BREAKING WITH TRADITION

Since we last caught up with Adrian Breakspear for his production and engineering work on the runaway smash, Gang of Youths’ ‘Go Farther in Lightness’, he’s been busy. Lately he’s been working with post-punk band Johnny Hunter, indie duo CLEWs, up-and-coming songwriter Georgia Mae, and kept motoring through COVID with artists like Josh Pyke and Ruel.

Over the last few years, Adrian has been turning his hand to the writing side as well. “When I go to a writing session, instead of bringing two guitars, I just bring one – an Acoustasonic,” he commented. “It does acoustic, but electric as well.” In most writing sessions you might only have a day to churn out a demo, so flexibility and “a usable acoustic sound straight from the jack is a huge advantage,” reckons Breakspear. “I’m used to recording really nice acoustic guitars in studio live rooms with great microphones. Anyone would opt to record a really nice Martin in a room if that’s the sound you’re going for, if you have the budget and space to do it. However, there’s plenty of occasions where you don’t have that option and the Acoustasonic is much nicer than plugging in a standard acoustic.”

Breakspear is well acquainted with the perils of DI’ing an acoustic. Everyone is familiar with that cringey piezo zing. In a live context it can often be massaged enough to work, but it can be a rough listening experience on record. “I recorded and mixed a Boy and Bear live album recorded at the Hordern Pavilion,” recalled Breakspear. “They’re a lovely band with nice instruments, but even so, the acoustic guitar sounds were a battle. It had that zing and I had to use the UAD Sound Machine Wood Works plug-in and notch all kinds of frequencies to try and make it sound good.” On the flipside, he’s recorded a number of live-to-camera sessions recently and each time an Acoustasonic featured it made his job a lot easier. “With the Acoustasonic recordings it’s less about fixing it, and more about how much better you can make it.”

In the studio, Breakspear has another suggestion for how to use the DI’d sound on the Acoustasonic. “If a musician is playing and singing, I’ll record the DI as well. If there’s too much spill, or if the vocals are getting too affected in a section, I’ll usually notch the mic using a spectral editor or just duck it and turn up the DI for a moment in time. If the vocal’s loud enough, it’s not noticeable. The DI signal is also nice to have for body, you can roll off any piezo top end to give body to the sound. That way, the mic delivers the pick attack and the DI handles the body, and you blend the two to get body without spill. You could do a similar thing with the Acoustasonic and put a mic on it for the pick attack and use the DI for the body. It would be a nice sound that gives body with actual tone, but also give that ‘pick on strings’ effect, which is hard to emulate.”

PLUG IN PLATFORM

The Acoustasonic Jazzmaster is semi-hollow-electric kind of thin. Looking at it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s not going to give you much in the way of an acoustic sound. But Fender’s Brian Swerdfeger was really intent on it having a great ‘on-lap’ experience. That it would resonate in a way that makes you want to keep playing it. “It’s a very playable guitar,” agreed Adrian, with its electric-scale body and neck. Volume-wise, he said it strikes a balance of being able to accompany couch-singing without waking up your housemates.

The Acoustasonic’s body design is quite different to a standard acoustic, mainly because it’s trying to achieve a completely different goal. Traditional acoustics have a big body and a resonant top because they were designed to contain their own amplifier to compete onstage with a banjo or double bass. Decades later, when we started to plug them in, it created a double-amplified system that can fight against the physics of the acoustic amplifier.

From the start, Brian designed the Acoustasonic to be a guitar you plug in. By having that focus, his team were able to really focus on making the Acoustasonic a platform for the DSP — not adding-in DSP to paper over its issues. “I knew its magic would be plugged in, so we had to take away everything that’s bad about an acoustic guitar and only leave the properties that the electronics needed. A traditional acoustic guitar uses the back and top linking in harmony like a bellows. Every push or pull is actually pushing something out. If you get an additional source like a PA speaker pushing the top differently, that’s how you get feedback. Now you’ve got two sources in motion, and they might be in or out of phase. The extra energy causes feedback. Because of the design of the top and the back stiffness, it’s not doing that on ours. We don’t have the bellows effect.”

EXPECT MORE

There are two key features that make the Acoustasonic deliver more power than you’d expect: the bracing style and sound port. To capture the greatest amount of energy in the thin guitar and transfer it to the top, Brian looked at the way a guitar flexes around the neck joint. “If you’ve ever put a microphone on an acoustic guitar, you’ve probably put one pretty close to the neck joint because there’s a bunch of energy transfer happening there,” explained Brian. “On the Acoustasonic, we wanted to capture the energy of the neck joint and transfer it across the top. The two braces are nested in the joint and they run across the top on either side of the sound port and intersect the wings of the bridge. The top gives all the ADSR information of the note, and all the energy coming off the neck joint sustains that top and gives me real guitar performance. That’s what gives you the on-lap experience and drives the DSP. The chassis is super important for the Acoustasonic and each of the three has its own personality. Each responds differently, but in a similar fashion to their sisters in history.”

