewing music through. For us it was a real struggle at times to feel like what we were doing was us.”

Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman gets airborne during a performance in Dallas.

PHOTO: Eric Frost

“‘No mountaintop singing,’ is one of his sayings,” says the group’s guitarist, Drew Shirley. “No sing from up here down to people like you’re trying to tell them all something. Instead, speaking on a ground-level, experience-driven basis. No one said things to Jon like Tony Berg has. That’s what brings out the fire, brings out the art.” WHOLE BAND, WHOLE SOUND Once the songs were worked out in preproduction/rehearsals, everyone moved to Sound City, where Berg set up Jon Foreman in the “guitar room” to record his parts while keeping his vocals isolated. The remaining band members tracked simultaneously in the large live room.

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Standing, from left: Tim Foreman, Chad Butler, Drew Shirley and Jerome Fontamillas. In front: Jon Foreman.

Jon Foreman salutes the Warsaw, Poland, crowd.

“What I insist upon is that you take a macro view when you listen. What is the experience? What is the whole sounding like, and not the individual elements?” —Tony Berg Audio V76 mic pre. On acoustic instruments, he prefers Neumann KM 56 or Coles 4038 mics for their dark and seductive, yet inviting, nature. “What I insist upon is that you take a macro view when you listen,” says Berg. “What is the experience? What is the whole sounding like, and not the individual elements? We didn’t make a decision and follow it through. It was more, ‘Let’s work out a part, now let’s work out a tone, now let’s see how compatible that tone is with that bass part, and that bass tone against this drum part.’ We spent a lot of time honing sounds. There’s an intricacy to the album that is its individuality.”

PHOTO: John Baccigaluppi

Says Shirley: “Berg is old-school like that, where you practice the songs by playing them together in a room. If they don’t work well together playing them in a room, then they’re not going to work well together on a record.” “I am after a unique vocabulary for every record I work on,” Berg says. “The sound of Interrobang is the sound that those five guys made in the room. For a band that’s been making albums for over 20 years, to become as ambitious as they were on this album, and being open to new ideas and approaches, is so admirable. It’s so unusual. And it’s one more thing I love about these guys.” ■

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Zeitgeist is based around a vintage API console that lived at Record Plant New York in the 1970s—used by the likes of David Bowie, John Lennon, The Rolling Stones and many others. This is in addition to 60 unconventional amplifiers, a vast collection of vintage outboard gear, a Studer A-827 tape machine that is often in use, and Pro Tools as his DAW. For vocals, Berg uses a vintage Shure SM48, which he asserts is unusual and sounds different. This goes into a Neve 1073 preamp, then into a vintage UREI 1176 Blackface compressor, and finally into an Empirical Labs Distressor to catch the peaks. On occasion, Berg emplys a Universal

Tony Berg

on the cover

Ultrasound has provided The Dave Matthews Band with Meyer Sound P.A.s for 25 years. PHOTO: Sanjay Suchak

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whatever

IT TAKES

THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND AND ITS PRODUCTION TEAM OVERCOME COVID CRISES ON THE ROAD By Clive Young

aced with a full-on crisis, thirty years of improvising came in handy when the Dave Matthews Band played its annual three-night Labor Day weekend run this year at The Gorge Amphitheatre in George, WA. Like all major acts touring during the pandemic, the band and crew were getting tested regularly on the road, but disaster struck when drummer Carter Beauford, bassist Stefan Lessard and a member of the audio crew all tested positive for COVID-19 on the eve of the Gorge shows. Making things exponentially worse, the first night was set to be broadcast live on Sirius XM. “I got a call at midnight the night before telling me about it and we were still trying to figure out what was going to happen,” says monitor engineer Ian Kuhn. “That’s not an easy show to cancel because you’ve got 40,000 people coming and nobody lives out there; it’s a destination. Dave said right away, ‘Obviously this has to go on; we’ll figure it out’—and we did. It wasn’t easy to play without the guys that are the backbone on this thing; it’s the rhythm section! Well, that same night, the opening act, Dumpstaphunk, contained Tony Hall, a bass player who toured with Dave in the early 2000s as part of the Dave Matthews & Friends tour. He kind of knew the material and we knew him, so he stepped in to play bass that weekend, and Buddy

Strong, our keyboard player, happens to be a pretty good drummer, so he stepped in to play drums. The shows consisted of Dave doing a few songs solo, then our guitarist, Tim Reynolds, joined him for their ‘Dave and Tim’ thing, and then there were six or seven songs with this made-up band that we figured out the day of the show with no soundcheck or anything. We did it by the seat of our pants and it turned out to be a really memorable weekend. Audience members that come year after year got a completely different show—one that they can say they were at.” The ability to make such drastic changes and still come out the other side with flying colors highlights the band’s creativity, but it also underscores the reliability of the production team surrounding the group. Whether the DMB plays its way through a worst-case scenario like the Gorge shows or just a typical improvisation-fueled night in front of rapturous, sold-out crowds, those musical leaps of faith happen in part because every show is built on a bedrock of certainty. There are no distractions about production because the gear and crew are always the same: Ultrasound has been the act’s audio vendor for 25 years, most of the audio crew has tenures with the band running into double-digit years, and even the tom mics on the drums are still Brüel & Kjaer simply because they’ve been there since the

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PHOTO: Sanjay Suchak

PHOTO: Clive Young

A Dave’s Eye View at the Northwell Health at Jones Beach Amphitheatre in Wantagh, NY.

Keeping the sound tied down are (L-R) Paul White, PA Tech; Jeremy Miller, System Engineer; Greg Botimer, RF Coordinator/Monitor Tech; Ian Kuhn, Monitor Engineer; Tom Lyon, FOH Engineer; and Josh Horn, Assistant Stage Tech and Sirius/XM Technician.

Nineties before DPA acquired B&K’s pro audio department and rebranded everything. When there have been changes to the DMB’s audio world, they’ve been evolutions. Tom Lyon became the group’s FOH engineer in 2018— after working 16 years as its system engineer. Similarly, the band’s Meyer Sound-based house system evolved over the last quarter-century as the manufacturer’s technologies advanced. These days, the system is based around main and side hangs of 16-each LYON line array loudspeakers, augmented by two hangs, each with 1100-LFC low-frequency control

Reduce an entire microphone section down to two channels Reduce an entire microphone section down to two channels.

elements, and a center hang of four LEOPARD compact loudspeakers. Front fills consist of four additional LEOPARD loudspeakers, with four CQ-2 loudspeakers deployed for miscellaneous fill as needed. System optimization and drive are supplied by a total of eight Galileo master processors overseen by system engineer Jeremy Miller at FOH, plus Galileo Callisto array processors at the stage. The house mix, too, has evolved over time—a process augmented by a move to an Avid VENUE S6L console two years ago. “Jeff Thomas, who was our FOH engineer, had an Avid Profile, and originally I just took it over,” says Lyon. “I did a couple of refinements because the inputs changed a little bit, but not much. In 2019, I took that same file from the Profile and bumped it into the S6L platform, and it worked perfectly. Over the course of the COVID shutdown though, I stripped the file down to basics and built it up again with a lot of changes, so this the first year where it’s mainly my mix that you’re hearing, not ‘me mixing Jeff’s console.’ There’s a lot of cool things the S6L can do, too, that make things easier, like the bus-to-bus routing which I use for the drums. It’s made things a lot more consistent.” Given that the band is so improv-oriented, there’s no point in using snapshots to corral the 90-plus inputs coming off the stage. “The band’s tempo will fluctuate a little bit from show-to-show,” says Lyon. “Even though it’s the same song , there’ll be a little bit of flow, depending on how charged up they are. Years ago, when we first moved to the digital desk, Jeff

Key features: • High quality microphone summation system • Cost-effective control of entire microphone sections • Great sound quality • Smart and easy handling

FOH engineer Tom Lyon (left), seen here with system engineer Jeremy Miller, rebuilt his showfile during lockdown to make the most of his Avid VENUE S6L console.

