BLUE TAPE

Walking around in the painters tape outline of every iso booth, every room in the new studio. this place really is going to retain the perfect balance of weirdness and intrigue, "wrongness" and "right-ness"... 

  This space will still have the resonant , crazy, mutant ability to have a sonic fingerprint all its own. 

Too many people invent a pressure inside their own brains to conform to a certain type of studio design. In most aspects of pro audio, we are feeling a certain phenomenon ring true again and again: experience wins. 

San Francisco

In San Francisco for a day, to see the last Sleepytime Gorilla Museum shows. 

glad.

SSL is in the building.

 

 

Bosendorfer

Going to pick up the Bosendorfer grand piano I bought very soon. Crazy.
Tony is going to pick up the SSL console we got for one of the rooms at the new studio. Both things will be sitting in storage for a minutem but its insane that we have them at all.

It Begins

The buildout of the new 5000 sq foot space Tony and I have now... has begun.
  We are still sourcing some of the more interesting aspects of the design, but I am super proud of where we are at design wise nonetheless.

  I should have some pictures soon. Two more giant glass block window thingies were installed as well. Lots of natural light in this studio. TONS.
  Thats important to us humans.
ALSO: I decided we should build a couple of time capsules into the walls and floor. Pictures of friends and loved ones that are no longer with us on this earth will be built into different sections of the studio.
   Creating the right atmosphere for the right kind of spirits to inhabit our new, giant studios...

Some random pictures from the past few weeks

GOOD RECORDING STUFF

http://www.goodrecordingstuff.blogspot.com/

Check it out. A new blog, constantly updated to reflect all the cool stuff available for pro audio recording. Its edited, not just an aggregate. 

Sonic Scoop article

This ariticle is fun. Enjoy.

New Neve Console mods

Really looking forward to getting the 16 channel return section, built with 80 series parts, and carnhill transformers, installed in my Neve console. Brings the total number of returns to 48 at mix. Finally a monitor section I can really use!!!
   Stories of an SSL are emerging around these parts also....
Stay tuned for that.

ooooooooooooHHHHHH KAYYYYYYYY

Doing a really heavy remix of a polka song today, when I get a call from a neighbor... "IS YOUR BIKE LOCKED UNDER YOUR COVER?!?!?!" THERE IS A HUGE FIRE...ZZZT>>>>ZTTT>.....static static...MOVING IT...."
 So I haul ass out of the studio, in a car service...
I arrive in time to see flames shooting out of the roof of a three story building behind where I live. No threat to my apartment, but the place on fire is 10 feet from where my Ducati was sitting. Thankfully, I didnt have  the handlebars locked under the cover I use, and my neighbor pushed it out of harms way as the flames licked the fence just inches from my front wheel.
  Crazy.
Went to new space today with Stu and Janice. That felt great. That space feels great. I also visited the space that John/Aaron got and it is super cool.
Crazy times in studio land.
   Taking quotes on piano movers to get my new, 100 year old Bosendorfer grand piano up to brooklyn...
Life really only gets more incredible as the years pass. I couldnt feel more fortunate right now.

Pictures

Pictures and some video will be coming soon. I promise. thats why I woke this blog up from a very deep sleep.

SO it begins.

So we are holding keys to a 5000 sq foot space on McCarren park, getting ready to build the studio we always wanted.
  Amazing.
  Stay tuned for some seriously in depth detailed blow by blows on what it takes to build a multi room facility in NYC if you are NOT a millionaire, an investor group, or a business person at all. This wil be an extension of everything I have ever done as a musician.
  This place will be a temple for those of you that have simply stuck to your guns and made it happen for your self.
   I ran around in the empty space today with my 15 month old daughter.
          Yes, there are high hopes.

Surrounded

I am about to get into mixing an entire surround record, with stereo fold-downs of everything.
   It is a live show, and the players are amazing. Its a great show, lots of energy. This is going to be a fun one. Stubbs 2.

clocking madness

So today I got the DIGI SYNC I/O happening at Studio G.
   I did some wiring yoga behind the racks with Francisco, and we moved the Antelope 10M and Trinity to make room for the DIGI sync.
   The SYNC is now distributing clock that starts at a rubidium core, atomic clock source, which is divide down from 10MHZ to our sample rate, and also provides a speed/cal reference for the house SMPTE generation in the SYNC. wow. yeah. anyway... so its all up and running and creating LTC for the UPTOWN  moving faders in my Neve console.
  It is really cool to finally have a solid "house sync" to keep everything syncronized and on the same clock source digitally, but also to have solid LTC/SMPTE/VTC at every device that wants it. there is even MTC available from the same device, all deriving it main speed/cal info from the atomic clock, in theory.
More tile in the chamber tomorrow, with some more plexiglass sealing up some places where we are losing reflections.  Also starting to catalog ALL the gear at studio G for a massive website overhaul that is way overdue.

