The 131st Convention comes to NYC October 21-23 at the Javits Center, and the Platinum Panels are still TBD in terms of day/time, but we have lined up some incredible panelists so far. Check it out…

CREATIVE ENGINEERING – THE STUDIO AS AN INSTRUMENT:  Co-moderators, Engineer/Producer/Journalist, Justin Colletti and SonicScoop Co-Founder Janice Brown; Platinum Engineer/Producer Panelists - Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT, Neon Indian); Peter Katis (The National, Jónsi, Interpol); Chris Shaw (Bob Dylan, Public Enemy, Weezer) and Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Prodigy)

Peter Katis, Tarquin Studios, Bridgeport, CT

Engineers of a particularly creative breed, these multi-faceted audio gurus reflect a singular studio fluency which has inspired and produced some of today’s most sonically expressive, adventurous and influential recordings.

Typically recording, mixing and co-producing entire albums, these craftsman often collaborate with artists whose distinct points-of-view come across not only in the songwriting and playing, but also in the sound of their records. Though they may program, play and/or produce on their projects, these panelists are engineers first, with the skill set to truly play the studio as an instrument.

Participants will discuss the creative recording and mixing techniques they’ve developed, and how they’ve led to great success.

THE PRODUCER’S PORTFOLIO: Moderator David Weiss (co-founder SonicScoop) – Panelists: Gabe Roth (Founder, Daptone Records, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings), David Kahne (Sublime, Regina Spektor, Paul McCartney), additional panelists TBA.

Gabe Roth, Daptone Studios, Brooklyn

Everyone agrees the artist hires the producer to serve the band or singer/songwriter and their music. This panel, however, will address the producer’s personal artistic visions, and the growing bodies of work their creative philosophies pilot into reality.

Considered a creative artistic force in their own right, each of these producers collaborates fully with their clients both in pre-production and the studio. Participants will explore the artistic sensibilities they’ve nurtured, how they’ve expressed themselves in their work, and how that self-assurance and unique perspective has enabled their careers to flourish.

Stay tuned for more details…we hope to see you there!

With Dan Romer, every song is a think piece. (Photo credit: Shervin Lainez)

The diverse skill set on musical instruments – Romer can hit the stage on accordion, guitar, Mellotron, drum machines and percussion, in addition to tuba – reflects his agility in his Park Slope studio, home of Drawing Number One Productions. There, he’s tracked, mixed and collaborated with songwriters that are stepping up and out, scoring big with singles and synch licensing: a list that includes Ingrid Michealson, Jenny Owen Youngs, Ian Axel, and April Smith, among others.

Meanwhile, his work with Lelia Broussard has been a big part of the smart songstresses’ fast and recent rise. One of two finalists in Rolling Stone’s “Do You Wanna Be a Rock Star?” competition, Broussard has gone deep into the contest armed with the arresting album Masquerade that Romer produced. Equal parts sage, savage and sweet, Masquerade is a record real enough to cut right through the clutter — precisely why you should expect to see Broussard on the cover of Rolling Stone this August.

Smoking a cigarette on the stoop while his latest charge, Cara Salimando, looked through lyrics inside Drawing Number One, Romer made it clear that production, songwriting, engineering and raw musical instinct can successfully intersect.

On your Website, you seem pretty uninterested in making a big deal out of your studio, gear or the tools that you use. Why is that?
The most obvious answer is, I don’t really think it’s about the gear. It’s about the work. I don’t use the most expensive equipment in the world. I personally feel the way that home recording works is: If you’re not going to be doing drums at your place, really what you need more than anything else is a good-sounding space and a really good stereo chain.

I use a mic that I love, a preamp that I love, HD converters, and that kind of chain is something you’d see in a super professional recording studio.

What mic and pre is that specifically?
The mic is a Pearlman TM 1. It’s hand-built by a guy named Dave Pearlman in L.A. He’s a total sweetheart — I’ve left my mic on too long and blown out the tubes, and he’s sent out new ones right away. It’s in the U 47 vein. If I can, I prefer to go with mics where actual people are building them — you get more attention from them.

The mic pre is the Portico 5012. It’s a somewhat mellow preamp. I like getting the sound super-aggressive at the source, and then using my pres to mellow it out. The Portico, when you press down the “Silk” button, it makes more use of the transformers. When you’re recording something like percussion, you can hit it and it calms it down a little bit. It’s like having two preamps in one — it’s a fantastic feature.

What are the spaces you have available to you in your home studio?

Inside the HQ of Drawing Number One, with drummer Elliot Jacobson looking on. (Photo Credit: Deborah Lopez)

I have closet that I turned into a vocal booth. I padded every wall down with fiberglass, put a rug down, and left the ceiling open so I could have one reflection. I also have a humongous basement. What I did there is got a bunch of packing blankets and killed reflections until I had no slapback, then left it at that. So it’s as natural as possible.

When I record drum sounds there, I set up room mics near the heating ducts and get a whole lot of sustain. But I prefer a jagged live room with no slapback to a very well-treated wood panel room.

You seem to get along with some determined female singer/songwriters. In addition to Lelia Broussard, I see on your discography Ingrid Michaelson, Jenny Owen Youngs, Bess Rogers, for starters. What’s their appeal to you as clients, and why do they seem to like you back?
When you’re in high school, it’s very common for guys to be in hardcore, punk and rock bands, and very common for girls to be playing an instrument and singing alone unaccompanied. That has nothing to do with abilities or mindframe of either gender, it has to do with where society pushes them.

So when I got to college at SUNY Purchase, the situation there was that the guys had been playing with bands since they were 14 or 15 years old, while many of the female singer/songwriters had very little experience in bands. SUNY Purchase has some pretty distinguished alumni by the way — Regina Spektor, Moby, Langhorne Slim, Dan Deacon, Jenny Owen Youngs, the Presidents of the United States of America. It’s a left-of-center pop music school.