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PHOTO: Clive Young

* One Master Sum Box can handle Stereo Satellite Boxes for an expanded summation system for up to twenty microphones

feeling.” While guitarist Reynolds eschews IEMs, opting for Meyer MJF-212A monitors around the stage, that’s inevitable says Kuhn: “With the electric guitar, the air between the amp and yourself—and your relationship with that space—is part of your instrument.” Vocals are captured with Sennheiser e935s, and along with a smattering of Shure and Sennheiser mics across the stage, there’s Earthworks on the drums for ‘under heads,’ placed beneath the cymbals, while sandwiched between Reynolds’ guitar amp and a sE Electronics Reflexion Filter sits a right-angled

and I experimented with snapshots for songs, and it didn’t make sense for us; it backfired.” The house mix is relatively light on effects, so most of the plug-ins on-hand are for dynamic control, keeping a handle on gain before feedback. “Dave’s vocal gets a NR800 Noise Reduction Processor from McDSP. It’s kind of like a Cedar DNS—it’s a frequency-variable gate, so it can winnow out the noise in the background, but the instant he starts singing into the mic, everything turns all the way on. If he’s singing quietly, I may have to adjust the thresholds to let it open up a little more, but for the most part, I’ve got it at the spot where I can just forget it. I’ve got that same plug-in on all the vocals and on the Toms group.” Up onstage, in-ear monitors rule the day with nearly the entire band on IEMs, the vast majority sporting Sensaphonics 3DME custom tour systems. “Sensaphonics’ whole thing is hearing conservation first,” says Kuhn. “The company’s run by an audiologist, not engineers, and we’ve always taken that to heart. The goal is to be able to hear our grandchildren and still put on shows where you feel that rock and roll

Shure 57, modded by Granelli Audio. Making up for lost time caused by the pandemic, the tour has been going non-stop since July, aiming to wrap up this month with back-toback shows at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. It’s an ambitious run even in non-COVID times, but no doubt this year’s journey will always be defined by those Gorge shows. “That was what live sound is about: The show must go on!” said Kuhn. “We made it happen, it was very obvious that the audience loved it, and that’s what we’re ultimately here for—to put on a show for them, whatever it takes.” ■

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Audio Education

// news & notes

By the Mix Staff

Middle Tennessee State University Just one month ago, MTSU in Murfreesboro, Tenn., founded in 1911 and renowned for its Music and Recording Industry programs, opened a new 5,000-square-foot facility to house Studios D and E. The space includes two identical control rooms with attached recording spaces and isolation booths. Studio design firm non:zero architecture, Los Angeles, took advantage of the 17-foot ceilings in the tracking rooms and turned the new spaces into the flagship studios of the school’s renowned program. “The program here was started as a music business program in 1974; the original recording studios D and E were built in 2004 in an old dormitory,” says Dan Pfeifer, MTSU Professor of Recording Industry & Audio Internship

Coordinator. “The university had previously acquired a church with a fellowship hall and an ideal gymnasium, which is where we relocated the new studios in 2021.” The inside height of the structure exceeds 30 feet with no interior columns. The control rooms are nearly identical for teaching purposes, with students switching easily between the two. The live rooms differ in size, one with a large orchestral tracking space and the other suitable for recording bands and overdubs. Both control rooms have SSL AWS 924 consoles running Pro Tools HD systems. Monitoring systems are ADAM Audio S3H mains with Carl Tatz Phantom Focus near-fields and subs. “We have a student-oriented program and

PAMA Hosts Student Career Event Series The Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance has hosted a number of studentfocused online events in 2021 titled “Career Opportunities in Pro Audio Manufacturing Companies.” The most recent was held for students at the Berklee College of Music campus in Valencia, Spain. The first event, with the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences, was followed by events in 2021 with Full Sail University and Berklee Valencia. The panels were coordinated and hosted by Karen Dunn of KMD Productions At each event, panelists shared their own “nonlinear” career paths leading to their current executive-level roles with professional audio manufacturers, exposing students to various roles in audio industry manufacturing, including product development management and engineering, customer support and training, sales and marketing. Practical insights were offered into the culture, decision-making and career path options, along with how to find job postings and the application and interview process at the panelists’ respective companies. “Take a relentless approach to networking,” Chris Regan, Co-Founder, CEO and President of RF Venue and Chair of the PAMA Board of Directors, told students. “Be flexible, be proactive.” Upcoming PAMA event listings and an archive of past events can be found at www.pamalliance.org/events. ■

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MTSU Department Chair John Merchant, left, and Professor Dan Pfeifer in the new Studio D. Inset: The attached tracking room.

run our recording studios 24/7 during the semesters to maximize the time students have in our rooms,” Pfeifer adds. “When the students have the musicians on the other side of the glass and they have to make it happen for themselves, that’s what brings the reality to the equation and underpins their learning.” ■

Focusrite Hosts English/Spanish Education Sessions Focusrite has been expanding its offerings of online resources by hosting a number of informative panels and discussions on pro audio education throughout 2021. On October 27-28, the second episode in the Focusrite Group series of Pro Audio in Education webinars featured a panel discussion on studio recording and production essentials for the next generation of audio professionals. The events were held in both English and Spanish language on the Focusrite Pro YouTube page. They are now available to all. The English-speaking panel was hosted by John Escobar, Berklee College of Music. He was joined by: Stephanie Chiquini, head of audio for Hogarth International (Dolby, Amazon Prime Video); Carlos Freitas, Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer; Brian Smithers, Audio Production Program Director at Full Sail University; and Dr. Chandler Bridges, Indiana University associate professor of audio engineering and sound production. The Spanish-language session, also hosted by Escobar, features: Stephanie Chiquini, head of audio for Hogarth International (Dolby, Amazon Prime Video); Carlos Freitas, Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer; Salvador Tercero, CEO of Sala de Audio, Mexico City; and Omar Raez, professor and producer at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. ■

AUDIO EDUCATION

Weber State University The new recording facility at Weber State, Ogden, Utah, opened last month and houses a large control room with a connected recording space. Being the first part of an ongoing project, the recording studio is a step toward an adjacent larger space that will house another recording studio, performance space and lecture hall. The facilities will be connected and will allow for combined operations between the rooms. Located in the Val. A. Browning Performing Arts Center, the new facility rounds out an existing program of concert halls, performance spaces and rehearsal facilities. Weber’s music recording program was launched in 2018, offering degrees in Sound Production and Recording. Aaron Hubbard, a member of the adjunct faculty Sound Production and Recording program, oversaw the new studio’s design and construction, working with Peter Grueneisen of

non:zero architecture. “The building was built in the 1960s,” Hubbard says. “It was remodeled in the late 1990s, accommodating multiple large performance spaces and rehearsal facilities. After weighing the options, we built out two new spaces on the ground floor after excavating and installing a new floating-floor system to isolate the studio from the rest of the building. “We had some big challenges to overcome, and we now have a professional recording studio in a good learning environment with great sight lines and a camera system that enhances the experience for the students,” he adds. “Working through the design process during a pandemic really opened our

