From Struggling Guitarist to Recording Bob Dylan: Steve Genewick

[Music] hi everybody hope you're doing marvelously well sitting here with my friend mr steve jenowick how are you i'm good how are you i'm good welcome to my house now and not really my house but it's sort of my house i was thinking that couch could actually be a bed it has been a number of times wait so we were just talking about where to start i'd like to do a career retrospective okay like basically where did you start and how did you get to be here at capital studio c i mean that's quite a lot of information it's a lot of information it happened quick actually um like like most engineers i was a horrible guitar player um never going to be good enough to be in the band and didn't want to push speakers around but still wanted you know sex drugs rock and roll the whole the whole nine yards right so i figured well that guy's just standing there i can do that you know i'll be the sound guy i mean obviously it's a little more difficult than that but but then i you know i kind of got into it and and i was you know helping friends bands and stuff like that and decided like now there's something here you know i'd seen pictures of recording studios and you know that looks like fun um so i decided i wanted to do it having no idea how to do it lucky for me i grew up in la so especially la in the late 80s early 90s you know there were literally hundreds of studios within three miles of where we're sitting now so i actually found a school at the time now this is yeah we're talking 1989 1990. um and i started the program at the school is actually it was it was good for what it was the schools now are much more advanced but i was learning the basics it was called the trebus institute um actually one of my teachers was bob yasinski was one of my teachers so we had good teachers um and i was learning a lot again the basics this is what an eq is this is how a compressor works this is signal flow that kind of stuff the stuff you can learn in a book in one of my morning classes the guy that sat next to me in the class he got a job at cherokee studios and he was the night runner at cherokee so he would work midnight to 8am and then he'd come to class and then he'd go home go to sleep and you know and he came in one day and we were actually in babio since he's class in the morning i remember it he came in one day and he was telling me how he got fired i was like you got fired he was like yeah i did something stupid i did this i said so they're looking for somebody and he went probably you should go talk to him i said great and i literally closed the book and got up and left like walked out of class and walked over to took my resume and walked into cherokee and said i know you need somebody blah blah and they were like all right can you come back in an hour for an interview you know and i met with them there and they were like when can you start and i was like when do you need me and they were like can you be here at four for the you know the afternoon shift i said yeah so i started the cherokee as the runner same day same day yeah nice doing that still going to school you know eventually i then you know you're there for a week you learn where everything is and then you become the night guy the midnight to 8 a.m you know cleaning up and doing all kinds of stuff it was fun cherokee was a great place with five rooms so lots of bands lots of assistance like lots of stuff going on it was it was a it was a great first place to start because there was so much going on but i realized i was still going to school and i'm realizing that i'm learning way more at the studio than i am in the school and school was kind of getting in the way of me being at the studio so i actually never finished that program it was a two-year program i think i did the first year and then i was just the cherokee and i was there all the time and eventually made my way up to assistant and all that and then like everybody who worked there eventually got fired for whatever stupid thing you don't remember why you got fired i don't remember exactly was it bruce it was no it wasn't bruce it was joe who actually fired me and i walked in he was like you know what's going to happen right i was like yep here's the pager here's keys like sorry whatever we left on good terms so it was fine and then i was working for another friend of mine doing like sound system installations and stuff and doing live sound for bands um local stuff you know molly malone's places like that doing a little bit of touring and really liking live sound and i did that for like a year or two and then i was at molly malone's one night walking out and my friend bill smith who i worked with a cherokee still one of my best friends he had left cherokee and come here to capitol and he had been working here for about a year and i literally i was walking out of the bar he was walking into the bar and he was like we need to talk right now and sat down he goes somebody quit capital today um it's actually a guy i knew he said you should come get the job i was like man i don't want to do the studio again it was the hour i'm having fun on the road and he was like and he sat me down and went no this is different this is capital and laid it out for me that night and i was like all right i'll give it a shot so went home touched up the resume came in the next day walked in the front door said you know this is the guy i'm supposed to ask for was michael from deli at the time you know and bill said ask for frondelli the you know came in michael came out i said i hear you you're looking for somebody here's my resume he said how did you find out about this like this happened yesterday i said well i ran into bill last night he was like oh wait here he came down to bill who the hell's this guy and he was like he's good hire him you know and they needed somebody so he came back up he said when can you start and i was like when do you need me to start he said four o'clock okay so i came back at four o'clock that day and that was 27 years ago wow so yeah i've been here 20 a little over 27 years what were the first jobs you did here at 27 years ago here at capital mm-hmm here it's it's really cool because we have we don't we don't have runners necessarily we have our setup staff so the setup staff