The other element is the waterfall sound port. At its core, it allowed Brian to tune the resonant frequency of the box, which is essentially a Helmholtz resonator. The waterfall design gave him two dimensions to work with: the diameter of the hole, and the depth of the port. Both combine to deliver a surprising level of bass response for a thin guitar. Fender has been awarded patents for the non-linear shape of its port, but Brian said the development was really one of those happy accidents and each Acoustasonic design has a different shaped port: “You’re on a quest for the perfect depth and you go over to the belt sander and sand a bunch off, and lo and behold, it’s just right.”

FOREST GUMP TO CASTAWAY

With a willing acoustic platform, the next step was putting in the DSP. Considering Fishman had already provided the transducers, Brian went to Larry Fishman and described what he wanted. “I went to Larry and said I need a five-way switch and two knobs. He said, ‘what’s it need to do?’ I want to use IR, but have it wrap around my guitar. My guitar is Tom Hanks, if I dress him in a really tight suit, cut his hair really short and give him a Southern accent, he’s Forest Gump. Take away the wardrobe, give him long scraggly hair and a volleyball for a best friend, now he’s from Castaway… On the blend knob I want to go from Forest Gump to Castaway.”

Initially Larry told Brian he was nuts. Blending two IRs together is not something you traditionally do. But like a true innovator, Larry’s not capable of letting a fresh problem out of his sight. It took a year for Fender and Fishman to work it out, but at the end of it “this flat little thing was making huge acoustic sounds and rocking electric sounds.”

For Brian, it was “important we made a guitar and not a science project”. So all the switching looks like a standard Fender guitar, and users can’t currently upload their own sounds to it or change out the presets. Each of the Acoustasonics has its own flavour of sounds, and choosing the right version is part of the appeal. For instance, the Jazzmaster has “a deliberately cheap personality sound, like a Pixies or Violent Femmes pseudo cheap piezo into an amp sort of thing,” said Adrian. “I’m not that into it yet, but I see the intent.”

However, he really digs the electric sounds. “I really like the driven sound of the Jazzmaster. I work with an R&B singer, and we did live studio records the other day. I used the Acoustasonic for those with an electric sound and it worked really well. I also sent it through a Plugin Alliance Bx Bass Dude Bassman simulation, and it sounded huge.”

As far as Adrian is concerned, the DSP experience is transparent. “You haven’t got a bunch of different choices; it’s just flicking through presets and the blend knob allows you to really dial in the right amount of body. I’m not fussed about DSP, I mix a lot in the box and I’ll often use amp sims instead of real amps not only for the convenience, but because they sound good.”

Overall, he said. “If you can only take one guitar to a session, it’s much better to have an Acoustasonic than just an acoustic or just an electric.”

A RETURN TO COMPTOWN

I was a latecomer to the Ableton party, holding on desperately to a solely linear workflow for music production, and never dreaming of using playback live. After finally getting my hands on a copy of Ableton Live 9, and then my head around how a scene-based workflow could jumpstart my creative juices, I was hooked, and now it’s a staple in my live sets, too.

Coming from Logic and Pro Tools, I could handle the lack of editing tools, but Ableton has stubbornly held on to its electronic musician’s toy chest perception. Dispensing with ‘serious’ tools in favour of fun. The idea of labouring over a section of music seems at odds with Ableton’s manifesto. When it comes to getting ideas down into coloured blocks, thou shalt not delay, except as an effect, in which case, go wild. 

Still, one omission seemed to sit on the fence, swaying between the backyards of ‘fast and loose’ and OCD. Namely, comping. 

When comping was stripped away from me back during ‘the move’, I still managed. Mind you, I did try all the workarounds in a desperate attempt to imitate the feature but eventually gave up trying. In many ways, it was a net benefit to go back to tape-style tracking. Having to delete a section in order to redo it really made me pay fresh attention to each recording’s pitch, timing and rhythm. It also forced me to pay better attention to how each part fit as I was laying it down. I couldn’t go back and select another take if my arrangement started to go awry.

On the other hand it was time to take the kid gloves off. I felt I’d been around the DAW block enough times to be entrusted with a tool that had become a staple of every other mainstream DAW. Besides, it doesn’t have to be used to craft the perfect take, it’s just as likely to be used for improvisation.

FOLLOW TEMPO

On the complete opposite side of the coin is the live tempo follow feature. It’s a feature largely aimed at a particular use-case, or should I say, type of live ensemble where you have playback with a live drummer. It ‘can’ do other things, but this is where the feature excels, or rather, is reliably successful. 

To set it up, you toggle it on in the Link/Temp/MIDI section of your preferences. Set the external audio input source from your interface and you’re ready to go. It can be from a dedicated ‘tempo mic’ but can also be an audio input that’s feeding your session. 