Jenny Owen Youngs and I were really close friends in college. I had never produced a record before, but I somehow convinced her that I knew how to do that! She allowed me to record her first album, which she released independently and then got picked up by Nettwerk unchanged — they kept my mixes and the mastering.

More often than not, I’ve noticed guys have full bands that they’re already in, in which all the band members have artistic and financial stake, while it’s a lot more common for ladies to be solo artists. So it gives me an opportunity while working with them to put a band together and get the sound with them, rather than working with the sound that already exists between a bunch of people. Plus, the artists I’ve worked with that people know the best are Jenny Owen Youngs and Ingrid Michaelson. So I get inquiries from mostly female artists.

Beyond simply being a producer/engineer, you also collaborate with many of these artists as a songwriter. How does that work out?
I think being available as a co-songwriter as well introduces a specialness to the project. Instead of you [the artist] coming in with songs and just having them recorded, you’re making a whole new baby. It becomes a whole different project that couldn’t have happened otherwise.

When I’m writing with an artist, I try to get them out of their box. For instance with Cara Salimando, it’s a case of me saying, “You’ve written a lot of beautiful down tempo songs. Now let’s write some punk songs.” So when I sit down and start playing a guitar part unlike anything they’ve ever used, it’s an exciting place – ideas they’ve never tried before take them out of their comfort zone.

With an artist, I look at their top four or five songs they’re showing on the Internet. I’ll say, “What’s the same among all these songs?” Rhythms, chord progressions? Do they never use a two-chord? Or do they always change their chords on the down beat, or only have offbeat chord progressions? When I’m arranging, I’ll say, “What if we slow this song by 20 BPM? What happens if we don’t have the guitar, what if it’s just drums, bass and long piano chords?”

I try to get them going in another direction, not because what they’re doing isn’t great, but to get them out of their comfort zone so they get some ideas they haven’t thought of before.

That sounds stimulating. But what if an artist doesn’t want to leave that place that’s so comfy for them?

Ingrid Michaelson enters Brooklyn to exit the comfort zone. (Photo Credit: Deborah Lopez)

It’s happened before: An artist didn’t want to go out of their comfort zone, and it ended up not working. We did three days of writing and that was it.

As I understand it, Lelia started out as just a one-or two-song project. Why did it blossom into a full album?
She was going to record an acoustic EP out in L.A. We knew each other via some mutual friends, we hung out — I’d seen her live and really liked her.

I was playing a show with Ingrid out in L.A. and Lelia told me she was recording an acoustic EP. I told her it might be cool if we did a string quartet arrangement for the four songs, just to make them something special. I gifted her the album Chelsea Girl by Nico, and said, “Check out these arrangements. It’s pretty much acoustic guitar and a string quartet.” She called me back and said, “I love this record. Let me send you the songs I want to do.”

After some back and forth, and deciding the strings were a terrible idea and we should just do full band arrangements, Lelia and I wound up recording five songs in two weeks – “Spiderwebs,” “Rosey,” “Hipster Bitch,” “You’re Not Fooling Anyone,” and “Shoot for the Moon.” She went back to L.A., and then called me and said, “Can we just do another five, and make it a whole record?”

Couldn’t ask for a better introduction. What happened when she returned to NYC and your studio?
Having us both so happy with the recordings as they were — when she came back, we knew we had to one-up ourselves. Which was daunting and exciting. You always want to do better. So we did “Armor on my Heart,” “Masquerade,” “Something True,” “Satellite,” and “Heart Collectors.” It’s all the same players, it’s all the same gear, the same room, so it sounds like a cohesive record.

Together those became the album Masquerade, which came out late last year. The two singles from the record are “Masquerade” and “Satellite,” and those two come from the second batch.

What was your approach to capturing her sound, especially the all-important vocal?
The thing that I wanted to bring out in her music, more than anything else was the guttural nature of it.

When you listen to her chord progressions, which often have jazz qualities in them, an obvious vision a producer could have is a jazzy rock kind of thing, in a smooth realm. But her vocal isn’t just this big beautiful smooth thing – it’s also got this guttural thing going on, and that’s what I wanted to focus on.

It’s a very basementy-sounding record in a lot of ways, and we went for that sound to bring out this quality that I want to keep saying: guttural. She’s such an amazing singer — there’s not a stitch of Auto-tune on the entire record. The vocal chain was the TM 1 and the Neve Portico. We did a lot of takes and picked the ones we liked the best.

For an album like this, what are the strengths and limitations of working in your method, which is totally in the box?

Lelia Broussard's collab with Romer has gotten her THIS CLOSE to the Rolling Stone championship. (Photo credit: Shervin Lainez)

The strengths are recall speed, and also having as many instances of a hardware emulation as you want. For example, I’m smashing the room mics with an 1176 clone. I might have four tracks of toms, laid on top of each other, each with four room mics up and I use an 1176 on every room mic. So we’re talking — just for tom overdubs — sixteen 1176’s.

I know that there’s a certain magic that hardware has that software doesn’t, but price and convenience wins out in this area right now. I do believe this whole concept of hardware having any kinds of strength over software is going to be gone in ten years. Technology exponentially improves. How much better the plugins are now then 10 years ago is insane — the CLA 1176 plugin is just worlds ahead of any 1176 emulator from 10 years ago.

What’s the overall setup that all those emulations are stacked up in?
I’m running a newish desktop Mac, Pro Tools HD9, a 192 I/O, Focal monitors, and a pair of Events for reference, and Sennheiser HD650 headphones to check the headphone mix.

My preamps are the Portico, an API 3124, the Grace M101 — that pairs great with a Royer because it’s so transparent — and a Focusrite ISA 828, which I use when I need extra channels when I record drums.