here is responsible for setting up the live rooms um so you know when a big session comes in or whatever the setups app sets you know they set up the chairs in the stands and hang the mics and plug everything in and do all that kind of stuff and then the assistant whoever the engineer is takes care of setting up the control room so i learned in the first couple days it was you know you're learning where everything is and you know here's the mic locker and here's all the stuff i remember distinctly the first thing i ever did by myself was a huge what we call a two-room session because we have the two rooms that sit next to each other so this big orchestra it was for al schmidt who at the time i had never met i'd only been here like a week um and it was a huge willie nelson album but big orchestra big band string it took me like nine hours to set up by myself um yeah and then you know then came in the next morning i think i set it up on like a sunday and came in on the monday for the session that's the first time i met al and the first time i actually got to see like this big huge thing with you know willy and jimmy bowen was the producer and al schmidt and all the music i mean it was the first time i'd ever been exposed to something like that and it was like wow this is really cool like this is this is not making hip-hop records in the back this is like this is the real deal like he was right this is a different kind of place and then yeah so i did i was on setup here and at the time you know we were doing lots of film dates lots of scoring lots of tv so most of the sessions that went on here could not have one assistant there were always two or three assistants so because you were always running a dat machine or there was tapes to log or a two-track to run or whatever it was so because my friend bill who was al schmidt's assistant at the time and then you know the other guys that were here um you know at the time was charlie picari and leslie ann jones and pete dell they were you know and bill smith they were the engineers and so you know i said i would assist for them and then i got to know al pretty well al and i hit it off over baseball and everything else and and so when they needed another person bill would just be like well you do it here sit you know so i got to to hang out with them and do a lot of sessions so even though couldn't have both been fans of the base same baseball team so could you al and i absolutely oh really oh yeah because he was a dodger fan from brooklyn oh i see see i thought you were going to say you know being a new yorker that he was a yankees fan at oh al moved out the same year the dodgers did he didn't miss a season so he came with them he came with them yeah so no we were both huge dodger fans well eric's sitting over there look at the smile on his face he's a dodgers fan so he's happy yeah not this year but last year was great we'll see what next year brings um so we we hit it off so i was doing sessions with them so technically i was on the setup staff here for like five years but in reality i did it for like two years and then i was doing sessions myself because we were so busy too i mean we were doing you know in those two big rooms we were doing two or three sessions a day in those rooms you know do a string date ten to one two to five knock it down have another one up by seven you know and we were doing that in each room so it was really busy it was really fun um and it just kind of rolled along and then at some point bill was working with al and at some point bill had an opportunity to go off on his own and you know he had a job and you know to do the independent thing and and he came to me and said i'm going to quit today i'm going to quit al so be ready it's like okay and he went up and had a discussion with al and al came down and said i guess you're it tomorrow and i went okay fine and that started a 20-year run without guess you're it you're it tag you're it yeah again i had been working with those guys for a number of years at the time so i knew the routine i knew what he liked i knew what he didn't like so i had kind of already been doing it and that coincided very closely with pro tools coming in and when the hd systems came out and pro tools went to 96k that's when al decided it sounded good and that he would start using it so so this transition from the other guys who had been alexis so the job of being al's assistant changed overnight because suddenly i was not only i was assistant i had to be the pro tools operator which means i had to learn it first of all because again none of us knew it when it first came out we were still recording on tape and 3348s and d88s and all that stuff so so i not only had to learn pro tools but then i had to learn how to bring it into this workflow without which wasn't that hard because he would just use it as a tape machine anyways but what it did is it kind of engrained me more into his world and because we got along and we would talk about baseball and golf and smoke cigars and you know we were just we became really good friends and i just kept working with al and he at that point he kind of stopped working other places he was working here doing pretty much everything we had rebuilt this room and he started mixing here so he was here six days a week anyways so i just stayed on staff at capital even though i was working with all the time um to the point where i was giving my schedule to paula the studio manager because al and i were booked six eight months in advance so i just i didn't get my schedule from paula i got it from how i mean we would book vacations like okay we're going to take vacation this you know it was we did that for 15 years something like that incredible and it was great yeah i mean i got to work with just about everybody ever wanted to i got to sit next to al for 15 years and learn what he did and learn from him and you know i used to tell people you know i want to mix with the masters every day of my life i got to sit next to him um and also in that time i was working with other people you know if i wasn't working i was you know working with tommy vicari or jeff emerick or glen johns sometime you know i mean so i got to assist all those guys at churny you know ellie i did a lot of records with elliot shiner in here elliott would come mix here