In my tests it also seemed to respond better to louder sources, so make sure your preamp is gained up, and also likes a bit of low or mid range. Counter intuitively, it doesn’t do anything when you give it the ol’ drumstick click ‘1, 2, 3, 4’. Best practise would be to have a tap tempo device handy to dial in the range of your tempo prior to, or at the beginning of, your performance.

It also only likes to change incrementally. While I could double the tempo of a song from 80bpm to 160bpm, I had to slowly ramp it up over a minute. Sudden jumps won’t register at all and if your source/drummer isn’t always within a 5bpm range (max), you run the risk of skipping a beat altogether.

It has its applications, but it would require fastidious preparation to incorporate it into a live set. It will follow along  with more complex inputs, like guitar, but it doesn’t reliably track yet to hold over the duration of a take. In the future, I could see this being a great tool for recording because you can use it to record song tempo automation while tracking. It means you could theoretically record a singer-songwriter without a click, track the tempo of their guitar, then lay an arrangement down to the tempo they were most comfortable with. That’s theoretical though, it would often take a little while to find its feet and wouldn’t reliably lock in each take.

BIG KID’S MIDI, MPE ARRIVES

Besides vocal comping, another feature Ableton users have been baying for is MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE). Well, it’s finally arrived. It’s not ubiquitously applied to all of Ableton’s built-in synths, and in the current beta state, not all MPE plug-ins automatically work. However, it is fully enabled in all versions of Live and come launch time, I’d expect most incompatibilities to be largely sorted. 

Overall, MPE has been well-implemented by Ableton, managing to fit its innate complexities into the interface without it feeling too squeezed. There’s also a handy MPE Control MIDI plug-in, which allows you to adjust the plug-in’s response to an MPE input so you can perform functions like inverting a parameter’s response to make pitch go up when you swipe down, or adjust curves to make a parameter ramp up exponentially in response to constant pressure.

Of Ableton’s own synths, only Wavetable, Simpler and Sampler have been updated to handle MPE. Sampler allows you to assign two parameters to each of the MPE axes, whereas you can use Wavetable’s modulation matrix to add multiple parameters to each MPE axes. Simpler is fairly limited, with no control over or visual of what parameters are being modulated. It seems most are limited to per-note pitch controls.

If you don’t own a fully-capable MPE device, both of Ableton’s pad controllers, Push and Push 2, can now employ polyphonic aftertouch to activate the Pressure axes of MPE, which makes them much more expressive devices.

POWER USER MOVES

There are a lot of subtle, but powerful changes to the Live interface. Most of which reside in the Clip View of MIDI tracks where you edit your piano roll.

Loop, time signature and groove settings are all combined under the main header now, with the launch/follow action panel expandable when in Session View. All other functions have been separated into tabbed panels. There are Notes/Sample and Envelope tabs for Audio and MIDI clips, with an additional Expression tab for MIDI clips. You can shortcut between each tab with Option+1, 2 or 3. Let’s take a look through some of the updates to the MIDI clip view.

Randomize – Once you’ve programmed or played your sequence, you can randomise velocities and the chance that each note triggers. Set your range — 0-127 for velocity and 0-100% for chance – then select one or more notes and hit ‘Randomize’. Ableton will then move those values around their starting place within the range you set.

To really unleash the randomness, you can also set a range of possible velocities for each note by grabbing the pin head and Command [Mac] or Control [Windows] dragging it up or down. A dot appears in the pin head once you’ve set a velocity range, with a highlighted zone to denote your range. Also, if you select a chance value other than 100%, a grey triangle appears in the top right hand corner of that note.

Scale Features – There are now three levels of scale representation in the Piano Roll. Firstly, you can toggle the scale view on or off under the main header. This highlights which notes in the piano roll are in your scale. Secondly, you can press ‘K’ and that will highlight each note lane in your scale as well as make the root notes more prominent. Lastly, next to the Fold toggle is a Scale toggle, which folds to only the notes in your preselected scale. That way, any note you draw in the piano roll will be in key. If you already have notes outside your preselected scale, they will still display when folded but their lanes won’t be highlighted.

MPE Editing — Lastly, more automation lanes appear under the expression tab. Alongside Velocity, there’s Slide, Pressure and Release Velocity, allowing you fine editing control over your MPE parameters. MPE data is naturally complex to display, and Ableton has managed to keep these windows from being overly crowded despite the information they are carrying. While it’s fine to incorporate MPE, it’s not always easy to play accurately. So it’s great that Ableton has devised an effective way of viewing and editing your parameters. 

FOLLOW ACTIONS

If you’ve ever tried putting together a live set in Session view, you would probably wonder why it’s taken until Version 11 to implement these changes to Follow Actions. There are two main changes. Firstly, you can now toggle on ‘Link’ to trigger the follow action at the end of the clip without having to specify the exact bar:beat value. Secondly, you can now apply follow actions to entire scenes! It can’t be linked, as it’s over an entire scene which would likely hold different clip lengths, so you still have to input a bar:beat value. Each scene also now has a distinct number, so when you rename your scenes, you don’t lose which number it is.