My mics are the Pearlman TM 1, a pair of Mojave MA-200s, a Royer 121, a pair of KM-69s from Mercernary Audio, a slew of SM57s, a pair of Sennheiser 421s, Electro Voice RE20, AKG D112, Shure Beta 52 and a pair of Audio Technica 4033s. All the room sounds for drums on Lelia’s record are 4033s.

You and Lelia have done a lot of hard work together. Now it seems to be paying off, if approval from Rolling Stone and its audience still counts for something – which we think it does. Why do you think she’s made it down to the final two in the Rolling Stone “Rock Star” contest?
I feel like a lot of it has to do with the songs and the songwriting quality. She has great songs, great style, and we made a really special record together. She’s got a large fan base that’s behind her in this contest.

I know it’s an old rhetoric – “if the songs aren’t good you can’t do anything with the music” – but it’s true. She came with lot of really great songs, and we were able to transform them into recordings we both really love.

– David Weiss

Veronica Gretton has launched 401k Music in NYC.

Having already established a reputable roster with the launch,  401k Music has acquired a substantial stake in the first four albums by The B-52s (including the songs “Rock Lobster”, “Private Idaho” and “Planet Claire”).

In addition, the Company has signed Dylan Rau, songwriter and lead singer of highly touted Brooklyn band Bear Hands. Bear Hand’s debut LP “Burning Bush Supper Club” was Top 20 at CMJ Radio for the first two months of its release, and the band have been hailed by tastemakers and the music press worldwide as a band to watch. “High Society”, the first commercial single off the album, recently entered the Billboard Top Dance Singles at #3 and the Nielsen SoundScan Top Singles charts at #7.

Synchronization exploitation, as well as establishing deeper relationships between brands and artists, is a top priority for 401K. Recent synchronizations for The B-52s and Bear Hands include commercials for Target, David Yurman and French Connection, movies (“Paul”), TV shows (“Skins”, “The Good Wife” “Glory Daze”) and video games (“Rock Band 3”).

The first two signings demonstrate 401K’s flexibility – one deal is a straightforward administration agreement with additional creative services: highly proactive synch placement for example. The other is a co-publishing deal with an advance against royalties, and with additional funds available for recording, marketing, promotion and PR for the actual masters.

“I want to be uniquely, and completely flexible with our deal making – I want to be able to create the best possible scenarios for the Writer and Artist, ones that they are comfortable with and ones that will further their careers,” explains Gretton. “In addition, we can release the records ourselves or license to another company and work alongside them, whichever is best for the artist.”

Gretton has 25 years experience working in music publishing, recording, touring, branding, synchronization, licensing, merchandising, new media and business affairs.  In her career, she has worked in London, Los Angeles and New York, with such artists as The Cure, The Stone Roses,  Talking Heads, the Ramones, Tori Amos, Live, Black Grape, Ambulance Ltd, The Pogues and Mick Jones of The Clash.

Leveraging her relationships with managers, record company personnel, music supervisors, publishers, agents, radio, DJ’s and journalists Gretton’s expertise includes developing new artists, and re-inventing and maintaining established artist’s careers.

“Usually when you wake up later on and look at what you’ve scribbled down in the middle of the night, it reads like some kind of stoned epiphany: ‘Blue is blue,’ or something,” Nicolay relays. But not this time…

Banjo-accordion-keysman, Franz Nicolay

The keyboard/accordion/banjo, etc.-playing former keysman for The Hold Steady woke up to more than a song. What he had was the ill-fated love story of two characters named Felix and Adelita. “I don’t know anyone by those names, so I Googled them and it turns out that in Latin and Spanish the names mean Luck & Courage,” Nicolay explains. “And that’s the name of the [new] record.”

Nicolay is quick to point out that Luck & Courage is not a concept record, however. “I wrote a couple songs about these characters which are then mapped loosely against these other songs which are about a plague,” he describes. “So it’s the story of the troubled relationship of Felix and Adelita writ large on this story of a country that’s ravaged by plague.”

Now, we’re sitting in producer/engineer Jim Keller’s Brooklyn studio, sun streaming in through big windows over the mixing desk, as Keller cues up the album-opening track, “Felix and Adelita.” Freshly mixed just the day before, it’s Nicolay’s musical reverie come to life, and the church organ, banjo, slide guitar and brushed drumming set a sentimental, if not dark, tone.

“I wanted it to be a dark country record,” Nicolay describes. “One of the records I was thinking of when I was conceptualizing how I wanted this to sound is Lyle Lovett’s I Love Everybody.

“That record uses a simple drum kit with brushes, bass and Lovett playing guitar and singing. So there’s that sort of classic country rhythm section. And then a string quartet that’s playing the kind of arrangements you’d have on a big, lush 70s Nashville record, but compacted because they didn’t do it with a 50-piece orchestra they did it with 4 string players. I thought that was a really neat way of reinterpreting that sort of lushness, while retaining this really stringent, humble arrangement of the record.”

As Nicolay headed into the studio to record Luck & Courage other references he had in mind were American Music Club’s Mercury and 16 Horsepower’s Low Estate. “The banjo and accordion from 16 Horsepower, the pedal steel stuff from American Music Club and the string stuff for the Lyle Lovett record are like the three touch-points for this record,” he depicts.

WRITING & RECORDING LUCK & COURAGE: BROOKLYN to HOBOKEN AND BACK

Nicolay wrote the songs for Luck & Courage on piano and guitar, as well as banjo, which he’s taken up since his debut solo record, Major General, released in January of ‘09. “On one of the Hold Steady tours, I demo’d a half-dozen of my songs in a motel room in Boulder with the guitar tech who had Pro Tools on his laptop,” Nicolay shares. “I pitched them to The Hold Steady, but then ultimately left the band, so I took them with me.

Nicolay wrote much of "Luck & Courage" while touring his first solo record, '09's "Major General."