all the time um so so i really got to see a lot of that kind of thing and then over time you know you get your own clients too so so as as al's career was kind of slowing down a little bit you know mine was kind of ramping up so it was just kind of a natural thing where i was getting busier he wasn't getting busier kind of by choice because you know he was just he just didn't want to do a lot of the projects anymore so when he needed something i would do it and i was here um but yeah it kind of naturally just you know my career was going this way and his was winding down and it worked out great so now here we are still here i'm still on staff at capital because there's no reason to leave so they're great about it here too if i have to go do something somewhere else they let me do it you know i have a mix room at my house so if i want to mix it home that's okay if you know when al and i would travel it was like hey alan we got to go to london and do a record they'd be like okay fine we'll see you when you get back you know so so it was all the advantages of being an independent engineer but you know with health benefits and a 401k incredibly paycheck yeah wow and not a bad place to work you know kind of envious now i'm just thinking did i do this wrong believe it or not it kind of worked out because you know there was that you know the financial crisis and you know the late 2000s and stuff and i just kind of rode through it because al and i were working and i just stayed here so i had a lot of friends that struggled at that time you know work was leaving and this and that and and i just kind of cruised through the whole thing which was great i don't know what i do now but i just show up to work every day now you um dare i say are you know i one of the first people to mix music in atmos yes as far as i know yeah um and we're obviously sitting in studio c which is one of the first rooms to be used for mixing music i think it was the first room that was kind of purposely built for music only um we can do films in here um we haven't but the tools are the same but yeah it was it was one of those strange things where i literally got called into the office one day and they said uh we have to build we're gonna tear down studio c you know we're gonna tear the walls out and we're gonna build a dolby atmos room i said okay why are we doing that and they were like we're not really sure but the record company wants us to do it they said they have lots of work for us and they're giving us a lot of money to do it and dolby is one of the partners so we're gonna take the room down we're gonna put this system in and when it's in there's a record that has to be done by this date we should be done with the room by this date which was like a month before so when we're done with the room you have to mix the record in dolby atmos a nice okay is anybody going to be here to show we'll teach you how to use the tools but yeah have fun what was the record was rem automatic for the people oh really yeah no pressure yeah um so basically we built the room you know it came out great um all the dolby guys were here kerry was here nate kunkel at the time worked for dolby he was very much involved in building this room and putting it together and you know the day we turned the speakers on and they calibrated everything and the next day they sat me down and went okay here's the render and you do this and this and this and you can move the object this way and you can do stuff this way call us if you have a problem and everybody left and i had a record to do and to figure out basically um the band's coming in two weeks is what i was told so i just had to figure it out and and it was what year was this this was 2016 i think maybe 2017. um and you know we were still buzzing out the room we were i was still finding pro you know little the little problems you have when you when you build a room i got a buzz here and i'm not sure that's working right that kind of stuff so we're still doing that so like nate would come by in the mornings and we'd have coffee and he'd be like how's everything working out does everything be like yeah you know i got stuck on this thing where you know what do you do with the face when you do and he'd look at me and go i don't know you're the only one that's ever done this so figure it out thanks because again it had been used for movies but nobody had ever done it for music only and and i you know i remember literally asking the first question i was like so like do i have to worry like you know like in 5 1 you didn't want to put too much in the back because you never knew what people had and in films it's ambience here like what like what are the rules here and they were like no you got full range speakers everywhere and the way the system works it'll steer stuff wherever you want it so you know you really don't have that much limitations and i was like so i can i remember literally asking so i can put anything i want anywhere in this room and they went yeah i said i can fill the room with sound and they went yeah if you want to and that's what stuck in my head like i can fill this room with sound i have all these speakers and i'm not doing a little bit of ambience like if we're gonna do this let's do it let's go for it so i figured out a way to you know i mean there was things i had to to figure out how to like if i wanted something to stay somewhere i had to figure out how to anchor it there but still fill the room that kind of stuff so it was really fun for and literally for two weeks nobody you know people would pop in and see what was going on and this and that and and i ended up mixing the whole record and then the idea was scotland who produced the original record was going to come in and we were going to tweak the mixes and then the band was going to come in and it became very clear really fast that scott and i had a completely different idea of what this was supposed to be and neither one of us was wrong it was just very clear like okay he has he doesn't like this what i did um so basically i just went you know we worked on it for a while and i kind of went you know scott just like instead of using my let's just start over and he was like yeah that's probably not a bad idea like this will go quicker if we just start over um so we ended up just kind of