Full Sail Announces Hall of Fame Inductees A half-dozen Full Sail University graduates will be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in a 12th annual, weeklong event, scheduled for March 6-11, 2022. The inductees are: • Stephanie Dawson (2006): Producer, WNET Group, PBS Great Performances. • Bobby Jones (1997): Founder & CEO of Purple, Rock, Scissors (PRPL) • Narie Kay (2011): Senior Producer at Zynga. • Phil Pallen (2011): Brand Strategist & Keynote Speaker on Personal Branding. • J ustin Rathbun, CAS (2000): A1 and Production Sound Engineer/ Broadway Production of Hamilton. •T om Todia (1997 & 2012): Audio Director at Electronic Arts & CoFounder at Engine Audio Hall of Fame Week features a series of hybrid events featuring virtual and campus-wide offerings, including guest lectures, panels, workshops and hands-on technology demonstrations from leading industry influencers, experts and companies. Career networking events will focus on employment and mentoring for students and graduates. There will also be live musical performances, gaming tournaments, film screenings and more. Several events will be available to the public via streaming, including the induction ceremony to celebrate and recognize the 2022 class. Beginning in early November 2021, virtual panels and presentations dubbed “Hall of Fame Sessions” will be made available publicly via Full Sail’s YouTube channel. Additional information regarding events and

A rendering of the new control room at Weber State; the facility is so new that photos were not yet available.

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eyes to alternate ways of education. We added the infrastructure design to quickly capture lectures for video streaming. The result is a fantastic-sounding space that is set up for a great educational experience.” ■

Harlem School of the Arts Unveils New Performance Space Early last year, the Herb Alpert Foundation funded “The Renaissance Project,” an ambitious $9.5 million-dollar renovation designed to update the aesthetic and architectural footprints of the Harlem School of the Arts to meet the needs of the school’s next generation of artists and performers. Imrey Studio was retained to lead the physical and aesthetic re-design of the project. Herb Alpert personally recommended WSDG (WaltersStoryk Design Group) to handle the architectural acoustics. As detailed in The New York Times, one of the most critical elements of the redesign was the transformation of the school’s main lobby, a 3,500 square-foot entrance that was conceived as a visual reflection of the school’s ongoing legacy. A two-story glass façade facies the street, allowing a large amount of natural light in the space as well as a view into the school’s activities and performances. “The new transparency of Dorothy Maynor Hall both literally and figuratively increases the school’s connection with the vibrant cultural community in Harlem,” said designer Celia Imrey. “By bringing the street in and the internal activities out, we set the stage for endless possibilities that until now have only been imagined.” In order to guarantee optimal acoustics in the space, the design team recommended a precise angling of the towering two-story glass wall. Controllable acoustic curtains were hung at the north gallery wall and between the performance area and entry area to provide the room with “variable acoustics”—a custom-designed solution to enhance the reflective or absorptive requirements of the music being performed. ■

AUDIO EDUCATION

“Hey Audio Student” and Telefunken How does a company that specializes in highend microphones for recording stay connected to its customers? Partnering with John Krivit, an educator, past-president of the Audio Engineering Society and principal behind the popular “Hey Audio Student” Facebook group, Telefunken has been hosting a series of virtual Zoom tours of its 24,000-square-foot facility for college and high school classes around the world. “Before the pandemic shutdown, I would bring my classes from Emerson College in Boston on field trips to Telefunken each semester,” Krivit recounts. “The students would get to see for themselves how microphones are designed, measured, assembled, benchmarked and tested. They could watch first-hand as technicians would measure frequency response, see the software they use to design circuits, what the inside of a polar response switch looks like, how capsules are assembled and terminated, and all kinds of other great stuff. For an audio geek, it’s

a Willy Wonka-kind of tour.” For the past 18 months, students have missed out on the opportunity, so Krivit began connecting Telefunken to educators around the globe to offer online tours via the Zoom platform. Krivit’s “Hey Audio Student” Facebook group, comprising more than 32,000 students and educators worldwide, offered an ideal resource. ‘“We started with the Philippines and have made our way around the globe with tours to groups in Malaysia, Myanmar, India, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the USA,” Krivit reports. “We’ve done tours for universities and high schools. We’ve given tours for broadcast groups and AES groups.” “These virtual factory tours have given us the opportunity to not just reach a much wider audience, but to impart more detail about microphone technology, and about the

John Krivit, left, with Telefunken Director of Operations Alan Venitosh.

company’s long and storied history,” says Alan Venitosh, Telefunken Director of Operations. “It’s truly been a win for all concerned.” ■

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Occidental College, Choi Family Music Production Center “What we’re doing at Oxy is unique and very important for the music scene in Los Angeles,” explains Max Foreman, Director of the Choi Family Music Production Center. “We have many great music conservatories in greater L.A. and Southern California, but we didn’t have a school like this in the Eagle Rock, Highland Park and Silverlake area, which is one of the richest parts of the city’s vibrant music scene.” Located in the school’s Booth Hall, the new Choi Family Center spaces include a fully operational recording studio, large control room and a 16-student music computer lab in the new venue for music production, film scoring, audio engineering and songwriting courses. Studio design firm non:zero architecture was brought to the project by Associate Professor and composer Adam Schoenberg. The challenge going in was retrofitting the basement space, which had previously housed the music library’s huge underground vault of vinyl record collections. “When the ceiling was gutted, a tall space above was uncovered, allowing for a

13-foot high live room that was exactly what we needed,” says Foreman. “We can do tracking From left: Adam sessions, mixing sessions, Schoenberg, Max Foreman and Amos film mixing sessions, and 5.1 Himmelstein in sessions. And we have a large the PMC 5.1-based Extron monitor above that can control room. display anything that’s on the computer displays.” The control room houses an Avid S4 console controlling Pro Tools, to go with main PMC IB1 monitors with a 5.1 PMC surround system. Dante connects the control room, live room, production lab and Foreman’s office. The control room seating layout allows students to sit in on professional recording suite of plug-ins, sample libraries and software instruments. The Extron system has a hub in sessions. The Production Lab has 16 student stations, the control room’s adjacent machine room so each equipped with Pro Tools, Ableton and that students’ displays mirror the screen on the Logic. Each desk has a mini-controller and a instructor’s lectern. ■

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Tech

Showcase

DAW Version 2021.11

Updates Follow Release of macOS Big Sur By the Mix Editors

his past year has seen a slew of new version releases and updates from DAW developers, many in response to Apple’s introduction of its macOS Big Sur (macOS 11) and latest “system on a chip” CPUs. September, especially, brought a bunch of releases compliant with Apple’s M1 processor, which is in new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, Mac Mini and iPad models. For pro users, rumors continue

to swirl that products with Apple’s high-performance M1X multi-core silicon will be available before year’s end. A major new release of Apple Logic Pro is also anticipated. The following is a brief guide to the most recent major version releases and dot-x updates and bug fixes for some of the most popular and widely used DAWs.

