ISSUE 04 / APRIL 2021 SUPPORTING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
MAGAZINE / 04
MAX MAKING BLUEBERRY EYES WITH SUGA OF BTS
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MCCARTNEY III WRITING AND RECORDING HIS 18TH STUDIO ALBUM
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EVANESCENCE
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SUP P
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04 March 2021 saw Evanescence make a triumphant return with The Bitter Truth – the band’s first album of original songs in (would you believe it?) 10 years. In this issue, we catch up with Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Amy Lee about overcoming industry sexism to keep the band alive, and how a potential lawsuit turned into a collaboration with one of the UK’s top bands.
In L.A, former Nickelodeon star, MAX reveals what it was like to collab with SUGA of BTS on his single, Blueberry Eyes, The Lumineers co-founder Jeremiah Fraites delves into his album of intimate piano instrumentals, Piano Piano, while Mike Rosenberg (aka Passenger) talks all things Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted. In the studio, engineer, mixer and producer Steve Orchard takes us behind the scenes on Paul McCartney’s surprise lockdown project, McCartney III, mix engineer Mitch McCarthy talks about mixing Olivia Rodrigo’s drivers license; producer, mixer and engineer Chris Tabron (Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Mary J. Blige) digs into all things production, and we take a tour of JBJ Studio, a new residential recording space in London. There’s been no shortage of composing projects during the last year: we catch up with Emmy Awardwinning composer and pianist, Kris
Bowers about composing Bridgerton during lockdown, while Michael Yezerski gives us a lesson in scoring horror films. On the tech front, we chat to Empirical Labs founder, Dave Derr, and Softube’s Niklas Odelholm about the debut collaboration between these two companies, while iZotope’s Jonathan Wyner discusses the emerging opportunities to connect with users in exciting new ways. Fender’s Dan Grace chronicles the rise of the Acoustasonic Series, and L-Acoustics CEO, Americas, Alan Macpherson tells us why he believes there is genuine hope for a return to live events this year. In Spotlight, find out how our experts rated the Sensel Morph, Neumann’s V 402 mic preamp, Shure’s DL4 DuraPlex lavalier mic, and Teletone Audio’s first VI – Postcard Piano. Enjoy the issue!
Alice Gustafson Deputy Editor, Headliner HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
20 / CHAPPELL ROAN 14 / MAX 08 / JESSE PALTER
40 / MICHAEL YEZERSKI
26 / MITCH MCCARTHY
32/ EVANESCENCE 46 / NORA KROLL-ROSENBAUM
54 / JEREMIAH FRAITES
50 / LAWRENCE ‘FILET’ MIGNOGNA
58 / THE ACOUSTASONIC JOURNEY
64 / JIM ROACH
68 / MCCARTNEY III
74 / AUBREYWHITFIELD
78 / JONATHAN WYNER
88 / ALAN MEYERSON 82 / FENCES
102 / JBJ STUDIO
92 / SHE KNOWS TECH
98 / CHRIS TABRON
108 / STU CHACON
124 / SPOTLIGHT REVIEWS
114 / KRIS BOWERS
118 / GORDON KENNEDY
144 / BUSINESS
160 / PASSENGER 150 / TECHNOLOGY
166 / NATHAN HALPERN 156 / LIFESTYLE
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JESSE PALTER
HEADLINER USA
Better Days
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During the start of the pandemic, L.A-based artist Jesse Palter parted ways with her record label to start anew and focus on the next evolution of her music and sound. Out of that dynamic came Better Days – an ode to quarantine and lockdown.
One of Palter’s earliest memories takes her back to when she was four years old in nursery school, answering the teacher’s question: ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Without missing a beat, “a singer” she replied, promptly belting out the chorus of Tomorrow from Annie. Chuckling at her determination and certainty at such a young age, Palter says that knowing what she wanted to do from this age has been both a blessing and a curse. “There was never a doubt in my mind,” she asserts over Zoom. “To be completely honest, the doubt in my mind came not too long ago when I was locked into a contract, surrounded by a team of people that just weren’t right for my brand or for my specific project. I started thinking, ‘man, I’ve been fighting for this all these years
and making a lot of sacrifices; moving away from my family... this isn’t cute anymore’. “When I was four years old, I knew that it was what I wanted to do. It was a cute little hobby. Then it became more than that when I really started writing music, telling my own stories and composing. Then you realize, ‘gosh – it’s a business, it’s not just a passion’.” During the start of the pandemic, Palter parted ways with her record label, and free to write from the heart, she released the aptly named Better Days. Reflective and optimistic, this tune was co-created and produced with Jake Bass and features notable musicians Jeff Babko (music director for Jimmy Kimmel, James Taylor) and Ben Williams on the keys and bass, respectively.
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the creative juices started flowing. Anytime that I feel inspired, that’s the reminder of why I’m doing this in the first place.
The song was written over Zoom and each segment of it was recorded in everyone’s individual living spaces; a fitting tribute considering Better Days was written in and is about the quarantine lockdown. As Palter puts it herself, “now, more than ever, I trust you understand, just as I trust that there are better days to come. When quarantine hit, I had gone several months without feeling creative, and that’s such a frustrating feeling for a songwriter who places a lot of self worth on their latest song,” she admits. “I was just looking for some fresh energy and I remember Jake being so positive at my show when he came to see me. The song fell out of me, which doesn’t happen every single time, sometimes you have to chase the song, and then sometimes it’s just sitting there, ripe for the picking.” She shares that she has a video (that she will never play to anyone) where she recorded herself freestyling the entire thing: “The video is hilarious. It was just like a total stream of consciousness, so clearly it was something that needed to exist. I just tried to trust that. Longing for a brighter and better future felt so appropriate to what HEADLINER USA
we’re all collectively experiencing right now. In my gut I felt like, ‘just don’t overthink it, don’t give yourself a chance to talk yourself out of it’.” Palter made the decision to part with her record label last year (“my hands were tied for so long and I felt so out of control of my career – I was just screaming to be heard”), and is now an independent artist. Most importantly, she is feeling inspired again. “This is just the reminder that I needed to be like, ‘okay, being on a record label might have been your dream at one point, but that’s not the end goal’ – the end goal was to feel creatively fulfilled as a creator. It was an incredibly empowering experience for me to begin to get back in the driver’s seat of my career, and even though all of these transitions perhaps haven’t been particularly fun, they’ve been necessary – and
“As artists we all have our unique point of view, and so you’re never really in competition with anybody but yourself.”
“For me, the most exciting thing about writing music is creating something out of nothing. It’s that bit of elusive magic that after all these years of doing it, I still didn’t understand, and yet it feels so good. That really fuels me and keeps me going. It feels really good to me to know that even in a time where we’re all handcuffed in a way and we’re all feeling really stuck, that art will prevail. Creativity is really the heartbeat of what we do; it’s just a matter of thinking outside of the box. I’m really grateful that I found my mojo. Better Days is my first single as an independent artist after leaving my record deal.”
YOU’RE NOT ALONE Palter’s philanthropic passions include raising awareness for suicide prevention and mental health advocacy. She has written a number of op-eds on mental health in the music industry, and is very open about the fact that suicide runs in her family on both sides. On the subject, Palter reiterates that having a strong sense of purpose and lofty goals at such a young age was a blessing and a curse. It meant never having to take a job aptitude test, but it also meant she was pursuing one of the most competitive and challenging career paths, signing up for a 24/7 job in a constantly evolving industry, all the while setting herself up for a constant cycle of affirmation and rejection. Palter calls herself a “professional dream chaser”, and points out that on paper she is living her dream. But big dreams come with big expectations, and big expectations don’t always lead to smooth sailing in the mental health department.
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“Discussing this has been my saving grace,” she says. “Throughout my entire life I have dealt with anxiety and depression issues. I’ve learned that that’s sort of what makes me the artist that I am. It has been integral to my family for us to be open and to speak about mental healthrelated issues, because the more that you talk about it, the less alone you feel. My anxiety and my depression has been triggered directly by my experiences with the music industry, and the profound impact that being an artist chasing a dream and going through all of the ebbs and flows of the industry has had directly on my mental health. “The one thing that I do have is my truth, and perhaps by speaking it, I will feel a little more free, and perhaps somebody else that hears it might feel a little more free as well, and less alone. That’s such a powerful experience. It’s another way that feels like I’m contributing to the greater good, that I’m using my voice positively. That means so much to me.” HEADLINER USA
Palter says that she’d be lying if she said she had everything all figured out, but these days, when it comes to her music, she’s just doing what feels right: “I’ve got a lot of material, and clearly, I have a lot to say! I’m just trying to take one step forward in a really weird time. I think that artists have a way of giving voice to the voiceless, or painting the world in a certain way, or shining a light on collective experiences. The cool thing about being an artist is that we all have our unique point of view, and so you’re never really in competition with anybody but yourself. Nobody can say things the way you will say them as an artist – that’s what makes you the artist that you are, so be authentically you and walk towards that vision,” she smiles.
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Colour Vision
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MAX
MAX’s new music continues to dive deeper into spreading a message of being true to who you are, wearing what you want to wear, loving who you want to love, and feeling accepted. His most recent collaboration with SUGA of BTS, Blueberry Eyes, has accumulated over 100 million streams and over 30 million YouTube music video views since its release. MAX explains how he bonded with the BTS star over basketball, and why he’s done people-pleasing.
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Last year was a big year for MAX personally and professionally; he welcomed his daughter into the world and released his sophomore album, Colour Vision. Joining me on a call from “La-La land”, MAX (real name Maxwell George Schneider) is adjusting to the very early mornings and sneaking in naps where he can, but is loving every second of fatherhood: “Being a dad is the best. I had this thought yesterday: it’s like when you
get your driver’s license and you can suddenly drive a car, and you’re just like, ‘whoa – I’m doing this right now’ – that’s what it’s like being a dad! This feels like a lot of responsibility,” he laughs.
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“It just changes everything. It changes your perspective; you feel everything more, and time is so different – it’s much more precious. It’s remarkable. She’s the coolest little human. I can’t wait to watch her grow up.” Before making a name for himself in the music industry, MAX worked on Broadway, modeled with Madonna for an international Dolce & Gabbana campaign, and co-wrote the song Show You How to Do for the Disney show, Shake It Up. He later portrayed Zander in the Nickelodeon TV series How to Rock and starred in the Nickelodeon original film, Rags as Charlie Prince. He was killing it in film and TV, but despite that, he knew that music was his real calling. “I’ve always been a people pleaser, and I always said yes to a lot of stuff – you don’t want to turn down an opportunity,” he says. “I got super lucky to do so many different things. There was a certain point where I got offered a big movie, and it was a lot of money – more than anything I’d ever been offered. It was a leading role.”
“I’LL LOOK BACK ON THIS IN 10 YEARS AND DEFINITELY GO, ‘DANG, THAT WAS A FUN, CRAZY RIDE THROWING THAT KOREAN/ ENGLISH SONG TOGETHER WITH ONE OF THE COOLEST, BIGGEST ARTISTS IN THE WORLD.”
Faced with the choice of taking the role (and huge paycheck), or going on tour and creating the next piece of music, MAX made his decision: “The choice was so clear to me. I realized so many other people would die for that part that I was offered and be so excited for it. I realized I was not fully alive on set in the same way I was on stage. Life is short so you’ve got to choose the thing that you’re the most passionate about and make it work. That was my big moment because this was literally the choice between the two. I had been making both work for so long, and I just wasn’t really doing great at either one. I was doing well, I just wasn’t doing my best,” he clarifies. “By committing to music I’ve been the happiest, and I’ve also been the most fulfilled, for sure.” How big a role are we talking? “I don’t even remember what it ended up being called! I wonder if it even
came out... It wasn’t like Spider Man or something – that would be amazing. It wasn’t like, ‘oh, he was gonna be the next Batman’ – that would have been hilarious,” he laughs. The decision proved to be the right one – the single Lights Down Low from his first full-length album Hell’s Kitchen Angel generated over half a billion streams globally and is certified triple platinum in the US, platinum in Canada, and gold in the Netherlands and Australia. The song means a lot to MAX as he wrote it for his wife, Emily, when they first started dating, and encapsulates so much of his personal story – he proposed to her by singing it. However,
being a marketable young male artist, it’s often frowned upon to appear anything other than single. MAX was done with people-pleasing, and proudly featured Emily in the music video, as well as uploading a wedding video version. “There was a lot of backlash from a lot of the people I worked with at the time about being open about my marriage,” he shares. “I feel like a lot of people in pop music are married now! But at the time, it was very taboo to not be a single ‘pop guy’, so I took a big leap with that song in deciding to be open about the story behind it so I can tell people when they interview me, and I don’t have to lie. I can’t lie; I am the worst liar in the world! That started my HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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wife being in the music videos in subtle ways, so we just realized, ‘let’s make this a fictional world that we create, but with the little tidbits of truth of our actual story’. Looking back a couple of years later, it is pretty amazing how that’s been the one that started it in a real way. I’m grateful for that because it’s so much better than something that doesn’t mean much.” Looking back, MAX feels he only scratched the surface with Hell’s Kitchen Angel, leading him to take more risks on Colour Vision, where he has been as authentic as possible.
“With Colour Vision, it was an arc and a full storyline that I wanted to really commit to, because my favorite artists have always done that. I love Purple Rain by Prince and Igor by Tyler, the Creator – he commits to a very specific aesthetic and a world – and you feel part of it. So I said, ‘why not try to do that myself in my own way?’ In more of a Disney meets Wes Anderson way that’s a little more about my personality and my world. It just gives it more life, and I feel like I didn’t do that as much with the last album because I was too focused on getting the big songs.
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“I want to get the best songs, but I do want there to be a through line and a cohesive sound. I’ve always been sort of all over the place sound-wise, and I love being able to experiment in that way. But I like the full album to feel like that same cohesive world and sound for that specific time. I really wanted to create a world and a culture for fans to hopefully dive into.”
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BLUEBERRY EYES Recent single, Blueberry Eyes features SUGA of BTS. MAX first said he wanted to remix a BTS song back in 2017, which did end up happening in 2020 when he featured on SUGA’s D-2 track, Burn It. Their relationship blossomed from there. “I was a fan, and SUGA and Jungkook have both given love to my music over the years, so I would just give love back and Tweet them sometimes. Then I went to Korea and met with SUGA for the first time, and we got along really well. He asked me to be a part of Burn It, and months later we hung out again and I asked if he’d be a part of the album. I sent him every song, he heard Blueberry Eyes and really liked it so he added his spin – I love that he’s singing in his native language. I’ll look back on this in 10 years and definitely go, ‘dang, that was a fun, crazy ride throwing that Korean/English song together with one of the coolest, biggest artists in the world. Life is crazy!” MAX is a diehard New York Knicks fan, which him and SUGA bonded over: “The Knicks have always been pretty notoriously bad, but I’m just basketball obsessed. When you’re obsessed with anything and you casually mentioned somebody else…” he trails off. “Fun fact: SUGA’s name means shooting guard in Korean – he played basketball growing up. It’s those little things outside of doing music that I think sometimes bond you, and that definitely bonded us.” MAX admits that he was surprised that SUGA picked out Blueberry Eyes as the song he wanted to hop on, saying that for him, it was more of a sleeper hit. “I mean ‘sleeper’ in that it was bubbling under the surface of something that I knew would hopefully connect, but it wasn’t an obvious single to me,” he clarifies.
HEADLINER USA
“He definitely elevated it with what he did. That’s why I respect him as an artist because he does what he feels; especially with his Agust D mixtape, he’s so expressive and very raw with his lyrics. I loved that he was so specific about which song he wanted to jump on.” MAX now can’t imagine the song without the guest verse. Did he have to check Google Translate to check SUGA’s lyrics? “Luckily he works with some really great people who translate,” he reassures me. “He speaks English, but he has a really wonderful translator. I asked her what it meant because I heard it and I was like, ‘it sounds really cool, I hope it fits in the story!’ And it did fit perfectly in the story – he did it masterfully.” The combination of MAX’s fans and the BTS Army has resulted in the music video being viewed over 30 million times, which again features MAX’s wife – who at one point (heavily pregnant at the time) is submerged in a bath full of blueberries. “I feel like that’s just sort of the theme of our relationship – we think of these insane things to do,” he laughs. “I say, ‘baby, you’re pregnant – you want to get this bath full of blueberries and learn this Korean verse as our vows?’ And she says, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ I’m lucky that I get to experience it with her.” MAX wanted the music video to feel as if “Disney made a baby with Wes Anderson”. MAX and Emily studied and memorized all of the Korean lyrics to SUGA’s verse for the video, which he says were pretty tricky to learn – not to mention performing face to face. “We had a lot of help! It took us about two and a half weeks; we did a new line every night. We shot the whole thing in a day and there were so
many setups, but there were definitely moments where we burst out laughing. I have this really bad habit of bad nervous laughter with her, and in the worst circumstances. She might be really angry and I nervously laugh – it’s one of her biggest pet peeves. She was like, ‘if you start nervous-laughing when I’m giving birth, I’m gonna kill you!’” The BTS Army picked up on the nod to SUGA in the video – in the form of a cat – a reference to the nickname the fandom has given him. “I wanted to throw something in there that felt like the fans would know that it was a homage to him even though he couldn’t be there in person. They call him Lil Meow Meow; it’s definitely a term of endearment. I didn’t think it would be as big of a thing as it became, but I remember telling the directors, ‘guys, we have to throw the perfect little cat moment – it could be just a split second, but it’s got to be in there’. So my directors spent hours looking through this generic cat footage and found the perfect cat. I was pretty sure the fans would get it, and luckily they did – it was a big hit!” Like most artists unable to travel, MAX is already thinking about new music, and is already diving into his next album. “This new phase reminds me of Lights Down Low and about going back to those roots of intimacy, because it’s the part of life I’m in right now. I want people to hear this next album and feel like I’m right in their living room singing to them. That’s the kind of vibe overall with the intimacy of it.” MAXMUSICOFFICIAL.COM
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RedNet in the wilderness:
Garth Richardson's Vancouver Studio GRAMMY® Award-nominated and Juno Award-winning music producer and engineer Garth “GGGarth" Richardson took the opportunity during the COVID-19 lockdown to make improvements at Farm Studios, a seven-acre property with panoramic views across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island, where he has lived and worked since 2002. In addition to the cosmetic and acoustical upgrades that he's made to his control room, he has installed a Dante-networked system comprising many Focusrite Pro audio solutions. Visit the Focusrite Pro website to read the case study.
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California, Here We Come
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In 2018 Chappell Roan – armed with the hair of a mermaid, the spellbinding voice of an old soul and an Instagram account you’re going to want to follow – packed everything she owned into the back of her car and drove for three days straight from her tiny Missouri hometown to make L.A her home. However, when she arrived, she wasn’t feeling it.
“I did not know what to write about until I moved to California,” Roan admits straight away. “I was having such a hard time finding myself, and I still feel this way. I feel like I don’t really fit into the pop writing industry. I feel like I’m a little too country, but I’m not country! In California I missed the seasons; I missed the simplicity of the Midwest.” However, pining for her hometown and struggling to adjust to the supposed glitz and glamour of Hollywood did inspire her single, California, which took her three years to write; a stark contrast to how quickly things have come together for her before. Taking up the piano aged 12, by age 16 Roan had written a melancholy song called Die Young, accompanied by a video she created on her own.
Just six months later, she was signed to Atlantic Records, and her School Nights EP was released in September 2017. “I just had no idea what was going on,” she says, reflecting on the speed that things picked up for her at such a young age. “I just didn’t know how to process it, and sometimes I still don’t know how to process it! I was 17 when I got signed, and it just felt like a whirlwind. I felt kind of lost and like I was roaming around. But at the same time, I was releasing music and it was very overwhelming, but it was the best learning experience.”
“Literally, I was having to do my math homework the night before I went and showcased for the execs at the label. I graduated school a year early so I could do music, and it was super hard to adapt from a small rural town, to Los Angeles and New York. I had never seen a skyscraper! We’re so far away from the ocean back home, even. I was shocked...for three years straight!” Die Young’s vocal maturity and the nature of the lyrics belie the fact Roan wrote the song aged just 16. I have sneaking suspicion that as well as being influenced by Stevie Nicks and Karen Carpenter, Roan grew up listening to a lot of Lana Del Rey.
That reminds her of a time she was in New York showcasing for Republic Records.
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“Look at your mama, now she’s crying / Cause she thinks her baby’s dying / Don’t put up a fight, she just wants to hold you / And look cause your daddy, he hates lying,” she sings on Die Young. Looking back on the song now, Roan almost cringes at her younger self, and says she never listens to her old material. “It feels like a different person, honestly. It just reminds me – wow, I have come so far. That was me when I was a very moody, angry teen. Every time I hear that song or when someone brings it up, I’m like, ‘I still don’t even know how I wrote it, because I don’t even think I understood what it was about when I wrote it, fully’. I look at it now and I’m like, ‘Oh, I see what I was trying to get at’. But when I was writing it, it was just like screaming out, or something was ripping out my skin. That’s dramatic,” she laughs, “but that’s what it felt like.” Roan followed School Nights with a series of well-received concert tours, including US runs alongside Declan McKenna and Vance Joy. Still, the weeks and months that HEADLINER USA
followed saw Roan’s artistry wholly transformed, fusing boundless energy, nostalgic introspection, and theatrical power into a wildly original sound. And it’s all thanks to one wild night at a gay bar. Not long after landing in her new city, Roan found herself at iconic gay bar The Abbey – an experience that soon altered her entire trajectory as an artist. “All of a sudden I realized I could truly be any way I wanted to be, and no one would bat an eye,” she recalls. “It was so different from home where I always had such a hard time being myself and felt like I’d be judged for being different or being creative. I just felt overwhelmed with complete love and acceptance, and from then on I started writing songs as the real me.” Sounds like it was quite the night out. You may be picturing scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in The Hangover, but on that fateful, fabulous night, Roan hadn’t touched a drop.
“I was sober the entire night!” she insists. “I needed to experience it sober. I danced my ass off and I didn’t care; it was one of the most fun nights ever. It was shortly after I had turned 21 and I could finally go out. The Abbey was packed, there were go-go dancers on the table, and I walked in and it was the most spiritual experience. Everyone was having a great time; it was magical. I just felt like I belonged there, and that really changed my life. It’s something that I couldn’t really have experienced here in Missouri – in my small town at least. It was completely eye opening and changed my direction from that point on.”
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“ALL OF A SUDDEN I REALIZED I COULD TRULY BE ANY WAY I WANTED TO BE, AND NO ONE WOULD BAT AN EYE.”
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California, Here We Come
PINK PONY CLUB Her night at The Abbey inspired Pink Pony Club, a transformative, dreamy single that marked the beginning of a fresh chapter for Roan, not least due to the uptempo nature of the track and the hopeful lyrics: “I know you wanted me to stay / But I can’t ignore the crazy visions of me in L.A / And I heard that there’s a special place / Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day,” she sings on the single, which she explains was the result of a conscious effort to write something more upbeat: “And that took me about six months of failing; of writing session after session trying to write a happy song and just coming out with a sad ballad. I didn’t understand how to write a happy pop song, but I was tired of singing sad songs on tour. It just makes you feel sad after a show... you don’t feel super excited, and I wanted to dance and move on stage. I wanted to wear weird, fun clothes, and I felt like I couldn’t do that with Die Young. It just felt too dark, so I purposely was like, ‘I have to change, because this is not sustainable’. “I was just bored,” she furthers. “I wanted to push myself – I wanted to be bold and say things that might be a HEADLINER USA
little edgy. I come from a super conservative area where I wouldn’t even wear the things that I wear in L.A here in public – I would just feel weird about it. So I’m just going to be everything that I am in L.A, in my music. I needed to be myself and I wanted to feel theatrical; I wanted it to feel like a show for people. That’s what I feel like Pink Pony Club is doing and what my other music that will come out will do as well.” Although baring this daring new side of herself has been far from easy: “I was so nervous,” she admits. “I was crying before it came out because I just was going back and forth. I was embarrassed! My team is so good and they worked really hard on it, and I worked hard on it. I was scared because I felt like it wasn’t going to be accepted for some reason, or that people would hate me. I don’t know why I thought that! Even recording the vocals for that – I couldn’t have anyone looking at me because I felt so out of place. But I knew I needed to do it. It was just uncomfortable, but I’m so glad that I pushed myself because this is exactly where I want to be.”
EMERGING HEADLINER
If recording the vocals was difficult, this was nothing compared to the music video, which sees an apprehensive Roan (clad in a bedazzled cowboy hat, leotard, boots and fabulous fringed leather jacket) take the stage at a near empty dive bar – the only audience a few uninterested bikers. “We shot it pretty much in order,” she recalls. “That nervousness that you see is 100% real – I was absolutely terrified. I’m not a dancer – I’ve never been strong at it, and I just knew I had to just not care...but it was hard to not care.” Unfolding like a ‘what if?’ daydream, by the end of the video Roan has won the crowd over, and is joined by a guitar wielding drag queen and is lifted into the air by a few muscular leather-clad men. “When they were lifting me in the air it was my absolute dream come true! I’ve always wanted to do that. It was like my dream to lose it and dance my ass off...even if I look like a fool, I had to do it!” Roan says that songwriting is an emotionally exhausting process for her, but that it allows her to live out her fantasies:
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‘ooohh... me writing is me living my fantasies’. Pink Pony Club, for example is about being a go-go dancer at a club – that’s a fantasy of mine. But instead of doing it, I would just write a song about it. I get to live that experience through the song and when I’m performing it live. I’m such a romantic and just love fantasizing about people, so that’s a huge inspiration. It’s changed because I’ve let myself write bad songs, and that was really, really hard to get to because I’m pretty hyper critical of my art. I just let myself fail, and just know that it’s okay. That took a long time to get to.” Roan hopes that by sharing this bold new side of herself through her music, in turn her fans will feel that connection: “I just hope they feel something; that’s really all the goal is with my music: just to feel something in this wild world. And, hopefully – if they desire to – I hope they can understand me as an artist as well as a person. All I really want is to feel like I’m understood. If it helps them through something, maybe homesickness, or understanding queerness, through moving from a small town to a large city, or just feeling out of place...I hope they feel something.” PINKPONYCLUB.NET
“At first I didn’t really know why I wrote, I just did it because it felt like I should. Recently I was just like, HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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MITCH MCCARTHY
Mixing Drivers License
MIXING DRIVERS LICENSE
HEADLINER USA
how he used oeksound’s soothe2 plugin to mix one of the biggest songs in the world right now... McCarthy has kept himself very busy indeed of late, having been inundated with records to mix since the success of drivers license, and he’s very thankful for the situation he finds himself in. In fact, he admits
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Mix engineer Mitch McCarthy has worked with some huge names in the world of pop music, and just so happens to be one of the people responsible for mixing Olivia Rodrigo’s drivers license, which was recently announced as the longestrunning No. 1 hit on the Billboard Global 200. Headliner spoke to McCarthy about his process, and
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that working on the record has represented a complete turning point in his career. Starting out as a guitar player, McCarthy soon caught the recording bug, and was being shown different techniques on Pro Tools when the DAW first started to gain traction. He threw himself into learning everything he could about the recording process, eventually attending recording school in the San Francisco Bay area where he gained experience working with tape on large format SSL and Neve consoles. McCarthy then started his professional career as an assistant to songwriter and producer Mario Marchetti, who taught him the ins and outs of the music business, the record making process, and vocal production in pop music. He subsequently met his current manager, Ian McEvily, and was busy enough at the time to start mixing records on his own, which he’s been doing ever since. “It’s been a lot of time and patience, and just never really giving up,” says McCarthy. “I’m from the generation of people who work mostly in the box, but I think getting my hands on analog gear in recording school changed the game for me, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate both into my workflow. Over the years, I’ve developed a hybrid setup here at my studio, with specific pieces that I like to use to impart a certain vibe or color. “For quite some time I had a studio in the house that I was renting, but it got to the point where I needed to separate them. My studio now is in downtown L.A, just a block from Warner Brothers in the art district.” When it comes to his studio setup, McCarthy is a big fan of Dangerous Music gear, utilizing an Apogee Symphony as his main interface with
a Dangerous Convert-AD+. Most of his analog processing is on his master bus, so he also makes use of the Dangerous Music Liaison, “which is like a digital patch bay,” he explains. “I have all my mastering gear going through the Dangerous, and I can quickly audition them with the click of a button. “I’ll route all the outputs from my Apogee Symphony into the Dangerous Music summing box, and then from there that goes to the digital patch bay, where I can audition certain pieces. One of my favorites that I have here is the Hendyamps Michelangelo; if I get something that sounds way too
digital and harsh, I can immediately run it through this piece and it’ll impart some really nice color, as well as taming the high-mids a bit.” McCarthy tells me that he also has a Dangerous BAX EQ, an SSL Fusion, a Warm Audio bus comp, and a Manley compressor in his arsenal ready to be called up when needed: “Mixing is about the little details,” he adds. “If you can get an extra two or three percent out of the physical piece of gear, then I’m gonna buy it and use it.”