starting over and at some point we of course we ran long and i had to go to a project with a house so they actually ended up finishing that record so the record that's out now are actually not my mixes um they're very good mixes but again they had a different conceptual idea but i still liked my idea so when they were done i was back on it and i was and for the first couple years you know we knew that universal had to deal with dolby and we knew that something was coming but at the time just this music wasn't being released this was the only place i could really listen to it unless i went to the dolby theater across the street if they would let me in there were no you know there was no home stuff there was no you know there's no title there was no title there was no amazon eventually it was amazon that that was the deal but we didn't know that at the time um so they were like just mix just mix mix mix mix mix so sometimes they would give me songs to mix other times it was like hey i just did this cool record they were like great do it mix it so if i thought something was cool i would just grab it and mix it and it was really funny some cool stuff commitment exactly it was that kind of thing you know and of course everybody was like when are you gonna do queen what are you gonna do you know and i was like i don't want to do that stuff i want to do like like it was actually a very conscious because queen came up immediately because i had worked on the 5-1 mixes with elliot shiner and everybody so they were like you can do the queen stuff and i was like i don't want to do that so did elliott do the queen stuff yes all of it yeah we did a night at the opera in here actually did brian come down for it yeah he was here for weeks yeah we could have hours really fun yeah really fun yeah brian's a great guy um yeah there's hours of stories about that record um there's lots of people watching go what's going to happen next so they're going to talk about queen only because it's warren and everybody i'll tell you a fun funny story but really quick please we were mixing one of the songs and brian says there's two guitar parts missing and we were like man we've been through this like for the fine like are you sure like we went through this with a fine tooth he says they're not on the record but i remember doing them i'll bet you they're there they didn't fit so we went back to the tapes and i was like there's two guitar parts here that we're not using he was like let me hear him and put him up he goes yep those are the two put them in we're like but they're not on the original record he goes nope we didn't have room form but now we got plenty of room let's put them in so there's parts on the 5-1 version of a night at the opera that are not on the original record we never would have made that call ourselves but when brian absolutely when brian said to do it we did it of course yeah what about uh i because you did open the can of worms is there a plan to do the atmos version of it i believe that they're either being done or going to be done but the brianal doom in england right yeah he's got his own studio there and his own engineers and they're great guys um so yeah that's where it should be done so i mean i'm i'm of the opinion that if you can get the original people to do these records that they should do them sure yeah 100 if they don't want to do them all sure i'll take a crack at it but they should do them i think the two bands i always hear are queen and steely dan that's the other one everybody asks me yeah yeah i don't know what they're doing about steely dan i'm sure elliot'll do them at some point yeah that makes sense but yeah but queen i remember i remember having the discussion about queen and i was like guys i don't think we should do those records yet like we've been doing this for like three months like nobody's heard it we we don't even know how this is going to get played like maybe we don't completely screw up bohemian rhapsody in the first three months like let's just put that one aside and wait till we you know let's not even talk about dark side of the moon and like let's get some of this stuff under our belt and figure out what the hell we're doing first and everybody kind of went yeah that's probably not a bad idea so you know so we were taking you know other stuff and playing with that some of it came out really great there's there's some stuff that we actually did in atmos that like it became a bigger deal because of the atmos mix than it than it actually was in stereo what do you think's a good example of that so there was a record we did in stereo and i don't think the record even came out in stereo it was a record they did in england with the def jam label so they took all these old hip-hop tracks and put all this orchestration around them and i had done some of the first string sessions here for that record um so i knew about the record and when i started doing this i was like ooh that would be really cool like all the big orchestra you know with this hip-hop stuff that would be really fun so i took um ll cool j's mama said knock you out and i thought it had a lot of sound effects and you know i said ah that would be fun so i came in one saturday by my and i just did it i was like i got a thing to mix on saturday they were like alright have fun um and i did it and it came out really well and i was like wow this is sounding pretty cool and i brought chris walden who has a room upstairs and he did a bunch of that record i brought him down like what do you think of this he was like this is kind of amazing and i was like yeah it's pretty fun huh you know the record spins around and gunshots and and brought somebody else and i was like what do you think of this you know like this is really cool so like that next monday i brought the record company people in the dolby people were here because they were always here at the time and i was like what do you guys think of this and it was just like dead silence in the room like people couldn't believe how crazy it was but it actually worked and from then on it was like all right all bets are off like this i remember hearing it this is nuts and this is like yeah we got to do that yeah i remember hearing it was phenomenal and it lent itself to it it was it was you know i did like four or five in this