“Then in the fall of last year, I was on a solo tour supporting Mark Eitzel of American Music Club and we were in Manchester, staying at this house that’s sort of a legendary rock crash pad that has a piano and a bunch of rooms for the bands that come through. I had a day off and the place all to myself; I spread out and had my headphones on and guitar out, and all in one day, all these lyrics came together to this collection of songs I’d been working on. That was the first day I thought ‘wow, this is what my record’s going to sound like.’ It was a really cool feeling.”

In the meantime, Nicolay had met Keller during the making of his friends’ record, the NYC rock band Demander’s album, Future Brite. “I was just blown away by how good that record sounded, and I knew I wanted to try to do something with Jim,” he notes. “So I came in here and we demo’d the vocals on those existing songs and banged out a couple more that I’d written in the meantime and lived with those for awhile before we officially started the record.”

Keller, meanwhile, set out to find the right studio in which to record Nicolay and band as a group and to capture the desired sound. They ended up at Excello Recording in Williamsburg to track basics. “It’s a great, huge live room with two or three huge windows,” says Keller of Excello. “And we came away with really good sounds. We tracked 11 songs in two days. Everyone was very well rehearsed and getting good sounds in that room was easy. The assistant, Nathan Rosborough, was also really great.”

Tracking Luck & Courage, Nicolay’s band included Brian Viglione (The Dresden Dolls) on drums, Yula Be’eri (World/Inferno Friendship Society) on bass and Maria Sonevytsky (The Debutante Hour) on piano. Other players on the record include Ben Holmes, Jared Scott (Demander), Mark Spencer (Sun Volt), Ken Thomson (Gutbucket), Emily Hope Price and Jeremy Styles (Pearl and the Beard), and Susan Hwang among others.

Keller captured a lot of “room” in the basic tracking sessions. “I put up a lot of different room mics, which is something I usually do when tracking a band,” he explains. “You get all the close mics and the main mics on the drums sounding good, and then you add the fun mics. You never know what you’ll get — especially in a room you haven’t worked in before — so I’ll put mics up in a couple random spots.

“This time, I took Excello’s old RCA 77, ran it through their Altec tube amp and just smashed it. Sometimes you’ll get something that could be just perfect to be featured in one section of the song.”

Keller made an exciting technical discovery at Excello one night after everyone had left. “Excello has this old Calrec board from the BBC, and we didn’t use the pre’s in the board (I used their Neve sidecar and the API pre’s), but at the end of the day, when I was printing roughs of the monitor mixes, I patched a couple of the board compressors in. These Calrec DL 1656 compressors that I’d never used before are awesome. Now I’m totally on a search to find a pair that I can rack up!”

Nicolay and Jim Keller listening back to "Luck & Courage" mixes at Keller's studio in Brooklyn.

After capturing the band sound at Excello, including drums, bar room-sounding upright piano, banjo, bass and guitar, Keller and Nicolay booked a couple days at Water Music in Hoboken to record strings, Hammond A100 organ, group vocals and grand piano. “We took the doors off of the piano booth there and put some room mics out in that big live room,” Nicolay points out.

Keller reflects on his spacious production approach: “The way sound behaves in a room is what makes a record exciting, which is what I hear when I listen to old records that I like. Spot- and close-miking things is great, but you don’t give the sound a chance to work around the room and build up its energy. When you put up a lot of mics in different places and you keep the pre’s pretty wide open, you bring those up in a mix and it’s like all of a sudden adding this energy to the track.”

“For the control and the dynamic element of the piano and drums, everything gets a spot mic, but the room mics are in almost all the way too,” he notes. “So you get the dynamic sense from the close mics and the sense of space and energy from the room mic.”

OVERDUBS & MIXING BACK IN BED-STUY

Nicolay’s commanding lead vocals were tracked at Keller’s studio back in Bed-Stuy. “We cut all the vocals, acoustic guitar, banjo, horns, cello and percussion here,” Keller explains, pointing back from the control room area to a small, glass-doored room he uses for overdubs.

On the day of our visit, Keller was mixing with hopes to finish before Nicolay left on tour with Against Me! He’d be out with the band all summer. “I’ve been a fan and friend of Against Me! for years so I’m excited to go on tour with them,” says Nicolay, who’s also been a member of the Brooklyn-based cabaret-punk collective, World/Inferno Friendship Society. “Plus, it’s coming at the right time — basically, the Against Me tour is paying for this record! (laughs)”

Keller in the zone.

Prior to mixing, Keller had been having technical problems with the automation on his Amek Big 44 console and, ultimately, decided to mix the record in Logic.

“I’d been thinking about what would be the most efficient way to mix this record,” explains Keller. “I like faders, but the last two records I’ve done, I’ve mixed in Logic to surprising (for me) results! To the point where I’m second-guessing my setup here — do I even need this console and all this stuff?”

He continues: “For me, it’s all about the workflow. And I’ve gotten this thing down to where mixing in Logic is really fast.”

As for the sonic processing palette inside Logic, Nicolay offers, “I’ve always been super impressed by the plug-ins that are bundled with Logic.” To that, Keller adds, “Yeah, and I’m using all stock plug-ins. The only thing I’m running out for is to go through my SSL clone compressor, a couple of dbx 160x’s and a 1/4″ tape machine for tape delay, but, for example, the Logic Silver compressor is great. It’s all really useable stuff, right there. I don’t need to buy thousands of dollars of plug-ins — it’s just not necessary for me.”

We’ll have to sweat out the rest of the summer before hearing anymore of Luck & Courage — Nicolay expects the record will come out sometime this Fall. After a spin of another album track, the horn-heralded lament, “My Criminal Uncle,” it seems Felix and Adelita’s star-crossed fate is sealed, and we are left captivated, wanting more.

Catch Nicolay on tour with Against Me! at a venue near you and visit him online at www.franznicolay.com. For more on Jim Keller and to get in touch, visit www.jim-keller.com.