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Mixing Drivers License
CHANGING THE GAME A random internet search caused McCarthy to discover oeksound back when the company was brand new: “I was using multiband compression for a very long time to tame those high-mid resonance frequencies and harshness, but after downloading the soothe demo and putting it on my vocal, I immediately was like, ‘Okay, this just saved me hours of automation work,’” he reveals. “I think every single session I’ve received since has had soothe somewhere on there, whether it’s on guitar, vocals, or on the master. “I find that it works best with my workflow on acoustic or electric guitar, and then of course on vocals it’s a game changer, usually sitting last in my vocal chain after everything else. The interface is super easy to work with, and I love the oversampling feature - I think that steps up the sound completely if you have the CPU power to use it. It’s fantastic. I start with my master bus preset which, when used subtly, does something really nice across the master - just levelling off things that are poking out.” McCarthy already had a friendship with fellow songwriter and producer Daniel Nigro before the pair found themselves working on drivers license together, blissfully unaware that HEADLINER USA
the song would blow up in the way that it has. “I never get too tied up on that notion of ‘this is gonna be a big song,’ - you have to detach yourself from that mindset, because otherwise you’re always just going to be let down,” he shares. “It was just through the relationship between Dan and I that this came about, and now we’re trucking along.” McCarthy asserts that the track’s appeal is rooted in Olivia Rodrigo’s performance, more than anything: “When I got the session she sounded incredible already,” he recalls. “So it was more of an enhancing process of making sure the track breathes and that it’s dynamic. That’s definitely one of the comments I’ve been getting from fellow producers, mixers, engineers; that there’s just so much emotion in the song and it sounds so dynamic. I think what comes into play there is just a lot of automation. I have to give a lot of credit to Dan, whose idea it was to basically bring the vocal to the forefront. When you listen to the production, I think there’s only something like 20 total stems in the whole session, with very minimal compression across the whole track.
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Mixing Drivers License
“SOOTHE SITS ACROSS THE WHOLE THING AND GELS EVERYTHING TOGETHER IN A SENSE, ESPECIALLY WHEN SHE STARTS HITTING THOSE HIGH NOTES.”
“The starting point was the bridge because of all the low end information coming in. Then everything comes in and explodes, and it was important to get that sounding as big as possible. My typical approach is I try to start with the loudest part of the song and then work down. I ended up doing some additional vocal editing on Olivia’s voice using iZotope RX, cleaning up some background and spit noise with audio restoration. The emotion and the performance was already there, so it was part of my job to just not mess that up! “Dan has a specific chain that he uses and I will duplicate the track, start messing around with it and see if I can get it sounding better, which in this case I did. I used just a little bit of EQ with the Waves CLA-76, and the McDSP 404 multiband compressor, which when also used very subtly, controls the vocal and entire frequency spectrum. And then a little bit of de-essing.” The final piece of the puzzle for McCarthy was using soothe2 in a chain: “I started with the preset I always start with, which is in the new oeksound update, and then tweaked it from there. Soothe sits across the whole thing and gels everything together in a sense, especially when she starts hitting those high notes. There are some very harsh resonances in her voice and soothe really just levelled that out. “It’s super easy,” he continues. “I know that some mixers like to adjust the mix knob and kind of blend some of the dry vocal back in, but I just leave it at 100%, and then I like to adjust the depth. The Q Level parameter is a lot more narrow and I like to dial that in, so it just targets those HEADLINER USA
specific frequencies to kind of notch them out… I’m really big on that.” Drivers license is the kind of song that, no matter who you are or what your age, most listeners will be able to identify with through some type of past experience; the familiar process of heartbreak, rejection and healing: “I think it’s all relative to everyone, and I think the way it blew up on social media — like on TikTok — really caused it to snowball. It was also used on a Saturday Night Live skit and this accumulation of things made it take off. We were all just very surprised, but also super thankful; it’s been a humbling experience for sure.” While he’s unfortunately not allowed to discuss the details, McCarthy can confirm that Olivia Rodrigo’s album is indeed in the pipeline, and that he’s going to have a hand in its creation - exciting stuff. Until then, it will be interesting to see how many more records drivers license smashes as it goes from strength to strength; its melancholic tones and Rodrigo’s stunning vocals serving as an anchor for those in need of heartbreak music to heal the soul. I’m not crying, you are. MITCHMCCARTHY.NET OEKSOUND.COM
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EVANESCENCE
Without The Mask
Evanescence
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WITHOUT THE MASK Building up film music credits, releasing an album of songs for children, an electronic and orchestral remix album, spontaneously covering Italian artist Francesca Michielin, plus a global pandemic — a few of the reasons why Evanescence haven’t released an album of original songs in 10 years. But the wait is very nearly over. March 2021 saw the band release The Bitter Truth; their fifth record, with a particularly apt title in this era of misinformation and fake news. Headliner spoke to Grammywinning singer and songwriter Amy Lee about overcoming industry sexism to keep the band alive, why we should be very excited about their new music, and how a potential lawsuit turned into a collaboration with one of the UK’s top bands.
It goes without saying that Evanescence has been an unbelievable success. As the numetal sound of the early 2000s (which included the likes of Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn) appeared to be heading out of the door, in came Evanescence with a debut single that combined metal riffs, orchestral strings and female vocals – translating into international chart success. Bring Me To Life hit the top of the UK charts in 2003 and made the band unlikely stars on Top Of The Pops. Evanescence, then the brainchild of founders Amy and guitarist/ songwriter Ben Moody, were whisked
out of their home city of Little Rock, Arkansas and sent on a worldwide tour, which Amy describes as a “baptism by fire” for her stage fright – they had only played a few shows prior. Evanescence’s commercial success only continued with the release of more singles such as the monstrously popular My Immortal, and their debut album Fallen. With international sales of more than 17 million copies, it is one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century.
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This might all sound rosy and delightful, but only in more recent years has Amy gone public about some of the unsavoury things behind the scenes — their label at the time, Wind-Up Records, had tried to force the band to accept a full-time covocalist, who had to be male. Adding the rapped vocals on Bring Me To Life was revealed to be a hard-fought compromise to keep Evanescence alive. And despite this paying off commercially in a huge way, the group’s co-founder Moody then dramatically left the band midtour later that year when he and Amy could no longer see eye to eye creatively. I’m speaking to Amy via Zoom while she’s visiting her parents in Little Rock, where she’s completely snowed in. Starting with that life-changing and simultaneously tempestuous time in her life, I relate a personal experience from then: my first big concert as a teenager was Evanescence at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, mere weeks after Ben Moody had got on a plane. I’ll never forget the unforgettable moment where HEADLINER USA
the lights went out, everybody screamed, and the riff from Haunted shook everyone’s bones. Amy then appeared on stage, dark angel wings protruding from her back.
“I fought a lot of battles all throughout the years,” she says. “And it was always about preserving the integrity of my vision for the band and for my art.
“No way,” Amy says. “That’s awesome! Man, things happened pretty quickly for us. I was fresh out of high school, went to college for a couple of months. And then we got a record deal. I would have been 22 when you saw me! [laughs] I remember in those early days, I was fighting stage fright. We went and did some festivals in Europe, and actually in Japan, in that first year. It was so wild to stand in front of so many people and to see other artists on the bill that I had just been in my parent’s attic idolizing — suddenly we were peers in a way. That was a wild time.”
“What they really wanted was for us to hold auditions and hire some rapper-rocker guy to be in the band full time. And I went home for it! We left the place in L.A. that they’d put us up in. I thought, ‘Okay, I guess we’re moving home with our parents!’ We all drove home, with our heads hung, thinking the band was shelved.
That disagreement about whether or not Evanescence would be a female-fronted band almost saw the project end before it began. With Evanescence hot on the heels of some particularly testosterone-fuelled acts such as Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit at the time, it seemed Wind-Up feared Amy’s leadership wouldn’t appeal.
“Standing our ground like that was really hard, because it wasn’t like we had any other options. We didn’t have any clout yet. And then we agreed to the compromise to put a guest vocalist on one song. I still sweated it, because I knew it was our first single and my biggest fear was that people wouldn’t understand who we were. But people actually did listen to the next single and the next one [Going Under and My Immortal]. And we survived well beyond it. That let me get over that and let it go.”
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“I FOUGHT A LOT OF BATTLES ALL THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, AND IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT PRESERVING THE INTEGRITY OF MY VISION FOR THE BAND AND FOR MY ART.”
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I put to Amy my belief that in making that compromise, it’s very possible that female rock artists who followed her, such as Hayley Williams, have had an easier time in the music industry as a result. As far as we know, Paramore were never ordered to guest Fred Durst on any of their earlier singles. “That would be awesome,” Amy says. “But it’s hard for me to just accept that, because of all the women that came before me. I have been inspired by so many amazing breakthrough women in rock, especially in the ‘90s. In the alternative scene, there were women everywhere. It felt like the more unique and different you were from the mainstream, the cooler it was. “Which is why it was so weird to me in the beginning when it seemed like being a female was so different, and that was going to be an obstacle for us. But at the time there was a bit of a dip for women in rock music. So if that compromise helps people that came after me, then that’d be amazing. I met Haley and she’s incredible. She came up to me and told me that she had been inspired by me, and we hadn’t even been around that long. And then to see how far she has gone, and what an incredible artist she has become... I have watched things change in my industry, and in my genre over the course of the time that I’ve been doing this and it makes me feel really happy, inspired and empowered.” The two albums that followed, The Open Door (2006) and Evanescence (2011) kept the huge popularity very much alive and kicking, spawning more huge singles such as Call Me When You’re Sober and What You Want, two prime examples of the band’s trademark of combining chugging guitars, dark electronica and irresistible hooks in the verses and chorus. But that self-titled record was the last time we got a full collection of new Evanescence material. 2017’s Synthesis included two new songs, but was otherwise reworkings of HEADLINER USA
older songs such as Bring Me To Life (with only Amy’s vocals, as originally intended). With the group currently completed by Jen Majura, Troy McLawhorn (guitars), Tim McCord (bass) and Will Hunt (drums), I ask Amy if it feels mad that such a length of time has elapsed since 2011’s self-titled album. She does know full well the group’s ardent fans are champing at the bit for this new LP. “So much has happened in between,” she points out. “It’s always such an undertaking and never something that I can go into lightly. But it’s been great having all that exploration within the last 10 years between writing music for film, doing a kid’s album, reworking our old songs, and playing with a full orchestra on tour; we got to do a lot of really cool things. So this time, we were all ready for it.”
“IT WAS SO WEIRD TO ME IN THE BEGINNING WHEN IT SEEMED LIKE BEING A FEMALE WAS SO DIFFERENT, AND THAT WAS GOING TO BE AN OBSTACLE FOR US. ”
The Bitter Truth campaign led with the single Wasted On You, which is another fine example of Lee’s delightful hooks also being able to exist in that darker place of distorted guitars and synthesizers. And it’s very interesting to learn that for Amy, this song was her “trying to break a habit of trying to be overly complex in my songwriting. It really is a little out of character for us, for it to be almost just four chords for the whole song. I was sort of challenging myself, like, ‘what am I trying to prove?’ So many of the songs that I love and have loved throughout my life are simple like that, and it’s not about proving you’re some excellent songwriter through the crazy chords you’re using and writing it in five-four time. It’s about something coming from the heart.” Next up was the gloriously heavy The Game Is Over, and then third single Use My Voice. Not written as a political song, it just happened to be scheduled for a release close to the Biden/Trump US election, presenting a powerful opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. I discuss with Amy their deliberate approach to advocating for voter registration, rather than telling US citizens who they should vote for.
COVER STORY
“We got involved with HeadCount,” she explains. “They are a company that is all about making it easier for people to vote. It sometimes seems unreasonably complicated to track down all the info you need, like figuring out where to vote, especially in a pandemic. And this definitely wasn’t a year where we could just say, ‘whatever, it’s just between one guy and another guy’. It was so much more than that.” Evanescence were also in the (music) news recently for another reason entirely – it transpired that
Sheffield alt-metallers Bring Me The Horizon had accidentally lifted an Evanescence verse (from Never Go Back) and used it in their song Nihilist Blues, which features Grimes. At the time, several publications posted click bait articles claiming Amy had sought to sue, but the true story is quite different, and has a very happy ending. “The way the story really goes is they’re the ones that contacted us,” Amy says. “They said, ‘hey, we think we accidentally ripped you off, and we want to give you credit for it’. I
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remember thinking, ‘who are these amazing people? Who does that?’ The story everybody hears is always the other way around. And that’s when the conversation started around collaborating. My drummer, Will had been talking about being a fan of theirs for at least a year before that.” Which yielded the BMTH song One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death which features Amy.
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“At the time, I was actually feeling really stuck creatively,” she says. “And then (BMTH) sent that song to me, which was just this beautiful gift to have. So I put Evanescence on hold for a week and just really worked on that. And, man, I love the song. It’s not what I would have done, which is what I love about it. It empowered me to see that we had just finished something within a week. It just put me in a different headspace and then I was able to turn around and finish the part that I was stuck on for Far From Heaven.” HEADLINER USA
We’ve had to come to terms with some bitter truths in recent times, but the new Evanescence album offers up something infinitely more enjoyable. Make sure to stick it on and celebrate this band bulldozing past everything thrown at it, and as Amy continues to pursue film scoring, watch out for her name in the credits of films when cinemas reopen. Here’s to women in rock, getting out to vote, and happy endings. EVANESCENCE.COM
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Scoring The Vigil
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SCORING THE VIGIL
MICHAEL YEZERSKI
HEADLINER USA
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Christianity and horror films go together like prom queens and pigs blood, and have been arming priests with holy water and crosses since the genre hit the big screen. 2020’s Saint Maud proved that there’s still life in the concept yet, but what about Judaism-inspired horror movies? The Vigil might be the film to tip the balance. Michael Yezerski is a night owl. So much so, he’s technically a morning owl. There’s not many people that would happily volunteer to be interviewed at 1am, but for this composer, it’s the perfect time to catch him. “I couldn’t think of a better time, at least for me! I’m completely nocturnal, naturally. So this just works,” he insists from his home studio in L.A. The Australian native usually travels back and forth between L.A. and Sydney, but a certain international pandemic has put a stop to that over the last year. “I’ve had studios in L.A. and Sydney running almost concurrently, so working from home was no issue. People just seem a little bit perkier behind their masks now. It’s hard to describe, but for the first time in a year, I’m feeling optimistic.” While many composers grew up in musical households, this was not the case for a young Yezerski. His parents are Russian immigrants who were born in China, moving to Sydney in 1950. Setting up in a new country, they were focused on vocational pursuits when it came to how they made money. “Then I came along,” he chuckles. “I was incredibly willful, as I seem to recall. I was going after music at any cost. I remember just coming home
from music class in early high school, and starting to write something. My mom came in and was like, ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m writing music’. It just sort of kept snowballing from there.” Yezerski is a classically trained composer, studying a formal composition degree at The University of Sydney, then studying audio engineering for a year afterwards. He took to composing film scores “like a duck to water” – his first feature film was The Black Balloon (starring Toni Collette and winner of eight AFI/AACTA Awards, including Best Picture). With plenty of experience behind him now, Yezerski brought his signature musical intensity to recent horror film, The Vigil, which follows a young man who is tasked with keeping vigil over a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community, only to be targeted by a malevolent spirit. It’s fair to say that Yezerski’s haunting score for the festival horror hit stands out as a defining fright-factor in the film (and yes you will find yourself watching from behind a cushion) – but there’s so much more to the film than just scares. “This was an immediate yes for me,” recalls Yezerski. “My agent called me and she said, ‘it’s a horror-thriller set in the world of the Hasidic community of New York’, and I’m like, ‘Yes’. She said, ‘do you want to hear the rest?’ I said, ‘no, get me a meeting’. I really wanted to do this. I read the briefing material they sent me, and the question was posed: why have there been so many horror films that have explored the various denominations of Christianity and demons and devils and everything associated with Christianity, but there has hardly ever been a film that explores the dark side of Jewish mysticism? I’m Jewish myself, so this is exactly the question
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that I’ve been asking.” Despite the sinister subject matter, the film was actually a lot of fun to work on, says Yezerski, stressing how well he got on with director Keith Thomas and producers Raphael Margules and J.D. Lifshitz. “It was like we had known each other for years – we were telling jokes immediately, and it was an open, collaborative relationship, which led to great work. But the work itself, we take very, very seriously. So while the process of creating this fun and there’s some banter, the actual writing is really difficult. The material does drain you, because it’s not just a horror film, this is a film about grief, loss and the passing of a soul from one life into the next, with someone left behind. It’s not just a horror film, it’s actually quite a deep, devastating and hopeful film.” And it’s not just the paranormal element that lends itself so well to a suspenseful and compelling score in this film; what Yezerski found particularly fascinating was the role of memory – both personal and cultural – and how it can be both a blessing and a burden. “It can be horrific,” he stresses. “One can have horrific memories that one takes through life, especially for one of the protagonists of this film, who carries memories of the Holocaust. The film also explores issues of PTSD and grief, so it’s an exploration of trauma.” That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have its fair share of jump scares. “I do love jump scares,” he admits. “The Vigil has been called out for some jump scares. But I think they’re very necessary to the story that we’re telling.”
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MICHAEL YEZERSKI
Scoring The Vigil
I put to him that it must be hard to avoid horror movie cliches when composing? “Yeah, of course. That’s the hardest thing about film in general! There’s a push-pull between trying to be completely different, and trying to do things in a totally new way. We needed the music to do something specific here, and that’s always the creative tension when you’re working as a film composer. We want to give the film a unique voice and a unique sound, but at the same time, the music is in service of the film and of the story. “There are times when it needs to do something very, very specific and communicate to the audience in a way that they’re familiar with. You know when there’s a sound and it’s meant to scare the pants off you, there aren’t that many ways to get around making a sound that’s scary. I tried to do it in this film by infusing sounds from the natural world, like jackhammers, explosions and sound design elements mixed in with synths, distorted violins and guitars. So at least when one of these techniques sneaks up on you, it sounds kind of different, hopefully.” Horror films tend to follow an unspoken rhythm when it comes to the ebb and flow of ramping up tension and
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scares, followed by a period of some level of respite to ensure the audience doesn’t suffer from fright fatigue, and that the scares land. For Yezerski, it’s all about light and shade. “One of the ways that we get around what you call fright fatigue is we frighten the audience very, very quickly, and then we move on very, very quickly,” he reveals. “And like I said, it’s a film about grief, trauma, memory, and love, in a funny kind of way. The horror is woven into it, but we don’t dwell on it for longer than we need to. There’s so much depth in horror as to what you can do. “My favorite horror films go back to The Shining and Poltergeist, and everything in between,” he shares. “I love horror films that aren’t necessarily really tightly scored; there’s so many ways to score horror films, it’s such a rich tapestry. I guess that’s what I love about horror films, and dark, edgy films, in general – there’s so much creative license to play with musical effects in non traditional ways. It’s really fun as a composer.”
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“I LOVE HORROR FILMS THAT AREN’T NECESSARILY REALLY TIGHTLY SCORED; THERE’S SO MANY WAYS TO SCORE HORROR FILMS, IT’S SUCH A RICH TAPESTRY.”
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MICHAEL YEZERSKI
Scoring The Vigil
WHAT’S IN THE BOX? Thanks to Steinberg’s Cubase, the frights are reserved entirely for the film in question – Yezerski knows that this is a DAW that he can rely on. He uses his audio engineering background on every job he takes on – it’s interwoven into his compositional process, and he takes each part of the job extremely seriously. “I don’t submit work that doesn’t sound good. I don’t go, ‘well, this is just a bad demo, but can you imagine it like this?’ Everything that I submit to directors and producers needs to be the best I can possibly make it. I’ve always used Cubase; I love the program and it’s my goto composing DAW. It’s the fastest compositional tool that I have.” For Yezerski, it’s all about the familiarity and that all-important filmic sound. “I actually love the way it sounds. I’ve heard people say this before, but I really like the way that the bus routing works – I know it’s kind of crazy, but it has a sound to me when you send things to reverb on Cubase. It has a sound that other DAWs don’t quite have, and can’t replicate. If I set up the same reverb on Logic, it just sounds different to me on Cubase – it sounds wider and fuller. There’s something about the stereo imaging HEADLINER USA
which I really respond to; Cubase is not only the one that I feel most comfortable with, but it’s the one that sounds most filmic to me. “I find the way that plugins on buses react to their sources on Cubase to just be really smooth and very interesting, and apart from that, just on the technical side, there’s so much you can do in this application – particularly if you get under the hood,” he enthuses. “It’ll allow you to do anything; you can completely customize it to your instrument templates, or to any MIDI function you want. Plus, the reliability of Cubase is that it hardly ever crashes. You can bring it out and it’s going to sound the same as you left it the day before. When you’ve got a film composer on a crazy deadline, you just need that.” I note that it’s almost 2am for him now, so I’ll let him crack on with his next project – a new TV series that sees Yezerski collaborating with another composer, which is rare for him. “There’s nothing really unusual about the 2am hour for me; my best work is done between 10pm to 3am,” he smiles. MICHAELYEZERSKI.COM STEINBERG.NET
Creative Intelligence
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NORA KROLLROSENBAUM HEADLINER USA
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A Grammy Award winner and trained at the most prestigious school of Julliard, Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum has been carefully establishing herself within the world of film music, especially with her very unique work on the Quibi series, Don’t Look Deeper. Headliner grabbed a chat with Kroll-Rosenbaum about her stunning work on the series, as well as the locked-down composer life and her important work on the board of The Alliance for Women Film Composers. Kroll-Rosenbaum tells me that a short film she has recently finished composing for is being shown at a slightly unlikely venue: Walmart parking lots. “They’re doing drive-in movies in Walmart parking lots, which I think is an awesome idea, right?”, she says. “I mean, look, nobody can go to the movies right now. And people need entertainment. And they’re able to play short films before the main feature. And to play a DreamWorks short before is a wonderful way to bring an audience in. I never thought my music would be played in Walmart parking lots, but hey, a new careerhigh!” If one industry really did grind to a halt during the last year, it was the film industry. So of course, it’s been an interesting time for film composers. Kroll-Rosenbaum explains that “there’s really a logjam in film right now because we have the very end of things that were produced before Covid hit that are going through postproduction. And then there are just tonnes of projects in the pipeline. “But I will say, the opposite of bigbudget is people making things at home. I have so many friends and so many collaborators who have been in touch about films and projects that they’ve made in their houses, on Zoom, and just remotely while they’re social distancing. Some of my friends have really re-thought what can be made and how it can be made. So I’ve been contacted about a lot of projects
that are now ready for scoring that have been made during Covid.” Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper launched during lockdown; its stellar cast coupled with the very unique streaming service that Quibi offers (it’s completely optimized for mobile phones). It stars Helena Howard as high-school senior Aisha, living in near-future California, where she learns a dark secret about herself. She goes from dreams of graduation and college to suddenly doubting her own humanity. Don Cheadle, also starring as her father, brings some Hollywood heavyweight attributes to proceedings also. “The whole story revolves around Aisha,” Kroll-Rosenbaum says. “Notice the first two letters of her name are AI. She’s an artist, and she feels like an outsider. What teenager feels like an insider? None that I know of, right? I think that’s a universal feeling
that teenagers have. And I think it’s a beautiful part of life and that it’s something we can all relate to.” To find a unique angle for the series, Kroll-Rosenbaum spent a lot of time thinking about things that are organic: “Like the body, like your heart, like breathing, like any of the things that feel really organic; your skin, your hands, the sounds that you can make with your body. And then I thought about things that were not organic at all. And things that are artificial, and how could I create a score that was really not just a hybrid score, when there are a lot of hybrid scores already. I wanted to make it hard to discern between the two. There’s humming too, so it’s weirdly familiar music. But then at the same time, it’s always manipulated slightly.”
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Besides her musical output, KrollRosenbaum recognized that women are hugely under-represented in the film-scoring industry, so she did something about it. “My wife, Laura Cartman, along with Lolita McManus and Miriam Cutler cofounded the Alliance For Women Film Composers. And everyone would say, ‘there aren’t any women composers’. Well, that’s just not true. There are hundreds and hundreds of female film composers. And when the Alliance started, it was about naming people. “So our first mission was to create a directory on the website. We just needed to name them all. It sounds so HEADLINER USA
Creative Intelligence
basic, but it was literally like a phone book that shows how many women composers there are and all their credits.” As talk turns to Kroll-Rosenbaum’s studio, it’s no surprise that a familiar name for composers arises, Spitfire Audio. “I like Spitfire a lot,” she says. “Those are some beautiful samples in there, and this is coming from someone who is really picky. There’s so many orchestral libraries now, but I would say that Spitfire are probably king. It’s all beautifully recorded and robust. I still love their Albion collection, and I do really like their free LABS stuff too!