room is where i heard it by the way yeah at the time it was the only place you could hear it yeah yeah i remember um and so that's what like when we would do demos we always start with rocketman because that works the best and we would always end with ll cool j um in the middle beach boys in the middle yeah then we did the beach boys track was the same kind of thing it was a record they had done in england again with orchestration around the beach boys and i figured that would be fun because then i can get a beach boys track but i don't have to remix the original record and get the beach boys police on my ass you know so plus i had this big orchestra to work with and and at the time again my whole thought still is like fill the space so sometimes these old records they're not as much fun because they're you know eight tracks like there's not a lot of stuff for you on them four tracks sometimes i mean you can peel stuff apart and there's ways to do it i mean obviously you know stuff like kind of blue and stuff like that which is a whole another discussion um so you can do it but sometimes it's not as much fun i actually have a lot more fun working on new records you know now the stuff that they're sending us now to do almost everything we're doing now is is frontline new releases which is great yeah which is really great so we've gone from me by myself in this room kind of doing whatever i had laying around to five engineers here two or three three engineers in nashville a couple in line i mean we've got we've got two rooms here we've got two rooms in nashville building rooms in new york building rooms in santa monica we got people mixing at most all over i have my house still you know during covet i set up an atmosphere in my living room and that's still up and running so i mean we're cranking out atmos mixes which is really fun are all the systems that you work on pmc uh yes let me think yes there's one room that we use for playbacks in santa monica that's atcs the great thing about atmos i mean it's it's kind of agnostic to all that you can use you can use whatever speakers you like we have a partnership with pmc here at capital and we had before all this atmos stuff came up and we have a great relationship with them and obviously maurice is a great friend and you know we've traveled around the world together doing this stuff so and i love the pmc speakers they're great um so most of the rooms that we build are pmc speakers and a lot of that is based around the people and not necessarily the speakers the speakers are great but the people are better sure because we don't just buy the speakers from them they help us with them maurice comes in and helps us install and he's he's here if something breaks they're here the next day they're here we've often thought that he's been cloned yes because he seems to be in eight places everywhere yeah and seems to be running every single facet of it absolutely yeah from selling it to seemingly using it using it to help design the rooms yeah i don't know how he does once in a while i'll call him and i'll hear like you know the european ring oh crap he's in europe like when the hell did he go there but he'll answer the phone what do you need what do you need man we blew we blew a tweeter somebody will be there tomorrow okay somebody's here tomorrow it's great so yeah they've been a great partner for us so um let's talk about the room capital c capital c there you go done okay bye monitor controller over at pmc studio was it the same thing is it the same no so this room this room and atmos because this is one of the earlier rooms yeah we didn't have all all the dante implementation so the monitor in the and in this room we had the unique situation where we wanted to still be able to work on the analog console so for atmos this is a three computer system playback rig a print rig and then the renderer on a third computer which up until recently was an old a pc that dolby had given us now we're running it on a mac mini um so so we have three computers in this room in this room it runs maddie from one computer to the print rig and then dante from the print rig into the render again because at the time we had to do it that way and we have a crestron system here that handles all of the monitoring um but also the cool thing about the this crestron system and this is one that nate kunkel set up is we can completely bypass the atmo system so when i hit that button all of that is bypassed and we go right back to the analog console which which today is turned off but because we've been doing so much atmos work in here that we just shut the niv off but so that bypasses the entire system so if you wanted to mix in here in stereo you hit that button you move these out of the way you're an analog console mixing in stereo uh if you want to mix in five one you can go to the console this is now the out the five one outputs of the console if i go to patch five one or patch seven one i have patch points over here that i can patch straight out of pro tools into the monitor system or i can go right back to dolby atmos it's pretty ingenious pretty ingenious system um the newer rooms that we're building and like the room at lemon tree they just do the one or two things you know we can do stereo or we can do we can do atmos but they're not quite you know we don't have the analog console issue in those other rooms the original idea was that we would be able to use the analog console to mix if you wanted to you could put the analog console in the signal path to do atmos and i did it once and it was such a huge pain in the ass that we never did it again and we changed it so that now it doesn't do that so it's a much slicker digital system now you changed quickly so i presume there was no like massive benefit that made you want to stay oh well things that would be disguised in a pair of speakers because everything's layered so those little buzzes and stuff that we're used to are okay in the stereo world but suddenly when there's an acoustic guitar right over there that had a buzz on the microphone that was barely audible now it's going right or what i was finding is you know buzzes in the patch bet you know right right or yeah or you know a channel on a neve console that suddenly you know that eq has a little bit of buzz in it and like you