SHOW TIME

With my confidence boosted by the refreshed tone library, I walked into the first rehearsal armed with the KeyLab Essential 49 and a MacBook Pro.

A few rules of thumb when entrusting a computer with musical instrument duties on stage. Firstly, keep just the instrument application open. You want all your CPU juice concentrated on one task. Secondly, go into your energy saver settings and set your sleep timer to Never. Third, use gaffer tape to secure all cable connections to and from your laptop. Now’s not the time for a clumsy footfall to curb your show. Fourth, try to get the best signal out of your laptop possible — don’t use the headphones output if you can help it. I hooked up a Focusrite Forte to handle D-to-A conversion, with the stereo outputs DI’d into the PA. Finally, choose a buffer size that responds fast but doesn’t excessively tax your processor resulting in snaps, crackles and pops. 64 samples was just right on my machine and interface combination.

Using the KeyLab Essential at the gig went as well as I could’ve hoped. The Analog Lab 2/KeyLab Essential duo formed a truly coherent experience that wasn’t dissimilar from playing a regular hardware keyboard. I developed a new appreciation for the pre-production effort that goes into preparing sounds for the stage while sitting in a home studio. I saw Arturia’s MIDI controllers in a whole new light given the live possibilities.

LIGHTEN THE LOAD

Sure, MIDI controllers have their place in a studio during the songwriting or production workflow. But in a world where an artist’s signature sounds are more often built in laptops than on 50kg modular analogue synths, there’s a need for products that lend a physical embodiment to their software instruments counterparts. Arturia’s KeyLab Essential does it easily and affordably, without you breaking a sweat to pick it up.

SHOWMATCH SHOWCASE

Making its Australian debut on the Conscious Tour was Bose’s new ShowMatch DeltaQ line array system. The Civic Theatre is split into two levels, so the PA was ground stacked to give best coverage to the entire audience. FOH engineer Anatole Day has worked with Guy for over 10 years now and as well as knowing the intricacies of Guy’s oeuvre, he’s also rolled into regional hubs like the Civic Theatre many times. He’s tried every kind of flown and groundstacked configuration here and finds this the best for coverage as well as reducing slap at the back of the venue.

Day went with two sides of six Bose SM20 elements stacked on four Bose SMS118 18-inch subs. The top two 20-degree vertical dispersion array elements curved up to send audio into the balcony.

“I’m trying to recreate what Guy is trying to express and the ShowMatch can handle all of it,” said Anatole. “The electronic material can go from super high to super low sub bass. You need to be able to translate that across the board, along with the quieter, more acoustic moments. The ShowMatch can definitely cover everything we’re throwing at it.”

While ShowMatch borrows much of its inspiration from Bose’s popular RoomMatch installation-focused line array, the ShowMatch is targeted to the rental and touring markets. Everything from bump in to rigging reflects this.

“The rigging couldn’t get much more basic to operate,” Anatole observes. “One guy can move and position a box easily. Two guys could get a hang of 12 up in under 20 minutes.”

GUY GOES WITH SENNHEISER

It’s been a couple of big switches for the Sebastian production crew. As well as going out with Showmatch, the Conscious Tour saw the crew switch RF audio duties over to Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 system. Reproducing Guy’s elaborate vocal chops was the D6000 handheld transmitter with a Neumann KK 205 supercardioid capsule. A SK6000 digital wireless transmitter was used for his Telecaster while he and the whole band were on Sennheiser 2000 Series IEMs.

There was lots of wired Sennheiser gear on stage too. The drums set-up included an e901 and e602 for the kick drum, e904s were used for the snare top, snare bottom and floor toms and MKH 8050s for the hi-hats. All the guitars were miked up with a combination of e903 and e906, while backing vocals were through a combination of D6000 handheld wireless mics with MD 9235 capsules and e945 wired mics. The MK4 and e914 provided live ambience to the monitor mix.

“Guy loves the clean, crisp audio quality in his IEMs,” said Anatole. “I love the Sennheiser range of products because they sound great and are extremely reliable.”

Bose Professional: pro.bose.com
Sennheiser: (02) 9910 6700 or sales@sennheiser.com.au

FROM BUNGALOWS TO CONDOS

It’s classic smoko chatter. Albini even wears a daily uniform of Electrical Audio-branded coveralls, a visual reminder that his focus is on engineering recordings, not artisan-crafting them. The brown brick building Electrical Audio inhabits fits the workmanlike operation to a ‘t’. It was built at the turn of the 20th century, barely newer than the Lutheran church down the road. All of the ground floor windows and doorways have been bricked in, leaving just one solid door access. On either side of the studio are apartment buildings, but Albini said it wasn’t so well-established 20 years ago.