Both of these inclusions are massive time savers when setting up basic, user-controllable playback systems.

The third inclusion is another randomised chance feature. You can now set up two different follow action possibilities and then adjust a slider which alters the chance of Ableton choosing one or the other.

MACROS IN MANY VARIATIONS

Macros are indispensable when it comes to creating dynamic electronic live performances. In Live 11, you have 16 of them — up from eight — and can add or subtract them at will. If you just want one big knob, you can do that, or you can get ultra-granular.

There’s also now a Macro Variations section where you can save snapshots of your macro settings to quickly jump from one sound to the next. And because Ableton has decided to randomise everything in Live 11, you can randomise macros, too. It’s a simple way to get tons of sounds out of the one instrument rack; just keep hitting the randomise button to see what comes down the pipe. You can also exclude particular macros — like volume — from randomisation, or from including them in your Variations. 

WRAPPING UP

It’s always a difficult task going through all the updates to a DAW. There are still some high-voted requests that didn’t make the cut, like ‘Bounce in Place’ or freezing groups down to one audio track. Another that would be a nice companion to comping is ARA 2 support for seamless integration with vocal tuning programs like Melodyne. However, Ableton is typically slow to move on external standards. After all, MPE was a long time coming.

Thankfully, Ableton has largely paid attention to users’ feature requests and picked some winners. Better still, the integration of MPE is solid and will hopefully make it a standard across MIDI plug-ins and devices going forward. For Suite users, there’s plenty more in the way of new packs and effects when you upgrade, so make sure to peruse the rest of this review to get a sense of the added value you’d be getting.

Pricing will depend on when you purchase. If you are new to Ableton, you can purchase Live 10 versions now for 20% off and receive a free upgrade to Live 11. You can also save 20% on upgrades from Live 10 to 11 if you purchase before the release date. Considering Live 11 will be released on Live 10’s three-year anniversary, the upgrade to Suite works out at roughly A$100/year. While it’s a bit to shell out at first — especially for Suite — the pricing works out a lot cheaper than any subscription-based DAW. The upgrade itself is almost a no-brainer if this is your DAW of choice.

THINNING OUT VOCALS

Cassian thinks about vocals a lot. In fact, the first thing he did the day COVID-19 restrictions eased in LA was hit the gym, grab some bread from the bakery, then head to his mate’s place to chew off his ear about vocals. He said his trick is to make vocals thinner, not bigger.

“I come from more of a dance music angle where a song has a kick with a bunch of 50Hz in it and a bunch of sub going on in the bassline,” he described. “You can’t have that big full pop vocal. The vocal needs to be a bit thinner. You have to balance the thinner vocal, but still have those intimate moments.

“When I listen to a performance and hear the melody of it — where it’s moving, what it’s doing dynamically, the frequency spectrum, and what mic it was recorded on — I get a very specific sound in mind of what I want to hit. A lot of the time, it might sound pretty different to the recording. I’m not afraid to be aggressive and do a lot of subtractive EQ.”

Cassian can really stretch his use of subtractive EQ. One of his favourite moves to get the high end where he wants, is to isolate the sweet spot of the high end, then take a big low shelf and turn everything below that point down by 6-10dB. “If I feel like it needs more of that high-end sweet spot, I’d rather turn everything else down than boost it,” he explained. “It’s just how my mind works. Where’s the sweet thing? Okay, everything else has to bow to that sweet thing.”

VOCAL COMPRESSION: LITTLE & OFTEN

He’ll compress gently, and in layers. Mostly after the fact, but the very first move is to gate and compress the vocal with a few dB of gain reduction. “Then after I tune it and do that first round of broad shaping EQ, I’ll do another round of compression that might be a little bit more aggressive, depending on the performance. A Teletronix LA2A is great for that stage of it and adds a bit of vibe as well.

“I do a bit of multi-band compression, especially on the Rüfüs stuff, but mainly as a de-esser. I’ll de-ess, then use a multi-band as well at 4 or 5k as a de-esser. Multi-band compression also helps create space for the low end without just EQ-ing out all the lows in the vocal. I’ll find where the lowest part of the melody sits, maybe it’s moving over one octave from 200Hz to 400Hz, and I’ll set a multi-band from 400Hz down to compress that range and control it without changing the tone.”

To achieve that sense of space, while maintaining intimacy, Cassian rolls off the top end of the reverb, especially in verses. “There might be a bunch of space there, but you don’t get the splashy obvious reverb-y high end. Also, pre-delays. The other day I was working on a mix and had a 60ms pre-delay. It was a bit much, and I had to tone it down, but I’m always trying to push the longest pre-delays I can get away with, which definitely helps with that upfront feeling for vocals.”