“There’s some wacky stuff in there, which I admire. But other key gear for me would be my new Arturia keyboards, and I also love working with Genelec speakers which I’ve had for a while now, and Focusrite for my interface – they’re a little new for me, but I’m getting there!” she smiles. NORAKROLL-ROSENBAUM.COM
Throwing a Lifeline
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THROWING A LIFELINE
LAWRENCE ‘FILET’ MIGNOGNA HEADLINER USA
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Headliner catches up with Nashvillebased live sound engineer Lawrence ‘Filet’ Mignogna about his use of DiGiCo consoles on the road, working with Alicia Keys and 21 Pilots, and how he’s been working hard to support the live events industry. Filet has mixed monitors and front of house for a number of big names in the world of music, but it’s his work with event technology provider PRG that has been keeping him particularly busy over the last year. In fact, December 2019 was the last time he was out on the road himself before he took the PRG job as audio projects manager, where he is responsible for coordinating tours, from staffing to system design and so on. Yet just a couple of months later, the show cancellations started coming thick and fast. “And then it was around April that our VP for audio put me in touch with people who started the Live Events Coalition, who at that point were in early talks about putting together a benefits show,” recalls Filet. “But first it was about trying to raise awareness outside of our industry bubble; I helped put together a 12 minute documentary video that got something like 80,000 views on YouTube within a week or two.” It was not long before Filet and some of the original members of the Live Events Coalition, along with some other like-minded collectives like WeMakeEvents, started working on Level Up, with the primary aim of raising awareness and funds for those struggling to find work in live events during the pandemic. Between sponsors and donations, the event in December 2020 raised an incredible $250,000, some of which went towards production costs (the majority of the gear and backline was donated), but most of which
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“ALL MY OTHER FRIENDS WERE WITHOUT JOBS, AND HERE I WAS STILL HAVING ONE, SO I ALMOST FELT OBLIGATED TO TRY AND HELP OUT IN SOME WAY.”
went to giving 200 workers paychecks just before Christmas. “Those production costs of putting on the show was part of the benefit, paying the people who are out of work right now,” says Filet. “There were just six of us putting this together; trying to find artists, lawyers, agreements, sponsorship which was not easy, especially during this time when a lot of companies and corporates have put a freeze on their budgets. Everyone was keeping their money close to them because of the uncertainty of the future, so at some points it was tough. “All my other friends were without jobs, and here I was still having one, so I almost felt obligated to try and help out in some way.”
BEFORE THE STORM Our conversation moves on to some of Filet’s favorite tours from over the years, before the pandemic brought the world to a standstill: “I mostly gravitate towards those special moments during shows when collaborations between artists have happened,” he tells me. “That was one of the things during my years with Alicia [Keys], guests were constantly coming up and jamming out - everybody from Santana and
John Mayer to Chris Martin and Adele. Those kinds of things really stick out in my head. When else are you going to have Damian Marley show up and just jam out with you? “When you’re doing tours, a lot of the time it’s the same thing day in day out, but switching it up like that, and having surprise guests show up on stage always makes it well worth it.” Rather impressively, Filet’s first monitor mixing gig with Alicia Keys was in South Africa for an AIDS benefit concert, in a big stadium that was recorded for MTV. “Miriam Makeba, who is known as Mother Africa, came out with Alicia and they did a version of Kumbaya together,” he laments. “It sounds hokey, but in Africa it was pretty awesome; it really was one of those hair standing up on your arm moments.” For all of his recent tours, Filet has been relying on a DiGiCo SD10 to mix monitors, although back when he first started at front of house with Alicia Keys and with Joss Stone, he was using the original D5 console. So while t’s fair to say then that Filet has witnessed the full evolution of DiGiCo desks, although has his workflow remained the same?
HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
LAWRENCE ‘FILET’ MIGNOGNA
Throwing a Lifeline
Pictured: Filet standing top left on tour with 21 Pilots
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“The SD series brought a lot of great changes with it; the multiband compression on every channel, to me, was a game changer,” he shares. “The SD10 — for clients, economically, size-wise — is just the most convenient. When I start a file for a new tour, I pretty much recall-safe everything. I take everything out of automation, start by building my mix, and then it’s just a case of figuring out when’s a good time to start the scene. “When I started with Alicia, it was a 12-piece band, and everything was very organic. I’d always have to be ready for changes, so I was always trying to be as flexible as possible - running scenes manually, spur of the moment, so when I approach scenes now, I kind of keep that same mentality.”
HEADLINER USA
Another feature Filet likes about the SD10 is the macros, in terms of how they streamline his workflow:
channels there, and that’s one of the great things about DiGiCo desks, you truly can put anything anywhere.
“You can put multiple changes that you might need on one button; for 21 Pilots where we needed to keep switching to the B-stage, I didn’t have that in the scene for the song. The macro button was programmed into where they would go out, but there were also times when I wanted to go out to the B-stage last minute, so the programmable macros are great for that.
While Filet is still at PRG, he remains hopeful that he’ll be able to do some more 21 Pilots shows soon, although he might have to find someone to take over if they go out on tour again... “The main reason being is that my son is living with me now, so I can’t really go out on tour over a long distance or for a long time. Hopefully I get to do a few shows here and there, and in the meantime, help other people gear up for theirs!”
“I always keep in the back of my head just trying to stay flexible, laying out the console bearing in mind what could possibly come up last minute, INSTA: @LAWRENCEMIGNOGNA or what certain artists might spring DIGICO.BIZ on you - extra mixes here, spare
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JEREMIAH FRAITES
HEADLINER USA
Luminary Compositions
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My conversation sees Fraites just settling into his new home city of Turin, the business and cultural powerhouse of Northern Italy. Something of a change then, from his native New Jersey, and Denver, Colorado where The Lumineers found success. “It’s really, really beautiful,” he says of his new home. “My understanding, and don’t quote me on this, because I’m an American, is that it was the first capital of Italy. So even before Rome, and I think even before Florence. But they
seem to have got a lot done because the city is extraordinarily beautiful.” Fact check: Turin served as the first capital of a united Italy from 1861 to 1865, so Fraites is quite right. As Fraites joins this new contemporary piano scene which will naturally draw comparisons with such luminaries as Dustin O’Halloran, Lambert, Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds, we talk about how this previously eurocentric sound is seeing new music of its ilk emerging in the United States. “I don’t know why I’ve always connected with Europe,” he says. “I lived in Kingston upon Thames about 14 or 15 years ago to study abroad. Something clicked inside my head. And with The Lumineers, we’ve been able to tour all over Europe and we’ve been very lucky to do so. I feel like that’s something that’s probably subconsciously seeped into my music.”
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JEREMIAH FRAITES Releasing chart-topping indie-folk albums that have certified triple platinum status, selling out Madison Square Garden and supporting U2 on tour — just a few of the things The Lumineers co-founder Jeremiah Fraites has temporarily left behind to release an album of intimate piano instrumentals. Piano Piano, which released in early 2021, might not quite have the commercial chart-topping potential of his band’s albums, but it’s an album that Fraites has yearned to release for some time. However, as the record amasses thousands of streams, it appears it’s striking a big chord with fans old and new.
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Lumineers records, or co-writing The Hanging Tree with bandmate Wesley Schultz and composer James Newton Howard for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt.1 (the most popular musical moment from the film series, and there have been a few). “I think the album is an ode to minimalism and simplistic ideas. I think every great idea starts with something minimalistic and something ideally distinct, and there’s some sort of recognizable DNA to the musical idea that you’re coming up with. And it was challenging after 15 years of writing music with singing and lyrics. But I’ve always loved what John Cage has said about silence: to not think of it as a negative space, but more of a positive void.” I tell Fraites that I was struck by some of the track titles on the album, and I learn his wife actually came up with the album title, Piano Piano.
It might seem a surprising move from the outside, but in fact, Fraites has certainly given us hints throughout his career that he’s had this in the locker; whether it’s instrumental interludes on HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“HONESTLY, I WOULD PLAY A SHOW AT A STARBUCKS RIGHT NOW. I WOULD BE WILLING TO PLAY THIS ANYWHERE THERE’S A PIANO.”
“Her being a native Italian speaker, it translates to little by little, because piano means many things in Italian. It means the instrument, it means the floor you’re on in a building (il piano). And then it also means slow. I really loved that. As an English speaker, I loved the playfulness of Piano Piano.” It’s safe to say at this point that there’s a lot of piano music going round, as Spotify playlists such as Peaceful Piano and Not Quite Classical become increasingly ubiquitous. Thankfully, Fraites is bringing something new to the table, as these new ambient piano pieces come with touches of his Lumineers backstory — subtle touches of drums and guitars. “I was a little bit wary of adding drums,” he says. “My wife told me to add drums to Maggie four or five times. And every time I’d say, ‘no, I can’t just add huge drums to one song, the album is gonna feel so random! When I did record the drums one day, I told my wife to come down, and I had a funny expression on my face. I put the headphones on her head and hit play. And I said, ‘you were right. This is awesome’.”
There are some delightful and subtle orchestral moments on the album, and I’m keen to know where these were recorded. London? Los Angeles? Prague? None of the above: “I got to work with a Macedonian orchestra. We had done a Leonard Cohen cover with them years ago for The Lumineers. It’s a 40 piece orchestra, and we used this awesome technology where you can see them, listen to them and work with them in real-time. I was in Denver at this point, so I was getting up to work with them at 6am for the time difference.” It perhaps goes without saying that Fraites isn’t alone in the musician community in that he’s champing at the bit to get out there and play live again. “Honestly, I would play a show at a Starbucks right now,” he says. “I would be willing to play this anywhere there’s a piano. Here in Turin, some of the airports and train stations have pianos you can play publicly. So maybe I could do a guerilla type show. But once it’s allowed, I would absolutely
love to do a bit of a tour around Europe and the United States with a few string players.” And of course, I can’t let him go without asking about any murmurings in the world of The Lumineers. “The last time was November, I flew back and we were doing some writing in Denver,” Fraites says. “Which was really fun and re-energized the soul. Amidst all this isolation, we found a safe way to do it. I think we’re going to try to write a lot more Lumineers stuff this year and take advantage of this off-time. For me, as a musician, so much of what I do is based around writing, and then eventually touring. And when both are sort of put on pause, it creates quite a strange sense of almost floating in outer space where you’re not quite sure what you even do for a career. So touring and writing times are to be determined, but I hope very soon!” INSTA: @JEREMIAHFRAITES
HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
FENDER
The Acoustasonic Journey
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As iconic guitar brand Fender enters its 75th year, we catch up with the company’s product manager for Squier and acoustics, Dan Grace, about the rise of the Acoustasonic Series - a unique and expansive hybrid guitar design fusing the best of the acoustic, semi-acoustic, and electric guitar playing experience in one instrument. The Acoustasonic Series kicked off with the Telecaster in 2019; the Strat came next; and the most recent addition is the Jazzmaster, which I’ve been enjoying playing for the past three weeks. At design stage, the big question, Fender’s Dan Grace says was ‘What would Leo Fender do?’ “We’ve had a pretty storied history of innovating electric guitars,” opens Grace. “We really felt it was about time for us to equal that innovation in the acoustic guitar world, where we’d not been as present. Leo [Fender] would not have used a traditional guitar design. He would have done something completely different. So the thinking was to take this to the drawing board, and a little outside the box. What are the problems [with acoustic guitars], and how can we solve them?” Some of the problems with acoustic guitars which Grace refers to include feedback, lack of versatility, comfort, and their susceptibility to ageing. “With traditional acoustic guitars, you see bellies pulling up at the tops, necks being reset – and that just happens, and they can be fixed, of course – but if you look at real old vintage instruments, they do need a bit of love,” Grace says. “So we wanted to find something that was a real solution to those problems, and that’s how the whole ‘what would the modern acoustic guitar look like?’ came from. And that was the birth of the Acoustasonic Series.” The Fender team wanted an instrument with multiple sounds, a slim and comfortable body, a control that would be intuitive for a musician to use, and a micro-tilt adjust on the back of the neck so the action could be adjusted with the neck angle
rather than the bridge. These were all nods to what they believed their fearless founder would have done. Conversation turns to the original Jazzmaster. It’s a model that’s never had the mainstream appeal of the Tele or Strat, but it’s a great guitar in its own right, and it played some serious catch-up during the ‘90s. “When the Jazzmaster came out in 1958 it was designed for jazz musicians, and they’re based on those traditional big boxed hollow body guitars that have a high break angle on the bridge,” Grace explains. “They’re super-loud, and really, Leo wanted to give it a similar playability to the Tele and Strat, but with more versatility. But it didn’t really take off at that point. It got adopted by surf musicians in the ‘60s, but the turning point really was the late ‘90s with artists like Thurston Moore [of Sonic Youth] and Kurt Cobain - they picked
these guitars up because they were super-cheap and misunderstood on the second hand market. Since they popularised it, there are so many people playing them today from Jim Root to Thom Yorke and Tame Impala. It has more mass appeal now, but not as strong as the Tele and Strat. It’s more for someone who offers something a bit more out of that mainstream. And the Jazzmaster now is an important part of our catalogue in most ranges. In recent years we have seen more and more people wanting something different.”
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I ask Grace why might someone go for a Jazzmaster Acoustasonic over the Strat or Tele alternative. “They do very different things,” he insists. “The Tele came first – and part of the design of that was that it was immediately playable by anyone who knows how to use a Tele. A fiveway selector switch and two knobs. Same with the Strat. We wanted to go with something that would work instinctively for anyone who uses a Strat. So the way the switch works on the Strat is slightly different. With the Tele, a lot of the work you do with the blend knob on the five-way selector switch. And that’s how I usually play my electric Tele. With the Strat, you tend to find players are way more heavy on the switch usage. “People want to wander around all over the place, not necessarily going for the controls – so with the Strat, if you use side B on the blend knob you can use each of the core sounds: a dreadnought, a small body acoustic, the body sensor that features in it for percussive sounds, as well as an electric clean and an electric dirty just by moving the switch. Of course there are electric sounds there and you can use that tone control, but we figured Strat players wanted that all in one.” With the Jazzmaster, Fender believed the user would prefer something a bit more weird and wonderful in terms of tone and playability. The size of
the guitar’s body shape is physically bigger and that meant at prototype stage, it had huge low end. And that meant Fender was able to do real justice to a jumbo acoustic sound: “With the Jazzmaster you have a great sound where you can blend between a massive jumbo sound all the way down to a folk body guitar – it’s a really wide contrast. Also, for a singersongwriter performer with vocal, the body sensor setting on here marries an auditorium, so if you crank it up you can get all those percussive sounds, but it you bring it down to the middle on the blend control you get this warm and very present sounding acoustic which really goes well with your vocal take, so it’s a nice little trick.” I mention to Grace that I was blown away by the massive gain when I cranked the Jazzmaster switch right up. This is due to its Tim Shawdesigned pickup, the Shawbucker: “The Shawbucker was designed from the ground up by Tim Shaw – our pickup designer extraordinaire – and you’re right, it’s like plugging into a big Marshall stack with a 4 x 12 cabinet on full volume; and as you wind the blend knob down, it’s just like using your volume control on the same amp. The driven sound on the Jazzmaster is outstanding.” It is indeed. I mention that I also love the plethora of clean sounds
achievable within the instrument. Ten different sounds in one guitar sounds ambitious, but Fender has really nailed it – the five-way selector switch (each of which has a pair of sounds within it) and blend control opens up sonic opportunities that I certainly wasn’t expecting. So how did they do it? “Our R&D team tend to say, ‘if it’s impossible, it might just take us a little longer to figure out’,” Grace laughs. “But it’s a very clever pickup system, and the first time I heard it I was amazed. In terms of the design, it was about three years in the making; much of that time was on the pickup system which was created by Tim Shaw [Fender’s VP of R&D], Brian Swerdfeger and [Fishman founder] Larry Fishman, who is the go-to guy when it comes to acoustic preamps. “The task set was 10 different sounds, infinitely adjustable with your hand with a five-way selector and two knobs to control it. And the real focus of it was to try and create something that any guitarist would understand. Because the second you start adding loads of sliders and extra lights, it’s something that a musician can’t instinctively use. And the real point of it was to have the fewest barriers to creativity as possible. Record off the bat without having to fiddle, or create something great live right away – that’s what we wanted.”
“WE WANTED THE ACOUSTASONIC GUITARS TO HAVE AS FEW BARRIERS TO CREATIVITY AS POSSIBLE...”
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“THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR INNOVATION...”
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BEHIND THE BRAND
“With the Acoustasonic, once you’ve played around with the settings, you just know where to go – click the switch, twist the blend knob and arrive at your chosen tone. And if you fancy a bit more bass, just twist the blend knob a little and you know you’ll get that bass. The whole focus is to use as much of your energy and brain power as possible for creating music.” Grace is just as passionate about Fender the brand as he is guitars in general – and that’s saying something: “It’s a fantastic company to work for – and being able to help develop guitars and continue to support musicians, making music more accessible to more people is exactly what we’re about,” he enthuses. “And now in our 75th anniversary year, when you look back at the amount of different instruments we have created, and the players we’ve served since – it’s actually changed the world. Right now we are seeing so many new artists and bands getting into playing these Acoustasonic instruments, and hopefully over the next few years we will see that translate into the output of the modern musician. We’re not talking about a seismic shift
here, but if you go back to the ‘50s and the introduction of the Telecaster and the effect that it had on modern music, and then later the Precision bass - the effect that the electric bass had on modern music, then it’d be good to see what the Acoustasonic influence will be on modern musicians; it’s all part of it, and why we do it.” And as the world begins to heal itself after the insane year that was 2020, Fender will continue to use smart initiatives such as Fender Play to support the creative community as much as possible across its digital platforms. “We embarked on a rather large push with Fender Play when lockdown struck, offering a free three-month subscription to hundreds of thousands of people because we thought it was so important to do,” Grace explains. “We know that there are so many people who try to learn how to play guitar - and it’s a shocking amount of people who stop. So Fender Play aims to try and help people continue with that and develop it into their passion; we can do that with simple lessons showing people how to learn songs
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- stuff that is actually inspirational for them to keep hold of and keep playing. Communicating with Fender fans and potential Fender fans - even just music fans more generally – is so important to us.” “And guitars are well cool, in my personal opinion,” concludes Grace with a smile. Agreed. “It’s a very interesting thing to get into and to focus on, and it’s seemingly neverending. And like we have proved with Acoustasonic, there is always room for innovation and something new around the corner to get excited about. So we will continue to be as communicative as possible with the world.” FENDER.COM
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JIM ROACH
HEADLINER USA
Consistency Is Key
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CONSISTENCY IS KEY
JIM ROACH Monitor engineer Jim Roach has worked with a diverse range of artists throughout his career, and so like most, found the complete cancellation of gigs and tours last year to be a real shock to the system. However, with certain parts of the US now starting to open up, he’s thankfully getting back on the road, and gearing up for a return to live shows with Justin Bieber using his JH Audio in-ears...
Despite spending around eight months at his home in Philadelphia when the pandemic first struck, Roach has been incredibly busy since November, and for that simple fact he is extremely grateful.
show, so that was kind of nice.”
He was in fact doing rehearsals in L.A this time last year with Justin Bieber, preparing for a two year tour cycle before the world was turned on its head.
“To some degree yes, but it’s a bit of a skeleton crew out there,” he responds. “There’s probably only about 20 of us in total including the band members; we get Covid tested every day, or at least six times a week. We’re still wearing masks as required, but it’s been nice to be around some people who are Covid free and to feel comfortable around each other again.”
“All of a sudden I found myself at home, but was fortunately in a position where I felt comfortable, for a while anyway,” begins Roach. “I haven’t been home for the summer in 15 years so that was really nice. “I’ve been back in L.A mostly with Justin Bieber since November, doing a variety of shows. We’ve done a couple of awards shows, some TV, some album promo, a lot of live stream video recording type stuff. On New Years Eve we did a live stream for T-Mobile on the roof of a hotel, and it was a full
I suggest that it must be nice for Roach to be out on road again, socializing with his fellow crew members having spent some unscheduled time at home:
Deciding quite early on that he wasn’t going to make a living as a musician, Roach took a job at a small regional audio company called Clear Sound just one week out of high school. He ended up working there for six years in a number of capacities, from prepping rental systems to doing actual productions, as well as working for a few years as a system installer. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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JIM ROACH
Consistency Is Key
“There’s quite a few good audio engineers in the touring world that have come from Philly, one of whom was a good friend of mine I met while I was working at that audio company,” he recalls. “After I left there, he called me and said, ‘Hey, you available this weekend? And do you have a passport?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m available. I have a passport,’ and he said, ‘Okay, you’re gonna come to this show with me in the Bahamas.’ “The tour manager called me and worked out the details, but I still didn’t know who I was going to work for! It wasn’t until we got there that I figured we were going to do a one off with Brian McKnight; I spent a year and a half with him after that, and the rest is history. As far as breakthrough moments go, I guess that was it. That was the beginning of my touring career.” Roach was exposed to all kinds of music growing up, from classical and jazz to rock and punk, and he feels like this has helped him in his professional career in terms of being able to appreciate whatever genre he works in. His resume speaks for itself... “There’s obviously different approaches to different styles of music, which I’m fortunate to have learned early on during my days at that little audio company,” he says. “I got to do a HEADLINER USA
“GET THE INSTRUMENTATION RIGHT AND GET IT RIGHT FROM THE SOURCE, AND THEN THE FRONT OF HOUSE GUY WILL HAVE LESS HEADACHE TO DEAL WITH.”
variety of different shows; I did a lot of jazz actually at the University of Pennsylvania, and that was invaluable. The way you approach miking and mixing jazz gigs drastically differs from a rock or an R&B gig, so I learned a lot there in that respect. “I approach most gigs the same, especially mixing monitors. Typically these days I only really mix in-ears; there might be a couple of wedge mixes here and there, but I haven’t done a full on wedge act in a very long time. I approach everything pretty simplistically at the start - picking microphones that I know and then if we’ve got the luxury of time, try a bunch of other mics until we find the right one. “I honestly have a minimalist approach; I EQ things as little as possible, I start with zero automation, and if a keyboard’s too loud on a certain section of a song or a certain song, then we work on that keyboard patch. I figure we take the time in rehearsals
to get the instrumentation right and get it right from the source, and then the front of house guy will have less headache to deal with.” Roach’s mixing console of choice at the moment is the DiGiCo SD7 Quantum, and he’s been using their desks for the best part of the last decade. He describes the SD7 as the most flexible console he’s found to date; he can set up the desk however he wishes and never feels restricted by channel count or bus structure, as well as being able to quickly adapt to changes that often happen in early rehearsals. He’s also been using JH Audio IEMs for the last 10 years, and has not looked back since: “I did a short stint covering for the monitor engineer for Janet Jackson in 2011, and they were all on JH,” he remembers. “The show that immediately followed was with Guns N’ Roses, who were also on JH. “My favorite part about JH is the service and the attention you receive as far as repairs and service goes, or if you need a pair of ears quickly, they can turn them around quicker than any other company I’ve ever worked with no matter where you are in the world, which is really helpful.”
ENGINEER
While room acoustics of course change from venue to venue, Roach relies on his JH in-ears to provide him with that “incredible consistency” of sound. With wedge mixes, room acoustics play a much bigger part in the equation, but through using his IEMs, Roach is simply glad that he doesn’t have to turn up a cue wedge loud enough to hear it, and risk having a headache at the end of the night. “I haven’t found anyone that’s more comfortable on wedges in a while,” he shares. “I think there are certain situations that could demand there actually be a speaker nearby though. For instance with Bieber at the moment, my bass player has a wedge, and it is kind of a glorified key bass amplifier because that’s the only thing that’s in it! But he can’t really get the sound or the feeling he’s looking for just out of his ears; he needs some air moving around him. And my DJ also has a wedge just because he likes the feeling of a wedge near him. So there’s certain
instances where wedges are necessary, but I’ve certainly done tours where there’s not a single wedge on stage. “With Bieber, everyone on stage is on JH Audio Roxannes, with the exception of the dancers, who are also on in-ears but a much less expensive earpiece because there’s so many of them.” I proceed to ask Roach if there’s any particular situations he can recall where in-ears have been absolutely crucial: “I can think of a few jazz festivals and whatnot that I’ve done in various places where the gear has been subpar, and the wedges alone wouldn’t cut it for the day, but our in-ears could offer that consistency,” he reveals. Before his stint with Bieber, Roach had worked on Janet Jackson’s live shows for around five years, and says she’s one of the most amazing artists he’s had the pleasure of working with. At
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the moment however, there’s more work to be done with the prince of pop, who has a gig scheduled in Atlanta on April 17. After that, Roach admits that he has no idea what’s next for him; I suggest a bit more well-earned time off perhaps... “Surprisingly, I won’t argue at this point in time,” he laughs. “To be honest, I’ve gone pretty hard for the last four months, as strange as that is during the pandemic. I think it’ll just be a matter of sitting back and waiting until touring can resume again. I actually love being in an arena full of people; there’s nothing quite like the feeling when the show starts and the fans are screaming, so I’m looking forward to that again.” INSTA: @JIMROACH01 JHAUDIO.COM
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STEVE ORCHARD
HEADLINER USA
Recording McCartney III
Photo: MPL Communications
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RECORDING MCCARTNEY III
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What does one of the most famous songwriters in the world do when forced to stay home for the best part of a year? Write a brand new surprise album, of course. This is exactly what Sir Paul McCartney did in 2020, using the unexpected downtime to write and record McCartney III – his 18th solo album – which serves as a continuation to his solo albums McCartney (1970) and McCartney II (1980).
For engineer, mixer and producer Steve Orchard (who works full time for McCartney), their lockdown work turning into a new album was definitely something that was not planned. “It was a surprise, really,” Orchard begins, speaking to me from McCartney’s home studio, Hog Hill Mill. “We worked in a very tight, controlled bubble. It was just me, Paul, and my colleague, Keith Smith. We ended up making an album which turned into McCartney III, but we didn’t know we were doing it at the time, because this bit of film music that we had to finish suddenly expanded into finishing up other songs that Paul had, and then recording some new ones. It ended up being a very productive, amazing time!” Orchard has been working with McCartney since his 2007 album, Memory Almost Full, where he
focused on the orchestral sessions, and was then invited to Hog Hill Mill to help with the recording and mixing. When Eddie Klein (McCartney’s recording engineer since the early ‘80s) retired, Orchard was asked to come aboard. “At the end of 10 weeks or so last year, we had the songs and we went, ‘actually, these all sit together really nicely!’ Paul came up with a really good sequence and we tried it and made a CD, and he took it away. That’s when he came up with the idea that this should be called McCartney III and said, ‘let’s put it out!’” For someone that has been releasing music since the early ‘60s, McCartney is as energetic as ever, and is forever recording or noting down ideas as they come to him.
to how full on things get sometimes, and how busy things are. I think Paul’s just always had this level of activity in his life where things are always happening. It’s never the same thing twice – he’s got an incredible enthusiasm for music and performing. I mean, even if he’s just putting down a shaker or a tambourine or something, you look at him out in the live room, and he’s really getting into it, he’s performing it, you know? It’s quite inspirational.” The unexpected nature of the project didn’t affect its popularity – McCartney III was met with widespread acclaim from music critics and became McCartney’s first UK number one solo album since Flowers in the Dirt in ‘89, and debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 albums chart.
