Arun Pandian Studio Tour | Signal Corps Recording Studio [Full video]

[Music] [Music] hey everyone my name is Arun ponan the owner of signal core recording here in Dumbo Brooklyn I started my career as the lead guitar player for Lauren Hill on the miseducation of Lauren Hill album I toured the world with her for a couple years and then after that I segwayed into production and Engineering I've been doing that for almost 20 years now this is my studio I've modeled it after uh old Studios that were in the 70s like ABY Road and Stax and mtown where um it's a highly curated list of gear so that the studio has its own sound um and you're not just a commercial Studio that just caters to everyone want people to come here for a reason and the reason hopefully is the work that I do and the work that the engineers do that come here and the sound the studio produces currently I'm running the Masters program at Berkeley NYC for songwriting and production alongside running this studio some of my credits include Mumford and Son uh John Legend Norah Jones also David Lang uh he's a new music composer I do a lot of work with Gabriel garon Montano I recorded and mixed his album Au here and we are currently working on a salsa record with the FAA Allstars and his next album which is a followup to agita lead up to how I got this Helios console when I started the studio and I decided I wanted a console I originally invested in a lot of Seaman's gear so at one point in time I had probably the largest collection of Seamans and wsw which is the Austrian branch of Seamans gear in the world I acquired all that gear over about 10 years I ended up selling my wsw console to the National and you can find that at their Long Pond studios in Upstate New York I purchased the console from Heidi Miller who was the manager of heliocentric studios in England and the wife at the time of Chris tifford and this console was originally owned by Elvis Costello and Chris tifford and they put it together for their studio uh in England like I mentioned the uh console is is from two consoles one that was located in Island basting Street Studio 2 which recorded Stairway to Heaven and a bunch of other Rolling Stones and David Bowie and the other half of the console was from Alvin Lee's hook and Manor Studios which recorded a bunch of other stuff Helios consoles have a special uh place in my heart a lot of the British rock records were done on it and it has a certain angular and Punchy sound to it that other consoles of the era just don't have dick swam the designer uh designed a really fantastic EQ and Mike Prix that just channels that punchiness of those British rock records that a lot of us love and listen to over and over again I started my career uh learning from Henry hirs who recorded the first three Lenny Kravitz records and he's the one that turned me on to the sound of the Helios the sound of the line channels and the sound of the EQ and when I heard that I realized one day I hopefully would either have a few channels and now I lucky enough have a whole console the console was put together by a guy named sirel Jones he was the probably the last person to work with dis dick snam on a Helios project in the 90s and they had to put these two consoles together that came from two different Studios were two different voltages and two different formats so he had the job of putting it together and he was the right person for the job because he's the one that started reain Durk and was involved with Helios from some of its earliest stages when uh dick swam invented the Helios console before he invented the Helios console he designed the Olympic console which is at Olympic Studios and that console is a germanium console that can kind of be considered the prototype for what became the type 69 helos uh silicon versions and that Olympic console is in Canada at the moment at a museum a music museum and sirel Jones was the one that was uh tasked to modify that console and if you go look at that console online you will see that there are a lot of similari ities between uh this console and that one particularly the way serel set up the busing and uh a lot of the routing features that are located on that console and so what was special about this Helios is it was redone in the 90s and so has a lot of modern flare to it in terms of its busing capabilities and its headphone capabilities and the way he has set it up but it's very similar to the way he modified the original Olympic console one of the original features of this console is the ADR accessories that are located over here on the left we have the ADR compressors and the ADR eqs audio design and recording which is ADR was um who Helios hired to do most of the compressors that you see in all their consoles so even though they're labeled Helios they were designed by Audio design and recording and these modules were original to the Alvin Lee setup at hook-end Manor this section over here is a monitoring system designed by sirel probably has some features that he put on reindert consoles uh the cool thing about it is that is completely separate from the console so it has its own setup for oxes and fullbacks so you can completely give the musicians exactly what they want without interfering with anything that's going on in the main console so one of the special things about Helios is The Punchy and angular sound a lot of the ways those Zeppelin records sound like that is because the engineers would record through the Helios channels which already had a Punchy sound to it they would run it to tape and then they would run it back through the console and Juke up the line amps to get it to stand up as we call it to get it give it really like an overdriven uh sound and then they compress it and put it back on the tape so that's one of the tricks is the way Engineers used to use these old consoles is constantly rerunning uh everything through the line amps and riding them hot so that uh when they bounced tracks down they were getting the sounds as the process of the recording was going along on the Helios console the mid-range is a really special part of the EQ I particularly like the 700 HZ range to get rid of boxiness and recordings it's kind of like the secret trick of mine to uh make a bad recording sound good and then you can uh on this console just like the original Olympic console you can stack eqs together so I can steal eqs from any Channel I want and uh daisy chain them together and reduce on one channel and then boost on another Channel and so it provides a