Audio Underground Workshop To Launch in NYC, 2/25

A new traveling high-end audio showcase will kick off in NYC this month!

The Audio Underground Roadshow will take over the SAE facilities in Herald Square on Saturday, February 25 to show off a range of boutique audio equipment including A-Designs, ATC, Bock, Chameleon Labs, Cranesong, Daking, Drawmer, GML, Sonodyne and Tube-Tech.

Mark your calendars, and stay tuned for more details!

Monitor Motivation: Guzauski-Swist Audio Systems

MOUNT KISCO, NY: In lands near and not so very far away something sonic has been brewing. Boutique audio gear manufacturers – from cables to compressors — are proliferating at a nice pace in the New York Metro area, and monitors are no exception.

For multiple GRAMMY-winning mixer Mick Guzauski (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera) and studio designer Larry Swist (Tainted Blue Studios, Quad Recording Studios, Eargasm Studios, Cloud 9 Mixing Stages), a near-lifelong musical partnership has led to an ambitious system for critical listening.

This particular brainchild is Guzauski-Swist Audio Systems, producing stereo, 2.1 and 5.1 Surround monitoring systems created expressly to satisfy their own exacting standards. Based upstate in bucolic Mount Kisco, their main offering is the GS-3a active 3-way speaker, which sports an intriguingly flexible design with high performance for both tracking and mixing.

At $12,000/pair (with G-S amp) it’s a more serious investment, but with installs in NYC, Nashville and Rochester, their expectations of an appreciative audience in the market have been validated. Larry Swist explained how the pair’s passion for audio and massive mutual respect made the G-S project – and the daunting challenges of boutique manufacturing — a calling he couldn’t refuse.

What first got you thinking about creating the G-S speakers?
It started with a phone call from Mick. He and I have known each other since we were in our late teens, and back then we were building PA systems and speakers. Mick was doing recording in his basement, and I thought, “This guy’s a savant, I gotta learn what he does and put my bass down.” I fell in love with sound for the first time.

We’ve been working together since then, but we also got our own careers going. I got involved with Spyro Gyra and jazz. He mixed every chick ballad in the world and sold a gazillion copies. But he called me a while back and said, “Are you still into speaker design? I’ve been using the Tannoys, I can’t get them reconed, and they’re running out of gas on me. Are you into it?”

And the answer was, “Yes!” I take it?
It started as a science project. We looked at design philosophies, thinking back over the years, and what were the best speakers we ever heard — boxes, three-way systems – and we came out with a goal of what kind of performance we wanted.

We spent about 18 months trying drivers, amplification processes, DSP, and then we came up with something Mick was willing to put into his control room and put his mixes on. We kind of fell in love with it. It was our child, but the big thing was it sounded great, and everyone’s reaction to it was incredibly enthusiastic.

So we said, “Maybe we can produce these. We’re two audio geeks that have been mixing records and designing studios. We can really do this.” So we’re in that stage of being a company, producing our flagship model the GS-3, and we’ve now got Chris Bubacz involved as a third partner. He’s been in the industry a bunch of years also and brings the organizational structure and business mind to the company.

I’m excited about this company, and I get that way again every time I listen to these speakers. That’s why I got into audio. It had gotten to the point where everything I was hearing was not dynamic enough, or ran out of gas too fast.

Another aspect of that is that Mick mixes in them. They had to have accuracy so they translated, but they also have a robustness so you can also track on them. In a smaller studio, this is the only speaker you’d need – they’re a Swiss Army knife, because they enhance the sound, but you still get all the accuracy out of a speaker that you need to mix on.

As you’ve built up the company, what are you finding out not just about speaker design, but about being a manufacturer?
We learned not to be satisfied. You have to be very uncompromising. You want to be able to say, “OK, let’s just do this the best we can and go on to the next stage.” But you can’t do that. It can be tempting to say, “Let’s use that component, or this one, because it’ll be cheaper,” but Mick’s hearing is a big factor in preventing those decisions. He’s a savant when it comes to that, and I trust him when he says we have to take a certain path to maintain the sound quality.

Of course, Money is always a big issue. Mick and I do other things that bring income in, and then the monitors are what we invest in: buying parts and doing R&D. The frustration comes when you try and market something. Getting something out there when you have the Genelecs of the world to compete with – it’s hard to have the budgets to do that.

We’ve had shootouts with very small groups of people up to this point. It’s gratifying when we do have these demonstrations and they win, but then people need to have the money to buy them. That said, they are a reasonably-priced speaker system compared to Genelecs or ATCs, for example.