“He’s extraordinarily busy and productive,” Orchard confirms. “It took me completely by surprise as HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
STEVE ORCHARD
Recording McCartney III
Photo: MPL Communications
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“He keeps me on my toes,” smiles Orchard. “For instance, on the song Deep Deep Feeling there’s a sound that sounds a bit like tremolo strings, but in fact that’s tape loop guitars that Paul did. We ended up making a couple of chords, but each chord would consist of four notes doubled, so it ended up being about 40 tracks of these tremolo string effects. We ended up doing different mixes where we favor different notes, or sometimes it would be mono, sometimes it would be stereo, or sometimes it would have all the notes in the chord – that was good fun! “You might listen to the song and think, ‘that’s weird; they’re odd tremolo string samples’, but it’s actually the guitars that he’s played HEADLINER USA
through his Brenell tape machine that he’s had since the ‘60s. I think he used it on The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows. He’d play a lick into the tape recorder, then I’d stop it and play it back at different speeds so you get different octaves and different timings. We use that quite a bit.” There is no set routine with the way Orchard and McCartney work together; the studio is set up just the way they like it, ready to bring every new idea to life. “Sometimes he’ll just throw something at me and I’ll think, ‘Oh, my God, how am I going to do this?’ I’ll figure out a way... thank God for Pro Tools! If we were doing stuff on tape…” he trails off. “It’s quite amazing what you can
do nowadays with changing tempos or keys, and editing. That’s why records used to take such a long time; I mean, they still take a long time, but that’s because you’ve got more options. When you’re on tape, you’d have to make a decision. To edit something or repeat something you’d end up having to copy multitracks and offset things with timecode, so it’s knowing when to stop tinkering.” With all of these tempting options available to polish and manipulate a track, I’m curious as to when Orchard knows a track is done?
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“I think there’s a tipping point with a mix where things can just be overdone, and I’ve been conscious of that with McCartney III; we were trying to keep things pretty honest and raw, and not overly tweaked. When we were doing the songs for the album, we would work on a song and we would get it to
a point where we felt it was completed. Then we would listen to the track and the balance and just make minor adjustments. “We did that at the end of the first session, and that’s how it evolved. I think it worked well because it’s not
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overly studied. It’s quite easy to do that now, particularly with technology and the amount of plugins that there are available; it can become a bit too much and you can lose the focus and go down the plugin wormhole!”
“You can never forget who he is and all of that, but when we’re in the studio, I just treat Paul as Paul.”
ONE MAN BAND Like McCartney and McCartney II before it, McCartney III features the man himself on all instruments.
I have to ask: how does one suggest to Sir Paul McCartney that another take is needed?
“It’s amazing, and he’s very quick as well,” notes Orchard. “If he’s got a new song, he’ll put down the main instrument first off – usually guitar or piano – and then we’ll have a vocal at the same time. Once that’s down, he’ll jump behind the drum kit or something, or we’ll do a complimentary guitar or another keyboard; there’s never a set routine. One advantage of having just one musician is you don’t have to worry about spill with other instruments! If you’ve got a band playing, you’ve the concern about the drums going down the vocal mic, which you have to try and control.”
“We’ve just got to be real about things,” Orchard says. “You can never forget who he is and all of that, but when we’re in the studio, I just treat Paul as Paul and try not to be overwhelmed by things. He’s a great musician and he realizes when something needs to be done again – he’s got a great intuition for things like that. I feel very privileged and honored to be able to be part of what he’s up to. I like to make the studio as transparent a process for him as possible so we’re not getting held up by the technicalities of something like a computer crashing.”
Orchard points out that often when McCartney plays a song in the studio, it’s the first time it’s ever been played or performed, so some songs take a little longer than others to come together. “Other times, it’s just a straight off the cuff thing – if it’s got the vibe. On Lavatory Lil, the vocal on that was completely live and in one take. On Women and Wives the voice and the piano went down together, live. But then Deep Deep Feeling was quite constructed with the backing vocals and all the different arranged parts that we were doing. It’s never the same.”
On working with a musician who famously had one of the most well known songs in the world come to him in a dream, Orchard says no day is the same: “Paul’s got a great intuition and radar for all of that sort of thing. He always surprises me with what he comes up with, and then the approach and direction it takes. It’s never what you’d expect, he always takes something slightly off angle and comes at it from somewhere else. It’s quite refreshing to see this and be part of it.”
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STEVE ORCHARD
Recording McCartney III
Photo: MPL Communications
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Hog Hill Mill As you can imagine, McCartney’s home studio is full to the brim with an eclectic mix of instruments and production kit, including a huge 60-channel VR60 Neve V Series desk. Right after finishing school, Orchard cut his teeth as a runner at PRT Studios, which he remembers had a 1073 Neve studio; then he did a stint at AIR Studios, which houses the legendary vintage Neve console, designed in 1977 and destined for AIR’s new facility on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, which Orchard was lucky enough to visit. George Martin was heavily involved with Rupert Neve in the design process of this radical new desk.
“That one went into Studio One at Abbey Road, which was quite controversial at the time,” he recalls. “They ended up having the SSL for a while, but then decided to go for the Neve because it’s a bigger, more flexible desk. Paul loves that sound as well, as we all do. It’s a superb desk – the flexibility of the V Series when they first brought it out was amazing! You can swap anything within the channel as opposed to it being a global mode switch: you can swap individual channels and processing, so it’s very, very flexible. The desk is absolutely full, and then I’ve got other preamps set up as well.”
“It’s just quality, quality sound equipment with Neve – it’s always well made. It sounds great and it’s always got a nice depth to it. Neve is a firm favorite of mine, I have to say.”
On the V Series desk, McCartney in the past has said: “I’m not technical; I’m hopeless about technical things, so I need really good engineers to help me on this. But I know it sounds good, you know? It’s got a lot of knobs, a lot of buttons, and it’s wonderful.”
Orchard discloses that when McCartney’s home studio was first built, Klein first used Abbey Road’s very own SSL desk.
“Yeah, that’s about right really,” Orchard says, good naturedly. “He records his demos on his iPhone now though, which is a good step
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because he used to have a cassette dictaphone. He’s entered the digital domain, which is cool! You’ve got to use what you have the best that you can really. Down here we’ve got everything set up on the VR60; I’ve got things on mic inputs, line inputs, sharing on channels... but thankfully because it’s only Paul recording at once, that facilitates a lot more freedom and flexibility with it. So although it’s a 60-input desk, it’s probably more like 80 inputs because things are on line inputs and mic inputs, and you just locally swap them depending on what’s going on.” Hog Hill Mill is also home to six Neve 1081s and four 1064 vintage modules – some of them feeding directly into Pro Tools as there is no room left on the VR60 – plus a 33609 stereo compressor. “They’ve all got their roles – each module, and the old 1081s have got a lovely character to them. I think it was in the early ‘90s when we got the V Series down here, so I guess it’s become vintage now! But it’s a bit more precise; you’ve got a lot more
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scope with a parametric EQ, whereas the 1081s have more of a fixed band and you have to tune in what frequency you want rather than it be sweepable – and the Qs are preset, so it gives you different results. The preamps sound different when you drive them or overdrive them, which I like to do sometimes because you get a different character – it’s like a different instrument, almost.” Orchard is a big fan of the depth of the sound when it comes to the vintage modules: “They’re a good size, too; when you put a mic through those, they sound great. You’ve got an instant vibe; it’s correct and you’re not searching for something. It’s all about using things that are going to give you that result – it expedites the whole process. You want the stages of everything as good as possible. So you start with a nice source instrument, a goodsounding guitar, and then a nice mic in the right position into a great preamp with a bit of EQ sometimes, although I tend not to EQ too much. I do that as a corrective thing as and when, rather than a default. If you start with that signal chain and that process and get things as good as you possibly can throughout each stage, then you end up with a better result. It always pays off and you end up with a more satisfying recording.” Orchard adds that he also uses the 33609 compressor on McCartney’s mixes “an awful lot” – particularly as a stereo compressor. “I use it for recording as my primary thing. It’s a favorite stereo compressor, which I love on the piano, on acoustic guitars, on the Rhodes, or whatever we’re doing at the time. If something needs a nice bit of controlled, tasty compression, I dial it in - and it’s great for extreme compression. It’s just a super useful tool, and a firm favorite of mine.”
Orchard also uses two AMS DMX 1580S stereo microprocessor controlled digital delay lines and an AMS RMX16 reverb unit. “They’re still classics – I love them! They’ve been around for years. They’re a familiar piece of kit with a great, classic sound, and we still use them constantly. The AMS delay is great for slapbacks, rather than just straightforward repeats – there’s a nice tone to it. When you go through the AMS, it’s just got something a bit extra about it.” Hog Hill Mill is also home to 10 original Focusrite ISA 110 mic pre/EQ modules that Rupert Neve designed, which Orchard uses a lot as well. “They are tremendous-sounding units,” he enthuses. “Rupert designed them when he first left Neve and he started Focusrite – these are from that era. I love them; particularly on drums and on vocals – so I use those very regularly. They’ve got a nice versatility in the EQ and a lovely broad tone to them. They have that big Neve sound with a similar characteristic to the vintage modules, but slightly different.”
Orchard shares that they were another key part of the McCartney III album: “They’re integral to our set up; I’ve got a lot of the drums going through them, and I’ve got the vocal channels going through them, so they played a big role. I always really loved them on bass drums and snare drums and stuff; I used to use them on those at AIR studios as well. They were here before me; I think they’ve been part of this setup since when the Neve desk was put in. But if I had had the choice, I would have certainly gone for them.” With 2020 firmly in the rearview mirror, Orchard is grateful for the positive reviews their surprise lockdown project garnered. So are there any projects (surprise or otherwise) currently in the works? “Well...there are several things in the pipeline, but I can’t say what they are, I’m afraid. We’re always busy,” he grins. STEVEORCHARD.COM AMS-NEVE.COM FOCUSRITE.COM
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AUBREY WHITFIELD
Learning Curves
LEARNING CURVES
HEADLINER USA
It’s been almost a year to the day since I last spoke to Aubrey Whitfield when I catch up with her to reflect on a year spent in lockdown, and how it has affected her work as a producer, songwriter and musician. Always one to plan ahead and adapt to changing circumstances, Whitfield
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On International Women’s Day, we caught up with record producer, songwriter and musician, Aubrey Whitfield, who shares how she’s adapted to remote working, why she champions the important role of women in music, and why NUGEN Audio’s MasterCheck plugin has changed the way she works, forever.
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(who can normally be found at the Ten 87 studio complex in Tottenham, London), has created a fully mobile production setup in case anything like this happens again in future, or if the reality of working in commercial studios continues to raise social distancing issues.
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“A year ago when we went into the first lockdown, I started to panic thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can’t access my studio...I’ve got tonnes of tracks I need to produce, I won’t get my income, it’s all going to fall to pieces’,” she begins, frank as ever. “I needed to access my studio so I thought, ‘I’ve already got a really good MacBook here which is just as good as my studio computer, so I’m just going to make an exact copy of every plugin and every virtual instrument that’s in my main studio on this MacBook so that I can move anywhere and be able to produce’. It’s always good to have a backup so that you can continue your business.” Whitfield has used the last year to write some songs for TV and film, and has had a blast doing it. “I wish I’d done this earlier in my career! But I probably wouldn’t have got those opportunities earlier in my
career,” she considers. “I’ve now got them because people can hear my skills and my experience, and that’s taken some time to develop. What’s really good about it for me is that you get a brief and you have to stick to that brief, but it’s mostly focusing on the songwriter, and that’s what I feel is my main skill. When I was a kid, I was only interested in songs; I wasn’t interested in singing or producing or mixing, I just wanted to write songs. As I’ve become a producer, that’s got lost a little bit because I’m mostly producing other people’s songs. So to be able to have the opportunities to write the songs and produce and mix them as well is quite a hefty job, but it’s great.” Whitfield had an unconventional and rocky start to her career in music: although she has worked with artists including Kelly Clarkson, Soul II Soul, Little Mix and James Arthur, this almost wasn’t to be, as for the
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majority of her adult life she worked for the UK Government’s Home Office where she designed the UK’s alcohol policies, travelled the world as a Private Secretary to a Government Minister, and advised the British Prime Minister on international threats to the UK. Before this, Whitfield set up a recording label, but the more in demand she became, the more the pressure piled on. At the height of its success, she made the difficult decision to close it down. “I was 23 when I decided to close down this record label that I’d been working on for three or four years, and it had become quite successful. It got to a point where, because I was young and not really planning my business properly, I’d taken on too many clients and just couldn’t cope with it,” she recalls.
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Learning Curves
“Inevitably, once you close down something that’s as big as that, there’s going to be a backlash. I ended up losing everything. I lost my home, I lost my car, and lost literally everything in my home. I had to sell my studio, and I was getting death threats and all kinds of threats from clients who had lost their money through the label. I was only 23, and off the back of that I decided I wasn’t going to do music anymore. That’s why I ended up working for the home office for 10 years, but I was still doing music throughout that time I was there. “I’ve learned to approach things differently now,” she shares, now coming from a place where she’s thriving in the music industry. “When you fail at something and then you get back up again and you keep going, it shows resilience. I’ve developed so many other skills from my experiences, and I know what to do and what not to do. I know how the industry works now, so I’m glad it happened to me because I probably wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t experienced that side of the business and understood where I went wrong. Failure is often an important part of success. It was a tough time for me, but it worked out in the end.”
WOMEN IN AUDIO It’s no secret that men dominate the industry when it comes to producing, and Whitfield does all she can to promote the important role of women in music, and in particular uses her Instagram account as a platform to educate her followers on everything from production tips, to the unseen parts of her role as a producer – and everything in between. “I think 80% of my Instagram followers are male,” she estimates. “So I’ve only got 20% that are female, but I think it’s important to educate men as well around the role of women in music. HEADLINER USA
“THERE’S NO REALLY BIG FEMALE SUPER PRODUCERS OUT THERE YET, SO WE’VE GOT A LOT TO PROVE.”
Before lockdown I was going to local colleges and talking about music production, and I was seeing a few more women on those courses, which is good. When I was younger, there were no women on those courses! “There’s so few female producers out there that we’re not as visible, but in some ways we do stick out a bit more, because there’s less of us,” she weighs up. “At the same time, there’ll be occasions where people are sending me messages saying, ‘I want to work with you because you’re a female producer; I’ve not been able to find one anywhere’, so I think those few female producers have a role to play in promoting their experiences and encouraging others to come forward. There are many talented self-producing female artists out there who could be great producers, but they don’t consider that transition into producing for whatever reason. It’s good for us if we can make them realize that they could go on to produce, and that it’s going to be a safe, productive and creative environment for them.”
Whitfield shares that overall her experiences have been positive (aside from the odd internet troll), although there have been occasions in the past where she’s been in a commercial studio with a male client, and the engineers assumed that the client was the producer, and her the artist: “It’s just an automatic assumption, and things like that are quite frustrating,” she shrugs. “It feels like we’re being judged because we’re female; there’s no really big female super producers out there yet, so we’ve got a lot to prove. But it comes with confidence and experience. Compared to where I was three years ago, I would now feel competent to go into a studio, sit behind a desk with a load of men in the room and feel quite confident. If we can just feel confident in ourselves and not give in to that imposter syndrome, we can do anything.”
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that I think every producer should have if they’re going to be doing mastering, and it’s something that I wish I’d done earlier in my career. It’s going to be quite an important plugin for me now going forward.” All major online services encode music, using different specs and formats depending on the playback device, the connection speed, or even whether the user is a ‘basic’ or ‘premium’ customer. Hot mixes can introduce true peak overs that will clip on playback. Whitfield noticed how MasterCheck detects these errors, allowing her to hear obvious frequency masking and other artefacts, as well as giving her some food for thought:
MASTERCHECK Just prior to our interview, Whitfield was given the chance to try out any of NUGEN Audio’s range of plugins. MasterCheck was the one that immediately stood out for her, and is what has been missing from her arsenal of production kit. MasterCheck is designed to act as the complete optimization solution for today’s delivery services – essentially it’s a plugin providing the tools to make sure music reaches the listener as intended. As all producers know, streaming apps, download stores and podcasts all use data compression, loudness normalization, or both. These processes can affect a track in undesirable ways: your loud, punchy mix could end up quiet and flat, or suffer clipping and distortion. MasterCheck reveals these problems ahead of time, and enables producers to deliver masters perfectly tuned for specific playout systems, as Whitfield discovered: “I’ve had instances recently where I’ve produced, mixed and mastered a track – and I’m not a mastering engineer, I’d like to point out – but I’ve got basic knowledge. It’s important to make sure that your master is compatible with streaming services like Spotify and Apple, who use all kinds of different tools to make sure that all of their songs sound as they should. “What I like about this plugin is that it will help me test my mixes and masters and make sure I can hear what it’s going to sound like on Spotify and Apple and YouTube etc., and that it’s not clipping and it’s at the right level. It’s something
“Where it’s been particularly useful for me is that we have this loudness war thing where artists want their songs LOUD, and you could make a really, really mediocre song sound good if it’s loud, because everything sounds loud. And of course, what these popular streaming platforms do is they have a level that the volume shouldn’t go above, and if your master goes above that level, they’re going to compress it and take it down. I think I was kind of guilty of that, because my masters have been quite loud and they’ve been going over this level that Spotify etc. have set, and they’re compressing my tracks down and reducing the volume of it. That’s what I’ve learned by using MasterCheck, which is great because that means now I need to look at my gain stage and make sure that my master volumes are not going above that level. That actually is quite a huge thing because it’s going to change all of my songs going forward; it’s going to change all the structure of all my levels. “I can really drill down into the nitty gritty of the masters; it’s going to be on every master channel that I’ve got now,” she adds, on a roll now. “Everyone needs to have this kind of plugin; it’s so important because all of our songs go out on all of these different platforms, and we need to make sure that it’s compatible with all of them. Otherwise, it could affect how our mixes and masters sound, and that’s not good advertising for anyone!” Whitfield has got a number of projects on the go at the moment, and has just launched The Producer Club on Patreon for producers, artists and mixers, where she will share detailed articles on producing, mixing and “careerbased stuff”. Think of it as a more in-depth version of her Instagram page, which is pretty thorough as it is. Fingers crossed the next time I catch up with Whitfield it is outside the confines of our respective homes. AUBREYWHITFIELD.COM NUGENAUDIO.COM
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Listen to Teacher
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JONATHAN WYNER
HEADLINER USA
LBY RAM S CO
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As director of education at iZotope, current president of the Audio Engineering Society, and described by his colleagues as a mastering legend, Jonathan Wyner’s finger remains firmly on the pulse of the audio technology industry. Here he discusses the emerging opportunities to connect with users in exciting, unexplored ways, and how he continues to stay at the bleeding edge of music production and education initiatives. When Wyner first started out as a mastering engineer — for which he has historically been known best — he found the latest audio technology landing in his lap on a regular basis. Add to that his involvement as a producer and composer, and he had soon discovered his true calling; the music he was listening to from a young age encompassing the use of technology as part of the expression and musical vocabulary that started bubbling up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. “I’ve mixed records using older technologies like tape, and just admire the engineering and the sound of the tools,” Wyner begins. “But I don’t have any great sense of nostalgia or affection towards that; I don’t feel the need to hold on to the old ways of doing things. I’m always interested in unlocking new possibilities that result in either better ways of doing things or new creative expression.” Having been on the company’s radar for a number of years, Wyner was hired by iZotope to help formalize one of its core values: education. For iZotope, the notion of education is really about helping people get insights into their work and learn to do it better. As director of education, this has meant a number of things for Wyner, who has made
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“If we can collaborate with the technology, and if the technology becomes one of our partners in doing the work and driving insights, then that’s really, really exciting.”
himself resourcefully available as an educator and subject matter expert in mixing and mastering, restored aspects of the company’s development and product management teams, and helped to produce educational series like ‘Are You Listening’, which focuses on mastering. He’s also nurtured a network of relationships with various universities and colleges, having taught music production for over 35 years, most recently as a professor at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. “My work around education manifests slightly differently depending on what quarter of the year we’re in,” he explains. “In some ways, the holy grail would be to have products that educate people as they’re using them.”
I joke that if this was the case, surely Wyner would be out of a job..? “In a sense, I’d be happy to be if it means that I don’t have to grade papers or masters anymore!” he responds. “But on the other hand it’s quite the opposite, because when you design a system that’s going to represent best practices for the user, that has to be designed by people who understand what best practices are, and who are well suited to curating the user experience. “If we can collaborate with the technology, and if the technology becomes one of our partners in doing the work and driving insights, then that’s really, really exciting.”
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this set of offerings is.) Equally as robust is iZotope’s communication with beta groups and research teams who are conducting user interviews, and helping to drive these initiatives forward. One of the main trends Wyner sees currently is the convergence of various different workflows: “Understanding the relationship between the work of a producer, mixing engineer and a mastering engineer etc. is something that’s important to the modern creative, and the products should support that,” he says. “So we built a technology that allows our mixing suite to communicate with the mastering tools, and allows users with problems that need solving to get some insights like, ‘is this a mixing issue? Is this a mastering issue? Do I need to turn down the bass? Or do I need to remove bass?’ and so we’ve tried to facilitate that convergence.”
TOOLS OF THE TRADE iZotope as a company recently began transitioning to a subscription-based model, creating new opportunities to bring educational efforts into the relationship with its users. Rather than simply offering the sale of products, the company is looking to deliver ongoing value, which could be in the form of a new experience or various learning resources, and Wyner encourages me to keep an eye out for some new developments in this space. “We have something like 900 articles focused on different topics,” Wyner adds. “Some of them are very narrowly focused on things like, ‘how do I deal with masking in a mix?’ while some are more tangentially focused around things like room acoustics, as we don’t necessarily provide tools to HEADLINER USA
help people address that directly, but recognize that it’s something our users struggle with.” A few years ago, iZotope released an ear training practice tool and interactive web-based learning experience called Pro Audio Essentials, helping users to connect the technical language with their understanding of what they’re hearing and their sense of aesthetics, and get an overall insight into the ecosystem. Another of these tools from recent years is Tonal Balance Control, which Wyner describes as a new way of helping people get a sense of spectral distribution in finished recordings that have been commercially successful. (Simply head to the Learn section of iZotope’s website and you’ll see just how robust
In a very recent move, iZotope also announced an alliance with Native Instruments to form a new music and audio creator group, and I’m curious to find out what form this partnership might take. “We’re really looking forward to learning from the NI team; being able to tap into their way of approaching composition and the workflow, and marrying that to our expertise and signal processing on the production side,” shares Wyner. “There’s been some initial thoughts about ways that we can collaborate. They do some things better than we do, and vice versa, so we’re looking forward to learning from each other and working together, although I don’t have specific programmes to announce yet.” It looks like we’ll have to wait and see what this exciting new partnership between these two music production heavyweights has in store…
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POSITIVE EQUITY In the meantime, Wyner has also been heavily involved with the Audio Engineering Society, having started his tenure as AES President on the first day of 2021. One of his top priorities has been around the notion of equity within the organization, and indeed at iZotope itself: “We need to do better in our industry to lessen friction for people from underrepresented communities who either want to learn or have access to opportunities, and also shine a light on the work of those people,” he explains. “There are so many versions of this dynamic and issue that ultimately need to be addressed, so we’re working a lot on collaborating and supporting and learning from people about what the challenges are and seeing what we can do. “For my part, I’m just trying to be as good an ally as I can for those who really deserve as much access as anybody, whether it’s to information, or opportunities, and so on. So that’s been a big focus on top of creating interesting programming and making sure that we’re reflecting the interests of our membership and the activities. The change doesn’t happen overnight, so one has to stay committed to it.” Wyner rather reluctantly uses the word synergy to describe how all of his different roles inform each other,
from his best-practice focused teaching at Berklee College from a professional standpoint, to his work at iZotope, which is inclusive of a much broader range of creatives, to his role at the AES, which encompasses all manner of music production, manufacturing, audio engineering issues, and more. “That, to me, is kind of an expression of what my career and interests are, so I feel very fortunate that I can bring those different perspectives to bear into any conversation around any one of those loci,” he adds. “Audio engineering especially is a very, very dynamic place to be, with so much development taking place now around immersive audio, machine learning, audio development in browsers and distributed processing in the cloud. “I think five years from now we’re going to look back and see a number of developments that we couldn’t have possibly imagined,” Wyner concludes. “We’re [iZotope] going to have some announcements in the next month in the diversity and inclusion arena, and hopefully by the end of April we’ll have some exciting new things to offer. We’re feeling more and more like a global organization, and it’s really fun to get connected with people all around the world.” IZOTOPE.COM
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FENCES
Tattooed Troubadour
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FENCES “There’s almost no point to be in New York or Los Angeles right now, you know?” says Christopher Mansfield. He’s the singer, songwriter and figurehead of the hugely-hyped Fences, who have drawn favorable Bon Iver comparisons for some time, and were once produced by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara. Headliner converses with Mansfield as he gears up for the UK re-release of his latest album, Failure Sculptures.
I kick off our conversation about whether US-based musicians still have to live in either New York, Los Angeles or Nashville in order to ‘make it.’ It’s worth listening to Mansfield, as he’s lived in all these places. “And there were times that it was really helpful, particularly in Nashville, with so many studios and musicians. Music was almost the first language
there; almost everybody you met was a great songwriter, and it’s similar in L.A and in New York. But now, all the stand-up comedians are doing podcasts, people are doing YouTube channels, and musicians are just recording remotely at home.
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“So it seems to me we’re breaking away from the idea of needing to be in certain cities, and who knows if a lot of these cities will ever fully recover from the pandemic? If we go fully back to normal and have felt a little bit of success in this, I don’t know if someone’s gonna want to move from their place in Montana back to L.A if they’re already making music at home, have a podcast and are selling merch. I think that this is showing people there’s a lot of holes in Hollywood and the music business. It shows we do have the power to do what we want to do.” Mansfield was born in Massachusetts, and perhaps not immediately evidenced by his folky tunes today, attended the highly prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“I think it would be more something that other musicians could probably hear,” he says. “It’s not obvious because I’m not playing jazz fusion or progrock. The music doesn’t necessarily sound complicated, but there are a lot of little melodic movements. There’s some slick stuff in there that I think another musician might say, ‘oh, maybe you do have a bit of knowledge of music theory’.” Mansfield’s musical journey began all the way back when artists were still being discovered on Myspace. And it just so happened that his music was heard by Sara Quin from Tegan and Sara in 2009. I let Mansfield know that I’m thanking goodness itself that he still had his Myspace music profile up at this point, for it to be discovered.
Not that Mansfield had any such expectations, as for him Myspace was the only place to host music that he was aware of. “I don’t recall that I had any sense of trying to get famous. I mostly just put it up so I could have a place to show my friends. Before that I was burning CDs and writing on them with a Sharpie and handing them out to my friends. So it was really revolutionary to me to be able to upload music and my photos and not need someone to do that for me. When Sara hit me up, I honestly thought it was a prank!” You’ve probably got a sense by now that Mansfield is someone who has moved around quite a bit — and it was his move to Seattle, Washington state that saw the forming of another highprofile friendship, with chart-topping rapper Macklemore. “Macklemore found me through a collective in Seattle called Songs for Eating and Drinking,” he says. “An eclectic mix of us would have dinner together. Then we would stand up where we sat and play a song. It was a very community-based thing. It almost felt as if you were giving a toast. Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam was there once and played a Hank Williams song. That was pretty thrilling, actually. “I wasn’t even that aware of Macklemore at the time. Someone had posted a clip of me on Tumblr and he asked somebody to contact me. We had a mutual friend. My friend just
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“THE MUSIC DOESN’T NECESSARILY SOUND COMPLICATED, BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF LITTLE MELODIC MOVEMENTS.”