Chamber rage

Printed the chamber on the Secret Chiefs 3 stuff I was tracking. It sounds bananas.
  I cant wait to be mixing some more stuff just so I can use it on EVERYTHING. ;)

   Happily looking at Ducati upgrades now. Some carbon fiber here... new racing tank, new carbon side panels, new tail chop... should be looking good soon.

The failure of technology...

"Here lies the difference between the automaton and all tools requiring continuous handling; its purpose is automatic and uninterrupted mechanical functioning. We are surrounded by an automatism toward which all branches of technology are developing. The greater part of our production tools work automatically. Our transport is automatized in the form of the ubiquitous railways, ships, motor cars, airplanes, elevators, and so on. Our light, water , and heating systems function automatically.
There are vending and food serving automatons, all of them designed for the task of repetitious performance with mechanical uniformity, just as a phonograph record repeats the same piece over and over. It is exactly this automatism that gives its peculiar stamp to our civilization and sets it apart from other eras. It is automatism by which our technology achieves its growing "perfection." Its signature is the independent and unchanging repetition of its apparatus."
-Friedrich Georg Junger
"the failure of technology (perfection without purpose)"
written in the summer of 1939.

This book has become my manifesto for all things engineering , audio, production, and art.. in the summer of 2010. 

Mixing a couple of the songs we did in Africa. Chad Clark will be mastering them at Silver Sonya mastering in DC. I am really excited to hear the end result of this. This will be for the first 2 singles from the forthcoming record, as yet untitled.... It features the whole TRIAD crew, but the primary vocal on the first single is by Nomvula Nkosi. Remember her name...

Got the mics set up in the chamber. It is really sounding incredible. More tile going in after the weekend, but really just for brightening the space to make it have a more useable S/N. its already good, but it could be a bit better I think, with more tile and slightly more shiny stuff around the room. Its a very diffuse, but dense sound right now. Quite good, very even decay. its the perfect snare and vocal chamber, so I am not going to change too much, but just enough to extend the useable decay a half a second, hopefully, so that the noise floor is well below when placing the returns in a mix however we want... it sounded awesome today on a mix tony was doing. On the snare, and the vocal...

Chamber tile!!!

Got some of the random, super cheap , industrial glazed tile laid down in the chamber today. 

  The sound changed, for the better, but not as much as I thought it would. The high gloss paint actually made more of a positive difference to the sound of the space. I guess it was more square footage, but the tile is... um.... tile, so I thought it would sound brighter and slappier right away. It DOES, however, even out the verb tail quite a bit. The overall RT-60 in there is probably about 1.25 useable because of the ambient noise floor of being in NYC at all. The overall RT-60 of the room is probably about 1.5 seconds, which is what I was going for in the first place. If I can, I am going to shoot for closer to 2 seconds, with 1.5 useable. I also put a giant piece of bank security glass that some one gave me to hopefully knock down a little flutter echo in the corner. You can see it leaning in the corner. It weighs a lot, as it is about 5 feet but 1 foot by 3/4" glass. crazy heavy. Anyway, that helped a little, but then the tile really got things to move right. The tile is going to stay as randomized as you see in the picture, but with more tile laid in on top of this layer. So we wind up with a shiny, diffuse, crazy bunch of variation in the floor. The super glazed subway tile will lay on top of this shiny, but textured tile. It should be really surreal in there soon. even more than now. The 15" Mackie speaker is up on its stand firing into one of the walls that is super shiny, and all wired up. Tomorrow morning we will get some sounds happening down there. All the wire is done on the chamber end, just have to crimp a bunch of DL pins onto the other end of the snake and get it on the patch bay... then I can REALLY start to hear what needs to be done in the way of tuning and further construction/painting/tile/stuff....

DT3 IV, completely.

Finished up with Dub Trio for our 4th record together. There are some sounds on this new one that people will simply not know how the hell we made them. Some really fun ones. Modular trickery, multi buss pedal level freak out glitch trickery....
 Tricking the robots.