How would you characterize the current monitor market that you’re competing in?
There’s the home/project studio that’s always going to have real budget constraints. People get great amps, great mics, great gear, and then listen through something substandard, so they can’t really benefit from all that other equipment.  That’s unfortunate, in my opinion, because after the room, the monitors are the most important thing you’re hearing. Keeping this in mind, we believe people will stretch their budgets slightly once they hear our speakers.

I do think there is a market of commercial and high-end personal studio facilities that do a lot of tracking and writing, and are a little more endowed, and these hit that market perfectly. We’re also going after THX certification for the post world. We have all the dynamic and level requirements for good mixing of film and video, especially 5.1.

It seems to me that getting people to switch their main monitors is a pretty big proposition. How do you get people to consider such a drastic change in their setup?
I think you’re absolutely right. Any pro or serious amateur will get to know their monitors after a time, and they adjust their mixing habits accordingly. For example, they’ll know their monitors are down in the low range and so they’ll compensate for that.

When one top engineer heard these monitors in Nashville, he said to us, “I’ve been using ‘X’ monitors and I really understand them, but it would be nice to have monitors like this so that when I go into mastering, I wouldn’t have to hear all the things that I missed!” So for someone who listens on a constant basis, they’d be willing to say, “OK, here’s something that could make my work easier or better.”

I do think that takes a little bit of courage to say, “I’m going to leap from my current monitors to these new ones, especially after having had success with the first ones.” But I think the Guzauski-Swist speakers are enough of a jump above what people are using that they would be willing to make that change.

As you pointed out, you and Mick have been a team for a long time. How would you characterize the chemistry that the two of you have developed?
Mick and I bring slightly different abilities to the table. Mick’s ears are his greatest asset, and he’s respected across the board by his colleagues. But I bring stuff that Mick can’t do: I bring the mechanical end together. I construct prototypes and build very solid working enclosures that are acoustically a jump from something that Mick might not have thought of.

So the respect is back and forth. I’ll refer to what he’s hearing, but he may be looking too closely at something. So the combination is really about mutual respect, his ears and my mechanical abilities.

Does being an NYC area-based manufacturer help and/or hurt your efforts in any significant way?
NYC has a broad range of our potential users. The way we’re marketing these now is to have listening demos in studios, or with anybody who wants to check them out. Just get on our Website and email us, and we’ll arrange a demo.

That’s a big factor in helping these to sell, initially — the sheer amount of people and population here. We’re doing it in L.A., too, but we live here. This is our town. We feel we’re part of the community.

I talk to people all the time who want to take the plunge, and produce the “better mousetrap” that they’ve built – whether it’s cables, limiters, compressors, etc… What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into boutique manufacturing for audio?
The first thing I would do is make sure you have something better than anything else out there. Do something that sounds better, so the music benefits from your efforts. Then it’s worth the agony of what you’re trying to get out there – because you really believe in it.

– David Weiss

On The Record: Laurie Anderson, Mario J. McNulty On The Making Of “Homeland”

SOHO, MANHATTAN: Iconic NYC artist and sonic adventurer Laurie Anderson released her amazing new album, Homeland, earlier this week. Years in the making, Homeland emerged after a challenging and at-times vexing process in the studio, and very nearly never emerged at all.

“It’s this very, very weird hybrid,” says Anderson, struggling to pinpoint what ultimately makes up Homeland. “I’ve never worked on something this odd before: it was sort of a bunch of filters, a bunch of live [recordings] and a bunch of studio ideas. I’m not even sure what to call it because it’s such a bizarre collection of things.”

It started with sonic scaffolding. Anderson is credited as an engineer on Homeland, and would have to be for the way the songs are composed: they are, in effect, engineered.

“I start with many different rhythmic riffs — even though Homeland doesn’t sound particularly rhythm-driven, it really is,” she describes, when asked of her sonic palette. “By that I mean most of the songs are built on these scaffolds that get removed, and they are mostly violin filters that I’ve been building myself with a software designer named Konrad Kaczmarek. They were based originally on Eventide filters but we went further afield in building our own.”

These became the building blocks for Homeland — movements both ominous and euphoric built up underneath and around an epic narrative. And Anderson toured the work, developing it on the road, recording performances of her constantly evolving Homeland live show all over the world for three years. “That’s various versions of the show, in various tempos, in various keys,” she points out.