Back in December ’95 “it was essentially a vacant, industrial neighbourhood,” recalled Steve. “Across the street was a big, empty, abandoned building that used to be The Valley Pinball Company. This building was cheap and there was room for me to build two studios in it.”

Then the condos started rising out of the rubble of the industrial complex. First to go was the pinball company, then the warehouse to the west, and a printing press plate manufacturer to the east.

Albini nabbed the joint for just shy of a quarter of a million back then, after a handful of high-paying jobs gave him enough capital.

Albini has always been in the neighbourhood. His first studio was a bungalow a mile from Electrical Audio that he bought in ’86. He built an eight-track recording studio there, where “Big Black recorded its final recording sessions for our final album,” said Albini.

He started recording friend’s bands too, and soon enough, “I started getting engineering gigs outside my circle of friends from people I’d never met.” In the winter of ’87/’88 he was able to quit his job to become a full-time recording engineer, working mainly out of the house with occasional trips to other studios.

He saved money to buy more equipment then rebuilt the studio. “I bought a larger console, a 24-track machine and a bunch of outboard equipment,” he said. “I rebuilt the studio so the entire attic was a control room, and the basement remained the playing rooms.”

Demolition and construction started immediately in ’95, and it wasn’t until April ’97 when Albini recorded his first session there. After the building purchase, Albini had enough money to “finish off one studio of the two planned for the building. Then I moved the studio into the first-floor Studio B control room, sold my house, sunk all that money into building Studio A and started making records in Studio B.”

Albini’s name is linked to big-name acts like Nirvana, Pixies, Low and PJ Harvey, but his discography is packed with acts of all shapes and persuasions, many of them local to the Chicago area. He stops short of calling his work a documentarian-like effort, but he does appreciate the work and its connection to his hometown. “I’ve done a lot of Chicago bands but by no means a definitive portrait of the city,” assessed Albini. “Over the course of 20 years, a lot of people have had a chance to cycle through the studio. I’m in favour of staying in business. I love it that as a studio we are a resource for the local music scene. It makes me feel validated in building the place in the first place. But we don’t depend on the Chicago music community for our life blood. We have an international clientele. If we had to depend purely on the local business, we would have failed a long time ago.”

THROWING MUD

Albini took me on a tour of the facilities, starting with Centrefield. The roughly diamond-shaped, baseball-inspired large live room. The walls are constructed out of adobe, an unfired earth brick from the southwest of the US. Albini got the idea when he was doing a session at Mick Wordley’s studio, Mixmasters in Adelaide. At the time, Mixmasters was in Mick’s house, but he was in the throes of building a new studio out of mud brick, and invited Albini to have a look. “As soon as I saw people working with it I thought, ‘Wow, this is the perfect material to build a studio out of.’ It’s dense, it’s soft, the walls will be self-isolating — that’s really, really smart.”

Back in the US, he pored over earth building journals in order to become conversant in mud technology, then bit the bullet and trucked tens of thousands of bricks up to Chicago.

“The great thing about adobe is it’s an extremely forgiving material,” explained Albini. “The mud of the grout lines between the bricks becomes contiguous with the mud of the bricks themselves and acts like one solid pile of mud. The whole wall tends to settle in a way that eases its own internal stresses and avoids cracking the way more rigid masonry does.”

The key point, Albini stresses, is that if you were to hit a traditional brick with a hammer it would transmit the vibration of the hammer and ring like a bell, whereas adobe will absorb the energy with a thud. It’s really good at sound isolation. The result is Electrical Audio can have two studios operating on the same floor with minimal bleed. “We can have a roaring heavy metal band operating here late into the night and the people sleeping in the apartments next door never hear it.”

Albini flew a professional adobe brick layer in from New Mexico to show some professional masons and his ragtag group of friends how to lay the brick. “Within a week, our crew of layabouts and fools — just normal, regular people who’d never laid a brick in their lives — were doing it.” You can see it in two of the opposing walls; one is professionally even and square, while the other is a lot more haphazard. That one was by the “self-taught, punk rock construction crew.” Albini himself laid no more than a dozen adobes.

The remainder of the studio is comprised of another smaller live room called Kentucky, and Alcatraz, which is a prison for sound waves, designed to minimise the harm of loud guitar amps.

TAPE DOWN THE HATCHES

The control room is spacious, with plenty of space to house the battery of analogue gear and two core tape machines that record everything that transpires at Electrical Audio — a Studer A820 multi-track two-inch tape machine and an Ampex ATR102 1/2-inch machine for mixdown.

It’s been 20 years since Albini started the studio, and digital audio has become the predominant recording format. So, why does he continue to hold out and use tape?