lot of flexibility in what you can do over here on the console there's a little control box that Alvin Lee used to use he had it set up with three stoter revox machines and it had like a very speed control on it and he would use it for like special effects and all his delays sending out to those machines it's not set up now but it will be soon so generally uh my workflow in the studio is different from most Studios I record all my basic tracks to tape and the particular machines I use are 3M machines uh they were used on a lot of British recordings and even Michael Jackson's Thriller the reason I like these machines and in general the equipment I choose for the studio is I prefer equipment that has as little Electronics as possible so it doesn't mess with the sound and cause phase issues when you have tons of electronics in gear it tends to mess with your frequency ranges and so these tape machines have very little on each card very little electronics and they have nice big fat Transformers and so what I do is I have musicians come in here and believe it or not I'm more than the sound I'm using tape for the workflow that it provides to a session because everybody has to perform we are doing less takes so that we don't have to make decisions on the back end I get the sounds to tape which means I'm compressing and adding EQ and really driving the sounds as they are being recorded so that the recording sounds like almost a finished product as it's going down to tape and because you're limited in tracks uh what that forces you to do is only record what's important to the song and not mess around a lot of time with like 2 hours spending on a Shaker or something like that so we record the foundation of the album once the tape is filled I run it through the console and drive it some more and then I print it to uh Protools and then the rest of the recording is finished and edited in Protools and a lot of times the vocals are done in Protools a question I get asked a lot is why do I use uh vintage speakers I got a collection of vintage speakers so in the back behind me you can see the tanoy lockwoods which were used at Olympic over here in front of me I have an Altech 612 cabinet which is the Beetles speaker and above that I have a Yuri 811 and the Yuri was the next generation of the Altech designed by Bill putam to like replace it and the reason I have these vintage speakers is I use them as filters to hear what the engineers were Hearing in the room so when I listen to a Beatles recording on the Altech I'm literally hearing exactly what they heard when they made the recording and with the tan noise I'm hearing what Zeppelin heard when they made made the recording and with the Yuri 811s I'm hearing most of like 70 style recordings that were done and also early ' 80s recordings so the workflow in the studio is that I get it to sound good on all the different speakers and each speaker provides me with a different listening experience and I EQ it to sound good in all of them and I quickly switch between all three and as soon as it sounds good in all three I know I'm good to go over here in this rack these are some of my most prized possessions we have about 10 channels of E Miller eqs this was related to all the Eastern European quality broadcast eqs and filters each one of these things weighs like a 10 lbs built like a brick house the tank could roll over it and it would survive and these are just low cuts and high cuts and some mid boosts but um they're made with such high quality components and they have such an amazing sound to them uh so I use them for a variety of things down here this piece of gear is an RCA stereo mastering EQ I have only seen one other version of this it was owned by Lenny Kravitz and it took me 10 years to find another one Henry used to use it on my recordings to master it and he was able to just carve out frequencies and do all kinds of things to my recordings and you couldn't even tell there was an EQ on it and he completely changed the sound of the recordings it looks very similar to a gml um I don't know when it was made but it was designed I have a picture of a Italian mastering house there's five or six of these and I've only seen this is the only second one I've ever seen uh in the world so I don't know if anybody else has one but if you have one I will buy it over here on the right I have my seens Ela eqs these were designed by Seamans for their Italian branch and they're two big giant mono eqs and they're set up in different sections from lows to highs and you can either boost or cut in uh certain frequencies and it has the ability where you push these two buttons right here and you can get the center frequency that's in the middle but they just sound big and beautiful and um I've loved them ever since I got them and now I can't afford them because the prices have jumped up so much as I said earlier I'm a seman fanatic or at least I'm a recovering Seaman fanatic so I have these original Seaman racks that are all vintage that I custom made to be house rack gear they they were originally designed for Hi-Fi equipment these compressors here are wsw which is the Austrian branch of Seamans they're some of my favorite compressors ever made they're broadcast you can run a whole mix through it I love to use them for parallel compression I have a fourth one but a tech has it right now and I'm having him modify it to see if we can get some more uh cool features out of it that don't exist already below this are ntp compressors these are some of the first compressors Henry hirsh told me about they were like the secret sauce for some mastering engineers in the 90s and the 80s they can really hold tight onto something and uh once again it's similar to this but another version of it maybe like a little smaller of a sound this is kind of a big huge big sound and this is kind of a tighter version of that below that this is serial number one and serial number two of a compressor that's being designed by Henry Hirsch and chip for speak that they are just now releasing to market the beautiful thing about this is it was the only compressor I've ever heard that actually beat these they're modern versions but they're also cleaner so you can really uh reduce signal by like 16 DB and you can't even tell it's being compressed so these are just now coming to Market and uh definitely look out for these below that we have early versions of the famous Pi compressors that I just recently acquired something else in this rack I'd like to feature is the Yuri Cooper