ANALYSING MELODIES WITH SPAN

With dense electronic dance mixes, crafting space for all the elements you want to feature is more than just a balancing act. Sure, at the end of the day it comes down to what you turn up, and what you don’t. But when a single stereo synth patch has the potential to eat up all your space in one swell swoop, it requires a lot of minor surgery to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Cassian thinks in a flowchart. When it comes to balancing out synth parts, rather than start with everything in, he initially goes through each part in solo. This part of his process isn’t about ignoring the whole, but laser-focusing in on each synth part’s melodic contribution. “Then when it comes back to balancing it out in the end, it’s just a matter of priorities.”

He uses Voxengo’s Span analyser, in high-res mode, to help see where the melody of each part is. “I always focus on whatever the fundamental melody frequencies are of that sound, I really try not to EQ those frequencies. If you EQ it, what you’re really doing is changing the relationship of the note. If there’s a melody that has six notes, and you EQ half of those notes down 3dB, why are you turning the notes down?”

Instead he uses Span to train his focus on the harmonics and overtones that might be taking up too much space, like a rogue D# overtone when the melody is playing a D. “As long as the melody is still there, that’s the most important thing musically.”

“It’s easy to make musical decisions with that analyser. If you’re hearing something that doesn’t sound right, and you’re looking at it, and it doesn’t look right. Then if you have a LUFS or RMS meter and it doesn’t seem right on that. Then, with certainty, I can make that decision to address it. Whereas ears can be deceiving, rooms can be deceiving. Also, if you’re just visually looking at things and making decisions purely off the meter, that’s definitely not the right way to go either.”

SPEAKING OF METERING

Cassian maintains a number of hearing/metering checks and balances throughout his mix process. His gain structure always starts with false headroom, knocking back his master fader 6dB, and keeping a self-imposed limit of ensuring any one sound in solo doesn’t exceed -6dB. “In order for that to happen, the drum bus can’t be too loud, because you’re not going to turn up your kick past that,” explained Cassian. “If you want your kick louder, then turning it up isn’t the answer. It’s a different workaround. Maybe it’s some clipping, maybe it’s a different EQ to make it feel louder without using up more peak level.”

That invisible brick wall applies to everything. In his game, even the lead vocal isn’t allowed special dispensation to rise above the rest and eclipse the -6dB limit. Same with the bass. And in his music, those three elements – kick, bass and lead vocal – will always be the loudest parts. If he keeps those in check, the rest will follow suit.

Within that structure, it’s also easy for him to reference tracks: “It’s easy to get a mastered file, turn it down 6dB, look at it through the same metering plug-ins I use and have it be directly applicable to the mixes within that structure.”

KICK DRUM: LENGTH & RMS

He’s also learnt to use RMS as a gauge for the loudness of his kick. He links mixing low end to confidence and a bit of relational know-how. Over time, Cassian has built up an internal measuring stick that relates the length of a kick to its RMS value. “A longer kick drum is going to register a higher RMS because there’s more time for those frequencies to develop. If I have a 200ms kick, I can look on the T-Racks Metering plug-in I use and know that within the structure, it’s going to hit at a certain point on that meter. I look on Span and know what it should look like, too. I’m now comfortable to know that a kick can be at a particular level depending on its length.”

If he needs to check a mix, or send a copy to a client, he can apply his own faux mastering chain with a compressor followed by a limiter. Without any adjustments, his gain structure allows it to translate well “because you’re not going 10dB into the limiter. Usually it’s 4-5dB into the limiter, at most, it’s going to be 6dB.”

As for being a little-known Aussie engineer mixing it with the likes of Spike Stent (who did one track on Rüfüs’ most recent album Solace). Cassian credits it to Australians having a slightly different skillset and mixing approach to our international counterparts. Sometimes it feels like there’s an established sound LA mixers are chasing, reckoned Cassian, that often cares less about the details and more about aggressive compression. A huge generalisation, he says, but a favourable one for Aussies.

THE STUDIO

James Bellew: Brent’s home studio is a converted garage that measures 6m x 5.8m. The studio is a multi-purpose space for both recording and mixing, and nicely equipped with ADAM A7x monitors (with subwoofer) and some choice pieces of gear such as an Avalon 737 and Neve preamps, as well as an ELI Distressor.

The walls and ceiling are plasterboard and the concrete floor was partly covered with some light rugs. Although it was fairly reflective and live, Brent had plenty of bookcases and gear around the walls that help.

STEP 1 PREPPING THE SPACE

The first task was to clear the wall space around the workstation so we had bare walls to work with. Then the bookcases were moved to the rear of the studio to help break up some of the reflections.

STEP 2 MEASURE ROOM RESPONSE

I marked out the midline of the studio and put some tape down at 30cm increments along this central plane. This was to simulate potential listening positions for Brent. I then performed acoustic measurements using Fuzzmeasure to look at the original frequency response and reverberation times at each of the listening positions using a mic adjusted to Brent’s typical seated listening height.