With two films he worked on in Sundance this year, we thought Neil was oh-so-apropo to learn a ton of really valuable information from.

Brooklyn Sound Society at On Kawara's Million Years at the David Zwirmer Gallery

Q: (Said like Navin Johnson) Who is Neil Benezra? What came before Brooklyn Sound Society?

A: I started out as a drummer in NYC rock and experimental bands and played with a wide range of musicians—everything from making a record with Joey Ramone—you can read all about this in the new book I Slept With Joey Ramone written by Mickey Leigh — to performing and recording with sound artist Stephen Viteillo, and playing percussion and making a record with the band Sulfur that included the brilliant Swans guitarist Norman Westberg. Along the way, I started playing a few other instruments and writing some music and doing sound design for theater.

Q: Nice start. From there, what led to Brooklyn Sound Society being born?

A: It was a combination of a few roads that led me to starting BSS. After spending a few years working as an art installer, and also as a result of being in the right place at the right time, I was asked to work on different sound projects for museums, galleries, and theater.

Fortunately this led to working with some really incredible artists, including Richard Foreman, and Joan Jonas, among others, sometimes becoming part of their creative process, which became for me the most valuable part of the job.

One highlight was working on-and-off for eight years with the avant-garde theater director Richard Foreman.  It began by assisting him in his NYC theater on his sound design and making his ideas come to life with the occasional idea or mistake of mine getting thrown in.  Then I went on to work on the sound for his international tours and had the chance to work throughout Europe and Asia on making his vision translate to different-sized venues.

One week the show might have been in a four hundred seat black-box theater and the next week it might have moved to a 1000-seat, four-tier opera house; obviously this presented some serious challenges. The most valuable part of the job for me was helping him develop the sound design for each show over a three-month period. He is widely recognized as a ground-breaking artist and his ideas on sound are a big part of that reputation.

A few years later, I was asked to supervise the building of an audio post production studio in NYC called Splash Studios, and this is where I got involved in working on films.  After the construction was finished I jumped at the chance to work as an editor and mixer on the first big wave of reality shows that hit the airwaves and whatever film work was available.

Neil Benezra

It was a real trial by fire, within the first year I had the chance to mix about 60 shows that went on air.  This experience taught me all about the process as well as what is required to pass through the QC process at different networks including Discovery, HGTV, Nick etc.

Q: Nice timing. Dude. What about your approach makes Brooklyn Sound Society different or unique from other audio post providers?

A: Well this is the tricky part!  In a sense, I don’t want to compete — but I do want to try to stand out — in one area which is creativity.

My approach from the beginning has been to take the extra time needed to commit to each project in this way and to become a creative partner and part of the team as opposed to watching the clock. I’m committed to watching the outcome.

A lot of times when filmmakers come to me they have put everything they have into their work emotionally and financially, and I appreciate this and try to give them 110%. I’m interested in working on great films with interesting people and it seems that having this attitude is starting to pay off as I see the quality of work keeps going up.

I should say however that this is not the approach to take if you are in it for quick money. Most of the jobs that I find I’m up for these days are in direct competition with much bigger facilities and I think that I offer something that is increasingly hard to find at these places, which is a one-on-one relationship with each person that I’m working with.

Q: It’s a service industry, I agree. Tell us about your technical setup. What’s your key hardware/software, and why? And tell us your secret weapon! IF YOU DARE.

A: For the time being at least my studio is an extremely well-equipped small studio, although I should point out that it is acoustically designed and has a fully isolated voiceover/foley/ADR room, unlike most smaller spaces.

I work in Pro Tools because I find it to be the most straightforward program for editing, and is so far the industry standard in film sound, and it is important that my files can transfer to other facilities if needed.  My setup is a fully loaded Dual Mac G5 with a Digi 002 LE with the Complete Toolkit so that I have surround-mixing capabilities.

For monitoring, I use the JBL LSR series and find that they translate incredibly well to different playback situations.

I also use the Waves Gold Bundle and assorted noise reduction programs, which I think I have worked to the limit of their capabilities. I’m on the fence right now about buying a Cedar DNS system, which is what most Hollywood studios use, because the technology is changing so rapidly.

My assistant editors are working on a fully loaded Intel Imac with an Mbox and the DVToolkit, and when I travel I take an Intel Macbook Pro with the Mbox Micro.

My secret weapon would be twofold:

First, technically I have really taken the time to learn what can be done with noise reduction after a few years of editing and mixing about two hundred episodes of reality-based broadcast episodes which was an incredible training ground for working with bad sound!

My second secret weapon, and more important one, is that I think I’m pretty good at connecting on a creative level with people, and this is what it’s really about for me.  My goal is for people to come to me for this reason above anything else.

Q: You get a lot of art installation projects. How did you get started in this niche? What are the unique demands of art installations, from an audio post perspective?

A: Working as an art installer put me in the place of being the only guy on the crew who knew anything about sound, so I would hang the speakers, make the last-minute recording and mix or whatever else came my way.

After a while, I started getting calls to do all sorts of interesting projects from working directly with an artist creating their next sound piece to cleaning up important archival works of sound and video art.  Some of it has been installation-based, like the On Kawara show in 2009 where I designed a voice booth that was installed in the middle of a gallery for five weeks, during which I had an engineer record voice recordings five days a week for eight hours a day as part of the artist’s work.

The whole time the gallery was open for visitors to walk through and view the process. Ultimately the recordings will be made into a limited edition box set — a piece of art.

There are unique demands in working one-on-one with an artist, who might be very demanding, since each project is part of their life’s work and could be looked at for many years to come.  It is also common for a project to evolve in relation to the space it is being presented in — it might be site-specific, which means that the environment can change at any given moment, and you need to be open to this possibility.