Ableton Live 11 Ableton launched Live 11 in February, adding new features and improvements for the electronic music producers, composers and DJs who favor the platform over many of the alternatives, not least for its comprehensive MIDI and time manipulation capabilities. Among a long list of new features, Live 11 introduced enhanced audio and MIDI comping functionality and MIDI Polyphonic Expression, the new protocol (based on MIDI) that enables digital instruments to behave more like acoustic instruments by controlling multiple parameters for each individual note. At the end of September, Ableton announced that an update to the performance and production software is now in public beta. Among other features, Live 11.1 introduces minor improvements to its Shifter device, which adds a new mode for real-time, monophonic pitch shifting, as well as delay, an envelope section, an LFO and glide functionality.

subscription-based DIY music distribution service. Avid also announced that annual Pro Tools subscribers will receive more than $1,500 in plug-ins, sounds and training content for free with the new Pro Tools Inner Circle program.

Avid Pro Tools 2021.6 The latest version of Pro Tools, which Avid dropped in June, is all about the power, enabling users to record and mix bigger sessions with more I/O, tracks and voices. Pro Tools and Pro Tools | Ultimate now support a maximum 64 channels of I/O, double that of the previous version. With the new Hybrid Engine for HDX, Pro Tools | Ultimate supports a maximum 2,048 voices and audio tracks at all sample rates, or five times more than previous versions. Pro Tools now supports a maximum 256 mono or stereo audio tracks at all sample rates, up from 128 at 48 kHz. Hybrid Engine users may toggle between Native and DSP modes on a track-by-track basis to reduce the distraction of latency. Pro Tools also works with more outboard gear using any Core Audio or ASIO interface. In July, Avid made it possible for users to distribute tracks mixed in Dolby Atmos for Apple Music’s Spatial Audio from the AvidPlay

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Cockos Reaper 6 Arguably the best bang for the buck among DAWs, Cockos Reaper (Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering and Recording), which costs $60 for personal and educational uses, has an avid fanbase for its consumer-friendly feature set and very frequent updates and improvements. It’s also light on computer resources, occupying less than 70 MB when installed. Reaper 6 was released at the end of 2019; the license supports free updates through version 7.99. Version 6 introduced FX plug-in embedding, auto-stretch and a routing diagram that provides a graphical patchbay emulation. The latest update, Reaper 6.36, released at the beginning of September, adds a long list of fixes and minor improvements, including to the metering, MIDI and surround sound mixing capabilities.

Image-Line FL Studio 20.8.4 Image-Line has the distinction of being challenged by food manufacturer Kellogg’s over its U.S. trademark application for FruityLoops, which the Belgian software developer introduced in the late 1990s. “No one ever took the ‘FruityLoops’ name seriously,” the developer’s website notes, so they changed the moniker. Available as FL Studio since 2003, Image-Line’s DAW is certainly taken seriously now, boasting a reported 30,000 trial downloads daily and regularly appearing

in DAW Top 10 polls. Available for Mobile iOS, Android and Windows, it will also run as a VST inside another VST host. Image-Line has offered lifetime free updates for FL Studio users for more than 23 years. In addition to the expected bug fixes, the latest update, 20.8.4, released in early September, also introduced a new Frequency Shifter that offers metallic, dissonant, ring modulation and phasing effects, and improvements to 3x Osc for better fidelity of sounds with high-frequency content.

MOTU Digital Performer 11 The latest version of Digital Performer, released in July, introduced a long list of new features to the DAW, which has been around since 1990. DP 11 now offers support for MIDI Polyphonic Expression; Articulation Maps, enabling full control of the expressive depth of today’s most advanced orchestral sound libraries; and Audio Retrospective Record, which captures audio even when the transport is not in Record (retrospective MIDI capture was introduced in a previous version).

“Like magic, users can immediately recall any audio or MIDI material they’ve recently played,” the developer says. This latest version of MOTU’s flagship workstation also offers a completely redesigned Nanosampler 2.0 instrument plug-in and “dozens of additional user-requested enhancements.”

PreSonus Studio One 5 PreSonus released Studio One 5.4 in September, the third major feature update to the latest version of its recording and production software in less than six months. Studio One, launched in 2009, covers all the bases, from composition to production to mastering and even performance, and is promoted by PreSonus as the only DAW

with harmonic editing for both audio and MIDI. The latest update, free to registered users, introduces a Plug-in Nap option that bypasses plug-ins when they are not processing audio, reducing demand on the CPU and minimizing dropouts. The company says that it has also updated its Mix Engine FX plug-ins for greater CPU efficiency. A new Plug-in Manager provides additional tools for identifying and tracking down issues. As a further aid, a new Statistics tab monitors load and save times and preset sizes, and identifies each plug-in’s version number. Another timesaver is the new ability to output up to seven audio formats in a single pass. Those settings are saved when the Export Mixdown window is closed.

Steinberg Cubase 11 Cubase, available since 1989, introduced Cubase 11 at the tail end of 2020. Available in three versions—Pro, Artist and Elements—the

comprehensive DAW is aimed at music producers, songwriters, engineers and composers. Updates exclusive to Cubase Pro 11 include improvements to printing stems and better synchronization across different windows. For Cubase Pro and Cubase Artist, an update to the Frequency EQ plug-in adds dynamic response options. The Score Editor also now comes with many new enhancements. Also new across the range is Squasher, which combines upward and downward audio compression for up to three bands. Cubase 11.0.40, released in September, introduced several fixes and improvements for audio export and working with Broadcast Wave files.

Steinberg WaveLab Pro 11 Launched two years after the previous major release, it’s no surprise that WaveLab Pro 11 delivers a long list of new features. Among them are extended support for multi-channel, interleaved audio files for opening, editing and saving up to 22.2 and Ambisonics surround sound formats, with easier editing and detailed selection options. The new release also now provides automation with clip envelopes to automate the parameters of VST 3 plug-ins. Speaking of which, version 11 comes with a bunch of new VST 3 effects plug-ins, including Frequency 2, Squasher, Imager, Quadrafuzz v2, MixConvert V6, VST AmbiDecoder, DeReverb and LINpro, a dithering plug-in developed by mastering specialists MAAT Inc. While WaveLab Pro—as the name suggests—is intended for mixing, mastering, post production, sound design and broadcast applications, WaveLab Elements is aimed more at musicians and podcasters. The new Elements 11 inherits some of the Pro edition’s features and plug-ins. ■