STEP 3 ANALYSE INITIAL RESULTS

At Brent’s usual monitoring position the frequency response below 100Hz was somewhat uneven, due to room resonance and phase cancellation (otherwise know as room modes).

Reverberation times are particularly useful when assessing the performance of an acoustic room treatment. The ‘Before’ bargraph on Page 1 demonstrates the reverberation characteristics of Brent’s room prior to applying the acoustic treatment, which show it’s a pretty live space with reverb times around half a second. A balanced acoustic treatment should be designed to reduce reverberation times evenly across the spectrum. A good target range in this space is 250–300ms.

STEP 4 FIND THE BEST MONITORING POSITION

The frequency response at a position further into the room was somewhat flatter than Brent’s usual monitoring position and is the location that avoids the worst of the room modes. See the ‘Finding the Sweetspot’ box item for more.

STEP 5 FIGURE OUT THE BASIC PLAN

A good philosophy when applying acoustic treatment is to install a moderate amount, assess the room and then apply further treatment if required. With Brent’s studio we decided to create a Live End Dead End (LEDE) acoustic treatment, which would allow him flexibility during recording, as well as concentrate the treatment around the listening position.

It’s not strictly LEDE due to the bookcases and gear at the rear of the studio. The studio space is quite large so we decided to install a SoundAcoustics RK3 room kit which consists of eight LF70 corner bass traps, 16 HA600/75 hybrid wall panels and six MP700/40 ceiling panels.

Both the LF70 bass traps and the HA600/75 wall panels feature a shallow-radius reflective insert which boosts low-end absorption and partially reflects high frequencies. This characteristic allows a room to retain a natural sense of space while dealing effectively with problematic lower frequencies.

STEP 6 INSTALL FIRST ROUND OF TREATMENT

Acoustic treatment is best applied to the first reflection points. We installed four hybrid panels on the side walls, eight on the wall behind the workstation, and six panels on the ceiling above the workstation. There’s usually competing interests in most home studios, so it becomes a balance between practicality and results.

The biggest mistake people make is only putting up a whole lot of HF treatment. Psycho-acoustically it makes a huge difference in sense of space and definition in that 1–3kHz range. You can walk into a space that sounds dead, but is acoustically terrible. As well as bass trapping, the reflective inserts in the hybrid panels and bass traps help balance out the room’s treatment.

To help control the low end, we installed four LF70 bass traps in the vertical corners behind the workstation and four bass traps in the ceiling. In an ideal situation the ceiling bass traps would have been installed in a symmetrical layout — though not as important as workstation position or first reflection symmetry — but there was no ceiling corner on the left side. As a compromise the bass traps were installed above the workstation and in the ceiling corner to the right side.

SoundAcoustic panels feature a unique hidden fixing channel which allows quick and easy installation with a staple gun. This is particularly useful when installing ceiling bass traps, as large traps are nearly impossible to install using adhesive.

STEP 7 RE-TEST THE ROOM

After the installation we re-tested the room, and as the ‘After’ graphs show, the reverb times at have been reduced fairly evenly across the spectrum down to 63Hz, which is excellent. This is a good demonstration of the excellent absorption characteristics of the RK3 room kit. Above 50Hz the reverberation times are sitting nicely in the 250–300ms range, which was a good result, especially in a larger space.

Between 25 and 50Hz, you can hardly ever make headway without having a purpose-built space or putting in massive trapping. Helmholtz absorbers are relatively inefficient and would have to be quite big, so you’re talking about putting in four-foot-deep trapping across the whole back wall, which isn’t practical and is cost prohibitive. Also, half a second reverberation time at 50Hz is not too bad, you’ll still be able to mix low end effectively. A LF reverb time of one second or more would be quite bad.

For now, Brent plans to retain his regular mix position to maximise space. In the future, he might decide to move the speakers away from the wall and set up the listening position in this optimum spot. Still, with the superior listening position marked out on the floor Brent can easily slide his chair back and fine tune the low end of a mix. There’s a limit to what you can do in a space not purpose-built as a studio. However, even high-end mastering suites I’ve measured have been lumpy below 150Hz. As a rule of thumb, if I can get a room within ±5dB, that’s fantastic.

STEP 8 LISTEN & FINE TUNE

After listening to some material he was familiar with, Brent noted that the low end was tighter and better defined. At higher volumes he felt the room still sounded a little harsh, so after the installation we sent Brent some additional AT600/40 panels to reduce the reverb times above 1kHz a little more. Fine tuning a room is very much part of the process of applying acoustic treatment.

THE VERDICT

Brent: “It’s been a real eye-opener. The two biggest differences have been the clarity in the bottom end and reverbs. I’ve noticed my reverbs are easier to mix and translate. I’m used to them being murky while I was mixing. Then I’d take them out to my van or another stereo and realise I had too much plate on the vocal. I can make much better choices now in here.