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said, ‘you guys would get along, you have a similar style’. Which I believe is true because it’s really just like a delivery system. He chooses to deliver his words in the way he does, and I do in the way that I do.” The ensuing friendship produced Arrows, an indie/hip-hop crossover single between Fences, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. And fast-forwarding to today, we have the new deluxe version of Failure Sculptures, which gives a big solid push to the original Fences LP that was released in 2019. With the time that’s elapsed, I ask Mansfield how the record feels for him in the context of his long career. “It’s the darkest,” he says. “Because the self-titled had Sara (Quinn) producing it, it felt very much like a quintessential indie rock record. And then Lesser Oceans had Chris Waller from Death Cab for Cutie producing some of the songs, so that was still extremely indie rock. With Failure Sculptures, there was no thought process of making this sound like how Fences sounds. I guess as funny as it sounds, I wanted it to sound as depressing as possible. “There were a lot of weird studio tricks we did, where for most of my guitar tracks, I recorded an octave up and double speed, and then slowed them down to the tempo that I wanted them. And the pitch would be where it was supposed to be. So all the guitar sounds would sort of wobble around and sound almost drunk and messy. So it was a lot of stuff like that. I wanted it to have a real hopeless, dark, tonality to it.” And before I let Mansfield go, we discuss his affinity for the Shure SM7B microphone, as well as working with vintage guitars and recording equipment to ensure the Fences sound is as warm (and dark) as possible. “It’s always been the SM7B. That’s the microphone I’ve used for every album I’ve ever done. For whatever reason, my voice sounds the best to me on that. And all the producers agree, which is kind of funny. I never would have pegged myself being someone who had a specific mic, especially for recording. Definitely so for Failure Sculptures. Everything else we used was pretty old — lots of ‘60s and ‘70s gear. I guess for the obvious fact that the newest stuff wouldn’t have the same sound. You wouldn’t be able to get it sounding just that little bit warmer and darker.” INSTA: @FENCESMUSIC
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ALAN MEYERSON
HEADLINER USA
Scoring the Jackpot
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scoring the jackpot
ALAN MEYERSON Undoubtedly one of the greatest movie scoring mixes of the modern era, Alan Meyerson recently joined Headliner on a call from the 5.1 ATC mix room that he’s built in his home — and where he’s spent the majority of the last year — to talk about some of his favorite projects, his philosophy when it comes to crafting film scores, and his love of Leapwing Audio plugins.
After a couple of slow months when the pandemic first hit, Meyerson’s work as one of the industry’s most reputable movie scoring mixers soon started picking up; he expanded his home studio as things got busier, and now he’s cooking with gas. In fact the movie he’s currently mixing, Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James and Don Cheadle, is his 11th movie since the start of the pandemic. Not to mention his recent work on Reprise, the upcoming 19th studio album by Moby scheduled for a May release. And when it comes to movies, Meyerson’s credits as a scoring mixer are second to none. Iron Man, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Inception, The Dark Knight, Kung Fu Panda, Despicable Me, Hannibal and Gladiator; just a handful of the incredible projects he’s worked on over the years, and while it may seem like an impossible question to answer, I’m
curious to know whether he has any particular favorites... “Hopefully my favorite project is the one I’m working on at any given moment,” he replies in earnest. “So right now my favorite project is Space Jam, because it’s a phenomenal score by an incredible young composer named Kris Bowers [check out his interview on page 114]. The first movie I did as the lead mixer on the music for Speed was memorable for me, because it won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing, and that was quite an experience.” In his 30 years of mixing, Meyerson has been involved in over 300 movies and has worked with all the leading film score composers; he has a particularly long-standing working relationship with the great Hans Zimmer that continues to this day. “Everyone points to Gladiator as where maybe my reputation got cemented that was a great score and I really
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loved working on it,” he adds. “For that we were at AIR Studios in London, and I was particular about how I wanted to record it and mix it. Although it’s the last movie we ever recorded on two inch tape, I was still trying to really fit it into this certain formula.” While Meyerson has a wealth of experience in engineering and score mixing in particular, he’s also racked up gold and platinum albums along with a bunch of number one R&B records. “Music in support of another medium tells a different type of story; it’s more about the storytelling and the emotional content than it is about how it’s going to sound on the radio. Space Jam is a hybrid hip-hop orchestral score, which also fits because of my dance record background, so it’s interesting how all of the skills that I’ve developed through the years have sort of paid off. The only skill I didn’t develop was negotiation! [smiles] If I had, this would be a bigger home mix room!” As well as having his 5.1 ATC home mix room, Meyerson is also settled at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions studio complex in Santa Monica, where his 7.1.4 mix room there contains a Euphonix System 5 digital desk, a bunch of Pro Tools systems, ATC monitors, and a few analog boxes. HEADLINER USA
Part of Meyerson’s process is helping the composer develop a sonic signature early on in the writing process, helping them set up microphones the way they like it, and building some useful reverbs. In the mix, he also has an assistant whose job it is to tighten up and edit the orchestral and live percussion elements: “Some of the cues I work on are 1,000 tracks, so when you’ve got 25 layers of percussion, and everything’s not quite together, it becomes a dog’s breakfast almost immediately. My mixing philosophy is to work very fast on the first pass, then go back into each mix and get into the music and understand what it is - oh, and lots of coffee!” And to help him achieve his sound, Meyerson finds Leapwing Audio’s plugin collection extremely powerful; he uses them across all his mixes: “With Space Jam, I wanted to give the orchestra a bit of smack, so having a dynamic multiband compressor like DynOne means I can do that in a much more elegant way. Equally, with StageOne, if I get a signal that’s either too narrow, or is actually mono, I use it to expand that out to a wider or more interesting depth width. And then there’s this center gravity thing, which is very cool: I can gravitate one
sound a little bit to the right or left; that’s the magic sauce for getting that spatial feel - if you spend less time on compression and EQ and spend more time on spatial choices, you’ll get your mixes approved so much faster. I use it on reverb returns too; like on this one particular project, because of COVID we had to have the harp player in a booth. So I recorded her two ways: with a pair of modern stereo mics and a mono ribbon mic from back in the day, the output of which I put through StageOne to create an image that I could tilt either to the left or right. “RootOne meanwhile is phenomenal. Having all the sub octaves of the primary signal, and being able to decide how much depth and low is there is super useful. I use it on a bunch of things, usually to get a little bit more grunge out of the ride cymbal.” Meyerson has got a packed 2021 lined up, with a number of big movie scores on the agenda to keep his chops up: “I’m not good at not being busy,” he admits. “I also have found out that the easiest way to get dementia is to retire. So I have no intention of stopping, and I’m gonna keep doing this until they stop hiring me!” LEAPWINGAUDIO.COM
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SHE KNOWS TECH How many women did you see at your last recording session? Not as a secretary, manager, singer, or someone’s girlfriend, but as a recording or assistant engineer, a producer or a studio runner? Chances are, not many. Enter She Knows Tech, which is working to change that.
Each year after the Grammy Awards, the USC Annenberg Institute releases a study on the representation of gender and race across the music industry. This year’s study was released in January 2021, and looked at 800 popular songs from 2012 to 2019. The study showed that for every female artist, there are 3.6 male artists, and for every female producer, there are 37 male
producers. 56% of 800 popular songs had an all-male songwriting team, while less than 1% had an all-female songwriting team. So where are all the women in our industry? According to Jasmine Kok, founder and CEO of She Knows Tech, women are simply not included, celebrated, or represented enough – but she and a team of like minded women are working hard to change that.
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Kok is a producer, songwriter, topliner and educator based in Valencia, Spain, and leads the event planning and public outreach for She Knows Tech, which aims to channel waves of trained women into technical roles in the music industry and dispel the notion that there are not enough female professionals in music production and technology. The dream is simple: to work in a music industry that is flooded with female-identifying producers, engineers and tech performers, to provide a platform for women to give and receive training in music technology, and to create a safe space for open discussion in closing the industry’s gender gap.
I thought too. But the more we got into She Knows Tech activities, the more it showed us otherwise.” Lisa Murray then joined She Knows Tech – she oversees all of the social media channels as well as working on overall operations for the team. Murray is an artist, music producer, audio engineer and multi-faceted creator from Ireland, and reveals that although she has not experienced any negative experiences since becoming a producer, she has found that she has had to make the most of all learning opportunities while working in live events, in particular.
She Knows Tech began as an allwomen student collective at Berklee College of Music’s Valencia campus in 2017, motivated by the lack of women faculty members in the music production department.
“I was trying to mess around with a mixing console, and I ended up learning on the sly,” she admits. “Whenever the guys would go out to get a pint or have a smoke, I would jump on and say, ‘I wonder if I can make this sound a little bit better?’ – because I always had quite a good ear for mixes.
“It got me thinking, ‘are women just not cut out for tech? Are we just better off writing, composing and performing, and leaving production to someone else?’ I just couldn’t shake that question off,” says Kok. “Why are there so few women doing this? A lot of people were like, ‘maybe women are just not interested’, and initially, that’s what
“I think one of the prevailing things, especially in the studio world, is that if you’re a woman you don’t automatically become a part of the community when you’re working with all men, and you feel like people are always watching their tone, or they won’t let loose or share open opinions. Sometimes you walk into a room and things just get
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a little bit quieter than they were before you walked in, and those little things can really add up in your brain. “What She Knows Tech does is showcase the people who have said, ‘well, I’m just gonna learn this and I’m going to be great at it’, so that more reserved or less confident women can then be like, ‘well, if they could do it, maybe I could do it as well’.” She Knows Tech runs a series of workshops, masterclasses, tech training programmes, mentorship opportunities, and recently held a She Knows Tech summit with the theme, ‘It’s Time’ – an event curated for a new generation of multifaceted producers, artists, songwriters and music professionals. “We also provide a space for female creatives to make mistakes, because the production industry started out with all men, and then they had many years to perfect to where they are today,” points out Kok. “Women need to be given the same opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. But I also think that women are now thinking, ‘with or without your approval, we’re doing this’, you know? We’re like, ‘you’re not giving us jobs; we’re gonna create jobs for ourselves. You’re not hiring women; we’ll hire ourselves’.”
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WHAT ARE THE BARRIERS? “I think the biggest challenge is to feel like it’s a space and it’s a possible career for us, or a space that we’re welcome into,” answers Kok after considering the question carefully. “It’s very important for educational institutions to actively curate the balance of classroom representation. For me, the lack of representation itself is a big challenge. And also, we’re perfectionists, so we’ll try to minimize the chances of making mistakes in public, especially if you’re in a very masculine environment where you’re a minority.”
“To go off that perfectionism point, for a lot of female creators, when they decide to undertake something, they want to make sure that they have a brilliant product at the end of it, but with production, it takes an awful long time to become good,” offers Murray. “You need to be really shit before you can become really good! It takes graft to that point where whatever you make is going to be brilliant. You need to go through a lot of really crappy tracks before you end up making something that’s really good.
There’s so much behind the scenes work, progress and self development as a producer that leads you to being great, and that’s not showcased as much. This can make women think, ‘well, I don’t have a very natural aptitude for this; I wasn’t brilliant as soon as I started, so I’m going to leave it and not pursue it’.” Some men and women get riled up about the F word, but feminism is nothing to get hot under the collar about, and it certainly isn’t anti-men. “Exactly,” says Kok, who points out HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“I DON’T THINK YOU NEED TO HATE MEN, OR TO HATE NON FEMALE-IDENTIFYING PEOPLE IF YOU’RE A FEMINIST – I THINK IT’S THE OPPOSITE.”
that She Knows Tech has been supported by many allies throughout the industry who respect what the organization is doing. “Our focus is to make this space a lot more inclusive, and not just for women, but for everyone – for men who want to support us, or for people who want to learn more about the gender gap. We want She Knows Tech to be a safe space for us to talk about this, and then to share our different experiences and perspectives of the industry. “I don’t think you need to hate men, or to hate non female-identifying people if you’re a feminist – I think it’s the opposite. To be a feminist is to awaken the support for equality
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within everyone, because to a certain extent, everyone is a feminist, you just need to wake them up within everyone and to work together towards a common goal, which is equal representation for everyone in the industry.” Genelec is a proud official partner of She Knows Tech, and has been working with the organization to champion women working in tech. “Our summit is precisely the kind of event that Genelec wants to support: highlighting and celebrating female creatives like producers or engineers,” Kok explains. “They really understand how underrepresented and how under-celebrated women are as producers and as engineers.
Even though both Lisa and I are producers ourselves and we graduated with a master’s degree from Berklee College, a lot of times when you mention, ‘I’m working with a producer’, very naturally, people would assume that it’s a male, and go, ‘who is he?’ So we definitely want to normalize the fact that a producer is not just a term to describe a masculine profession.” SHEKNOWS.TECH GENELEC.COM
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CHRIS TABRON
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The Spice Of Life
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CHRIS TABRON Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Mary J. Blige, Common, The Strokes, Robert Glasper, Erykah Badu; just some of the artists whose records Chris Tabron has worked on as a producer, mixer or engineer. With his credits having gone multi-platinum, Tabron caught up with Headliner to chat about all things production – particularly how he uses Waves plugins to achieve his sound.
Joining me on a Zoom call from his studio in Brooklyn, Tabron starts by telling me that he’s thankfully been keeping himself busy of late, which is of course no mean feat in the current climate. One recent project that he’s able to share details of is the latest record from Will Johnson, a friend and collaborator who he started working with at the start of the pandemic, and who he’s used to being together making music in the room with.
recalls. “The whole video calling has been useful in some ways, because I think it requires maybe a little bit more sophisticated filtering at the front end in terms of what projects I’m going to actually take on. The vibe needs to be particularly right because you’re consigning yourself to literally staring at someone on FaceTime all day long, which is a different type of exhausting to just being in the room with somebody.”
“It was an interesting challenge and a new paradigm to embrace, because he and I actually didn’t do the video chat thing before,” Tabron HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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He’s also been “half promising” making his own music again… “I’ve got some demos that I worked on over the holiday break that I literally just opened up this morning, and was like, ‘oh, they’re actually not half bad. I should finish these two songs,’” he adds. Tabron grew up listening to the sounds of ‘50s and 60’s motown and stax, along with salsa recordings from the likes of Fania All-Stars, Santana, and some “lighter disco stuff,” he reveals. “I’m just realizing now that those genres really do explain my sensibilities towards drums and rhythm and vocals, and it makes sense, because the way that subdivisions are accented in salsa music, and in all that polyrhythm, of course affected me in a way that I didn’t even understand.” Starting off his musical career as a DJ in New York City, Tabron believes this is what probably led to his philosophy of what mixing is: essentially just managing energy. He soon started making his own demos in his Brooklyn apartment, which was filled with instruments and where he could make as much noise as he wanted. Tabron worked a brief stint with a producer before one of his friends, Amanda Chiu, who worked at Virgin Records at the time, offered him an opportunity that he was never going to pass up — the chance to get in the studio with Grammy Award winning producer and engineer Tony Maserati. “I got to work on my music at my little home studio, and I got to chill with Tony every now and then when he was around, and basically get a world class, A-B session of ‘Oh, this is what a control room sounds like, or this is what drums sound like in a really good live room,’” he remembers. “And so that’s how I ended up getting my feet wet in engineering properly. I spent some time building out a studio in Greenpoint, and I recorded every indie band under the sun in the early 2000s.” HEADLINER USA
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
‘what can I contribute here?’”
Tabron admits that he’s somewhat of a single task-minded person; whatever project he’s working on at any given moment, to him, is the most important thing he’s ever done in his life:
Tabron’s production setup is built around an Apollo system, comprising an Apollo 8, Apollo Twin and an Avalon interface. At the front end he uses four Hardy M-1 pres (his favorite preamps), along with a distressor, an Avalon 737, and a bunch of toys and synths, including a Sequential OB-6, a Moog, a Rhodes, a Juno, a Whirly, and more, all of which he uses to create with.
“I sort of go into this hyper focus mode,” he says. “Rather than favorite projects, I think of developmental records where I feel like I turned the corner and either did something new or learned something, built a new friendship or relationship, or really just added to my way of thinking, even if it’s just an episteme about what record making actually is.” When working with someone at that level of intimacy, Tabron is quick to point out that there’s no room for facade; you become fast friends fairly quickly and easily if you’re doing the job right. And while he can now be a little more judicious and selective when it comes to his taste, he believes the eclecticism is still alive and well. He goes on to say that he believes there’s more utility in being a producer if you’re not limited by genre: “As a mixer, I’d never wanted to be the rock guy, or the hip-hop guy, because that’s not really how I hear music,” he shares. “I think genre is just an artificial thing made up for marketing, so why would I use a marketing term to define what I do sonically? If you just think, broadly construed, about what a producer does — a producer takes an idea and makes it real. “One of the things I’m most proud of being able to cultivate in my career is that it’s not limited by genre. People want to paint you in those corners, and they want to typecast you, so I work hard to be selective about the projects that I take on in the sense of,
“Some of it is MIDI, some are virtual instruments, and some of it’s just me recording a room mic of the piano and sampling that,” he explains. Similarly when it comes to mixing, it’s very much a hybrid world for Tabron: “I use a Dangerous Music 2-Bus+ summing mixer, so I’ve 16 channels summing and then I work on hardware inserts for all of my gear in Pro Tools,” he explains. “In total I have 24 I/O of hardware inserts, so I can basically input all the gear as a plugin in Pro Tools, meaning I get the ergonomics of working in the analog world, but also don’t really have to change the threshold of a compressor from song to song — I can just add a trim plugin before it if the compressor isn’t hitting hard enough, or it’s hitting too hard, and thus Pro Tools becomes my patch bay.”
SURFS UP When Tabron first decided to start mixing records himself, he bought the Waves Renaissance bundle, and has been a user of the company’s plugins ever since. “The Renaissance stuff still creeps in on sessions; sometimes it’s just a sound that is hard to match,” he admits. “I don’t think there’s anything that does exactly what R-Comp does — if you want that specific sound, it’s
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“USUALLY I’M LOOKING FOR THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN AN IDEA AND IT COMING OUT OF THE SPEAKERS.”
really good for giving you that kind of in-your-face vocal. “I also really like the RS124 compressor that just came out. I have a Chandler RS124 here, but I only have one of those, and so now I have as many as I want! I’ve also done presets for the CLA Epic, which was really cool because I actually have some of the original reverbs and delay units. The Scheps Omni Channel is genius. It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, you can finally have a mid side de-esser.’ When you’re working in an electronic or rap genre, and you’ve got super crispy wide vocals, and you only want to de-ess the sides, that is really useful.” At certain phases of mixing, Tabron highlights that speed is often king, for no other sake besides not getting too
precious with your own ideas. “Usually I’m looking for the shortest distance between an idea and it coming out of the speakers,” he adds. “There’re so many plugins that they make, and I sort of rekindled my romance with a lot of the older ones through the MultiRack, because it harnesses the power of so many at once, and I can use them in ways that I wasn’t previously able to.” Tabron’s foremost piece of advice that he would impart to young producers is simply to produce, “whether it’s yourself or your friends, or for free, or making covers of songs that already exist. That’s a great way to learn chord shapes and voicings and tones and how to keep different tricks in your back pocket that you can pull out when in the studio with an artist.”
Having witnessed a different paradigm of how to make music (one that was imposed on all of us involuntarily), Tabron is looking forward to emerging refreshed — spiritually, mentally and professionally. “Something I’ve learned is that the industry, and the mechanics and the business behind making music, are fragile,” he offers as we round up the conversation. “As we know, once touring gets removed it affects the whole ecosystem, but the human need to create music is not fragile; that is evergreen, and so that’s been very encouraging. I’m looking forward to rekindling as much of that as possible, even if it’s virtually.” CHRISTABRON.COM WAVES.COM
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JBJSTUDIO We take the tour of JBJ Studio with producer and engineer Jamie Brown, whose four-storey facility located bang on London’s trendy Portobello Road is one of the capital’s only residential recording studios.
Jamie Brown has worked in and out of studios for a long time, and at the time of writing, his newly acquired West London studio space is almost ready to open its doors to the public for the first time. JBJ will be one of London’s only residential recording studios, and as well as its extraordinary location, the fact it’s stretched out across four large floors (and has an actual slide in it) and is stocked with an abundance of state of the art kit means it’ll be an extremely attractive option for all manner of creatives. “Being freelance, and working at Uxbridge ( JBJ’s sister studio) enabled me to learn the ropes a
bit and learn what not to do, more importantly,” opens Brown, as we wander into the main live room which has an abundance of natural light. “We were going to block those windows out, but we decided to quadruple-glaze them instead, because so many studios are dingy places and it’s so rare especially in London to be able to record while watching the world go by. So we decided that was the way to go.” Brown’s ultimate goal since moving to this Portobello location is for everything to expand – from the clients JBJ is attracting to the amount of people the studio can physically accommodate. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“The idea around this move really was just to go big,” Brown declares. And with an SSL AWS Delta console, Focusrite RedNet I/O, a Yamaha grand piano, and a plethora of Neumann microphones in the bag, you could argue he’s already done that. The studio – literally on Portobello Road, just to clarify – is owned by a good friend of Brown’s, and Brown saw its potential when they viewed the property for the first time together. COVID came along and threw a curveball or two, to say the least, but the kit was already acquired, and it would take more than a global pandemic to stop him. “We were already too far along, so COVID wasn’t going to stop us,” confirms Brown. “But touch wood [slaps the Yamaha grand on his left hand side] things are looking good for everyone, and here, certainly.” The Yamaha grand takes center stage in the live room. Brown only got hold of it in January 2021: “They don’t come about very often, but we jumped on it, got a piano van booked in, and ever since, we’ve built up a good rapport with Yamaha, which is nice.” Although not officially open yet, there are already a number of high profile artists coming in that have booked, and some very high profile artists interested in booking. “Our first booking is coming through Capitol Records, which is great – and that’ll be a residential booking – and I can confirm that we have Eliza And The Bear booked in too, so that’s exciting,” Brown reveals. “TMS have been round looking around the place and they really like it - and that’s all within the first few weeks, so we’re optimistic about where we can take this place.”
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BATHROOM ANTICS Brown and co. have done a lot of experimenting around the place with mics - they’ve clapped and sung, and tried to figure out which spaces work for where. One cool finding was a particularly great way of capturing huge drums using the height of the building – but cooler still has to be creating a homemade reverb in their downstairs toilet. “We discovered that the toilet in the basement – which has a concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete everything, basically – was a very unusual sounding room,” Brown explains. “So we put a PA speaker in the corner and we’ve got it hardwired in so it feeds to the SSL permanently, and put a pair of [Neumann] U87s in there, equally measured from the speaker. And we just feed stuff through it, and it becomes our reverb, and gets brought up as a return on the desk. We can EQ the reverb send in realtime and suit it to the track we’re working on, and it sounds so natural and glues it all together because it’s real. “There is a reason that some reverbs are so expensive, because they’re created in such detail - and we as humans can perceive real reverb. And our reverb just sounds like it’s been recorded in a really big and beautiful space.” Brown is off to Costa Rica later this month to do a big vocal recording session, and will be taking his trusty Neumann microphones with him – for several reasons: “I’ll be taking my TLM 170R - which is the most underrated mic ever made in my opinion. Chris Potter, Richard Ashcroft’s engineer, got me into that and I ended up buying two! It’s a thick, almost tubey sounding mic – but it’s actually a FET mic – and it’s great when the vocals are a bit thin and you want depth to them,” he
says. “I’ll also take a U87AI – which is a new mic – and we have two of them. And that’s a totally different thing: much more presence about it, and it’s a better mic for when you want to sit a vocal into a dense production as it’s more scooped and hyped in the top end, but still pretty natural. It’s a classic pop vocal mic. And then I’ll take our U47 which sort of plunges the gap right in the middle. So TLM for thick and warm, U87 for bright and pop, and U47 for
“I MIGHT DO THE VERSE WITH THE U87 AND SWITCH TO THE TLM IN THE CHORUS; IT’S NOT A STANDARD THING TO DO, BUT IT’S GOT US OUT OF JAIL BEFORE...”
the mid range – it’s silky smooth, and it’s got a velvety thing going on – it’s a bit like a cross between the other two. And between those three mics, I’ve got all bases covered. “Sometimes I even swap between the mics in the same song; there might be a singer I’m dealing with who has a low, rich big sounding voice - but when he goes high he can get thin. In which case I might do the verse with the U87 and switch to the TLM in the chorus. It’s not a standard thing to do but it’s worked for us and got us out of jail before. But yeah, if you can’t get it right with those three mics then you’re in trouble!”
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“ON BLIND TESTS THE FOCUSRITE REDNET 2 WAS THE MOST NATURAL SOUNDING BY FAR...”
THE SIGNAL PATH Conversion at JBJ comes courtesy of a Focusrite RedNet setup, which Brown absolutely raves about – the A-D / D-A conversion is something he thought long and hard about, and it had to meet several criteria. “In this day and age when a lot of stuff is done on computers your D-A / A-D conversion is so important – second only to mic and mic pre for me,” he says. “It’s such a core part of the signal path so it’s crucial that you get something that works for you and your environment. We hired a lot of stuff in from leading manufacturers and
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ran a load of tests to find out which one did what and which was going to work for us. And the Focusrite just has this thing about it - and on blind tests it just seemed to win; it sounded the most natural by far.” There are two Focusrite RedNet 2s at JBJ providing 32 in, 32 out - all coming off the SSL AWS Delta console. “What you put into the Focusrite, you get back out, which is what I am a big fan of,” Brown continues. “There are other converters and interfaces that color, and some people are really into that – for me, it’s a bit of a lucky dip really – but because we spend quite a lot of time moving mics around and
trying to get the sound right, I needed to have the confidence that what I am recording is what I am getting on the playback, and Focusrite has absolutely nailed that. It’s like you’re in the room, and that is really what pulled us towards the brand. “They just work, they’re so reliable, and super-stable: you switch it on, and it works, and I should also add that the clocking is just phenomenal between two units. One other big tick in the box for Focusrite is their support – and when a company cares as much as they do, it gives you even more reason to stay loyal to the brand. I can’t say enough about them on that level either.”
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JBJ’s control room is located one floor above the live room and its centerpiece is the SSL AWS.
EQs are great - you can really dial in and crank out what you don’t need without destroying it too much, really.
“It’s a pretty accurate sounding control room, actually – not much ugliness,” Brown smiles, as he shows us the Focusrite RedNet units which are housed stage right of the console amongst a plethora of weird and wonderful outboard. “The SSL sounds great, and we’ve got some nice choice bits of outboard here. We’re pretty well stocked, and we can deal with most things.”
“We also do a lot of summing and bussing in the box so, you know, rather than bring out a 12-piece string section on 12 faders, I’ll bring it out on two – balance it and process it in the desk. I hardly ever use all 24 faders; I have developed a way of condensing it down to 20, and faders 21 to 24 I tend to use as returns, roughs, and references. It’s so great to go ‘there’s the mix, there’s the rough, what does the reference sound like?’. Having that flexibility at the push of a button the whole time is great.”