said it's over there by itself and suddenly you hear it and because in atmos you have to do all the panning in the box anyways because it goes into the render with the objects and stuff so really all this was doing was it was giving faders and if you wanted you know yeah you got the neve sound but but it didn't bias anything it and it and at the time it reduced us to 64 objects and we were like you know what nobody's ever going to do this and i'd rather have more objects so let's re so then we re-hashed the room and took the analog console out of the atmos system completely um but if you still want to mix stereo in here you know again you hit the button you move this away and it's just good old studio c the way it used to be actually the tape that's on it's still this is al's last mix oh wow really is this your handwriting no that's actually chandler's handwriting i didn't i didn't do that particular record with him what was the last mix i'll do it here uh it was a duet with willie nelson and diana crawl oh amazing so yeah but we we've just left the tape on because i think nobody wants to take it off i wouldn't either um so again it's it's still a great stereo room you know it's it always was and it still is so you just bypass all these speakers and it's great so talking speakers there's a schnizel ton of them like 20. we got a lot of them 20 speakers in this room um we've got obviously the three pmcs in the front with the xbds and the the point one the sub cabs there's actually four cabinets in this room that make up the point one um just because it's a fairly big room so we started with two and we needed more you know we just wanted to efficiently fill the low end so we added two more um and then so up top we have the wafers here they're on trusses because when we built the room there are two competing systems there's dolby atmos and there's oro 3d and the oro 3d spec is actually speakers over the front speakers so you have speakers here and speakers here so we put this trussing system in because if we ever want to do auro 3d the trusses move so we can take this set of speakers and push it forward and take these and move them here we've never done it but um but we could do it that's why we have the trusting system um works great and you know the video guys love it because they can hang their lights on we didn't think about it eric yeah i think after being in here a while i think at some point we're going to try to raise the height ceiling speakers up a little bit um just because these get a little close to you when you're standing up um but that's as high as we could go because the the top slant and the in the ceiling that's as high as we could go with them but since we're not really doing our 3d when the next time this room gets re-jigged will probably be when the analog console goes away um which again it just doesn't get used all that much anymore so if anybody wants to buy an 88r does this does this tie to a tracking room uh it can but it doesn't you've never tracked using this console no we have a brand new 88 rna and we have the greatest 8068 and b yeah so we don't have to use this console no i don't i mean other than maybe a vocal or keyboard these preamps have probably never been used not here at least we bought this console we bought this console about eight years ago and we bought it used it was at a studio in england what was what was in here before when we are oh it was a vr yeah because i was looking at it when i when i came in the room i'm like this looks like the room that i mixed with owen but that doesn't look like the neve yeah and that's why at the time it was probably yeah it definitely was a vr it was 2011 yeah 2011 2012. yeah we we put the 88r we put a brand new one that we specced in a in 2011 december of 2011 and then this one came in a couple years later it's just a great console i mean i love the 88r it's a fantastic console it's just completely impractical at this point you know so right now it just holds up the dock in the ass just just this is more of a me wanting to know why why did you why did you guys change from the vr to the seo that vr we had had had tons of miles on it um you know we had recapped it a few times um this was just a more modern you know at the time a more modern console um it was getting tough for you know we have great maintenance guys but they were working on that console a lot and this one came up and it was like yeah let's do it so and it matches the one in a so you know we do have times where we can start a project in a and bring it over here the automation matches and all that kind of stuff so it does make a practical you know practical for us to have the same console at both rooms um at one point we had four neves in the building yeah oh wow two old ones and two new ones do you think that this is obviously this room is going to carry on being a um an immersive audio room the dolby atmos room what do you think is going to happen just something in here that's maybe good enough to do vocals and overdubs so this will probably my guess i mean what we've been talking about is this will become a big s6 right yeah we have one on the second floor and actually we we designed our own frame for it so it kind of tilts up so when you sit at the s6 you can actually see everything but the buttons are literally like right in front of you it's really cool um so we'll probably have one of those and bring it down here because we still we still do a significant amount of films in this room um they mix film scores all the time they they don't always use the atmos system but they'll do them in seven one or five one um and on those film scores you know the track counts are so high on those that it's it's the analog console is it's kind of impractical for them too some guys might run some stuff through the console but you know it's it's 72 channels which sounds like a lot unless you have a thousand tracks in your movie score so um so yeah at some point this will this will leave and this will become an all digital room it's just the sign of the times we still have two analog rooms you can still come and make sense yeah yeah yeah you know and you've got all that tracking all that beautiful tracking exactly so three at the front here uh-huh three in the front big pmcs yeah with the extended xpd cabinets on the bottom