time Cube which is amazing for adding stereo width to stuff and also as Ascend to my EMT plate which is located in the back yeah and then I have some b76 is as a stereo pair just as an alternative choice to the Helios it's kind of a completely different sound more close to my wsw console that I used to own a lot of what I do is I like to balance transients in my mixes and so I use the Alicia and the SPL transient designers to really uh create some tonal difference between the characteristics in a mix it's kind of a secret weapon to create space uh in drums and bass rhythms and um both of these do excellent things and they are really great pieces and so I suggest you get them if you're looking for Hardware transient designers over here is a little delay effect setup I have the uh Echoplex which is famously used by Jimmy pagee I have the guild echor which is famously used by Pink Floyd David Gilmore and then this one is a little less known called an echolette 5 I hate to talk about it on video because now the prices of this are going to jump up but it's great for delays short delays and it's also a really great guitar preamp to drive your guitar Direct in over here is one of my favorite possessions of the studio that I just got it's an 1811 aard piano aard was a French manufacturer this is aard London and the cool thing about this piano is it is a straight strung piano and uh you can come over here and look at the uh way the piano is strung um most modern pianos after 1900s uh were developed into cross CR strung and what that allowed the manufacturers to do is make a shorter length piano and still have a longer bass string but what that does is if the Bas strings are crossing the other strings they resonate at the same time so the benefit of that no matter what key you play all the strings are resonating the benefit of that is that the piano is louder but then everything becomes more compressed and the keys all kind of sound the same and most of your favorite composers from classical music actually wrote their music on a straight strung piano and the cool thing about a straight strung is because it's straight strung and the all the strings aren't resonating as much you get a variation as you go up the octave in the piano so it almost sounds like a symphony so you'll have like your bases and your obos and your brass section and um it's a very unique sound and a kind of a more clear sound so when you play like big chords on like a Beethoven recording you actually hear he all the individual notes instead of it sounding like kind of one big uh mush so I I I like this piano as an alternative to something like a Steinway or a Mason and Hamlin which I have in the other room and um one thing I haven't mentioned is that the studio is moving to a much bigger space so I'm looking forward to putting this in a large room um and allowing people to hear the difference between a straight strong and a cross strong so over here we have a Celeste or a chesta don't know the exact pronunciation but this is one of those beautiful uh Bell like instruments I used it in a lot of Gabriel garon Montana's recordings you can hear it on there yeah I've always wanted one of these Henry hirh had a studio that had one owned by felonius Monk and every time I played that I always wanted one for my own so I I got this uh got this one just like it and uh it's beautiful I use it on a lot of recordings I also have this U sp1200 which is a famous hip-hop sampling drum machine I have a big history of hip-hop in my career and so I have a lot of drum machines that are associated with that I also have an NPC 60 and I used to do a lot of Beats uh hip-hop beat production worked for gunit and uh in my past so I like to still have those machines in the studio over here we have a honer clavinet Duo the cool thing about the duo is that it's a clavinet and a ponet in one so you can actually blend the two sounds together or have them independent of each other so that's why I picked this one for this studio and then I have my emulator 2 which is early 80s sampler used on thees mode and Peter Gabriel recordings it's really great and I got all the discs and all the sounds and put it onto a scan disc so we can basically get every single sound that this ever had uh on one disc so one of my recent base Acquisitions that I'm really proud of is this rickenbacher 4000 the Helios console came from Chris dord and the uh ricken rocker 4000 was used in by the bass player of the squeeze so I was really great to acquire one for the studio and it has just a really special Woody tone that I actually like better than the later Rick and Bacher models at the studio I have uh like classic vintage mics I have the u47 and m49 and u67 but um I thought I'd feature some kind of lesser known mics this EV 642 it's maybe the only mic to receive an Oscar it was used for voiceovers like recording the actors on stage they would have it on a large boom but what I like to use it for is to get punch from Like a Kick Drum I use also use it for all my bass recordings I got this trick from Henry Hirsch and also for um apparently at Olympic Studios they would use one of these uh 20 feet high above the drums and it gives a really nice spank to the drums and a real Punchy sound so it's kind of like a secret weapon of the studio some other mics that you might not have seen before for uh these are tanoi they're called Parliament mics cuz apparently they were used in the British Parliament and they're really amazing ribbon mics and they're really hard to find and they're great on acoustic instruments so I use these a lot for recording any acoustic instruments at the studio over here another mic that you might not have seen is a mic made by Fairchild the famous compressor company and these are the Fairchild synchrons and they're just a really beautiful high-fi sounding mic these originally operated off a battery and so you have to get them modified to phantom power so these get used a lot at the studio and there's some mics you might not have seen in other Studios Rachel and I would like to thank you for coming to Signal core recording uh please follow me on Instagram at signal core recording and Rachel at mixed by Rachel um and any questions you have about any of the gear or anything you saw in the videos please reach out to us and we hope that this can help you make better records as you continue on your path sh

Channel: Puremix

Views: 1,497

Keywords: music production, puremix

Id: k38SJzbwylc

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024