It was the two paths in the SSL desk that Brown found particularly seductive: “The E Series is quite aggressive, and it’s great on guitars; it’s got a nice punchy mid range. And the G Series is smoother and more ‘softly softly’. Both
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“But really, everyone here lives and breathes music, and that’s the aspiration, really. As long as great music is being made here, we’re doing something right.” JBJSTUDIO.CO.UK FOCUSRITE.COM NEUMANN.COM SOLIDSTATELOGIC.COM
And what are JBJ’s aspirations for 2021 and beyond? “We’d like to win an MPG [Award]! That’d be good,” Brown declares. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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Some Like It Hot
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Production sound mixer Stu Chacon explains why Lectrosonics never lets him down on the set of Hot Ones or Sneaker Shopping.
“I always knew I wanted to do something artistic and creative from an early age, and music and sound have always been a big part of my life,” recalls production sound mixer Stu Chacon, who recently has been working on hit US shows, Hot Ones and Sneaker Shopping. Chacon started his reality TV journey working on a show called Psychic Kids, and quickly adapted to the fast paced nature of the show’s way of working. “Coming from the narrative, web content, and corporate sound recording industries, I had to adjust to miking high numbers of talent for scenes in a rather small time frame,” he explains. “There are also many location changes in a work day, so
staying calm under pressure is key. This show also prepared me for traveling with gear, which can be a rather daunting task. “I’ve had to mic upwards of 12 people at one point, so it gets a little tricky when you’re by yourself. Also, having multiple locations in a day means making sure that wireless frequency coordination is given the importance it deserves, especially when you have multiple radio mics out at the same time, along with wireless camera hops and IFB’s for production. The last thing you want is to have frequency drop-outs when the action has started due to poor planning.”
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Chacon has been using Lectrosonics’ products since 2009 when he first started film school: “From the beginning, I quickly learned they simply worked better than some of the other options available, and were built like tanks!” For thriving in the ever-changing RF situations brought on by constant international travel, he depends on wideband wireless from Lectrosonics: the all-new, all-digital DCR822 dualchannel receivers paired with SMWB and SMDWB digital hybrid wireless transmitters. His kit is rounded out with a UCR411 receiver, plus IFBR1a receivers and legacy UM400a transmitters for comms. The DCR822 is part of Lectrosonics’ latest generation of digital wireless but can receive signal from any Digital Hybrid Wireless transmitter made in the past 18 years. This made Chacon’s choice of wideband as easy as it was necessary. “For a long time, I’ve used the SMV and SMQV for talent mics, and they’re great,” he notes, “but going wideband has just been a thing of beauty.” Chacon goes on to describe one among many instances where having the ability to retune quickly across multiple blocks saved the shoot: “We once had to shoot in a hospital in Africa. I had scanned and done my frequency coordination in advance, but we were just outside the building. The minute we went inside, everything went haywire. Of course, this is because medical equipment wreaks absolute havoc with RF. Having the wideband definitely helped me acquire new, clean frequencies on the spot. “Lectro’s wideband products definitely make it easier for me to adjust to changing RF environments. Having the ability to select from a wider range of frequencies is great in case a HEADLINER USA
certain area has heavy RF congestion. Funnily enough, for me, shooting internationally has proven to be easier when it comes to wireless coordination compared to the US, as the spectrum here has got smaller through the years.” He recently recorded a series of scavenger hunt challenges where talent needed to go around a big space to find objects. “I knew it would be difficult to deal with range issues, so the SMDWB transmitter’s ability to record internally helped make the shoot a breeze without having to worry about dropouts in case talent moved too far out of range from my receivers.” The DCR822, SMWB, and SMDWB can all double as stand-alone recorders, capturing audio to an internal MicroSD card. This has made a difference at times when the production has needed to minimize the impact on its surroundings. “With the travel and international romance themes, we shoot more than a few scenes in airports,” he explains. “Airports are also notoriously full of RF, and of course you don’t want to interfere with tower communications, so the MicroSD recording makes an ideal backup plan. Also, being in an airport with an audio bag full of gear can make people nervous when they don’t know what it is. Recording right
onto the wideband SMs or the 822 lets us keep a lower profile.” When working with an international and non-professional cast, the IFB (audio monitoring and comms for producers, directors, and other crew) carries a new wrinkle: translation. Chacon points to the flexibility of the R1a beltpack receivers for this application. “We often have translators on set,” he explains. “Since you can tune the R1a really quickly, I’ll have the production mix on one channel, then different banks of R1a for the translators. I am looking to upgrade to the R1B, though, because with the digital readout and room for 10 frequency presets, it will make things even faster.” Range, audio quality, and durability are what have caused Chacon to stick with the R1a for so long. “I do a lot of car scenes,” he notes, “and for these I’ll usually just drop the entire audio bag on the floor of the back seat. But producers still need to listen in from a follow car, and for this the R1a is just incredible. There have been so many times I thought the picture car was going out of range, but we had no dropouts. There have been as many times I’ve seen an R1a dropped — literally bouncing off the pavement — and we just picked it up and kept using it.”
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HOT ONES “On shows like Hot Ones, there’s usually A-list TV or sports talent and once they arrive to set, it’s gotime,” says Chacon. “I have very little time to ensure everything is as it should be before we start rolling. As always, I need to know my gear won’t fail me, and this is where Lectro shines, among many reasons. “Hot Ones is one of my favorite shows to record because it’s just so much fun to watch talent eat super spicy wings and more often than not, struggle through it all. They really eat all the spicy wings. I’ve been lucky to have recorded some pretty awesome episodes for this show. I can quote so many Will Ferrell movies that his episode is up there for me. Kristen Bell’s episode is probably a close second!” He adds that the crew he gets to work with also make this show a delight to work on. “On the episode with Will Ferrell, production took place in a heavily RF congested area of L.A. Luckily, the wideband receivers/transmitters helped me find some open frequencies that were available for me to use and for the show to move forward without any hiccups.”
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Another favorite show of his to work on is Sneaker Shopping, which sees Joe La Puma interview athletes, actors and artists at sneaker and streetwear stores. “The sneaker world is such a big industry and this show definitely puts focus on this,” he says. “On this show, we usually get a relatively small window with the talent, so when they arrive to set I have limited time to mic them before we get started. For me, prep is key: I have my lavs ready to be placed on talent, but have backup mounts, tapes, etc. ready in any case my initial setup might not work. My favorite guest I’ve had the chance to HEADLINER USA
record on this show is probably Jason Sudeikis since I’m such a big fan of SNL.” Chacon hopes to work on an episodic comedy series some day, which is something he’s yet to do. “I am a big fan of this genre, and I think I’d have such a good time working on something that makes me laugh through the work day!” INSTA: @STUCHACON LECTROSONICS.COM
Softube & Empirical Labs. A partnership made in analog heaven. Empirical Labs is on a mission to make innovative, long-lasting equipment that’s a riot to use. With platinum-level hits like Fatso, DerrEsser, and Distressor it’s safe to say they’re killing it. That success is due to ELI’s conviction to go past good enough. It’s an ethos that Softube shares. Softube believes that with truly excellent music technology, it’s not sufficient to just approximate the sound and function in software form. You have to go deeper. This dogged pursuit of high-quality sonic innovation is what bonds Softube and Empirical Labs, and what makes this partnership such a thrill. After fifteen years of friendship and fun, we’re putting our hearts on our sleeve. Together. We proudly present the new products from Softube + Empirical Labs: Mike-E, Lil FrEQ, Trak Pak For Console 1, and the Empirical Labs Complete Collection.
Composing Bridgerton
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Emmy Award-winning composer and pianist, Kris Bowers creates genredefying music that pays homage to his jazz roots with inflections of alternative and R&B influences. So how would he adapt to composing the score for Netflix’s hot new hit period drama, Bridgerton? He promenades Headliner through the process of putting a modern spin on a classic genre. Bowers has composed scores for an eclectic range of hard hitting films and documentaries, including Ava DuVernay’s devastating Netflix mini-series When They See Us, Kobe Bryant’s Muse, Green Book, Dear White People, and has recorded, performed and collaborated with Jay-Z and Kanye West on their Watch the Throne album. HEADLINER USA
So far, so cool. So I was surprised to see that Bowers was the composer behind Netflix’s new period drama romp, Bridgerton. Sure, a certain Duke of Hastings sent hearts aflutter and a record-breaking 82 million households around the world collectively swooned at the technicolor Regency period romances and gasped at the
scandals that unfolded (Duels at dawn! Pregnancies out of wedlock!), but is Bridgerton cool? To be sure, I watched the whole thing, strictly for research purposes.
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Released on Christmas Day, the show reached a captive, house-bound audience ready for some guiltypleasure escapism into a world where Zoom doesn’t exist. And guilty they were – the show reached millions that remembered the thrill of Mark Darcy in his wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice, those who weren’t even born at the time, and everyone in between. Yes, the husband-hunting themes may be the same, but Bridgerton is a period drama that appeals to the modern viewer. What Bridgerton is slick at is rejecting historical accuracy with its refreshing multiracial casting. In fact, the characters of color are some of the richest and most powerful on the show, and you can’t fail to notice its winking soundtrack filled with classical covers of modern songs, including recent hits by Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. When it came to composing the score, Bowers was deemed just the man for a modern take on this classic genre. Since 2013, the Juilliard-educated pianist has established himself at the forefront of Hollywood’s emerging
generation of genre-defying composers. What sets Bowers apart is his unique ability to compose music that resonates across such a diverse continuum of artists, storytellers and audiences. Naturally, he used his instrument of choice for most of the score, although other traditional instruments that sounded like they were from the time were included, but with modern flourishes. When first offered the job, Bowers could not have imagined that the series would go on to smash Netflix’s record to become its most-watched show by a wide margin (The Witcher only managed a mere 76 million in its first 28 days). “I don’t think I could have ever seen this coming!” he begins. “I assumed that it would have a following just from it coming from a book…” he trails off. “I’ve always been a fan of romantic movies and shows myself; I think I’ve watched more romantic comedies than my wife! I knew that aspect was going to be successful and popular because it was handled really well. I think that it’s really easy to make a love story cheesy; to make a love story that
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really feels like it’s saying something a little different is a challenge, and I felt like this was doing that.” Bowers’ first idea was to take a really modern approach to the sound using classical instruments, but incorporating more of a pop sound and style of production. Not all ideas are meant to be, and he scrapped that idea in favor of a more traditional sound more becoming of a show set in the early 1800s. The first step was to work on Simon and Daphne’s theme – primarily because Phoebe Dynevor (who plays Daphne) had to play the piano in a scene as she thinks of the Duke – the instrument being a very strong identifier for the couple. “That was one of the first things that I wrote and it really helped figure out a huge aspect of the sound, because, technically speaking, in the era that the show takes place in, the music would be more like early Beethoven than Ravel or Debussy – because that’s much more 20th century.”
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Showrunner Chris Van Dusen sent Bowers some classical pieces as a reference for the theme: “I was like, ‘okay, let me not try to be the musician that’s going to be really specific to the time period and all that; let me think of a way to represent this in a little bit more of a modern way’. At first, we were incredibly modern and I tried writing pieces with the orchestra and then taking those pieces, sampling them and then trying to make beats with those orchestral elements. It felt like a pop producer or a hip-hop producer had made the score, and that was really not working,” he admits. “Then I tried to do something that was really, really time specific and time appropriate, and it felt more like the classical era of classical music – not necessarily more impressionistic or romantic, and that felt a little too stuffy and a little too old school. One of the things that really helped was going back to that Simon and Daphne theme and thinking about why that worked so well.”
where I’m erring on the side of less is more,” he answers. “Not only as a musician, but also as a fan of film. Some of my favorite films are films that either don’t have any music, or have very, very little music. I think that’s just because I really love film and storytelling, and so I can really feel similar to that as far as watching things and trying to ask myself on a regular basis, ‘does this really need music?’”
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Alex Patsavas, the music supervisor, then introduced Vitamin String Quartet (the L.Abased group famous for their classical covers of contemporary bangers) into the soundtrack, who are behind the show’s covers of thank u next, bad guy, Wildest Dreams, etc.
Bridgerton had finished shooting by the time the pandemic took hold of the world, so the biggest challenge for Bowers was working out how to record the score from home.
“Those different arrangements that The Vitamin String Quartet did really opened me up to how we could approach the score to still having this classical instrumentation, but trying to have more modern rhythms and feels, because so much of it is dance music – it’s music we want to be able to move to and feel. If you put on some old classical music, most people are not going to know how to dance to that, and really it’s because of the rhythms and tempos and the way that things feel, not the instrumentation. So we took the modern elements of music, as far as harmony or rhythm and all of that, but still orchestrated it in this traditional way. We wanted to find something that felt a little bit fresh and modern.”
Music contractor Peter Rotter and his team quickly figured out what musicians had at home in terms of recording setups, and Bowers’ mixing engineer Steve Kay spent time with each lockeddown musician to make sure everything ran smoothly.
I ask Bowers if it is hard not to get caught up in the excitement of a new project, resulting in over-scoring a key scene or moment? “It’s such an interesting process to figure out how to balance that, but there’s so many times HEADLINER USA
“We did it all remotely, so when you’re hearing this huge orchestral sound, it’s really just eight musicians that are at home recording themselves and layering themselves over and over again,” he shares.
“He would have them do a test recording, we would listen to that and give them notes, like, ‘move the microphone a little bit further away or a little closer’. There were a couple of musicians that we really wanted to play on this score who didn’t have equipment, so we would help them figure out what equipment to buy and how to set up their space. We had a pretty good process where we would send all the music to each musician and give them two days to record themselves.
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“IT’S REALLY EASY TO MAKE A LOVE STORY CHEESY; TO MAKE A LOVE STORY THAT REALLY FEELS LIKE IT’S SAYING SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT IS A CHALLENGE.”
“Usually we would go to a studio, have around three hours, play the music and then leave. And in this instance, each musician is not only recording themselves, sometimes multiple times, but also they have to be their own engineer, they have to be their own administrative assistant and send all the files, and make sure everything is labelled correctly. “I just wanted to make the process as easy as possible for them and make it so that they have a little bit of time to turn this around and feel flexible. I can’t say enough how much I appreciate the fact that they still put so much love and heart into the sound of this music, because when you’re playing in a room of 30 people, if you’re not really feeling it that day it’s really easy to be pulled along by the rest of the ensemble into the music. And with this, everybody’s at home by themselves dealing with whatever they’re dealing with – on either side of recording – so for them to sit down and spend that time recording and still make it feel as incredible as they did shows how much the music is just as much in the performance as it is in the
writing of it – sometimes even more. If we didn’t have that effort from them, our score would not have been as successful.” Bowers shares that especially on the bigger moments, they mixed in some MIDI strings with all of the live strings recorded. His go-tos for that were Spitfire Chamber Strings or Spitfire Symphonic String libraries, and for mockups he used Spitfire Symphonic Woodwinds – all of which he says were a big help in getting Bridgerton done from home. “Another thing that was helpful to the process was that for the string players in particular, if they were doubling themselves, instead of doubling themselves on the same instrument so that we would get issues with phasing or not having enough variety, we would have players either double themselves with mute on, or they would double themselves with a second instrument if they had it, which also helped a little bit with that additional sound. I’d say 95% of the piano is live, but anything that isn’t live with piano or harpsichord
or any of that stuff was Keyscape by Spectrasonics.” In January 2021, the series was renewed for a second season (although to the dismay of the internet, Regé-Jean Page will not return), and Bowers confirms he is returning to compose the score for round two: “I’m looking forward to getting back into it. This year we really want to try to get a head start with the music because last year the toughest thing was recording that much music in that short amount of time. Towards the end of the series, we had seven to 10 days to turn around sometimes an hour of music, so we want to try to get a little bit of a head start this year. By this summer I should be diving back into it.” The cast of Bridgerton will return to production in the spring of 2021, with many hoping that this means season 2 will hit our screens in 2022. Patience, dear readers, is a virtue after all. KRISBOWERS.COM
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A man with a wealth of stories and (at the moment), all the time in the world to tell them, an hour with multi-Grammy Award winning songwriter, record producer and guitarist Gordon Kennedy doesn’t do him justice. He’s immediately warm and down to earth when we catch up over Zoom, and by the end of our conversation he’s offering to give Headliner a guided tour around The Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville – and he really means it. You’ve gotta love that southern hospitality. “I’m doing just fantastic,” Kennedy breezes in his relaxed, southern drawl (born in Louisiana, his family moved to Nashville when he was one), speaking to me from his home where he’s currently waiting for the green light to resume the Garth Brooks Stadium shows that started in 2019. Kennedy has written 15 songs recorded by Brooks and they have been friends for years. “He is the best,” he says of Brooks. “There’s nobody like that guy. If you ever get a chance to cross paths with him, you will know what I’m talking about. To do this with him is an adventure to say the least.” HEADLINER USA
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Both his parents were professional musicians who came to Nashville hoping to advance their careers. His father, Jerry Kennedy, was a guitar player in the house band of Louisiana Hayride, and his late mother was Linda Brannon – a singer on the show with her own recording career. “I remember growing up riding in the family car, and my dad was constantly reaching for the volume on the radio going, ‘I think I played on this!’ All these years later, I’m still learning records that he played on that I did not know about growing up – there’s just too many to count. I was always surrounded by musical instruments, guitars and amps. My first record player was a Seeburg 100 jukebox that played 45 vinyl records, and there was an upright piano on the wall adjacent to it, and he would bring home reel to reel tapes of whatever he had produced in the studio that day, like Roger Miller, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Statler Brothers, Reba McEntire, and all these great artists.” Kennedy’s father bought him a Fender Telecaster for Christmas when he was 15 years old, and he never looked back. In fact, he tells me that very guitar is about 30 feet from him as we speak. “It ain’t going nowhere! That just changed my life, and I have not done anything else since getting that guitar. I’ve never worked outside of being a musician, a songwriter and producer. From the time I was probably about six years old, all I wanted was to do what my dad did.” This, along with a basement full of his father’s guitars, a jukebox and a piano, nourished and inspired him as he became one of music’s finest songwriters, producers and players. Kennedy’s most successful composition is the international hit song Change The World, recorded by Eric Clapton for which Kennedy and his co-writers Tommy Sims and Wayne Kirkpatrick received a
Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1996. It also spent a record-breaking 81 weeks on the top of the charts. “We had a label in New York that was entertaining us for about a year,” he remembers. “They kept saying to us
‘give us a pop song so we can put another zero behind the number’.” During some downtime, Sims started playing the chord changes for the main riff that would go on to become Change The World, and the song then took shape after being passed around like a baton between the three songwriters. “At some point Wayne would ask Tommy to record a little riff and put it on a tape, and then he would start working on some lyrics. He would get to a certain point where he stopped, and then I would finish his lyrics and finish the music. Tommy and I recorded the demo almost a year after the session where he had first played us that idea. What’s interesting about that song is that none of us were ever together when each of us wrote the parts we wrote – it was all done separately over the course of a year, like a relay. Then it was another four years before Clapton had the song out on the radio and was a single from the soundtrack for the movie Phenomenon, and then the Grammys and all that happened.”
Kennedy not only received a Grammy
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for Song of the Year in 1996, but in 2002 a plaque on the Record Walk of Fame. In 2007 he also received a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Album, co-producing, composing and performing on Peter Frampton’s Fingerprints album, which he’s still pinching himself about now. “What’s even more surreal to me is when I’m sitting on stage and I look to my left (in the case of when we were doing the two-man acoustic shows called Acoustic Raw), and Peter Frampton is just sitting there...” he trails off in awe. “You’ve got to remember that when I was a sophomore in high school and the live album came out, it stormed! For the entire year that I was in school that year, there was a fella named Mark Vaughn, and every time we passed each other one of us would do it: ‘thank you!’ – we would imitate Peter Frampton at the end of all the songs on the record. So to say that this was a little bit of a cultural phenomenon during that time, I can’t stress how much it was!” Years would go by and somebody decided that Frampton and Kennedy should write together. Kennedy even had the honor of inducting Frampton for his star on the walk of fame in Nashville. “When I gave the induction speech I said, ‘somebody decided to try to put us together, so if you’ll look at his arms, you’ll probably see twist marks where they twisted his arm to get him to work with me’. If you look at my arm, there’s pinch marks where I’ve pinched myself to see if this is really happening! All they had to do was say, ‘do you want to write with Peter?’ ‘Yes’,” he says without pausing. “He and I have been working together now for 21 years and it’s just been such a thrill to participate in his music and be a go-to person for him when it’s time to write, or doing the two man acoustic tour.” HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“WITHOUT THESE RUBIES, THIS AMP WOULD BE A CONVERSATION PIECE FOR TELLING CHIP YOUNG STORIES. WITH THEM, IT SOUNDS GLORIOUS ON JUST ABOUT ANYTHING.”
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God doesn’t call the equipped, God equips the called Kennedy loves this quote because the first instruments he touched and played were the ones his dad used. Although professing not to be a collector, he does have an enviable collection of vintage guitars which he uses regularly. “I never got them to hang them up or put them behind glass, I always thought of them as the working tools,” he points out. A third of the guitars he uses are from his father, and Gibson and Fender are at the epicenter of his arsenal. Celestion is a big part of his sound, and he has been using their speakers for 20 years. “It was only then that I even bothered to look into what’s going on with speakers and amplifiers, and how much this plays into the end result of what I’m hearing. And that’s when I bought a 1960 Fender Tweed Deluxe amp from a vintage guitar show. I got the amp home and plugged into it and it sounded great. But I could tell that the speaker had a problem. So my friends, and in particular Peter Frampton, were encouraging me to get it recalled. I sent it to a local guy here in Nashville named Sammy to recall the speaker. While I was waiting for that Peter said to me, ‘you should put a Vintage 30 in the amp’.” The difference was like night and day: “Oh my gosh! It changed this amp into this little, mean monster of an amplifier, like it’s a baby Marshall all of a sudden. I left that speaker in there for years because it sounded so great. That was the first time I realized that changing the speaker could change the sound of the amplifier so much. I used that Tweed
Deluxe with that speaker for years and years. “On the Fingerprints album, Peter used my Tweed Deluxe with the Vintage 30 for the one song Float. He liked it so much that he went and found his own vintage Tweed Deluxe. I think he has three now! I do too.” Kennedy’s most recent vintage amp acquisition is a 1962 piggyback Fender Bassman rig in need of some replacement drivers, for which Kennedy chose the Celestion Ruby. “This amp is dear to me because I got it from the great Nashville session player Chip Young, who played on Jolene by Dolly Parton,” he shares. “I didn’t want something that would reinvent the ‘62 Bassman because that’s a great amplifier. I wanted to be able to plug a guitar straight into the amp and put a mic on it – that’s how I like to do things in the studio, not put a bunch of stuff before the amplifier. I want to hear this ‘62 Bassman the way it’s supposed to sound.” He called John Paice at Celestion and asked what he recommended. He was keen on the Ruby – a 35W Alnico speaker.
“I put in a pair of those and oh my gosh, it’s a thing of beauty! The first time I put a microphone on it in the studio and I plugged an old Telecaster into it, it had this beautiful guitar tone. I would say it was approaching a Mark Knopfler kind of sound, which I love. It makes my guitars do everything I want them to. Whether it’s a vintage Telecaster or a Les Paul or an ES-335, it just makes them sound more like what they are. I’m hearing the guitar sounds I grew up on. “Let me tell you, these Ruby speakers in the old Bassman rig I mentioned,” he enthuses. “I can do anything with this amp. I can cover Beatles, or Tom Petty in a tribute band I play in called the Petty Junkies, or plug in my ’61 Telecaster and get these warm tones. For myself, I don’t have much need for high-gain, high-saturation stuff. “I like to stage the amp so that it’s clean when I back off on my guitar volume knob, then just a little crunchy when I turn it up. Let me emphasize the Celestion part of the recipe. Without these Rubies, this amp would be a conversation piece for telling Chip Young stories. With them, it sounds glorious on just about anything.”