Albini says it’s for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Let’s take practical first. Albini explains it by using Robbie Fulks as an example. When he first recorded the singer-songwriter back in ’85, Fulks had no national profile to speak of. Last year, he was nominated for two Grammy awards. Now that Fulks has achieved significant status, “it’s not inconceivable that someone will want to do a compendium of his music,” reckons Albini. “If I had recorded his sessions on the digital format of the day, it would be impossible to resurrect those sessions in any meaningful way.” Now, he can just lace up those original tapes on the machine and mix any outtakes of interest. “I’ve already been involved in the silver anniversary editions of several records I recorded,” said Albini. “The master tapes having survived allowed them to be presented in a better listening experience than was possible when they were just being released perfunctorily in their original heyday.”

He doesn’t have a crystal ball that can predict which of the dozens of bands he records each year will warrant an immaculately mastered direct-to-metal LP in the future. What he does know is he doesn’t want to be the “person that dropped the ball on history and robbed these people of the opportunity for their music to have found an audience.”

It’s that respect for the archival permanence of the analogue recording medium that keeps Albini lining up azimuths and cleaning heads on a daily basis. “I feel like my fundamental obligation as a recording engineer, is to make an historical record,” he summed up. “I feel like all the digital sessions, as powerful as they are and as impressive as they can be in terms of their capability, they don’t have that fundamental element of permanence. They drop the ball on what, to me, is the most important part of the job.”

THE PERILS OF INFINITE TIME & SPACE

Albini’s secondary reason for using tape is aesthetics. Again, this is broken up into two parts. Firstly, because of the bass response and tonal stability of his specific machines [see box items], and secondly, due to the way working with analogue tape limits the scope and draws in the focus of an engineer.

A lot of his clients don’t have a lot of time, so making decisions as early in the process as possible pays dividends come mix time. “Generally speaking, the final mix isn’t miles away from the first playback of the first take.” If there’s something fundamentally wrong at that point in time, you should stop and fix it, contends Albini. That’s part of training in the analogue technique, “you don’t presume you can make something better later.”

In the analogue world, ‘the next step’ isn’t any easier than the one before it. While you have a similar array of tools available to you in the digital paradigm, “they tend to be more finicky; they tend to be slightly less powerful in terms of the scope and range of things you can do to the sound,” said Albini.

On the other hand, because it’s simple to “fiddle with sound in rather dramatic ways,” it’s also easy to keep moving on to ‘the next step’. But that “fiddling” ends up occupying the bulk of your time because you’ve continually moved on without getting it right.

Everything is on a smaller scale, too, says Albini: “Fewer instruments, fewer sounds get processed and the processing is much more subtle, much more gentle in the analogue domain.” While a Pro Tools session can easily reach into the hundreds of tracks, you tend to reduce tracks in the analogue world. “Instead of separately processing four voices recorded for a special moment, you’d bounce them to an auxiliary track, balance them and print that balance,” said Albini, leaving you with one fader to deal with instead of four. “With analogue, you have fewer things to babysit.”

Those infinite choices don’t just stack up down the screen, they can also happen with every channel. Albini reckons digital systems allow “more takes than is healthy for the attention span of the average engineer or the average musician. I’ve never done a record where if we had 30 more takes it would have made a difference in how the record came out.” From there it becomes a game of microscopic edits and tiny EQ tweaks to squeeze every last ounce out of the frequency spectrum, says Albini: “You would be unlikely to do those things in the analogue domain.”

“I mean, my job isn’t about the circus tricks and the magic show I can do in the control room. It’s not, ‘check out the sound stage on this drum kit.’ That’s not my job. My job is to make sure that what these people have entrusted me with survives into the distant future in the hopes that it will eventually find an audience.”

OPEN UP THE VALVES

Sebatron use handpicked modern JJ’s valves to keep quality predictable and high. You can, of course, swap the 12AT7s out for a different brand, or dig into some NOS Mullards to vary the tonal signature of the preamps. It’s as easy as popping the hood and wriggling the tube out of its socket. If you want any kind of similarities across your channels though, you’re going to want to buy some matched stock. The 12AT7 has a gain factor of around 60, compared to the 12AX7’s gain factor of 100. Every tube circuit is built around the tube it’s designed for, but a 12AT7 will usually sacrifice gain for a smoother response. It’s still able to add harmonics to the sound when in open loop mode, but it typically won’t crunch and compress like a driven 12AX7. Definitely don’t swap in a 12AX7 for the existing tube.

The unit does get quite warm, so it’s best to give it breathing space. I didn’t notice any adverse effects on the cleanliness of the preamp with it running for full days of tracking. It’s a well-built device, though Sebatron has moved away from a completely screen printed front panel, to a screwed on version. It doesn’t look quite as nice, but I still like the cream look.