This is something that most audio people are not at all used to and it can throw them off.  Audio perfection is not always the ultimate goal. Many times an artist’s aesthetic sensibility can overrule perfection and that’s more important than what is considered “good sound” to many.  Having played music in all kinds of experimental situations has made me more in tune to this idea than some might be. I like to think of noise as just another color in the palate.

Environmentally in art spaces there are always different acoustical challenges as a result of the space being designed for looking at things rather than listening to things, so as a result you may have a lot of reflective surfaces to deal with or overlapping sounds between different works in the same show.

On the studio side of it—when creating something new with an artist the demands are not that much different than in film but having a real understanding of the work and the history that lead up to it is important.  I fortunately think I went to art school in a kind of roundabout but possibly more exciting way by working on these projects, collaborating with artists and marrying into a family with three great visuals artists, so I like doing my homework. It didn’t hurt that I spent a few years studying architecture before finishing up with a music degree.

Q: Damn, you ARE perfect! Seriously, that’s why you’re on SonicScoop. Tell us about the challenging aspects of the Joan Jonas project — we’re especially interested in the 5.1 surround needs here.

A: We’ll I’ve worked with Joan on and off for many years, including work that was shown as part of the 2009 Venice Biennale and various museum and galleries worldwide, so I know what the demands are and what the outcome might be.

A few years back we worked on an installation that she had at the Yvon Lambert Gallery, which included a projected video of a live performance piece she had done in the past.  At the time we only had a stereo recording to work with so there wasn’t much we could do with the ambiance of the sound besides setting up a few speakers to listen back on.

Recently she approached me with the request to sound edit and mix another video taken from a series of ten performances at Dia:Beacon, Dia Art Foundation’s museum in Beacon, New York.  Fortunately the sound engineer Patrick Heilman had the foresight to place and record eight microphones throughout the space, some direct and some indirect.

The performance involved Joan Jonas herself, several actors and the incredible Blue Note recording artist composer and pianist Jason Moran. My initial reaction was to make only a stereo mix until I learned of the complexity of the sound and how many mics were recorded, then thinking back to the other gallery installation, I realized that this too could possibly end up someday in a gallery, so it would be fantastic to actually feel the presence of the original space when you listen back and watch it somewhere else. I proposed this to Joan and she liked the idea.

As far as 5.1 mixes go this one is pretty straightforward because we are working with sound that was in the space and trying to recreate the spatial qualities as opposed to flying SFX around the room as in a film.  The most challenging part was that due to performance constraints the mics were not always placed in a way to pick up the sound directly so there are times when I need to grab what one person is saying off of another person’s mic that might be across the room.  Another issue is that being a limited run in a museum space, again not the best location for sound recording. There is a lot of reverberant room sound, and in many places blown-out mics.

Q: OK, tell us a mix tip you’ve learned recently for sound-to-picture mixing.

A: This is a funny one because I learn it over and over again, just when I forget about it there it is. The best ideas are often happy accidents that happen when you’re really tired.

This happened to me on a sound design project last week where we thought we were completely finished and came back for one more quick listen. During the listen, we moved something around and accidentally hit on something that connected in a way with the visuals that the filmmaker had never imagined.  After we finished he turned to me and said that not only did it add to the films sound, but that it incredibly added a storytelling element to the film that he never thought of and looks as if it were written into the script.

That’s the kind of thing that I really love and for all of the musicians out there that hit upon that same kind of thing at 3:00 in the morning after recording all night, you know what I’m talking about.

Q: Let’s talk about your borough of choice for a second. Why is Brooklyn in particular a good place for an audio post company to be operating in and expanding?

A: It’s not, it’s terrible, stay out of Brooklyn, this is my town!  Only kidding, it’s a great place because it’s got a lot of really interesting people in it who want to change the world a little or maybe even a lot.

I’m always amazed at how many calls I get form people who live within a one-mile radius of me, but with the Internet there are no limitations, last year I collaborated on a feature film with a filmmaker in California without ever meeting him until he came to NY a year later for a film festival screening of the same film. We have since hit it off and are working toward a second project. In the past few years I’ve gotten calls from as far away as India, Ireland and Australia.

Neil Benezra and James Franco

Q: What’s next for this crazy audio post biz? What mindset does someone need to survive and thrive in audio post moving forward?

A: Hold on one second, I have to get out my crystal ball!  Seriously, I think the world of post is going to change pretty fast and the Internet is gong to open up a lot of opportunities in terms of streaming and getting everything big and small to your house or office on demand.  I have also recently seen the light as far as online social networking goes and think that this is really important to be a part of.  Here’s a perfect opportunity for a shameless plug, so here it is! Join my new Brooklyn Sound Society Facebook fan page to learn a few sound design tricks.

Q: OK, we WILL. Anything else?

A: Yes, this past year I was invited to create my own sound installation in Prenning Austria called Koln Kaddish which you can check out on my website. It was a big success and I have been invited back this year to work on two more.

Some other big news- I worked on two films which made it into Sundance this year and  both are heavy on sound design, James Franco’s Herbert White and Bobby Miller’s Tub. Brooklyn Sound Society also recently won a Telly Award for sound design for James Franco’s film The Feast of Stephen.

S: Congrats, Neil Benezra! Keep up the BUENO WORK. – David Weiss

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN: “I went to Disney World last year, and I thought Tomorrowland was so cool,” explains an enthusiastic Robert Schneider, lead singer/songwriter of The Apples in stereo. He’s showing me an illustration of a retro-futuristic society, one of those Atomic Age renderings of an urban skyway predicting a utopian dream-world of conceptual design — industrial and imaginative and high-tech.  “And, that was when it clicked for me, this is what I want my next record to sound like!”

Robert Schneider with Bryce Goggin (at the computer) in Brooklyn's Trout Recording. Photo Credit: Adam Cantor (www.adamcantor.net).