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Kennedy points out another reason Celestion speakers are the perfect match for him: “Celestion doesn’t stop thinking. I can’t stop thinking with what I do; I have to keep thinking of what’s next: ‘Can I do this better? Should I rewrite that verse?’ I have to continue that process, and thankfully there are people out there that put that blank screen or paper or whatever it is in front of themselves every day. “It’s like the Beatles said, ‘what haven’t we done yet?’ I am fascinated by people who do that, and the fact that I can call John at Celestion and have him listen to me, interpret what it is I’m looking for, and be able to suggest something like that, and then the payoff being what it was is a beautiful thing that you wish could happen all the time. It’s rare, but it’s just the most wonderful result.” In June 1997, the Southern Songwriters Guild inducted Gordon into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in a ceremony in Louisiana, and Bonnie Raitt has said that Kennedy is one of her favorite songwriters. It’s no surprise then, that four of her five recent singles have been Kennedy compositions, although Kennedy’s songs have also been recorded by artists including Alison Krauss, Stevie Nicks, Faith Hill, Don Henley, Tim McGraw and Carrie Underwood. You will have also heard his compositions in the film soundtracks of Tin Cup, For the Love of the Game, Where the Heart Is, Almost Famous, Summer Catch, Someone Like You, The Banger Sisters, Instant Family, and Disney’s The Fox & the Hound 2. Kennedy says the majority of songs he writes will have music, a melody and a chord progression before any lyrics. HEADLINER USA
“If I write a lyric first, it’s hard for me not to look at that page and just see a poem and think, ‘well, that should just stay that way’. I woke up at 3:30 in the morning two nights ago and wrote a lyric down that I woke up thinking about, so I’ve experienced that as well. One time, I was dreaming about a song, and I woke up, had a legal pad by my bedside, wrote the lyrics down and went back to sleep. I woke up the next morning to read it and it was total gibberish! It was just complete, nonsensical garbage,” he laughs. “So it’s all over the place and there’s no set way when it comes to the process of writing, and I don’t do tonnes of that anymore. “The world has kind of quit buying music, so the whole concept of doing 9-5 writing and having somebody go out and pitch songs went away some years back for me,” he explains. “I prefer to write when I feel like it, or if somebody puts that project in front of me. If Peter Frampton calls me and wants to write something, the answer is absolutely. If Bonnie Raitt needs a song – yes. “I still love to put a guitar up on the bench and change the strings on it; it’s sort of like therapy. I enjoy spending time holding the instruments and having them in my hands – it’s just something I gravitate towards every day, and then sometimes there’s some fruit that’s produced as a result,” he concludes, not before insisting that he meant what he said about being Headliner’s tour guide in the (hopefully not too distant) future. GORDONKENNEDYMUSIC.COM CELESTION.COM
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V 402 Mic Preamp
NEUMANN
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V 402 MIC PREAMP
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There is a lot to be said for having a quality mic pre dialled in at input stage – even if your audio interface is excellent. In addition to cutting great vocals, instruments such as bass and guitars, synths, and even piano can benefit hugely from being run through something nice and analogue at the front end before hitting the digital domain. The V 402 is Neumann’s first mic preamp since the now iconic 476B – so it’s been a long time coming. But has it been worth the wait? I’ve used a number of analog preamps with a variety of microphones – and there is a lot of quality out there. I have to say, just having something physical to get tactile with is enough to excite me, and although there are an abundance of superb plugins that not only emulate but sometimes improve on some analog circuitry, I prefer to add that stuff later, after the recording has taken place. And when I do record anything, it always goes in as close to sound at source as humanly possible, so I’m not one for crushing anything or even giving it much of a squeeze before it’s in the box. So today I’m trying out the V 402 with a Neumann TLM 49 microphone with an emerging artist in Headliner’s HQ studio. I’ve not tracked with the TLM before, surprisingly – my mic collection includes an Austrian Audio OC818, a Vanguard V12, a couple of AKG C414s including the one with the gold capsule, and a few more – all of them of course are great sounding, but considering this is a Neumann unit, I’m going with a Neumann mic. My audio interface is also right out of the top drawer – a Merging Technologies Anubis, and its pre is excellent, I should add. I find that it already allows for greater control of a vocal than most when I’m working
with artists, and it’s excellent for any instrument recording. Where driving a Neve 1073 will generate color and offer character, the V 402 seems to have been designed with silky clean sonics in mind – so with an already very clean signal chain, I’m intrigued to see how much of a difference it will make to my sound and indeed workflow. Aesthetically, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything as sleek and pro looking out of all the pres I’ve got hands-on with to date. A stunning anodized champagne colored housing with red trim, extremely sturdy knobs that you feel you can trust right away, a nice LED meter, and shiny chrome buttons make up the front panel. It’s a fantastically designed piece of kit which oozes class. The V 402 has a sizeable 60dB of gain along with switchable phantom power, HI-Z, 20dB pad, phase, and hi-pass on each of its channels - nicely laid out for all to see on the front panel. It’s a transformerless design, and it also has its own dedicated headphone amp which is a nice touch. I plug the mic in at the back – there are two XLR mic in and outs, with HI-Z instrument inputs on the front
– and feed the output to the Anubis, and turn the dial. The first thing that strikes me is how quiet this thing is. I get the vocalist to run through a take, and I begin getting the gain structure as I want it, also dialling in the hi-pass filter – and as I drive the pre a little, it remains really quiet. There is a presence in his vocal that I wasn’t getting without it, that is for sure. It also has this remarkable instant warmth – the vocal seems bigger and wider just running through this unit, filling the soundscape. I’m also really impressed with the air that the TLM offers – I can tell already that I won’t need to do much to this vocal in terms of EQ, as the top end is just there already. Also, as I push the vocal a little closer to the danger zone, the bright LED does its job and lets me know exactly how close I am to clipping. We double-track the main vocal – and the artist tells me he found it easy to deliver a performance going through the Neumann as his vocal was louder and fuller in his cans. Essentially, this is because headroom was no issue and I was able to give a loud mix with the vocal sitting nicely on top – not always easy to do without a good pre, which this V 402 quite clearly is. Very. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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V 402 Mic Preamp
What you don’t need with this unit is a huge knowledge of how to use a mic pre – it’s very simple to get a great sound, and it’s just as easy to see when you’re driving it too hard. But the sound quality – that is the greatest thing of all about the V 402. And it’s only really on playback in the track that I realize just how great it is. The vocal – without my standard compression chain dialled in – is just ‘there’, and I find myself doing quite a bit less tweaking than normal in the box. Less compression, less aggressive EQ, even less dynamics as I’m so keen to keep it up close and personal. The mic is most definitely a factor here, too – but this pre is very special, no question. I decide to try a bass guitar through it – and this is another eureka moment for me. I don’t have a bass amp in the studio currently so have been relying on DI, and the Anubis, HEADLINER USA
as mentioned before, provides a great signal; but with the Neumann, I have another level of control as soon as I plug it in. There is no boominess at all, and my sub isn’t screaming at me as soon as I play the low B string. I should add that the bass – as nice as it is for what it is – is only a Fender Squier, so we’re not talking high-end – but what I am finding is that suddenly it’s sounding more like a ‘real Fender’ – I mean that with respect, because I love this bass, I’m just saying that this thing is now suddenly punching well above its weight, and that is definitely down to the pre. There is more body, zero woolliness, and a little more punch – that’s the best way I can describe it. And as expected, when I come to dropping the bass into the mix, it’s sounding great before any further processing is applied.
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V 402 Mic Preamp
“The V 402 is a fantastically clean, rich sounding mic pre which literally allows you to get the best out of anything you put through it.”
My third test is acoustic guitar – again using the TLM. I’m using a Fender Dreadnought for this, and this is the first time I’ve listened through headphones. Once again I am drawn to the sound of silence within this pre – it is remarkably quiet, and also extremely clean. I then strum a few chords and play around with levels a little. Like it did with the bass, the V 402 provides a new level of control, as well as a natural warmth. I always feel the urge to place the mic over the sound hole to get that perceived warmth when playing
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rather than on the 12th fret position, but I always end up rolling some low end off when I do! Here, a warmth and richness in tone is evident without sticking the mic over the soundhole which, I have to say, fills me with joy! And there is no trickery at play here, just decent mic placement and good gain structure. Then hit record and you’re away. The difference in the way the guitar sounds on playback is really noticeable, and again is helping me get ahead in the mix. In conclusion, the Neumann V 402 is a fantastically clean, rich sounding
mic pre which literally allows you to get the best out of anything you put through it. Its transparency is remarkable, as is its surprisingly tight low end, and as cliché as this may seem, it just seems to make everything sound much, much better. And that works for me. NEUMANN.COM
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Late last year I did a review for Shure’s new, rather good SLX-D range of digital radio mics and body pack. For the pack I used the instrument cable with a couple of guitars to check and review the system. At the time, they had also sent me a TwinPlex TL47 lavalier mic to help test out the body pack but no instrument or lapel mountings for this mic. With a lack of lapel clip and any other form of mountings at home with me, it wasn’t until after the SLX-D review that I took a trip to the warehouse and picked up some bits and pieces. With the onset of the subsequent post Christmas lockdown, I was able to have a proper play with Shure’s flagship TwinPlex lavalier. This mic features a number of variants, sensitivity and cable-wise, but is essentially a side address, dual diaphragm condenser design that can be fitted with a choice of a flat or a presence EQ cap. I have fallen in love with the convenience of this mic, not to mention the broadcast quality sound, as I rarely sit still for long when I’m reviewing and video making! So having the SLX-D lightweight bodypack in my pocket and the TwinPlex Mic clipped onto my shirt has proved extremely convenient over the last couple of months. Fast forward to March and I was asked if I could check out Shure’s new DuraPlex DL4 lavalier mic, a mic designed to satisfy broadcast needs but with a number of key features that position it very favorably in the stage and musical theatre sound reinforcement market. It also shows a serious commitment on Shure’s part to stop the European mic manufacturers having everything their own way. So feeling positively well disposed toward the TL47, and in the interest of keeping abreast
of all things mic related and the possibility of debunking those rumors that Shure only make great rock’n’roll mics, I took delivery of a couple.
DURA-BILITY If you’ve ever worked in theater or musical theater sound you’ll know that part of the challenge is getting the mics on and off the talent in such a way as to preserve as much integrity of the source without obstruction and interference. Getting your mic as close to the talent’s mouth without it being seen, while all the time moving, getting contaminated with powder, make-up or sweat, is a tricky business. Bearing in mind these mics are invariably omnis, I’m always in awe of those special breed of sound operators who are able to ‘dance’ those faders with millisecond precision so that only the words being spoken by any one individual are ever open!
if it does happen to arrive back in your hands caked in whatever! It’s also fair to say that being omni and more readily prone to feedback, having a presence cap for the end of the mic is a very interesting feature, but more of this later. The general feel of this lavalier is one of strength and durability; there is no actual exposed grill on the DL4, just a series of patterned tiny holes behind which is a tightly woven mesh to allow the audio to pass, or in the case of the presence cap, one small hole. The DL4 is available in various colours to suit its application and comes with either a TF4 connector for Shure equipment or Lemo for other manufacturer’s professional radio equipment. Like many manufactured products these days there is an IP standard, IP57 which the DuraPlex conforms to for dust and water resistance. However in terms of microphones, very little of the DuraPlex’s competition does!
Enter stage left the Shure DuraPlex DL4. This miniature omni is waterproof and dust proof which means not only is it unaffected by sweat, but you can wash it in water HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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DL4 DuraPlex
THE CABLE FABLE Engineers know that you’re only as good as your weakest link. It’s also true to say that quality cabling and how your audio chain interconnects is equally as important as the components themselves! RF techs and their number twos often take a huge amount of flake from all sides for costume malfunctions, drop outs, cut outs and a whole host of things that can and do go wrong when the talent takes on technology! So having the edge when it comes to how the mic’s audio gets to the radio pack via its attached cable technology is definitely a huge bonus. One of the first things I noticed on the DL4 — and a feature it shares with the TwinPlex — is how strong the cable is. A common on-stage mishap is belt packs coming loose or more rarely dropping to the floor and slowly pulling the mic out of place. Or worst case producing a tiny break in the cable which produces resistance, poor audio, a microphonic cable, dropouts etc. rendering the mic useless.
Another noticeable characteristic of the DL4 cable is how it fails to retain any kinks or bends from previous placement, routing or taping and this definitely makes for easy handling and persistent reuse. An absolute must for a tool you want to reuse again and again. I have to say it, this cable is the strong and silent type! Despite numerous attempts to extract some form of microphonic noise from the cable, I was unable to and this was again the same for both the DuraPlex and the TwinPlex mics I have! The cable also has a coating which allows it to be painted with all the usual theatrical tones making it easy to hide and disguise.
MEMS THE WORD Traditionally, microphones have stuck to a familiar process of converting sound into electrical signals. A diaphragm with an attached coil, or a ribbon with a current passed through it move over a magnet and produce electrical signals which are then amplified in a couple of different ways: dynamic, electret and condenser. MEMS stands for micro electro-mechanical systems and are miniaturized electret microphones within a tiny circuit board or chip. This allows them to be manufactured in a consistent and reliable way and also helps to keep them cost effective. Early and more widely available uses of this technology were in mobile HEADINER USA
phones. But of course as with all technologies, silicon microphones have moved on to the point where they have similar frequency responses to traditional electrets and condensers. This technology all adds up to a consistency in sound quality from one DL4 to another, something which has traditionally proved difficult to do. Many mics are often analyzed to produce that matched stereo pair, and as I’ve found in the past from working in studios, an engineer will have their favorite, even from a selection of identical models!
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“WHEN IT COMES TO PRICE, DURABILITY AND CONSISTENCY OF SOUND QUALITY, THE SHURE DURAPLEX DEFINITELY OFFERS AN ATTRACTIVE ALTERNATIVE TO ITS EUROPEAN RIVALS.”
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MAKES SOUND SENSE So what do the DuraPlex mics sound like I hear you ask. I’d have to be fair and say they don’t sound like anything else or don’t borrow any one single mic’s characteristics. I’ve always found lavaliers difficult to quantify as the same mic can and does sink or swim at the hands of the engineer using it. So in the absence of a theatrical production I have used both the TwinPlex and the DuraPlex on a couple of recent reviews that are available to watch and listen to on the Headliner YouTube channel. The first which features the TwinPlex is the video: ‘How To Eliminate Ambient Sounds Using Oeksound’s Soothe 2’. It is featured on the reviewer’s voice, not the singer’s voice, and only has a high pass filter at 100Hz and some mild compression. The TwinPlex sound really opens and shines when it comes to broadcast applications. It still retains enough depth and low end to give it that radio and podcast-friendly sound, but this quality and transparency of
sound could just as easily find itself at home on a film set or in a TV studio. The second is on ‘Recording Guitars | Antelope Audio Zen Go Synergy Core’. This video features the DuraPlex which also utilizes just a 100Hz high pass and some compression, again showing just how transparent and open the DuraPlex is. There’s also a moment where I turn my head to read some notes on a key feature, which are on a table behind me, and although it’s noticeable that I’ve turned away from the mic, it’s still able to pick me up clearly. The DuraPlex and Zen Go were used on two different takes: the first when I’m facing into the room where you can see the DuraPlex on the tie clip with a pop shield fitted, and the second where I’m more enclosed facing my computer screen in the corner of the room, clearly reflected in the slight changing tone around the mic which beautifully
CONCLUSION The DuraPlex is a mic I found very useful and easy to use. It sounds good and comes with a whole host of attachments including a very neat little hard zipper pouch to protect it, as well as having a low noise floor and very good dynamic range. While the sound of any given mic and the way individual engineers work is all a matter of personal taste, when it comes to price, durability and consistency of sound quality, the Shure DuraPlex definitely offers an attractive alternative to its European rivals. If you thought Shure just made great rock’n’roll mics, think again. SHURE.COM
HEADLINER USA
conveys how well it works. And although it is only clipped to my shirt, I can imagine it would work equally as well concealed on true talent! The DuraPlex comes with a presence cap which simply fits over the top of the capsule and gives you a presence boost of around 3-4 db at 10kHz, which could prove very useful depending on where the mic is attached or concealed. I found this little cap easier to get on and off in contrast to the TwinPlex’s two caps, which were just a much tighter fit and were harder to grip. All the video sound mentioned above was recorded using the flat response caps.
OWN THE ROOM www.digico.biz DiGiCo UK Ltd. Unit 10 Silverglade Business Park, Leatherhead Road Chessington, Surrey KT9 2QL. Tel: +44 (0) 1372 845600
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SENSEL MORPH It’s the size of an iPad, it’s an incredibly responsive Bluetooth MIDI controller, and it’s got MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) multi-touch technology. These are just three of many reasons that the Sensel Morph is well worth a look.
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infinite palette of electronic sounds, enabling you to morph them (hence the name) into something totally unique. There are a few keyboards and controllers on the market designed for MPE workflow, and a number of hardware synths can receive MPE signal – though the VST software instruments that are MPE compatible are perhaps the most exciting to work with.
The Sensel Morph is very well built, and looks fantastically sleek. Imagine a cross between an iPad and a giant Apple Trackpad, except this surface is super-smart. It features approximately 20,000 sensors which allow it to detect an incredible range of pressure (from 1g to 5kg) – and it is remarkably accurate, which is evident when you bring up the Visualiser in the Sensel App. Sensel Morph is priced very attractively at $249 and is probably the easiest way of getting into using MPE technology. It’s an incredibly simple and intuitive device, superportable, and works with beautifully designed magnetic overlays which become your work surfaces: from a simple Piano (which I am using for this review) to Music Production, Drum Pad, and Buchla Thunder – and this is just for audio, there are loads more Sensel overlays designed for developers, video editors, designers, and artists. So it’s very much a multi-application device. But today I am using the Piano overlay, which feels quite piano-like to me right away despite the fact it’s almost pocket sized; probably due to the slightly raised black keys which gives you the feel of a keyboard. There are also a series of macros which allow for sustain, changing of octave, full chord
mode, and so on. And if you want to change your overlay, you don’t even need to switch the unit off – just pull one off and slap on another. The Sensel App sends ‘maps’ of said overlays to the unit in seconds once you’re connected via USB and you’re good to go. It couldn’t be simpler, in fact. The Morph works on Bluetooth too, which is a dream in a small space – especially in my studio, as I have four keyboards in here, and you couldn’t swing a cat! The Morph sits on my lap or desk without taking up any real space, and once you get used to the sensitivity, you realize it’s an incredibly playable and creative tool. The battery life is also fantastic – it didn’t get close to losing power despite the many operation hours.
MPE MPE is pretty new to me as a producer and musician. I am aware of it, but before the Sensel Morph arrived at my studio, I was yet to experiment with it in a creative fashion. Such was the excitement of using MPE, I’d bought Auras by Slate + Ash – the first Kontakt library designed to work with MPE. And boy, was I in for a treat. So what is MPE? For those who aren’t aware, it essentially allows you to take the articulation of an acoustic instrument with an
So sticking with the Piano overlay, after importing the Piano map (with MPE) within the App, in an instance it sends out controller and pitch information to the Morph, and you’re ready to play. There is pitch bend on each key, after pressure, and a vertical dimension to work with which gets the oscillators working as you move up and down the keys. As I experiment with some of the sounds within Auras, I realize I’m literally taking control of the parameters with my fingers, and it unleashes a world of possibility creatively. Sliding into a different note or chord is weird – but cool! Within Auras – and any VI that is MPE-enabled, I would imagine – I am able to play with the filtering and parameters, the delays and reverbs, among other things – and as I do, the more pressure I apply and as I vary the distance that I glide my finger up and down the piano keys gives me different overtones, effects, noises, all sorts of weird and wonderful after effects on a sound that, if not played with MPE, now seems, dare I say it, quite ordinary. In a nutshell, it’s addictive! I also instinctively reached for my sustain pedal, which is plugged into my Novation master keyboard – and was happy to see that it worked with the Morph, which was a nice touch. After playing – and indeed creating – for about an hour using Morph, to call it an MPE or MIDI controller feels like a bit of an insult, because it’s much more than that. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“AS I EXPERIMENT WITH SOME OF THE SOUNDS WITHIN AURAS, I REALIZE I’M LITERALLY TAKING CONTROL OF THE PARAMETERS WITH MY FINGERS, AND IT UNLEASHES A WORLD OF POSSIBILITY CREATIVELY.”
It’s a pint-sized powerhouse, and it’s a genuine platform to enable creatives to, well, create! And it’s so easy to use.
to Google the best drum VIs with MPE compatibility – because that with the Morph is an absolute no-brainer.
I think considering the price point – the most affordable device within the MPE realm as far as I can tell – and its plug and play workflow, it feels like an all-in-one solution. Although a deeper dive into the App will show you how to create your own overlays (without the need to input any code) and unveil a ton more options, this unit is also a superb choice for beginners; it comes with Bitwig Studio 8 Track - so there is a DAW included – as well as Arturia Analog Lab Lite.
And for advanced users, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Morph outputs polyphonic after touch – which most hardware synths can receive – so even if you don’t have MPE-capable hardware or software, the Morph can certainly add something flavorsome to your favorite synths without any additional setup required.
As I play more with Morph using the Piano overlay, I become better at using it – I didn’t initially notice the grooves within this overlay which ‘separates’ the white keys, and acts as a guide for your hands, and I was able to add strings patches, some actual piano playing, and a number of different effects using the excellent Auras palette without a single hiccup. And the cherry on top for me – veering away from the world of MPE for a second – is using it for drum programming. As a Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 user, I couldn’t ask for a better control surface. The Morph’s sensitivity is a dream for beatmakers, and I am now about
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Sensel Morph is a fantastic unit which can be used on the go pretty much anywhere, or in the studio – I think it’s hands-down the best option for an affordable road into the world of MPE, and a great controller in its own right. SENSEL.COM
ZEN GO SY NERGY CORE
Antelope Audio’s first bus-powered interface shrinks the gap between artists with access to professional studios and home creators, by making the 64-bit AFC™ clocking technology, discrete preamp architecture and Synergy Core effects processing more accessible than ever.
antelopeaudio.com
THE TURNING POINT FOR YOUR RECORDINGS.
Postcard Piano
REVIEW
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Teletone Audio is a very new company which I discovered via a Facebook AD (true story) - and after listening to the demo of its first VI, Postcard Piano, I was instantly in need of it. Two weeks and three piano-led songs later, it had inspired me to create and collaborate with several aspiring artists using this extremely cool little lo-fi piano.
I even more recently saw that Scarbo - the company’s second VI - was released, so I got in there fast and made my second Teletone purchase. As I’d hoped, it is also an extraordinary VI library which fuses mood, movement, ambience, percussion, and a whole spectrum of color which allows you to create anything from the darkest most haunting of tones to the ultra delicate and uplifting soundscapes. A written review will follow, but today I’d like to take you through my musical journey so far with Postcard Piano. HEADLINER USA
I should start off by saying that I started playing with Postcard Piano on a super compact Akai MPK Mini MIDI keyboard. Not because that’s my main MIDI controller(!) but because I wasn’t at my studio when I downloaded it; I felt like creating, and I had the Akai at home. I’d normally have a fully-weighted Korg or a semi-weighted Novation in front of me, but by a twist of fate, it turns out that this is important information, because I have never ever managed
to find a piano VI which is anywhere close to playable when working with such a tiny keyboard. Until now, that is. So before I dive in, be in the understanding that within 10 minutes of downloading this instrument and plugging in a sustain pedal to the MPK Mini, I felt like I was playing a real piano. That’s how good Postcard Piano is.
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UNDER THE HOOD So what does it do, and why do you need it? Well, if you’re into composition and you’re a pianist, I don’t think there is better out there, anywhere. As one of my fellow musical collaborators put it, who is a great pianist, and a huge fan of piano-led composers such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnald: “Postcard Piano literally has every lo-fi sound that people are after at the minute”. I’d have to agree. He and I are both fans of Spitfire Audio’s LABS instruments – particularly the Soft Piano – it’s excellent, and it’s free, so what’s not to love? But Postcard Piano takes that
sound and scope of modulation and playability to a completely different level. And it’s under £50 ($69). As presets go, Teletone’s are outrageously good: from the very oldy worldy sound of the 1920 piano, moving through the decades to the 1958, 1969 and 1974 (my personal favorite) – and then the exciting curveball settings such as Bad Cable, Doppelganger, and Grime Bass – it makes for an unbelievably playable, inspiring, and experimental palette.
As a writing tool, I instantly found Postcard Piano incredible – and that’s due to not only its phenomenal sonics, but its ability to take you on a journey with the expansive range and depth of controls. Each sample of this piano has been pitch shifted down a minor third and time-stretched, and as a result, it performs like no other.
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Let’s walk through the interface, from left to right: first up, the Reverb section – and it’s very good. From Spring and Plate to Room, Hall and Church, all options are catered for, with a nice and responsive dry/wet knob. The next section contains Tube and Age – and this is like the magic sauce for me. Tube is as it sounds, tubey! It provides warmth and a compressed tone, and you can also really drive the instrument using this. And Age is just brilliant – complete with the magnificent ‘Wow’ option, which adds an incredibly organic and nostalgic effect. Whether you use it a little or turn it all the way to 11, it can feel moody, seductive, emotive, atmospheric – awkward, even – I’m not sure one virtual switch has ever brought out so many adjectives! Moving on – and this next section really helped when playing on the mini keyboard – we have Output and Sensitivity. Output is your stereo image, ultimately – which allows you to make the piano super narrow or as wide as the ocean; and the Sensitivity is extremely accurate (again, evidence being the fact that somehow this little keyboard is bringing out real piano
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playing in me). Talking of the ocean – crank up the Reverb and the next setting, Noise, and you’ll feel like you’re by the sea. Dial in 1920 with some Wow and Noise, and I dare you to compose something that isn’t nostalgic and /or tear jerking. So wonderfully emotive. And Room allows you to add depth and sonic space to proceedings by ‘moving’ the mics in the studio virtually; the piano can be as in your face or distant as you desire. Then we have a Release Samples dial, and Sustain Pedal Noise, which is remarkably accurate also. I did eventually move on to a fully weighted full-size keyboard in my studio after my impromptu home writing session, and that was like discovering Postcard Piano all over again. For one, I was finally off headphones, so I could take in the sound of the room – and I was able to soak up not only the level of width achievable, but the richness in tone and the extraordinarily accurate low end in this instrument – particularly that 1974 preset. Also, I could now hear way more intricately the level of detail
and dimension within things like Noise and Wow – and I found it genuinely mindbending. What a sonically astute piece of kit this is, and at a pricepoint that is achievable for aspiring writers and musicians, too. Is there a downside? Only that you need the full Kontakt package to run it. But that is the only slight qualm I can find, because from an engineering perspective, and as a tool for creativity, I am hard pushed to find anyhing more desirable on the market. And if you’d like a taster of how it sounds, head on over to Headliner’s YouTube channel for our video review, where we also dive into Scarbo, Teletone’s second release, which has some welcome nods to Postcard Piano, but provides a whole other world of pad-laden color and texture with a nice rhythmic underbelly. Put the two together and you’ve got a hell of a soundscape palette. Teletone founder, Jeremy Larson, is most definitely onto something here. TELETONEAUDIO.COM
DEFY THE ELEMENTS. OMNIDIRECTIONAL WATERPROOF SUBMINIATURE MICROPHONE DuraPlex subminiature lavalier and headset microphones are consistent, long-lasting, and resistant to dust, dirt, water, and sweat. Offering professional-quality audio for film, broadcast, speech, theatre, and performance applications, DuraPlex is perfect for everyday situations but excels in the harshest environments. Capture every moment with confidence. Rain, or shine.
shure.com © 2020 Shure Incorporated. See shure.com/trademarks.
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Light at the End of the Tunnel
LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
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As the US pro audio market continues to carve a road out of the COVID-19 restrictions that have blighted the business for the past year, L-Acoustics CEO, Americas, Alan Macpherson offers Headliner some unique insights from the field and tells us why he believes there is genuine hope for a return to live events this year...
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The return of live events has been front and center of almost every music industry conversation since the turn of the year. The devastating impact of COVID-19 has trickled down into every nook and cranny of the industry since live events ground to a shuddering halt just over 12 months ago.
of the virus through lockdown measures – at least in some parts of the world – has started to pave the way for a return of live events, with certain festivals and concerts, such as Reading and Leeds Festival, committing to take place restrictionfree this summer.
Of course, the plight of those immediately impacted by the pandemic has been well documented. From touring companies and live sound manufacturers, to the thousands upon thousands of crew, engineers and venue staff, the devastation caused is both unfathomable and incalculable.
In the UK, the industry has been offered a welcome indication as to when live events could once again see the light of day. Back in February, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled his COVID-19 roadmap, which detailed a gradual easing of lockdown restrictions, culminating in the complete removal of social distancing measures on June 21. And while this is very much a best case scenario that is subject to change, it has at least provided a sense of optimism that a return to something resembling business as usual could be on the horizon.
The absence of touring has also put paid to many artists’ promo campaigns, cutting off crucial revenue streams at a time when recorded music sales deliver negligible returns. This in turn hits labels, while delayed releases hit retailers and so on and so forth. Just look at what the absence of new films has done to the cinema market… However, as we entered 2021, the conversation pivoted from ‘how do we survive?’ to ‘when do we return?’ The rollout of vaccines and suppression
As for the US, the picture is slightly less clear. According to Alan Macpherson, CEO, Americas, at French loudspeaker giant L-Acoustics, some markets appear to be recovering more rapidly than others, as he offers some unique insights from the field into how the US pro audio business is faring in 2021.
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“The US, Canada and our LATAM nations correctly responded to the pandemic in much the same way a self-induced coma in those dark early days of 2020,” he tells Headliner. “It was completely understandable that the response from authorities was to close down all instances of people gathering and shared cultural experiences, shuttering concerts, the performing arts and more. A survey we conducted last year confirmed that this hit all of our partners – not just touring and production, but also the integration community, very hard, and many had to respond by making hard choices. “As we learned more about the virus and our region experienced different waves of COVID, some jurisdictions acted differently in terms of easing restrictions. Some verticals, like houses of worship, performing arts centers and sports venues, were able to continue activities in 2020, and this segment of our business has helped many of our partners hold strong.