so are these like resonator cabinets no those are the same as they have it at lemon tree so it's just it's it it extends the bottom end right um in this room when you flip to atmos when you're mixing atmos some of the the xbd cabinets the lower cabinets on the left and right do some base management for the small speakers also oh i see yeah so you get a little more low end out of the small speakers right um and in this room we use the wafers as our small speakers so these are the six overhead and then the exact same speakers are in the walls also and there's another six three two three three three on this side three on this side and four across the back of it and the three are lined up perfectly with these three yeah so the way the way we do it here at our studios is the back wall has four speakers one of them is lined up with this tweeter one of them is lined up with this tweeter same on that side and then here these so there's a speaker here lined up another one here and another so they line up to those so it's pretty symmetrical it was really interesting um when because rajit who's holding the camera over here hadn't heard rocket man in a room that it was mixed in so i was like come and have that experience and you and i sat on the couch back there it's really interesting i've never done that before i've only heard atmos in the sort of ideal place there's been a couple of times i've sat maybe a little bit back but usually i'm in this general vicinity and hearing it back there it was like it was the ambience of everything like the vocal ambience at the beginning it's pretty cool it's pretty amazing yeah i mean the fun part about atmos is you can experience it different depending on where you're sitting i sit back here all the time i don't know why i picked that spot i'll do a mix and i'll just sit back there and listen to it you know that seems to be the spot for me but sometimes i'll go stand in the back corner and make sure sometimes it's making sure there's nothing weird coming out back there like the one dry vocal or something like that you kind of want to stay open singers don't like it when you put their vocal really dry in one speaker so i'll be sometimes looking for that um the other thing when i first did that that first rem record i was doing and again my goal was to fill the room so i took the vocal and i started spilling it into speakers because i wanted it to be to fill the room and i i spend a lot of time especially this room because it's so big i'll spend a lot of time walking around so i'll you know all and i was walking around the room and realizing that michael stipe was following me wherever i went he was like right there all the time and i was like okay this is kind of creepy like so i have to figure out a way to to anchor stuff you know so i figured out a way to anchor him to still have the vocal fill the room but anchor it up here because that's what i want it's an interesting question i'd love to have that answered because to quickly say this and i've said it before on camera one of the things i always hated about five one was everybody mixed in five one put them speak the vocal in the middle of the speech there and then filled the room with music and ambience and the vocal always ended up sounding like hi there i'm the vocal where the great thing about stereo is like the vocals coming middle sides everything at you at the same time obvious thing to say and i've always felt like that was a terrible thing with five one so how in an object-based world how does it work you you put it in there and then you can just choose to spread it so it can how do you do it i do it the opposite way okay i have i have zones set up yeah so i have two objects that live front left and front right yeah and i have two objects basically basically my zones yeah which we talked about in another video follow the speakers in this room because this is the room i was in when i invented when i came up with the zones yeah yeah so basically my zones are where the speakers are so i'll take and because of the way i do it i can steer that vocal into different sets of speakers different objects so i'll start with front left and right and then i have an object at the center so i'll take a send and i'll start dialing it into the center just to bring it out a little bit and then i'll start dialing it into the sides just to bring it forward a little bit and then a little more on the sides here and then i also discovered like i love height so i'll take it and i'll bleed it into these two speakers too which kind of gives it this presence kind of gives it this thing to come off the wall so so i i can control and that's how i figure out how to anchor stuff because like if i want it more anchored in the front i might add more to the center speaker but i like phantom center too it just sounds natural to me so i do have stuff coming out of the center and it's you know kick and snare and vocal i mean i use the center speaker but i use it sparingly if you were to mute the center speaker in my mix the vocal does not go away the bass does not go away it's all still there um one thing i caution people all the time is the subs too you know there's two things about the lfe channel always filter it yourself because you don't want to trust especially consumer playback systems and that's a whole another discussion but and always make sure that it's that the lfe is an extension of what you have going on not the only thing so if you mute the lfe channel your base should not go away it should be everywhere and that's just supplementing you know it's it's low-end do you have a good understanding or of like say for this for instance here the wafers these are wafers in the wall yes as well okay so so the majority of speakers in this room then are wafers so where do they kind of high pass that where do they disappear on on the low end i think that's around 150 ish but then they're doing again we have a little bit of base management going on um actually i think they're lower than 150. i've never really noticed like an appreciable i mean obviously i'm not throwing a kick drum into that thing and expecting it to be that right um but the one nice thing about using the same especially the same brand of speaker and pmc is very good at this is all their speakers have the same kind of character