We met Schneider at Bryce Goggin’s Trout Recording in Brooklyn, during mixing sessions for the new album, and had the chance to hear some of this music of the retro-future. And it was indeed conceptual, industrial, imaginative and high-tech — music to soundtrack that 60s-era utopian dream of the future. Driven by heavy R&B and disco grooves, these tracks feature space-age synths, fuzzed-out guitars, layers of futuristic flourishes and classic instrumentation, all arranged in a sprawling pop soundscape. Front and center is Schneider’s shiniest, most exuberant vocal, backed by harmonies (man and robot) galore.

As with the last Apples album, New Magnetic Wonder, the upcoming record was produced in multiple studios, on multiple computer-based systems, and then synthesized and mixed with Goggin at Trout. The multi-track, even multi-platform (Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic) process illustrates just how far Schneider has come as a record producer from the lo-fi, 4-track production approach of the early Apples records, or of Neutral Milk Hotel’s On Avery Island and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Schneider’s unique perspective on music comes from his lifelong passion for pop songwriting and recording, his co-founding of the Elephant 6 Collective, producing beloved records by Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control, his recently released Robbert Bobbert and The Bubble Machine kids music album and his ongoing success with The Apples in stereo. It’s a perspective that will enlighten, encourage and inspire. Read on, friends…

So, you had this ‘Tomorrowland’ vision for the record. Were you writing in your studio, experimenting with sounds as you wrote? Was there an overall sonic objective from the start?
Most of my sonic ideas came out of listening to music I really love and I’ve been trying to only listen to stuff that I want to absorb as influences — ELO, Michael Jackson, Hall & Oates and The Bee Gees (70s Bee Gees). And, I’ve been obsessing heavily on Eye in the Sky by The Alan Parsons Project. It’s almost all I’ve been listening to the last year! It’s so futuristic and slick and it totally takes me back to my childhood when I hear it.
When I’m writing songs, though, I’m just trying to write a good song. And, I wrote most of these new songs on piano, so the futuristic thing came in on the production and in the lyrics. Writing on piano is really different for me, most of my songs have traditionally been guitar based.

What made you try writing more on piano? And how did that impact the songwriting?
I have a really raw style of guitar playing and I’ve been noticing lately that the quality of my guitar playing was improving due to lots of touring. And I don’t want my guitar playing to get slick! I’m afraid that if I start using vibrato with my left hand or picking too cleanly with my right, I’ll never be able to go back! So, I’ve been trying to not play as much because I don’t want to lose my thing. So, I moved to piano.
In the past when I’ve written on piano, it’s always been in a Beach Boys style — either these thick lush chords like Pet Sounds, post-Burt Bacharach kinda thing, or a sunny, poppy thing. But on these new songs, I was aiming for this R&B direction, rhythmically, on the piano and I came up with these Hall & Oates, ELO-inspired chugging piano riffs with like jazzy chords.
When I’m playing these songs on piano, they could be Motown songs, but then when we recorded them, incorporating the futuristic sounds in the production and backing tracks, they became these plastic-y, futuristic songs that sound nothing like Motown.

When you’re writing, do you get a bigger sense of where the song will end up, like as in the overall sound?
Yes, as soon as I’m writing, I’m hearing the arrangement in my head. I’ll be strumming it on the guitar and suddenly the whole thing is in my head — I may not hear the exact backing vocal part or guitar solo, but I’ll hear that there is one, dimly, in my mind. And then when I go to record it, it’s almost like I’m polishing it away to see what it really is.
On this record, I had this set of sounds in mind from records that I love; things that sound to me to be either futuristic or retro-futuristic R&B. Like some Kool and the Gang keyboard sounds, and this glass-tapping rhythm track from Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” and these Hall and Oates piano sounds.
So, the new music is quite different for The Apples in stereo. Songs off New Magnetic Wonder, like “Energy” and “Same Old Drag” are pointing towards the new album a little bit, but this is still like two steps beyond that.

The first time I heard “Energy,” I thought it was a classic song I just hadn’t heard before. It does have this sort of retro-future, or at least classic-modern, sound.
It’s funny because when I wrote the song, Marci (my wife) said it sounded like the Coca Cola song, “I’d like to teach the world to sing…” And I agreed and joked that maybe Coke would license it. But, then Pepsi licensed it! They did this whole ad campaign around “Energy.”

Speaking of which, The Apples in stereo has done well licensing music on commercials. What do you attribute that to?
I’ve always been obsessed with writing hit pop songs. Not smash hits that sell a lot of copies, but songs that stick around. Like, I love Hoagy Carmichael and Steven Foster. Songs like “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” stuff like that. These perfect pop songs that have stuck around for hundreds of years.
And I always loved the Bubblegum Movement of the 60s and 70s. Songs like “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” by The Ohio Express and “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers, and “Simon Says” by The 1910 Fruitgum Company. These are like nursery rhyme-based pop songs, but they’re incredible songs, produced by these guys Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz.
They had massive hits all over the place. It was “Bubblegum music” so it wasn’t taken seriously, but it’s actually kick-ass, rocking, awesome, psychedelic music. It’s just as good as anything from that era.
So, ever since I was young, I’ve been interested in writing hit songs, songs that your grandmother and little sister would like, as well as that would ring true for you as a hipster. Music that people could roller skate to. But making modern radio hits was never something I was interested in; I wanted to write songs that would have been hits in 1966-72.
So, now, it’s really cool that as an indie rock band, I can have hit songs on TV! I can make the records I want to make, and get big exposure through Pepsi, or some other big corporation, which is kind of amazing.

So, it’s someone at an ad agency that ends up appreciating your hit pop songs!?
Yeah, some people picked up on what I was doing, and eventually some of those people were working at ad agencies. It’s really cool that you can make a hit song that doesn’t have anything to do with pandering to the modern audience or radio. Just make the music you think is awesome. And then it can still seep into the world and everybody’s hearing it in their living room!