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“WE THINK THAT THE TOURING AND PRODUCTION SIDE OF THE BUSINESS IS VERY RESILIENT AND WILL RETURN IN A BIG WAY, STARTING THIS YEAR AND THEN BOOMING IN 2022.”
“Now, as we ease into 2021, we are seeing re-opening in the southeast of the US at a far greater pace than other parts of the nation. There are some regional tours planned for this summer in the southern states that are not yet happening in say, the northeast. The light at the end of the tunnel is definitely becoming much brighter and we are hopeful that our partners in all of the vertical markets will begin the recovery process this year.” As has been seen across the globe over the past 12 months, events companies and professionals have been lobbying hard for greater government protection for live events and the arts during the COVID crisis. So how does Macpherson rate the US government’s support for the sector? “There have been a couple of prevailing notions from authorities in various levels of government that have had the effect of marginalizing the role our industry plays in society,” he explains. “The first notion is that shared cultural experiences are somehow optional – a ‘nice to do’ that can only return when the world is completely free of the virus. Secondly, even though we now understand a lot more about transmission and ways to mitigate person-to-person spread, there still is a generally accepted belief that all shared cultural events are inherently dangerous. “We believe that these prevailing notions need to be challenged,” he continues. “Society requires shared cultural events for its wellbeing and there are some compelling studies that speak to a direct connection between live music and arts experiences and our mental health. And thanks to science, we now know how to conduct events safely, and we better understand what types of
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gatherings are acceptable. The fact that we are allowed to travel in a pressurised metal tube at 35,000 feet crammed with strangers for five hours or more, but not experience a musical event outside at the Hollywood Bowl defies logic. Let’s reconsider our notions that cultural experiences are somehow non-essential and leverage medical science to reopen live music and the arts safely.” As for how L-Acoustics has handled the challenges posed by the pandemic, the firm’s comprehensive installation offering has certainly helped prop up the business during these testing times. And like so many other businesses whose efforts are spread more or less evenly across live sound/touring and integrated systems, the company has been using this down period to ramp up its install R&D efforts. “L-Acoustics has two main segments of our business that have contributed to our growth and success over the years: touring/rental and installation,” Macpherson elaborates. “Thankfully, the installation side of our business has not been hit in the same way as the mobile verticals and we have also greatly benefitted from what I like to call ‘safe harbor’ status in the market. Performing arts centers, houses of worship, sports venues etc have ploughed ahead with their installations this past year, and given the long lifespan of a large format audio system, they have chosen us as a company and brand that they feel most confident with. We also have been fortunate to launch new products that have landed really well. It’s almost as if we had planned them for the post-pandemic world!
Pictured: The Cavern’s socially distanced “Above Ground” Concert Series
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“When the pandemic first hit, we immediately took steps to ensure the safety of our teams around the world, and the company has continued its manufacturing operations and has successfully allowed much of the global team to work remotely. At L-Acoustics Americas, we have returned safely to our head office in Westlake Village California and achieved highest marks with Ventura County for the quality of our safety protocols, social distancing and other mitigation efforts. “We have focused our attention on the installation side of our business, and also contributed to charities that help production crews through initiatives with Crew Nation and Backup. We also supported industry efforts like #lightitinred, #wemakeevents and the Restart Act to ensure that our little corner of the wider market is considered by government for support. The US COVID-19 relief bill finally offered some help for shuttered venues and aid for out of work industry peers.” While installation has largely taken center stage in the eyes of many a pro audio manufacturer throughout the pandemic, the glare of a blank calendar is beginning to draw the industry’s gaze towards the summer months and a possible return of live events. For Macpherson and L-Acoustics, there is plenty of cause for optimism, albeit of the cautious kind. As he explains, the HEADLINER USA
determining factors in the return of live events are not merely confined to the removal of social distancing measures, citing planning and preparation times, as well as event types, as equally vital. “We are feeling positive about later summer and the return of some outdoor festivals, as well as PACs and larger venues being able to open, thanks to the greatly ramped up vaccination programs we see happening this spring,” he says. “The US will likely be ahead of Canada and some of our LATAM nations in this regard, but by fall we anticipate something approaching the herd immunity that we all crave. Due to the need for extended planning, large touring will take longer to come back online, and is unlikely to make this summer season, but we expect that there will be a boom in this area in 2022, given the pent-up hunger we sense that people have for shared cultural experiences.” He continues: “It’s not the type of event that makes the difference, it’s the planning. The industry has taken a hard, science-backed look at events and come up with a roadmap that includes staggered entry, spaced seating in bubbles, and seat-side food and beverage service. This industry wrote the book on event planning and is uniquely placed to rewrite it for current and future safety protocols.”
Not only is Macpherson confident about the return of live events this year, he is also sure of its resilience to return to its former glories in the longer term. “We think that the touring and production side of the business is very resilient and will return in a big way, starting this year and then booming in 2022,” he states. “So far, we have not seen many failures out there but have seen some consolidation. We expect to see mergers and acquisitions ramp up in the medium-term in the US especially.” With this faith in the market’s robustness in mind, Macpherson is primed and ready to spearhead L-Acoustics’s efforts in the Americas once it has returned to full health. “At L-Acoustics we plan to come out of this year-long, dark pandemic tunnel, ready to assert our leadership position in touring and production, and with a reinforced position of strength in the installation vertical markets,” he concludes. “We have been fortunate to keep our team together and ready to enter the sunshine we see so clearly at the end of the tunnel. Put on your sunglasses!” L-ACOUSTICS.COM
DRUM RE-SYNTHESIZER
A revolutionary way to design your own drums – Backbone is your new, innovative drum designer for single kicks, snares, hi-hats, percussion, rises, hits and more. Layer up to eight samples and shape them with classic subtractive synthesis, decompose samples into tonal and noise elements and re-synthesize samples to manipulate them in unheard ways.
steinberg.net/backbone All specifications are subject to change without notice. Copyright © 2020 Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. All rights reserved.
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KINDRED SPIRITS
DAVEDERR &NIKLAS ODELHOLM We chat to Empirical Labs founder, Dave Derr, and Softube’s Niklas Odelholm about the debut collaboration between these two companies in a bid to recreate some of Empirical Labs finest hardware within Softube’s digital domain. The result is four brand new products.
“We don’t have in-house DSP plugin developers, and I’ve known the Softube guys for many years, and am aware that that’s all they do – so it was really a case of tapping into each other’s expertise and helping each other out,” opens Dave Derr, Empirical Labs founder. Derr is pretty sure that initial ideas for a collaboration between the two companies began “a few years back” at a champagne rooftop party in Manhattan during an AES show, but he can’t put an exact date on it. “2007, I think,” suggests Softube’s Niklas Odelholm, with a smile. Derr laughs.
“Hopefully it won’t be another 15 years until the next product comes out! We’ve had many gear discussions over beers at trade shows, and various karaoke sessions! But Dave is right - that’s how Softube started: we know about DSP, but we have always needed someone to piggyback on who knew the gear and how it should sound. So working together with Empirical Labs and Dave really helps us to focus our DSP expertise. And remember we’re working on a version of a product that has been fine-tuned and perfected for a long time; we just try to recreate that in the best possible way.” HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“WHEN A PRODUCT IS SO WELL ENGINEERED, YOU KNOW HOW ALL THE PARTS BEHAVE...”
This cool collaboration will excite a lot of people, myself included – and it has born four products: Mike-E Comp, Lil FrEQ, Trak Pak for Console 1; and an ELI Complete Collection. “First of all, these guys are by no means beginners in the analog world; they know how circuits work,” Derr is quick to point out. “The Lil FrEQ is a nightmare because of the number of sections as well as a ton of filtering and parametric – but the hardest part to recreate I would think would be the de-esser.” “The de-esser was difficult mainly because we didn’t read the schematic right the first time,” says Odelholm, with a laugh. “But when a product is so well engineered - as the Lil FrEQ is - you know how all the parts behave. And then it’s so much easier to do the math as opposed to working on something that is more haphazardly put together. It’s all in the original engineering. So I would say the most difficult part was the transformer in the Lil FrEQ, actually.” Derr gives a nod of acknowledgement, and admits that the circuit is ‘bizarre’.
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“A lot of people use transformers, but this is a modified version of what is in the Neve 1073,” he says. “With most transformers you have AC in and AC out, and it’s like a cup: this side transmits to this side, and it goes out. But in that circuit – and it’s hard to see if you put a scope on it – the input side has a lot of DC across it, as opposed to AC. And that DC sitting there does a whole other thing to anything that goes through it. “And the frustrating thing is, if you can put a spectrum analyser or a distortion analyser on there, it’s very clean looking – but when you listen to it, something else is going on! It’s clean when you measure the distortion at 0.002 or 0.003 – that is very low distortion but that DC sitting there across that transformer does weird stuff, I can tell you! So the Softube guys did a great job on that also.” Conversation turns to Softube’s emulation of Mike-E – Empirical Labs’ iconic compressor. According to Odelholm, when creating these plugins, it can sometimes be a challenge ensuring that the Console 1
users are happy (as the C1 system has such a specific workflow) and that the emulation is as accurate as possible to the original piece of hardware. “With C1, the ‘Drive’ is post-compressor, because that’s the C1 architecture - so you could get other sounds out of it by driving it differently. That’s not how Mike-E worked, so it’s always difficult because we want the C1 customers to be as comfortable using it as possible but we want it to be as true to the original also. This was a case where we had to switch them up - and with the ‘Character’ knob on C1 – and Mike-E doesn’t have a character setting, of course – we used the same sweetening circuit that we have used for a lot of other distortions in C1.” In my opinion that just makes it even more fun – adding new textures and colours that wouldn’t have been achievable in the analog domain. Empirical Labs’ NUKE setting on the Mike-E also features on the Softube plugin – but again, with a creative twist.
TECHNOLOGY
“Scary though it is, it’s a useful ratio - try it on a room, and it’ll make it sound bigger,” Derr smiles. “You’d go to 100% mix [on C1] in that case, and it’s because we have that mix control on C1 that the NUKE becomes useful in a lot of places. It’s a severe ratio, but with the mix you can tame it a lot – and it keeps things present at the same time. It allows you to un-smash it a bit and still have some presence going on.” It does, indeed – when I applied NUKE setting on a pair of overheads at around 30% I found that it did fantastic things to a drum sound I was working on. But I digress... “The Mike-E has to be at least 10 years old... I should know this! [laughs] - but the fact is, if you can do something in the digital domain that gives you more options and is easier to use, then why not? And these guys did a lot of neat stuff that I love, and in some ways makes it more useful than the original,” Derr explains. “I remember with the hardware we wanted a longer attack, and immediately I had to start a workaround because you started to get saturation and run out of headroom quickly with a slow attack because of the giant transients all the way through - and they’d get through the compressor. So we did an unsatisfactory job at trying to lengthen that! [smiles] But we had to put in a circuit to try and compensate so the threshold was lower and so it didn’t clip.
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even though we had two measurements for the attack, because of the circuit I put in to try to stop it clipping down the line – which it did – it also stopped the attack from being different. But my friends at Softube made it work a little more ‘properly’ while still providing the original facets – and that was great.” What was surprising to me was the speed of delivery – just six months from first ideas to finished product (if you forget the 15 years of beers, karaoke, and audio chat in between, of course). And when it comes down to it, it seems to be all about zeros and ones. “Early on I was using analog test gear to look at the iterations, and of course listening to them as I know what they generally sound like! And I have to say it was all pretty close right off the bat,” Derr says. “And it was funny – twice this happened: I got the build and there was an issue with the de-ess threshold whereby the de-ess would turn on sometimes when no signal was present... The thing that was interesting was that the real hardware did that at first, too! That was staggering to me - the analogy is that their software was so accurate that they had the same problems that the hardware had!”
“But Softube discovered that it basically sped it back up – so when you lower the threshold or conversely amplify the gain control signal, you basically speed it back up. So HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“WHEN YOU DO IT THE HARD WAY – THE MATHEMATICAL WAY – YOU GET ALL THAT INTERACTION...”
“But if the math is correct then you basically have a mathematical model of how this thing should work,” declares Odelholm. “Then it’s a number of steps to get that mathematical model to actually run at a fixed sample rate on a computer, but most of that during the 20 years we have been doing this has been automated, so that just happens. But the mathematical model is key here: with a project like this, we get welldefined schematics, and we don’t even have to listen to the unit until we do the verifications. The beauty is that the mathematical model is like a blueprint: when you get that right, everything is sort of right. The foundation is solid, so you just have to iterate on the specifics of that unit -
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be it detector chips or a transformer - but with well defined or well engineered units there is usually quite little to do.” “They’re already starting with an approach that won’t have a problem in the digital domain,” says Derr. “Just doing a parametric section where you’ve got that one sample of delay - it doesn’t work like it does in analog world! But with these guys, it all worked off the bat, and all the curves were perfect. I decided not to ask how they did it..!” You can get something pretty close without digging this deep – but as Odelholm says, what would be the point in doing that?
“It is possible to dial in a normal parametric digital EQ so you mimic the curves of the Lil FrEQ, for instance, but it doesn’t take you the whole way,” he concludes. “We take a lot of pride in the way we work, and always make sure everything is consistent with how each circuit works. And with some circuits, it is absolutely impossible to just mimic, because if you turn one knob then several other things will happen. But when you do it the hard way – the mathematical way – you get all that interaction. And sometimes that interaction is minimal, but I strongly believe that there are people that will appreciate that.” SOFTUBE.COM EMPIRICALLABS.COM
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Making An Entrance
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Global pandemic or not, Audi was determined to give its latest product the launch event it deserved. But how to achieve this under the current conditions? For the presentation of the new e-tron GT, the Ingolstadtbased car manufacturer staged a special kind of demonstration at the Munich Zenith.
For the world premiere of Audi’s e-tron GT, a cinematic intro using spectacular lighting technology was produced in advance at the Munich Zenith – developed by LD Raphaël Demonthy. Demonthy worked as a lighting designer on behalf of TFN GmbH & Co. KG, which has been responsible for technical design at trade fairs and events for Audi AG for more than 20 years.
over the past 10 years, regularly realizes his own design projects, but is also happy to make his talent available to other designers as an associate designer or operator. As part of the world premiere of the new Audi e-tron GT, an impressive reveal trailer had to be produced. For this purpose, a driving circuit was installed in the Zenith Munich, which was constructed exclusively from light elements.
Demonthy, who has focused entirely on lighting design and programming HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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Making An Entrance
“IN ORDER TO HAVE THE AUDI RINGS NOT MERELY AS A STATIC LUMINOUS ELEMENT, BUT TO REALLY INTEGRATE THEM INTO THE COURSE, I RECREATED THEM USING 32 GLP KNV ARC.”
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Demonthy used a large number of different GLP fixtures to implement and highlight the varied, dynamic stations of the course. On-site lighting operators were Chris Moylan and Matthias Schöffmann, while the technical service provider was fournell showtechnik GmbH. To produce the ‘carwash’ element, the LD turned to 46 GLP FR10 Bars, which framed the tunnel, created laterally – both on the floor and from above. Three FR10 Bars placed on the floor were punctuated by two Bars installed vertically, one above the other. The resulting vertical lines were extended to the ‘tunnel ceiling’, with three further FR10 Bars. “With this resource, I was able to build a light fog wall, which on the one hand ensured that you couldn’t see through, and on the other, created a kind of ‘scan effect’ when the vehicle passed through,” explains Demonthy. “With the zoom, we were also able to brighten the vehicle from the side, while we used the narrow beams for the light walls.” For the curve at the end of the hall, the designer used 25 GLP X4 Bar 20 battens, which were installed at ground level on the inside of the curve.
“This enabled us to illuminate the passing vehicles or to hit them with individual light impulses, which further increased the speed in the camera image,” he explains. “Thanks to tilt and zoom, we also had the choice of whether we wanted to illuminate the vehicles directly or indirectly via the ground.” In the stage area, 16 impression X4 were used, which served as fill lights for the camera at the opposite end of the hall. In the rig itself, 36 JDC1 hybrid strobes were also installed in two lines over the entire length of the hall.
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wide variety of light images and effects very quickly by means of mapping; this enabled the rings to play along perfectly in the circuit.” With the exception of the FR10 Bar, Demonthy was already familiar with all the GLP products used. “The solutions from GLP leave a lot of room for creativity in both design and programming,” he enthuses. “Even if you have seen the various products many times, you can always rediscover them and make them look different.” GLP.DE/EN
“We used this to emphasize the length of the hall on the one hand, and to send bright bumps through the entire hall on the other,” Demonthy continues. “We also created playful effects with the strobe and RGB pixels.” Demonthy planned something special for the famous Audi rings: “In order to have the Audi rings not merely as a static luminous element, but to really integrate them into the course, I recreated them using 32 GLP KNV Arcs. Of course, on the one hand they created a light sculpture but on the other, I was able to generate a HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted
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SONGS FOR THE DRUNK AND BROKEN HEARTED
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PASSENGER Initially known for his busking, multi award-winning platinum-selling British singer songwriter Mike Rosenberg, aka Passenger, went from performing on street corners to international stadiums a number of years ago thanks to his hit Let Her Go, which reached number one in 19 countries and has racked up nearly three billion YouTube views. His incredible back catalogue extends across multiple albums, but it was his latest record Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted, released at the start of this year, that I wanted to pick his brains about on this particular occasion...
Speaking to me from his kitchen overlooking Hove beach on the UK’s sunny East Sussex coast, at the time of interview Passenger had just got back from Dubai, where he had been fortunate enough to play a few socially distanced shows. “It was so nice to get back on stage, and remember that I actually do that for a living!” he begins with a wry chuckle. “Obviously the last year has been a real challenge, but I’ve just tried to keep myself as busy as possible. I’m so used to being stupidly busy, whether it’s touring or recording or any number of other things, and to suddenly be clearing out my calendar for the next four months was a daunting time. But I ended up making a little lockdown record, and doing loads of writing, and of course the album kept me busy as well.”
Passenger shared a number of singles from Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted before its release, one of them being Suzanne, which builds on the album’s narrative with a nice music video to boot. It starts in a half empty bar, as the camera moves away from the sad clown band and focuses on one particular punter, Suzanne, who is reflecting on her life. “Throughout my writing, there’s always been character-based or story-based songs; some of those people I’ve met throughout my life and I have been lucky enough to actually hear their stories firsthand,” he shares. “Others are more hypothetical, and Suzanne is definitely the latter. But although I haven’t met Suzanne in person, I think everyone knows Suzanne, and has met her at some stage - she’s that
woman drinking the same drink in the same bar every night, staring off into the middle distance. “There’s a tragic and fairly universal story there, and a lot of the time when I try and write about people, I’m not necessarily picking out fantastically heroic or interesting or famous people. I think there’s a real beauty in the mundane and the everyday, and I think people really relate to that.” Many of Passenger’s songs touch on themes like the fleeting nature of youth, and how the passing of time is out of our control, and this latest record is similar in its motif. In fact, the majority of the songs from Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted were written off the back of a breakup, and from a place where he was feeling quite vulnerable. HEADLINERMAGAZINE.NET
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“IT FELT LIKE I WAS VERY CLOSE TO THE VULNERABILITY AND THE HONESTY THAT I NEED TO WRITE SONGS, AND THEY JUST CAME FLOODING OUT.”
“I’m certainly not the first songwriter to harness the power of a breakup,” he quips. “I’m not reinventing the wheel with that, but you can come out of a relationship and you’re suddenly in a very strange place for a few months — sort of tumbling through life a little bit and probably drinking a bit too much and making some interesting decisions — and I think it just proved to be quite a rich time to write. “It felt like I was very close to the vulnerability and the honesty that I need to write songs, and they just came flooding out really. There’s definitely an autobiographical nature to the records, but I am insufferably boring, so any time I can switch into telling a story about somebody else and showing drunk and broken heartedness from a different angle, then I try to.” I’m curious to find out how Passenger approached the new record from a writing and composition perspective, and he proceeds to tell me that the songs were written at his kitchen table with his guitar, which has been the case for most of his life. “Passenger is what I do, and what comes naturally, so I try to never overthink that side of the HEADLINER USA
process,” he says. “When it comes to recording and packaging records, you always want to do something different, and progress things and move them on. From a writing point of view, I feel confident that just having lived a year or two more, and having experienced things and listened to more music and felt various emotions, my writing will progress naturally.”
intimate evening at London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall for an exclusive performance film; he says it was just a really nice way of giving back and saying thanks to those who bought the record, or held onto their live show tickets, and have stuck with him throughout this challenging period of time.
Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted was originally set for a May 2020 release, and Passenger had built a busking schedule around it which of course had to be placed on the backburner for a while.
As fans will know, many of Passenger’s songs are beautifully soulful ballads, brimming with emotion and mellow tones, but how does he usually go about making these records, and has his process changed at all over the years?
“I do miss it though, and it really is just something I love doing,” he admits. “There’s something special that happens when you play on the street, putting on a free gig for people who might stay for half a song, or if they want to stay for the whole thing they can. There’s so much flexibility around it; you don’t have to be a certain age, you don’t have to pay for it, and there’s no restrictions. Something magical comes about from just giving music to people in such a sweet way, and I think people really appreciate it.” To tie in with the album’s release, Passenger invited his fans to an
A LITTLE BIT OF MAGIC
“I think usually it spawns from a guitar idea,” he reveals. “I’ll just be knocking about on the guitar not really thinking about much and I’ll stumble across something. My ear will pick up a little chord progression or a melody that just sort of lights the touchpaper. “I think it’s like anything; the more you do something, the better you get at it. And I think I’m now in the position to recognize when something’s suitably exciting to follow it through to a conclusion. I think years ago I wrote a lot more songs than I do now — it was
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quantity over quality — I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was trying to say or how I was trying to say it. But this is my 13th record, so I think I’m now in a position to usually get that stuff right.” He adds that that little chord progression, or whatever it may be, often sets the tone for the rest of the song, and enables him to get an understanding of what the song should be about and how to approach it. “Songwriting has always been a little bit magical to me,” he continues. “There isn’t a science behind it; it comes when it comes, and you just have to be ready to catch it when it does.” Fingers crossed we’ll be able to see Passenger gracing our stages once again when he embarks on a mammoth tour of the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand later this year, and we can all be treated to HEADLINER USA
the heartfelt, wonderfully expressive sounds of his latest record. He, for one, cannot wait to get back out and perform. “From both sides of the stage — from a performance side but also from the punter side — I think everyone has kind of re-evaluated and understands a little bit more about how valuable live music is, and how important it is to people in terms of the release it gives them. Without sounding ridiculous, I think it’s about as close as we get to magic on Earth.” PASSENGERMUSIC.COM
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NATHAN HALPERN
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Lone Rider
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NATHAN HALPERN Most composers would be overjoyed to have scored just one film that ends up on Barack Obama’s favorite films of the year list — however indie-flick specialist Nathan Halpern can boast of two. Those being the excellent Cannes-winning The Rider and the Oscar-nominated Minding The Gap. Clearly, the former Commander in Chief is a fan. As are we at Headiner, and we were delighted to chat with Halpern about his career so far, as well as working on the psychological thriller Swallow.
I’m speaking to Halpern in the fairly momentous week where President Joe Biden has finally been sworn in as president and much of the world collectively exhaled in relief. “I think for myself and friends and family, everyone is still sort of pinching themselves a bit,” he says, speaking to me from Brooklyn, New York. “But, of course, still very cautious about all of this. The inauguration was yesterday, and it was a really hopeful moment. So I’m cautiously optimistic, to be sure, but I think we’re enjoying that.” Halpern feels that his main breakthrough moment was “a film for HBO, about the performance artist, Marina Abramovich, which was at Sundance about eight years ago. I’d done a few little projects before that, but that film certainly felt like the real beginnings of my work in film and the all-important connections that came out of it.”
Of course, I can’t go long without asking Halpern how he felt when he learned that two of the films on his CV had been given the nod by an American President. “Oh, my God,” he says. “That was wonderful — 2018, a couple of years ago. Not only the fact he watched them, but even the fact he had time to watch them! “When I think about it, these were films that both have a real sort of existential universality. Both have very profound themes: Minding The Gap in terms of coming of age cycles within families and familial relationships. And then The Rider; very much with personal meaning, existence and one’s relationship to mortality. And on the other hand, there is an aspect of those films that is quite American. So that was very interesting to me and cool that he was connecting with the films in that way.”
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The Rider is a particularly beautiful film that deserves to be sought out — a stirring story of rodeo riders in South Dakota, with breathtaking scenes of its unbelievable natural beauty providing the backdrop for the real-life stories of the untrained actors who draw heavily on their own life experience. And while Obama may not have singled out the score himself, the music is absolutely a key part of what makes the film so excellent. “The Rider was a very special film,” Halpern says. “Chloé Zhao, the director, reached out to me, and she sent a rough cut of the film. I was so moved by this film. It deals with a cowboy who has suffered this debilitating injury while riding. And it’s his entire essence of his existence, to ride horses, and now he can’t do it. So the film deals with him coming to grips with who he is and what life is going to mean for him. I just found it so devastating and meaningful on so many levels. And it was beautifully crafted. It’s shot very beautifully with tremendous poetry to it. We premiered at Cannes and (Werner) Herzog came out and was gushing about it, which was beautiful!” Halpern’s most high-profile movie in his recent filmography is undoubtedly 2020’s Swallow, the Haley BennettHEADLINER USA
starring psychological thriller. There’s a great lineage of films that seek to unpack the American Dream in a disturbing way, and Swallow is no exception as it follows Hunter, a housewife and mother-to-be, mostly staying at home while her husband gets ready to take over from his father at their Manhattan Corporation. All sounding lovely so far, but Hunter feels so isolated and apathetic in her marriage and home life, that she develops an obsession with eating increasingly dangerous objects. “Early on we have this sort of beautiful artifice,” Halpern says. “We’re getting some of this Douglas Sirk kind of vibe, so initially the music is a bit of a callback to the mid century studio era cinema, and puts us in conversation with that American Dream feel. And then we let it slowly unravel as things go on, as the facade gradually disintegrates over the course of the film.” I then ask Halpern which are his favorite bits in his studio that help him achieve all of this musically. “Spitfire, absolutely,” he says. “Yeah, I’ve definitely used their products, among many, and have always been impressed. We actually did a presentation together last year. They
make wonderful, wonderful samples. I love using Spitfire for sketching things. And then another thing that I like to do, even when I’m using live instruments is to also combine them with sounds that are a bit more abstract, and sort of de-familiarized and make the overall sound of the music feel a bit less literal. “I love strings and their emotional directness, but sometimes I may combine them with weird sampled sounds and other things where the strings might be in there, and you can feel them, but they’re only more pronounced and explicitly noticeable at certain key moments. Soundtoys plugins are ones that I’ve definitely used a bunch, and I work in Logic. That’s just something I’ve done for a number of years.” I don’t want to over-labor the point, but you really should go and watch The Rider if you haven’t already, and the beautiful score by Halpern is absolutely worth a headphones-listen, especially when it’s so short at 27 minutes. And then, should you wish to follow that up with something more disconcerting, Swallow as a film and a score fit the bill perfectly. COPTICONMUSIC.COM
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