“Another thing I really noticed is I’m not getting the sound of the room so much through the vocal mic. I’m using a Shure SM7, and I’ve also got a Neumann TLM103. When I put the TLM103 up for softer vocals I was accustomed to hearing plasterboard, even with one of those mic shields around it. Now I’m listening to it and I can’t hear the plasterboard. It’s a joy.

“I would absolutely recommend putting up treatment if you haven’t already. I thought the little installation channel at the back of the panels was really clever. You can just fold back the foam, and staple them; you don’t even need a staple gun. I just put up the extra panels he sent me with a reasonably heavy duty stapler. They’re very easy to mount and experiment with, even the bass traps. You look at those and figure they’d be too hard to hold up, but they’re just up there with a staple gun. It would be really easy for somebody to put them up and experiment with positioning at home. I put them up, then took a few down to find a happy balance of liveness when I play acoustic guitar and sing. The wood panelling on the diffusors looks great, too.

“James was great, he explained what he was doing and how he was approaching it. After the treatment went up, the change was dramatic. I couldn’t recommend SoundAcoustics more. It’s made a real difference for me.”

LADY LUCK

“It wasn’t until many years later that I realised we got a little lucky, especially with the ceiling,” said Storyk. “I went back and found out why the room worked so well, and it’s because of the ceiling, which looks like a flat propeller. It was partly aesthetics, and partly a half-baked notion that I shouldn’t have a parallel ceiling. I also remembered reading a little bit about membrane absorbers. They’d been used at RCA Studios and the great Kultura Studios in Moscow.  I didn’t completely understand the science and took a stab at how to build it. We used very lightweight plaster and the ceiling turned out to be a giant membrane absorber, which keeps the low frequency reverb time down in the room.”

Storyk was frank: “I’m not going to lie. I had very little science to back up what I was conceiving, but Eddie and I took a shot at it and it worked out.” It wasn’t until many years later that he realised it gave Electric Lady a desirable large studio characteristic of tailing down the low frequency reverb time. It tightens up the sound, as opposed to concert halls, where you want it to tail up and bloom.

“That’s what’s doing it,” said Storyk about the studio’s ‘sound’. “It’s not Jimi Hendrix’s spirit in the walls, the coloured lighting, the fact you have to slide in a tiny door on Eighth Street, or the river that flows under the studio. All interesting stories, but the science is in the ceiling… although we all still wonder if Jimi is still with us sometimes”

STUDIO PODS

These days, Storyk’s company, WSDG, that he started with his wife Beth Walters (the W) is averaging about 40-50 studios a year. In its lifetime, WSDG has worked on thousands, along with halls, theatres, AV design, conference rooms and structural acoustics, “but the studios are still what I love”.

Lately, those studios have been getting smaller and many are specifically geared towards podcasting. ‘Small format streaming facilities’ have become more and more common.

WSDG has been designing spaces for all the big players; Audible (owned by Amazon), studios in LA and NY for Midroll (owned by Scripps), and a huge facility for Gimlet, which got bought out by Spotify for US$200m this year.

Every radio station is essentially in the streaming game now, as podcasting on demand has turned breakfast and drive-time shows into ‘anytime shows’.  The variety of content and production styles could mean anything from a one-person/no-engineer facility to a four-person, fully-staffed interview setup. “In the case of Gimlet, a 45-minute Gimlet podcast could take months to make,” said Storyk. “It could have been done in 20 different segments with live people, phone interviews, and purchased material woven into the product.” Often the equipment is kluged together from off-the-shelf products not specifically tailored to podcasting, and part of WSDG’s job is to piece together high-end audio systems that can integrate phones — “not as easy as it sounds”— and be operated by a podcast producer with no engineering experience. When he saw Rode’s latest product, the Rodecaster Pro, Storyk was impressed and wondered why it had taken so long for a manufacturer to pull all those pieces together into a podcasting-specific console.

A lot of the studios also have intense isolation requirements. Gimlet’s facility features 10 tightly-packed studios, and because most of these top end facilities are in Brooklyn, Manhattan or Los Angeles, no space goes to waste. Admittedly, says Storyk, the majority of podcasting is centred around the voice, so the low frequency isolation requirements are often reduced. However, the smaller the room, the higher the frequency of the first order mode, which can often land in the speech range. Small rooms are often more complex to deal with than larger ones”.“

While you’d be forgiven for thinking a company like WSDG would only spec, bespoke, custom-designed acoustic treatment, Storyk is a fan of off-the-shelf products [see Beating the Low Frequency Trap]. He also lauds the ability that today’s modern iPhone can make 90% of the acoustic measurements we need. This is amazing! That means thousands of people can make measurements, which takes the voodoo out, and puts a little more science back into it.” Unlike some acousticians who would be happy to maintain the perception of their practice being a dark art, Storyk is pleased about the dissemination of measuring tools and the information available about acoustics. “People are getting smarter,” and Storyk applauds that. He would have killed for it when he was designing Electric Lady.