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Tech // reviews Ocean Way Audio Pro3 Stunning Studio Monitoring for Less Than You Might Expect By Mike Levine

hen you hear the name “Ocean Way,” you probably picture the iconic studios that bear, or once bore, the name, where countless hit records have been recorded. Allen Sides, the legendary engineer behind those studios, also makes high-end studio monitors through his Ocean Way Audio brand. In commercial studios, you’re more likely to find the company’s three-way monitors with horns, often soffit-mounted in a control room. With large footprints and price tags north of $10,000, they’re not practical for all but the most elaborate personal studios. But recently, Ocean Way Audio released the Pro3, which is the latest in its smaller (and less-expensive) OWA monitor line. The company refers to the Pro3 as its “most affordable” monitor pair yet. At $3,000 for a pair, some might quibble with the term “affordable,” but it is within the range of many studios and recording musicians; to many, its high-end, pro-level sound quality makes it an exceptional value. NOT BAFFLING AT ALL The Pro3 monitors are the smallest that Ocean Way makes. The cabinets are designed to reduce baffle reflections and lowfrequency resonance. Each monitor features a circular port at the top of the back panel. With dimensions of 9 x 14 x 13.5 (WxHxD) inches and weighing 23 pounds each, the Pro3s are small enough to fit in any-size room. They’re two-way active monitors with plenty of power—125W per side for the aluminum low-frequency driver and 90W for the silk fabric dome–type tweeter. Compared to most studio monitors these days, you could call their control set “minimalist.” What there is resides on the back panel. The front of the Pro3s have only the woofer and tweeter. The power indicator light is on the rear, not the front. I’m not sure I understand that design choice; to me, it makes more sense if you can see it from the listening position. BACK PANEL The Pro3s offer two input options: Analog and Digital AES/EBU, both on XLR connectors. An AES/EBU digital XLR output is also included. The monitors can be switched between four different presets: Preset 1 is the default, with the analog inputs active. Preset

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The Pro3 monitors offer exceptional sound quality

2 is also analog, for use with a subwoofer. When it’s on, a fourthorder highpass filter rolls off at 85 Hz so as not to get in the way of the low frequencies coming from the sub. The other two presets are for digital input. Preset 3 sets the monitor to digital left input and Preset 4 to digital right. The process for changing presets is not what I’d describe as userfriendly. Each monitor features a small recessed button on the back panel called the LED Selector. Near it is a series of four LEDs: two white and two red. The manual recommends using a “small blunt

tool,” or breaking off the end of a cotton swab to make adjustments. Pressing and holding the LED Selector for a second or more switches the white LED from 1 to 2, which toggles the active status of the analog and digital inputs. Quicker presses set the two red LEDs, which blink when you first adjust them. The combination of white and red LEDs that are lit determines which preset is active. Fortunately, you probably won’t have to adjust them very often, if at all. I never thought I’d find myself wishing for dip switches, but I did in this case. Each speaker also features a Master Volume control for trimming the output. It’s recessed and requires a small screwdriver or a tweaker to adjust it. It’s not detented, but has 10 position indicators printed around the recessed area, making it pretty easy to set the left and right evenly if you need to lower the volume. That’s it for the controls, save for the power switch and voltage selector. Ocean Way Audio includes IEC power cables for each monitor. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s no room correction filtering or EQ that you can deploy on the Pro3s other than the high-pass filter for subwoofers that’s available with Preset 2. TAKING THEM FOR A SPIN I set up the Pro3s in a nearfield configuration, placed on speaker stands on top of Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizers, which are thick and heavy monitor pads. The Pro3s don’t have rubber feet, so you’ll want to use pads or decoupling stands. I connected the Pro3s to the outputs of my Cranborne Audio 500R8 interface, opened Ableton Live and hit Play on a song I’d been working on. My first thought was, “These monitors are really bright.” But I soon realized that what I was reacting to was clarity. Everything in the mix sounded clearer and more present— the drum loops, the bass, the guitars and the keyboards. The transient reproduction was beyond impressive. When I switched back and forth between the Pro3s and my regular monitors (I’m not naming names because it’s an unfair fight), which I like a lot, the contrast was enormous. Not only are the Pro3s excellent for mixing, their sonic clarity makes them extremely helpful in adjusting mic

for mixing productivity. The last thing I tried was hooking up a subwoofer. I own a KRK 10s sub and connected its left and right outputs to the inputs of the Pro3s. After switching the monitors to Preset 2, to activate the high-pass filtering, I let it rip. With that extra bass, the overall sound of the system was magnificent. Ocean Way Audio makes a couple of subs, the S10A and the S12A, which would probably sound better matched with the Pro3s than what I tried out here. But even with a sub from another manufacturer, the results were stunning.

The rear panel offers analog and digital connectivity, along with mode switching.

placement when setting up for a tracking session. The bass response on the Pro3s is extremely tight and defined. The specs show that it goes down to 45 Hz. Mixing on the Pro3s, I found it easier to accurately gauge the level of the kick drum and bass than with my regular monitors. The imaging on the Pro3s is also impressive. According to the company, the frequency response between the two speakers is within ±0.5dB. CRANK ‘EM UP I was curious how the Pro3s sounded at higher levels than the 70 – 80 dB range I’d been listening in. I cranked the music up to over 90 dB—which, with the speakers less than three feet from my ears, was quite loud. I expected to hear the clarity diminish, but it didn’t. The monitors sounded louder but otherwise no different than at lower volumes. If by chance you push the level up too high, the monitors are equipped with overload protection circuits that would prevent damage to the drivers and other components. I mixed a couple of full songs on the Pro3s and got excellent results. I noticed less ear fatigue than I was used to on either pair of monitors that I use regularly in my studio. The ability to listen longer before you have to stop for a long break, or until the next day, could be a real boon

QUALITY AND CONSISTENCY Doing this review has been an eyeopening, or rather, an ear-opening experience for me. The Pro3s are handsdown the best-sounding monitors I’ve used in my studio. I’ve reviewed quite a few, but these stand above. As noted, I have a few small issues. One is the lack of room correction features. Incredible as the Pro3s sound, if you have acoustical issues in your studio that you need to compensate for, they’ll be there no matter which monitors you use. I also wish they would add a front-panel power LED and that the switching system for the Presets was easier to use. But when weighed against the stunning sound quality and performance of these monitors, those issues pale to insignificance. The headline here is that from a sonic standpoint, the Pro3s are a revelation and definitely worth every penny. If you’ve never considered spending three grand on a monitor system, you might want to change your mind. ■

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Ocean Way Audio PRODUCT: Pro3 Monitors WEBSITE: oceanwayaudio.com PRICE: $3,000 PRO: Exceptional clarity and detail. Tight bass response. Impressive bass extension. Excellent imaging. Less fatiguing than many monitors. Analog and AES/EBU inputs. Subwoofer mode adds high-pass filtering. CON: No room-correction features. No frontpanel power-status indicator. Preset switching could be easier.

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Tech // reviews Antares Auto-Tune Vocodist Modeled Vocoders and Robust Control, From Within By Mike Levine

f late, Antares has been releasing products that integrate Auto-Tune with different types of processing, a recent example being Auto-Tune Vocodist. It certainly makes perfect sense to have tuning available during vocoding. Not only does it let you tune the source voice, but also imbue it with the “Auto-Tune effect,” if you want. But the built-in Auto-Tune is not the main story. This plug-in is an incredibly full-featured processor that includes 20 different vocoder choices, most of which are digital models of classic hardware units that you can dial up with a mouse click. CLICK AND TURN Sporting a large selection of adjustable parameters, including several built-in effects, Auto-Tune Vocodist requires some time to master. If you have an understanding of the vocabulary of synth programming, you’ll probably be up and running pretty quickly. Although the manual covers a lot of topics, I found myself wishing its entries went into more depth. The user interface consists of three large sections in the middle: Filter, Envelope and Oscillator. To either side of these are smaller control areas called Voice, Noise, Synth and Output+FX, along with an X-Y Pad and a control bar on top. In the Filter section, you can access a dropdown menu for switching the vocoder model. The list includes emulations of everything from Voder, which was created by Homer Dudley in the 1930s and was the first vocoder, to more modern units used by Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, Herbie Hancock and others. You don’t need to be familiar with the characteristics or history of the vocoders modeled in the plug-in to take advantage of them. You can hear their different flavors by switching between them as your audio plays. You can even change the number of bands in each model. Every band has an Envelope slider that lets you adjust the volume of the corresponding filter bank, giving you control over which frequencies get emphasized. PUTTING IT TOGETHER In a vocoder, a vocal track typically functions as the “modulator,” whose spectral content gets transformed by the “carrier.” In Auto-