Along the way, she recorded with a variety of collaborators, including Tuvan throat singers and igil players of Chirgilchin, and captured improvisational sessions with NYC experimental jazz and rock musicians including Rob Burger (keyboards), Omar Hakim (drums), Kieran Hebden of Four Tet (keyboards), John Zorn (saxophone) and Antony Hegarty (vocals).

“I wanted to make a record that would really relate to the live shows,” Anderson shares. “My live rig incorporates so many tools now — soft synths, homemade pedals, vocal processing, different vocoders, the homemade software we call ‘Tide’ in homage to Eventide” — to where I can do almost anything in the live show. It’s really, really exciting and I wanted to get that feeling into the record.

“So it’s like I ‘wrote the record on the road,’ and then came back to the studio and tried to ‘record’ it, but all of those terms were sort of meaningless by that point. I thought, OK now I’ll take some of these live files and paste them together into these songs in the studio and get that live feel. And, that was beyond hard! We took some of those rhythmic elements, printed them and then tried to make a studio version and the air went out of the whole thing.

“And, I thought, No!! I really didn’t want to do something that pristinely goes from my box to your box. I [found myself] sitting there working with all these clean files thinking now what? I’m going to put fake air around them? No! That kind of air to me feels like air-conditioned air — stale air from a hotel in Tokyo that’s never been aired out. I wanted to use air that had been pumped through real places; waves that had been somewhere.

“At that point, the record budget was pretty much over and it was just me sitting with like 100,000 sound files. Here I’d been thinking I’m going to make this spontaneous live thing, and now I was digging through and labeling all these files. I truly would never recommend this to anyone. (laughs) Do not try this at home!”

HOMELAND EXCAVATION: DIGGING, COMPILING, MORE RECORDING

It’s somewhat unsurprising, for an artist who’s always so embraced technology, that the infinite possibilities of today’s methods of music production might tip the scales into the overwhelming. “I got super-depressed looking at all those files and I actually stopped working on it many times,” Anderson admits. “At that point, I was only working on it as a hobby, a couple days a month. I thought I would never finish it. And it was because of Lou [Reed] that I finished it and because of Mario [McNulty] too. Mario really hung in there, and he said it is possible to do this. He was really willing to dig into those bins, and he was really patient.”

A NYC-based engineer/producer, Mario J. McNulty had worked with Anderson before. He mixed sound for a short film she directed in ‘05. “The first time I ever spoke to Laurie, we had a really nice chat about mixing,” McNulty recalls.

“And it was so great because it was abstract and artistic — the ultimate way I like to approach things, in a totally non-conformist sense. It wasn’t ‘this is a rock mix’ where the kick drum does this, etc. It’s not of the mainstream world at all, it’s of this world that I really admire, of Laurie and Eno and Gabriel and Bowie and Talk Talk and all of these records that I’m really passionate about.”

“That’s maybe the only talk we’ve ever had about mixing, and we’ve worked on and off ever since,” he continues. “So, on Homeland, we never had to talk specifically about what the album should sound like, because I already have a good sense of what she wants: she wants beauty. And, her vocal needs to be in the right place and really only she knows where that is. I mixed the record, but she’s very, very involved in the process.”

McNulty went into Anderson’s studio in SoHo and began the process of compiling Homeland, with the expectation of beginning to mix it. “There had been a lot of different people working on it, so the material was all over the place, literally,” he describes. “On different hard drives, in different studios. Neither of us realized how spread out the project was. I consolidated it all into one location, so something could be played back that made sense to her. And by that point, she was realizing she had more work to do. It just wasn’t moving her the right way.”

Anderson put mixing on hold to do some more recording, editing, and arranging at her studio, which has been her workspace since the 80s. “She has a lot of equipment, but the main recording system there is a Pro Tools HD2 rig,” McNulty describes. “And she has a series of laptops with soft synths, vintage and modern keyboards and racks of time-based effects like her Eventide Harmonizers, which she uses in the recording process as well as in mixing.”

“Pretty much any time we would need an effect, we’d go to the Harmonizer,” says McNulty. “She’s one of the pioneers of the Harmonizer so she’s very familiar with it and even the software emulations of the Harmonizer, so we would get into all kinds of sounds with them. She’ll record violin through this really awesome stereo delay patch that she made — and she also has patches that Brian Eno made for her stored in her Harmonizer.”

As she has throughout her career, Anderson used filters to essentially create new instruments, new voices. Homeland’s “Another Day in America” uses one of her classic vocal filters to voice her male alter-ego, “Fenway Bergamot,” the darkly comic storyteller, the omniscient narrator of the Homeland live show.