MARKETABLE ACOUSTICS

With over 3000 studio rooms under his belt, Storyk admits there have been times over the years when he has worried his interest in the subject would wane. Always one for the science as well as the artistry, the arrival of Time Delay Spectrometry (TDS) was one of those developments that piqued his interest along the way. TDS helped birth some of the industry’s most ‘marketable’ studio designs, and unravel others. “Live End Dead End came about when we had TDS and specifically when we had measurement devices that for the first time gave us data that mirrored what we were hearing. “Everybody realised that certain treatments were at the wrong end of the room. Chips Davis said, ‘Why don’t we put the dead end in the front, and the live end in the back?’ Peter D’Antonio then said, ‘We should put diffusion in the back.’ Which is a sharp idea. Then the acronym came about and it got marketed.” Nothing wrong so far, except that it makes “little sense for the low end. It made no sense to put all your low end absorption in the front, and low end diffusion or reflection in the back.” Storyk reckons it should have been called Frequency Dependent Live End Dead End, “but six-letter acronyms don’t roll off the tongue.”

Similarly, Storyk says the Westlake design developed by Tom Hidley “had some fallacies”. Again, the TDS analysis proved revealing. “We were now able to see that the compression ceilings were a mistake.”

The original intention of coupling a hard ceiling to a baffled hard front with big Augspurger-style speakers was to elicit more low end. Great news on one hand. The bad news was you would hear a first order reflection off the ceiling, creating disturbing comb filtering as energy bounced off the consoles. “It often occurred to me that you could have gotten more low end by just adding a sub,” said Storyk. “But people weren’t up to that.”

This isn’t criticism from the outside. In the early ’70s, Storyk and Hidley designed a room together for Stevie Wonder, which had a compression ceiling. It was Studio B, a small Quad room at Record Plant. “Stevie lived in it for two years with his engineers/producers Bobby Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil. One day, I walked in to one of the sessions, and there was a packing blanket covering the entire console. Bob had his hands underneath it while he mixed on the knobs and faders. “Bob said, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s better when I put the blanket over the console.’ Of course, the speakers up high were bouncing off the console, then off the ceiling, back off the console and back up again. He was essentially hearing a comb filter. He didn’t put the science to it, neither did I at the time, but his ears knew it.”

These days, one of the technological developments that most excites Storyk is Auralization. In short, the ability to listen to architectural drawings. “It’s pretty common now,” said Storyk. “Most acousticians will use it, though there’s only a handful of software manufacturers, and it’s not easy to use. We looked at the most popular ones (CATT, EASE, Odeon) and at the moment are still most comfortable with CATT-Acoustic.”  WSDG has Auralization rooms in both its Swiss, Berlin and New York offices. It allows designers to model acoustic environments and then listen to them in a calibrated room. “It’s one thing to read graphs, it’s another to listen.”

WHITE, WITH COLOUR

Storyk feels indebted to Electric Lady Studios. “Career tip: Make your first project famous!” He said. “Before it opened I had four more studios to design.”

At the time, Storyk could never have known the impact Electric Lady would have. Not just on the New York recording scene, but on the entire recording industry.

It was one of, if not, the first artist-owned studio. Jimi’s plan was unheard of; he would dictate the record making cycle to the label. “He was going to make his own records, at his own pace, then when he was done, he would hand them to the label. Few artists were doing that.” The studio was designed for artists, who were often seen as “the unnecessary people on that side of the glass,” said Storyk. “It didn’t matter how they felt; the quicker they got out, the better.” It meant he designed a larger control room, to make more room for artists on both sides of the recording process.

Jimi also wanted the furniture to be part of the mood, to make the live room feel like a living room. Coming from Cerebrum and then the shelved Generation re-design, Storyk simply figured recording studios should be architecturally interesting, too. That too was not the norm.

One of Jimi’s biggest takeaways from Cerebrum were the ability to shift the mood with colour-changing lights projected onto white walls. Back then, it wasn’t easy. At Cerebrum it was accomplished with 20 Kodak 35mm slide projectors. At Electric Lady, lighting designer Bob Walsch had to buy quantities of bulbs in three different colours, and attach them to giant dimmers to mix the colours. Four years ago, things came full circle. Paul Epworth had bought The Church Studio in London and wanted to overhaul the design. He’d worked at Ann Mincieli’s Jungle Studios in New York, a WSDG job, and wanted that specific Augspurger monitor system. It turned out one of the rooms at the The Church was almost the same size as the Jungle Studios control room, which worked out nicely. “In one of the conversations with Paul, we asked what he felt it should look and feel like,” said Storyk. “He said, ‘I’ve got this idea where everything’s white, and we just change the colours and the mood with lighting.’ I thought to myself, ‘I haven’t gone very far in 45 years!’

“I didn’t tell him that though, I just said, ‘That’s a good idea… I think we know how to do that.’”