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Tune Vocodist, the default carrier is an onboard, dual 8-voice oscillator (voices can be independently transposed). You can also use a sidechain signal from another track as the carrier. The plug-in offers three options for controlling the pitch of the vocoding. The default is Voice, which uses the source track. Alternatively, you can set the pitch reference to MIDI input (either from an external controller or MIDI track) or with a one-octave keyboard called Key. For the latter, you click on a key and it transposes the output to drone at that pitch. Antares included two dice-shaped randomize buttons. One is for the Envelope settings, and the other switches to a random preset. I found both helpful in creating settings. The X-Y pad is also useful, allowing you to assign many of the plug-in’s parameters and automate if desired. The Voice section is where you adjust the Auto-Tune effect. If you’ve used Auto-Tune before, you’ll be familiar with parameters such as Retune Speed and Humanize. You can also add compression or turn up the Emphasize knob (high-end boost) to the signal before the Auto-Tune effect processes it. The Output+FX section features a relatively subtle tube-distortion effect called Warmth, as well as a rich-sounding Chorus effect. VOCODE BREAKERS Auto-Tune Vocodist is available only to those who subscribe to Antares’ Auto-Tune Unlimited subscription program. That arrangement follows a recent trend where software developers provide subscribers with exclusive features or products. I understand that Antares is trying to incentivize people to subscribe, but I hope that Auto-Tune Vocodist might soon appear for separate sale. That aside, it’s an excellent plug-in that provides the user with a ton of creative tools. Having Auto-Tune built-in gives it a twist that’s both helpful and unique. Although it has a lot of parameters, I found it to be easier to adjust than other vocoding plug-ins I’ve used. Whether you’re creating robot-style vocals, adding pitch to a drum loop or going for a totally original effect, Auto-Tune Vocodist is an exceptionally powerful plug-in. ■

Tech // reviews Neold V76U73, From Plugin Alliance Excellent Re-Creation of Classic Preamp, Compressor By Michael Cooper

eold, a new plug-in manufacturer, is serving its first product with cream. Its V76U73, distributed by Plugin Alliance, emulates two lush vintage Telefunken rarities wired in series: the 1950s-era V76 pentode tube mic preamp and the U73b variable mu tube compressor/ limiter from the 1960s. Complementing Neold’s digital re-creations of these two modules is a digital reproduction of the Telefunken U70a, essentially a VU meter in the original hardware, but accessorized here with controls for Mix (wet/dry-balance, for effecting parallel compression), Makeup (postcompressor gain) and Trim (final output-level adjustment). START WITH THE PREAMP The preamp section includes an adjustable gain control and low- and high-cut filters for limiting its output’s bandwidth. The compressor/limiter section lets you select either a fixed 0.5ms (Fast) or program-dependent (Auto) attack time, and any of six release times from 0.3 second to 10 seconds; the three longest release times are program-dependent. Switches that separately activate a 100Hz low-cut sidechain filter and stereo mode (channel linking) add to the original features. Don’t worry about cranking the mic pre’s Gain control too much and overloading the plug-in; automatic gain compensation keeps signal level before the compressor section at essentially unity gain no matter how hard you push it. Rather, think of the Gain knob as a saturation control; boost it to add the desired amount of pleasing harmonic distortion. Then tweak the preamp’s crucial Send control to adjust how much gain goes to the compressor for the amount of gain reduction you desire. (Tip: Bypass the compressor to use the mic pre as a subtle, standalone saturator.) ADD SOME COMPRESSION Variable mu compressors are treasured for the perceived density their tube gain control element imparts to tracks, and the V76U73 nails this sound. In limit mode and with the 100Hz sidechain filter engaged, the V76U73 fattens bass guitar tracks and enhances their sustain beautifully, making it one of my favorite plug-ins for that instrument.

The V76U73 has also become my favorite plug-in on lead vocals—by a mile. The preamp section produces a warm, authentic tube luster; unlike most plug-ins that produce “tube” harmonics, the V76U73 never sounds artificially fizzy or dirty. And the dynamics control the compressor lends is super-smooth, sitting the track beautifully in the mix. Vocal tracks sound bigger, creamier and more even. The plug-in’s compressor also sounds downright awesome on doubletracked rock guitars playing overdriven power chords: winnowing out bass frequencies with the preamp’s 80Hz filter, activating the compressor’s

Auto attack setting, dialing in a 2.5-second release time and setting the Mix control to roughly 50% wet/dry balance produces a really stable and dense wall of sound, while retaining the detail needed to sound natural. DRUMS AND GUITARS The V76U73 can also be used to accentuate a kick drum’s beater click. Select Limit mode, the Fast setting for the attack time and 0.3 sec on the Release control to squash the shell’s sustain, leaving mostly the attack. Then add back much of the dry sound—about 39% on the Mix control does nicely—to blend it with the pointy attack. The resulting kick will pop more and sound a bit tighter. But rockin’ drum sounds are really just a bonus and not this plugin’s forte. Where the V76U73 really distinguishes itself is in its exquisite emulations of pentode-tube preamp and variable mu-style compression effects for bass, lead vocals and electric guitars. For gorgeously creamy, dense, supersized tracks, the V76U73 is the plug-in every in-the-box mix engineer must have. Must have! ■

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Tech // review shorts PreSonus PD-70 Dynamic Broadcast Microphone The PD-70 Dynamic Broadcast Microphone is specifically designed for capturing the human voice and improving intelligibility, even in acoustically unfriendly spaces. The Sounds like a cardioid pickup pattern reduces the amount broadcast of extraneous and unwanted background noise entering the mic’s sides and back while focusing on voices in front of it—just what you want for podcasts or radio broadcasts. The all-metal PD-70 is an end-address dynamic mic with an integrated (yet removable) foam windscreen and a simple, compact mechanical design that will fit and look great on the smallest of desktops. You can thread the mount onto a standard mic desk stand or boom, and connect a cable to any preamp using its gold-pinned XLR output jack. It comes ready to use with a gimbalstyle integrated yoke mount that allows tilting the mic up or down to aim it precisely. Once in position, it has a single knob to lock it down. It does not get any simpler than this! I tried the PD-70 in my studio as a vocal mic feeding a Retro Instruments 500PRE preamp; I also put it up for a Zoom meeting into an SSL 2 USB Audio Interface. The PD-70 has a frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz with a shelving boost starting at about 1.5 kHz and extending out to 10. I can hear that little boost in the midrange—especially on small computer speakers—and it does impart a certain gravitas and authority to speaking voices. I found it helpful for somber-sounding online speakers, as long as they stayed close in front of the mic to maintain a fat-sounding “lift