As well as the EQ and gain circuitry it’s got all the bits you need in a workhorse preamp; switchable +48V phantom power, phase flip, and a signal indicator LED. There’s no other metering, but it has loads of head room so you won’t overload the input. Anyway, driving the unit is a big part of the charm.

As far as connections go, Sebatron has gone out of its way to make things easy. There are four balanced mic inputs on the rear via XLR, and a 1/4-inch DI input for each channel on the front panel. This goes directly to the plate of the valve, so while you can use either input to process line level signals, Sebatron recommends plugging in via the DI socket.

On the output side, you can come out at line level via the XLR sockets or separate 1/4-inch outputs, which can handle either balanced TRS or unbalanced cables. Very handy if you’re lugging the unit around and don’t have the right cables.

SPECTRUM OF SOUND

I’ve been eager to get my hands on one of these units for a while. It’s Australian-designed and made, and I’ve only heard good things.

It hasn’t disappointed, the VMP Quad Plus is very clean when operating in Normal mode, with a solid representation of every source. Like any preamp, it’s a matter of suiting the source, but there’s a lot of sources it does suit.

On vocals, the slight bit of compression from adding harmonics helps them both come forward into focus while immediately bedding them into the track. It helped the vocals feel like they belonged.

I did a few recordings where I passively split the output of a Shure SM7 into the VMP Quad Plus and the preamps on a Focusrite Red 8Pre. It’s Focusrite’s flagship interface and no slouch when it comes to the analogue input side. In this mode, the vocal compression was less pronounced than when comparing the recordings made with a condenser. Probably because the less sensitive SM7 does a bit of levelling out itself.

I slapped it up on drums in the classic crush mic position above the kick. It’s a great spot to get a quick balanced mono kit sound. In this instance I was recording a pretty dry drum sound, with a heavily dampened snare in that ’70s close-sound vein. Without the heavy compression I’d usually employ, the Focusrite had slightly more presence to the snare sound, which came across a little cardboard-y in this instance. The Sebatron, on the other hand, contained the snare a bit more while bringing out the woody body of the close sound. It sounded a bit spongier and perfect for the overall drum sound. While just right for that sound, I’d prefer something a tad more snappy for ‘big’ rock drums.

While there are caveats for using the preamps to record a stereo configuration — lack of linearity in open loop mode, and non-repeatable controls — in practise it works fine for non-critical applications. The controls have enough markings around them to get you in the ballpark, and with a critical ear to your centre position, it’s fine. It’s still best to keep it in the normal position to avoid any drift in amplitude and non-linearities; all the things negative feedback keeps under control. I did, however, use it to amplify the signal of a stereo passive ribbon in a Blumlein configuration, and had to use it in Open Loop mode. In that mode I found it harder to keep the mic’s stereo centre pointed at the vocal than it was to line up the two preamp gains. When using the preamps to add character to a line level source you’ll have to line up the two channels with some pink noise. In this case, stepped controls would have been indispensable so you don’t have to constantly recalibrate whenever you make a change to the gain structure.

The variation in colour between the two extremes of clean and full harmonic colouration is relatively dramatic. Recording two passes of an acoustic guitar — one in normal negative feedback mode with gain control set to 0dB and the output control adjusted to match, the other in open loop with the gain all the way up and output control managing the level into my DAW — gave me two quite distinct sounds. The clean tone was everything I usually hear from the guitar, plenty of low end from the dreadnaught shape, but a bit flat overall. The gained up version added a lot more excitement to the mid range of the sound. All in all, it was a much better rendition of the strummed guitar without getting boxy.

The DI input is another very flexible tonal tool. I initially tracked some bass through both the Focusrite and Sebatron and was surprised to hear how similar there reproduced the low end. They both sounded full and tight. After a bit more experimenting with some guitar tracks into some plug-in amp simulation I soon realised the Focusrite sounds slightly saturated, which was a nice touch for an interface DI. The Sebatron could easily match that tone, or drive much harder for a very forward sound, which added some very usable twang and presence. On the other end, in Normal mode, the input was wide-ranging and glassy.

SEBATRON SPINOFF

I really dig what Sebatron is doing. The VMP Quad Plus is not only a great idea, but it’s well executed. Character is everything in music making today, so it was a smart move for Sebatron to spinoff a unit dedicated to micro-managing the level of tube flavour imparted on sounds. All of the things a lot of manufacturers miss, like phase flip, or robust connections, are all the things that makes the VMP Quad Plus even easier to recommend. Whether you don’t have any outboard preamps or have an entire rack of them, there’s a spot in there for the sort of versatile tube character the VMP Quad Plus can impart.