so if you were to turn on just the wafer or just the big guys over here obviously they sound different but the character is fairly similar so as you move stuff through the room it's not like you're changing dramatically you know you're not going from a pmc to an ns10 to a genelec you know which are so so having that consistency really helps um yeah i've never i've never run into a problem with thinking stuff was too again i'm not throwing real low end bass stuff in you know i'm not putting timpani's in the back necessarily i'm probably gonna well even if i could in this room you know the consumer system is probably not gonna like that because not all consumer systems are built the same at home i have a you know a sono sound bar the speakers in the back are this big sure you know i mean they do a really good job they sound really good but i probably don't want all my timpani back there so so we do we do think about that kind of stuff and again i'm trying to to anchor stuff where i want the focus to be too you know i go back to that thing where michael stipe was following me around the room and it was really creepy um about a year after that i was mixing a marilyn manson record and i thought it should be like that wow so i put his vocal in every single speaker equally so as you walk around the room he follows you and it's really creepy for that song it really works it's pretty cool so it sounds like you're basically in the box entirely is there any breakout for hardware ever there can be in this room there can be we have we have one 16 io yeah hooked up to the atmos system yeah so if you wanted to you could insert analogues you do you ever the only time there have been a couple of occasions where i did use chambers right um but that was very specific stuff um and again that's something i can only do here i can't repeat it anywhere else so you print it presumably i printed it yeah and then when we do the reamping that we do obviously we need analog inputs because we have to capture the microphones um so we do have an analog scheme if there was something you know if you're doing a catalog album and there's you know you needed that specific sound sure you know you run in you run into the closet and you grab the ams and yeah you get that or whatever the fairchild or the you know i mean we have great thing about capital we have all that stuff even as we go more digital we still have it we know we very rarely get rid of anything so yeah there's probably going to be a point of diminishing returns where some of the stuff especially old digital is not going to be worth selling why sell it keep it for that one time you need it it just paid for itself exactly yeah or are you like you know there was an instance you know again through the like the 80s and 90s every room had like you know 20 channels of drama gates because you need them on everything so we had you know 40 drummer gates like well we got rid of a third of them yeah so we kept a few around but but you know we'll trade them for you had 40 guys you got rid of 41 of them exactly so i've got to ask the capital valve compressor pretty cool huh um they were built by ayan sheftik who was on staff here at the time who's who does magic death eye um that's his company so these are essentially the early magic death eye compressors and it's a stereo compressor with step pots because it's it was built for mastering and then when the mastering department was eliminated a year ago unfortunately like about a month ago we went to the shop and somebody was like actually we took something out of here i can't remember what we took out of the rack but we were like we got to fill it with something one of the guys came down oh we should put one of these in and i was like oh we have those things so now we actually have one in every room because we have three of them there's only three that exist um there's one in every room and believe it or not we've all started using them they sound great i've used them on stereo busts i've used them on bass i've used them on piano i haven't used it on a vocal yet i have to try it so these are essentially the same as what compressor so the magic death eye i don't know the magic death is is iron sheftick who was a mastering engineer here he builds them it's a kind of a boutique there's a plug-in version of it but he he builds the hardware too um so if you're familiar with magic death i'm not going to be yeah these are kind of the prototype obviously he built it for us when he worked here um so yeah they're great i love it i didn't realize it was i've been in this room like multiple different times and i thought i was in two different rooms interesting yeah well the room changed quite a bit so had nothing to do with atmos but when we put this console in we redid the room so we got a new credenza there used to be racks yeah all along here hanging up because we had tons of gear yeah because it was a good room because al had his vocal compressor over here exactly there was a shelf there yeah there were racks up here racks down here there was like a producer's assistant engineer desk here the patch bay was down here kind of on the floor like so but but you know as things progressed one thing about capital we can't get more space so in order to make this room bigger we just started taking stuff out of it so i was like you know what we don't need all this stuff anymore half the stuff we're doing is in the box anyways let's get rid of all these cabinets so so we got rid of tons of rack space and all that kind of stuff so effectively made the room bigger that way and that's what we'll probably do again how do we make this room bigger easy get these things out of here get this big thing out of the way what's this thing do exactly and it'll oh so i see it's your headphone stand exactly people would come in and put laptops on top of it once again thank you very much my pleasure marvelous pleasure please leave any comments and questions below so long farewell have you seen our vladio sadio goodbye cheers [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 8,041

Keywords: Warren Huart, Produce Like A Pro, Home studio, Home recording, Recording Audio, Music Production, Record Producer, Recording Studio

Id: TmcVG3klhM4

Length: 48min 52sec (2932 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021