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

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in the bass” due to the cardioid proximity effect. At the same time, the PD-70 suppresses p-pops better than some other dynamic mic I have, with or without a pop filter. Removing the foam windscreen, you can see a resemblance to the internal mechanical design of the Shure SM7B dynamic mic. Paired with the 500PRE (tube-based preamp), the sound was rich and noise-free, and I would have no issues using the PD-70 for a loud lead vocal track—provided the singer could stay aimed at the mic. The SSL 2 USB preamp worked well except for very quiet singing, when that unit starts to run out of available mic gain. The PreSonus PD-70 wins as a workhorse of a mic that will improve the sound of anyone doing online podcasting, Internet radio or hosting/participating in Zoom meetings. —Barry Rudolph

SIR Audio Tools StandardCLIP Plug-in Today’s loud is louder than loud’s ever been, as the volume wars continue in popular music. Mastering engineers shave off pesky level-preventing MOST peaks with finesse and musicality, but IMPRESSIVE mix engineers and their abundant use of FEATURE saturation have made blazing loud a lot more Clean and loud feasible. But it’s the fine massaging of how made possible those remaining peaks approach zero that has taken master levels into the stratosphere. The StandardCLIP plug-in from SIR Audio Tools is one such level-maximizing tool that uses clipping to get hotter levels with a pleasant tone, absent of the clicking and splatting often associated with poppin’ overs and clipping. The process starts with a Soft-Clip Saturator that allows smooth, musical clipping to begin at whatever level approaching 0 dBFS that you desire; you also control the severity of that clipping, as well as the type: Soft Clip Classic, Soft Clip Pro and Hard Clip. Next, an oversampling process can be applied to reduce the distortion resulting from that clipping, caused by new harmonic artifacts from aliasing (the sampling error of high frequencies above the Nyquist frequency). Oversampling finds those errors and removes them, a few more with each pass-thru, up to 256x oversampling in StandardCLIP. After the oversampling comes a Ceiling parameter that prevents any samples forming over your chosen threshold, typically at, or just under, zero. StandardCLIP includes numerous types of peak and RMS level metering with plenty of visual feedback, my favorite being the red-topped waveform display that shows just where your

masters where I had gone a little overboard with the soft-clipping. With practice, less severity, and more finesse of thresholds and gain staging, I cleanly upped my master levels game by 1.5 dB and sometimes more. That’s all useful, but the best part is that

clipping is taking place. It takes a little time to get used to the process, as there are plenty of control parameters and they beg for experimentation, although some presets can help you get started. I got up to speed relatively quickly and soon churned out louder

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the oversampling makes a substantial difference and is a bit more flexible than I expected. The absence of high-frequency distortion grabs you first; there’s a little bit of “sand” in your maxed-out digital audio and you don’t notice it until it’s gone. At 4x, I heard improvement; at 8x, things got beautiful; at 16x, somehow even cleaner; but at 32x, the sound got so clinical that it was too crisp and perfect for me. At 64x, my Mac Pro couldn’t run in real time and I had to bounce/render to hear the results, but it didn’t sound any better to me and it took so long to bounce that I’m not going back there. In fact, I usually master at 16x and sometimes at 8x for the tone. Go figure. Considering that StandardCLIP is only $29, works like a charm and makes your masters louder than they were before, it’s a pretty lowrisk/high-payoff purchase. The only thing you have to lose is all those hours spent testing out clip levels, modes and oversampling rates—and that your bounces/renders will now take longer than ever. It’s still worth it! —Rob Tavaglione

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Tech // review shorts Sterling SHA4 Headphone Amplifier The newest addition to my monitoring fleet is the Sterling Audio SHA4, a 4-channel, 4 Channels, two-sets-of-inputs, 2 Sets of Inputs little workhorse of a headphone amp. Despite mostly typical features, there are a couple of design quirks that I like a lot. First, seemingly all headphone amps have external power supplies that tend to burn out, buzz or hum; the SHA4 has an internal power supply and a standard IEC power cable. Second, most cue amps have one stereo input (or possibly a pair of mono inputs), but the SHA4 has two sets of inputs (A and B), as well as balanced ¼-inch stereo or unbalanced ¼-inch mono inputs. The flexibility is especially appreciated if you run more than one cue mix. The unit includes four front-panel ¼-inch mini-plug headphone outputs and four back-panel ¼-inch headphone outputs. The four volume controls and two (A and B) master volumes are a little small, but they are firm and acceptable. The four input-selection switches are large and give

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

a confident click. There is no metering, but I do wish there were the minimal “green/yellow/red LED scheme” found on many devices, as well as a mono switch on each channel. The back panel houses all the ¼-inch connections; headphone outs, A and B balanced TRS inputs, A and B unbalanced stereo ¼-inch inputs and another nice feature—left and right balanced link outputs to chain up another cue amp. Attention to a couple more details makes the SHA4 a pleasure to use. For one, the power switch is large, backlit and recessed a bit by the unit’s oversized endcaps, making it hard to bump off. The chassis has a mic stand connection on the bottom, and it’s still rugged enough for the floor and small enough for a crowded desktop. Compared to my other three low-priced headphone amps, the SHA4 hung right in there in clarity, max volume and low noise floor. With some high-impedance AKG K240s, which require plenty of clean power, the SHA was able to reach ridiculous “loud enough for drummers” levels without much distortion (even if the tone was a little thin). With multiple pairs/models of cans plugged-in, the SHA showed no loss of headroom or tone. At $89, the SHA4 is not the cheapest 4-channel cue amp out there, nor the most expensive, nor the most sophisticated;

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but its abundant features, thoughtful design and reasonable price make it an easy recommendation for anywhere a headphone feed needs to get split up loudly and cleanly. —Rob Tavaglione

SSL Fusion Plug-ins This isn’t a review, per se; the product just came out. SSL has unveiled two new Fusion features premium plug-ins: inside your DAW Fusion Vintage Drive and Fusion Stereo Image. Both were meticulously modeled on SSL’s Fusion hardware processor and mark the introduction of the company’s new plug-in development program, which features scheduled monthly releases of premium production tools. As its name implies, SSL Fusion Vintage Drive is modeled after the Vintage Drive section of the SSL Fusion processor, enabling DAW users to take advantage of its nonlinear saturation characteristics. The Density and Drive controls on the plug-in interact to produce harmonics,

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

soft-clipping and natural compression that is reminiscent of pushing an analog console into its tonal “sweet spot,” and can be used lightly for subtle thickening saturation or driven hard for more extreme distortion. SSL Fusion Stereo Image is also modeled on the SSL Fusion hardware unit. The Width and Space controls allow users to access a digital version of the Fusion’s mid-side circuit directly in their DAW for detailed spatial manipulation of the stereo field. SSL Fusion standalone perpetual licenses are priced at $199 and will be available at a 25 percent

discount for early adopters (first 30 days from launch). They are also available as part of the SSL Complete Subscription Bundle at $14.99 per month. Additional Fusion plug-ins that will be released in the coming months include Violet

EQ, HF Compressor and Transformer. All of these plug-ins are compatible with major DAWs and computer operating systems, and support VST2, VST3, AAX and AU plug-in format —Mix Staff