[Check out these South Korean schoolchildren singing "Energy" by The Apples in stereo!]

Before the Apples and Elephant 6, my friends and I would write songs and record and I thought we were songwriting and recording geniuses. And in the world, as it was in the late 80s and early 90s, there was absolutely not even one model, one way that we could expect we’d sell a record, or make any money playing.
The Elephant 6 Collective [formed by Schneider (Apples) with his high school friends Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart (Olivia Tremor Control), and Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel)] was us starting to try to figure out how we could get our music out into the world, make some money and, more importantly, make an impact; to try to take down the slickness that we hated about modern music at that time.
It was frustrating to think that there we were — as I saw us at the time — this group of geniuses, and me personally writing songs based on Hoagie Carmichel and the Beatles and stuff that I knew people would love. I used to wish I’d have been born in the 50s, then I could have been the right age in the 60s, and I could have had the chance.
But, when what you do rings true for the few people who do hear you, it rings REALLY true for those people. It’s not just another band, it’s like THIS is the fucking thing I love.

You were tuned into something that was unusual for people your age at that time, but sure enough, people heard it and connected with it.
Yes, and we had multiple bands on Elephant 6 so there were always a lot of records coming out, which helped to promote all of the bands. And for me, being the producer of a lot of the records, it was great, because I developed these two different paths: my path as the lead singer/songwriter of The Apples in stereo, and then my path as a producer. And these were definitely tied together, because I was equally as obsessed with making my friends music as my own.

So your work as an artist/songwriter and producer was always intertwined?
Yeah, I was recording Jeff Mangum and Bill Doss’ music, as well as my own, back in high school. On the production side, I was just as confident with other people’s music. I was always so confident in my vision, regardless of my skill.
I can remember, with Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Jeff Mangum was living with me at the time, and every day I’d come in and wake him up to go to the studio, and I’d be like “Wake up, Jeff, we’re making a classic record!” And I believed that. We were trying to make a classic record; I didn’t know that 10 years later people would actually hold it in that esteem. We assumed people wouldn’t even hear it.
So, we’d go to the studio and have a great day and it was all really encouraging and creative and wonderful, and then it turned out we did make a classic record.

Is there anything you took away from those Aeroplane sessions that you still use, either as an artist trying to give the best performance, or as a producer/engineer trying to capture the best performance?
I was very conscious of trying to capture some real energy in those sessions. I believed at the time, and I still believe, that recording music is like taking a photograph. When you take a picture of someone, you’re capturing the light that’s bouncing off of them onto film, but the person in the photograph is projecting all sorts of things besides the light that’s bouncing off of them. Similarly, it’s not just the sound that’s coming out of an artist, there’s all sorts of energy, electromagnetic stuff surrounding us that we’re putting out…motions and disruptions in the air and in the room, and varying levels of enthusiasm.
And the thing is that people are so tuned into other people that you can listen to one vocal track and then in a second one, they could barely sing it any differently, and it could convey a whole different emotion to you.
I was convinced at that age, that you could really capture all of that stuff on the tape machine, that the recording could convey all of that. Just like looking at a photograph from 100 years ago can make you feel happy, as if the person in the photo was smiling now. It’s that sympathetic feeling that we have for each other and music’s just like that. It’s possible to capture that. And it will resonate with people.
You hear it in old R&B records and early rock-and-roll records. You can close your eyes and really hear the people playing in the room, you can almost hear the shape of the room.

Well, you definitely captured that in Aeroplane, captured something that people can really connect to, over and over again.
Well, I was really trying on that record. And it wasn’t hard to capture that because it was just there — it was a lot of friends working together, and there was a really good feeling in the air. But it’s really nice to know that it is possible to capture that, the symbolic representation of that moment.
When a hit record makes you feel something, it’s because these are feelings that were captured onto the tape. It’s not just that it triggers some memory for you or sounds familiar, it’s that the people that made the record had these feelings and they come out the other side for you, the listener; your mind decodes all of the human, emotional information on the record, and you love it. And that’s what I want to try and bring out in records — not only the great music, but all the other information people connect with that comforts them. That’s my main goal in music, really, to try to do something that makes people feel better and even feel good.

Some of the keys setup in Trout's live room

Now you can produce music of unlimited tracks, where you were once committed to recording on 4-track and 8-track machines and only to tape. What changed that now you’re content to travel around, recording to a laptop DAW?

It was the early 90s when we started our bands and Elephant 6 and, at that time, we believed that a recording studio would suck the soul out of the music, and you’d leave discouraged because it would sound like you. It was this awful “studio sound” of that time that we heard on major label records from the 80s and 90s.

Even the lo-fi bands — stuff like Nirvana and Sebadoh — signed to major labels and started to make slick records by our standards. I thought digital was evil. So, I wasn’t recording with 4-tracks by convenience, it was like a religion. When I moved to 8-track that was like a big leap, and not all my friends were into it.
Recording studios are different now. Like I’m in one now and it’s the best studio I’ve ever worked in and the engineer is mind-blowingly talented. And the music industry that I was so “anti” at the time has now failed and everything I hated is gone. Modern recording studios are filled with vintage gear and people worship it the way they should.
So, I’m pretty pleased with the overall musical environment we’re in as far as production goes in the modern world. So, now I don’t care about whether you use a 4-track or 100 tracks on Pro Tools. For Apples, I’d rather have the 100 tracks.

Stay tuned for more info on The Apples in stereo’s new record, which will be out April  ‘10. In the meantime, check out the lead single off a new record by Schneider’s new band Thee American Revolution, a ‘home recording project’ band he started with his brother-in-law, Craig Morris. Click to stream the song “Powerhouse”: http://www.fanaticpromotion.com/projects/theeamericanrevolution/mp3/theeamericanrevolution-powerhouse.mp3