View From the Top Mark Williams, Executive VP, RAD Global Distribution By Mark Williams

y fascination with audio started at a young age—in junior high, I really wanted a mixer, but my dad wouldn’t let me buy one with the money I made mowing lawns, so I built my own with parts of a broken stereo and some light dimmers in the garage. In college (University of Alabama BA and North East Louisiana MA), I worked in broadcast (radio and television) while learning production, theory, management and business. After grad school, I ran the largest recording studio in South Louisiana, then in 1999, started with PreSonus, a tiny company doing around $2-$3 million a year. Within a year, I was running international sales. The company began to evolve exponentially as we entered the digital and interface realm, and over the next 17 years, we grew the international side from $100k a year to over $23 million. I learned by trial and error while making some great customers and friends for life, and left PreSonus for good in 2017. I met Jon Haber, owner of RAD Distribution, that year while working for Warm Audio in Texas. I was fascinated by his manufacturing and distribution model, working with amazing brands as a manufacturer (Avantone Pro, Black Lion Audio and Lindell) and distributing other

The only thing missing was an interface, but Cave and I had significant experience with those from our days at PreSonus, the Black Lion team knows how to make anything move sonically from good to amazing, and Jon is a wizard when it comes to awesome brands (Heritage, manufacturing, logistics and HEDD, Golden Age, TK Audio, leadership. We all worked hard Isovox, Cymatic, Kahayan). I and came out with the Black looked at it for almost two years Lion Audio Revolution 2x2 USB before contacting Jon. I messaged Mark Williams interface, shipping with Studio him on a Friday about working together and he flew from New York to Louisiana One packed in after negotiating with our friends on Monday. We put together a business plan at PreSonus. The interface was a catalyst for over dinner and then finalized our agreement significant growth, product expansion and over breakfast. Then we met with United Studio market penetration over the last year. At RAD, we’ve built a core team of nine Tech (Cave Daughdrill and Chad Kelly), both guys I’d worked with at PreSonus, and set up a people who allow us to be nimble, quick and manufacturing and distribution agreement (and proactive. We have a strong element of boutique pro audio recording by brand, but cumulatively, placed the first order) by dinner that night. Cave—always my favorite creative director the strength of a mid-size manufacturer. This and marketing person to work with—joined lets us cater to niche market segments, too, with our team shortly after, and we faced some smaller runs that address specific geographic familiar challenges: growing and revitalizing needs (like the Black Lion PG power grid series in some established and brands, and additionally markets like Australia). Also, the balance between localizing European brands for North America. the background that I have in manufacturing and We also had to make the delivery of RAD international sales, coupled with Jon’s experience Distribution as an entity easier for dealers as a U.S. retailer and North American distributor, and distributors to grasp, so we branded it give us a view from the top globally down to the as the mothership. We quickly focused in on retail store environment in the U.S. The result is the fact that RAD can provide a full signal that RAD has continued to grow, fostering strong chain solution for customers, offering mics, business relationships and providing great audio dynamics processors, monitors and headphones. tools for pros. n

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Open Channel A Musical Legacy, Or Slip Slidin’ Away?

e know what kind of clothes Egyptian (for comparison, an 18 TB Seagate hard drive is around $22 per terabyte). pharaohs wore because their paintings and LTO is the best we have now, but it’s not perfect. The storage environment writings have lasted to this day. We know is crucial, because any contamination is fatal to such incredibly thin tape. that the Babylonians were way into beer because they Also, consider compatibility limitations. Generations 1 – 7 can read tapes engraved that information in stone tablets. We even know from two prior generations, and write to the previous generation. LTOwhat kind of animals existed 20,000 years ago thanks to 8 and 9 restrict reading and writing to only the current and previous generations. And although tape costs are low, a single LTO-8 drive costs the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France. By Craig $3,000-$4,000; a dual-drive is more than $7k. The more data you need to But we have no idea what kind of music any of those Anderton store, the more cost-effective LTO becomes. people played. All we have is some sketchy ideas of their instruments. We don’t even know for certain what Bach’s Brandenburgs sounded like. Yes, there was BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CLOUD? notation. But some believe that later baroque music had an inherent, Cloud storage is relatively convenient, fast and secure. But local storage isn’t subject to the ransomware that plagues connected or cloud storage. That’s subtle swing that wasn’t notated because it was a given. Thankfully, recording has kept modern musical history from slip slidin’ a huge deal for major corporations that need to safeguard sensitive data. away. We know what operatic tenors like Enrico Caruso sounded like And an X-class solar flare of the same magnitude as the 1859 Carrington thanks to gramophone recordings of the early 20th century. We can hear Storm would cause massive damage to the grid and any electronics that how the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the legendary Artur haven’t been hardened. If all our musical history is stored in the cloud, it could disappear in Nikisch, interpreted Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony more than a century ago. literally a few seconds—although, admittedly, And Elvis lives—or at least his music does. we’d have far more serious problems, like We have gone from millennia where music Will people nuclear reactors melting down and not being existed only for the moment to an era where 20,000 years from now— able to eat. (Side note: I’m amazed that the every piece of music can be frozen in time, blasted out into the world through venues like or even 1,000 years from federal government hasn’t allocated the couple dollars needed to harden the grid against YouTube and Spotify. now—know what kind of billion flares and EMPs, especially considering the music we made? National Science Foundation and NASA believe A LITTLE LTO an occurrence of the same magnitude is about But digital data isn’t stone tablets. Will people 20,000 years from now—or even 1,000 years from now—know what kind “when,” not “if.”) So NARAS made the right decision for archival storage, at least for the of music we made? We’ve already seen the CD’s arc, from primary music playback medium to streaming’s poor relative. Sure, you can still buy next several decades. But not all studios need to back up Petabytes (1,000 audiophile CD players—but I suspect playing back a CD in 2121 will be Terabytes) of data, and LTO becomes less cost-effective when you take the drive, storage and refreshing into account. For example, my business challenging. Fortunately, preserving music as digital data means it can be converted, uses Blu-ray for archival backup of modest amounts of data. Today, 25 GB transformed and refreshed. The P&E Wing of NARAS has studied archival and 100 GB discs are around $1 and $10, respectively, far more robust than storage and recommends industry-standard LTO (Linear-Tape Open) DVDs, have at least a 30-year shelf life, and aren’t too fussy about their cartridges. LTO is supported by heavy hitters like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, storage environment. For multiple terabytes of data, hard drive backup to at least two drives, Quantum, FujiFilm, Sony and others, so it’s not going anywhere. The standard Ultrium cartridge using the just-introduced LTO-9 format (the with periodic refreshes to new drives, works well. SSDs are viable, too, but number is the current generation) can hold 18 TB of uncompressed data, bear in mind that they’re more sensitive to electrical issues. Of course, the and typically twice as much compressed data. The LTO-8 generation in cloud can provide a holding tank for data, prior to archiving. So it looks like our musical history won’t be slip slidin’ away, as long as common use stores up to 12 TB uncompressed. The LTO.org site has a roadmap for future LTO formats—until now, we keep refreshing our digital data to whatever can read it back. People in there’s been about three years between generations. LTO-10 is expected the 23rd century will almost certainly be able to know what pop music from to store up to 36 TB uncompressed, with 72 TB for LTO-11 and 144 TB the 20th century sounded like. I wonder what they’ll think of GWAR… ■ for LTO-12. Keep in mind that LTO-8 tape is only about $6 per terabyte

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