“Mario’s the reason I added Fenway Bergamot to the record — we just put up a mic and improvised for awhile to see what would happen,” Anderson recalls. “And that became ‘Another Day in America.’ I’m very glad I included that because my music is about words and their rhythm, so to have that very stripped-down [piece] in the middle is kind of what I was going for as well.”

THE MIX OVERLAY: UPGRADING THE SIGNAL PATH

By the end of the summer of ’09, Anderson had finally finished recording and decided she wanted to mix the record in her own studio. “I proposed that we rent some equipment, basically do an upgrade to the studio,” says McNulty. “So I called Jim Flynn Rentals and explained how I wanted to mix analog but that I wanted to avoid all the old analog gear that I wasn’t liking in her space, like her Mackie consoles which she mainly uses for monitoring.

“We did what Jim called a “mix overlay,” McNulty relays.  “We upgraded to an HD3 system and added a Dangerous 2-BUS for analog summing, and a series of compressors — Urei, LA2As, 1176s. We also had some gear from Lou Reed. He brought over his LA2A, which is the best LA2A I’ve ever heard, and some Avalon compressors and EQs. We were able to basically bypass her patch bay and patch all of our analog compressors and EQs by hand. So it was a totally custom setup.”

McNulty also rented an A-Designs Hammer. “I used one side of this stereo EQ on Laurie’s voice, and it’s just a fantastic sound,” he adds.

They also rented an arsenal of plug-ins. “Laurie had a good collection of plug-ins but I also needed some other tools that I find really useful when mixing, like the McDSP Emerald bundle, the Crane Song tape saturation plug-ins and the Sound Toys bundle — TimeBlender, PitchBlender, and Echoboy is my favorite. They’re really useful and really fast — sometimes you need to just pull things up quickly, especially in a mix scenario. I also used the Waves SSL plug-ins and EQs, which Laurie owns, and the Sonnox EQs. For effects, I’ll use ReVibe, Waves and the Eventide Harmonizer plug-ins as well.

“We also used her hardware Harmonizers on the mix — she has special reverbs, cave reverbs, all kinds of de-tuned stuff that won’t be found in any other H3000 because they are patches that were designed either by Laurie or by Brian Eno. So that was a real treat!”

HOME-STRETCH: LOU REED, HI-FI- MONITORING, KILLER BASS!

Though Homeland had involved many people’s contributions along the way, including Roma Baran who’s credited with Reed as a producer, by the end, it was Anderson, Lou Reed and McNulty finishing the project in the mixing stage.

“That was, in a way, the hardest stage,” says Anderson. “In the beginning of a project, it’s all experimentation and great and at the end, you realize ‘oh, but we do have to eventually make something and present it to someone.’ Lou said he was going to come in and sit here in the studio with me until I was done. And I thought, ‘oh, that’s a bad idea for a couple!” (laughs) but I would truly, literally be working on it today, without that.’

“Lou is a great producer,” Anderson continues. “I’d play something and he’d say that’s done, let’s move on. And I’d say ‘No, no! It needs horns, background vocals, etc…I can’t leave that vocal on there.’ Lou is a really fascinating blend of perfectionist and purist and somebody who’s just really loose. He’d say, ‘Leave that raggy stuff in! Why would you take that out?’ And ‘This doesn’t need 17 more parts. Air can be part of it. Air can be rhythmic.’

“Every writer I know is indebted to their editor if they have a good one and same with a musician to their producer. And Mario in a lot of ways worked as a kind of producer. He wasn’t just the engineer — he would definitely express himself in a way that was so well-timed, he understood the process so well that he was never intruding but he had this way of putting his opinion in.’

They monitored Homeland on a few systems. “Laurie has her ProAc speakers that she’s used to listening on in the control room and then I added NS10s, which Lou and I would listen on,” says McNulty. “We also wanted a really hi-fi monitoring setup we could listen on, so Lou brought these huge ATC monitors over from his studio. We set them up in the live room — on foam on the floor — and there was a couch and blankets, and people would sit in there and listen on these huge 3-way monitors, which have this incredible frequency response.

“That was great — to be in the control room with the nearfield monitors and then be able to clear our minds, take two minutes and go in the other room and crank it on the big guys — see where the bass is sitting, see where the vocal is sitting.”

What was Anderson listening for? “We conceived it with a very wide sonic range,” she describes. “And I wanted scary bass. I wanted the bass to jump out and kill you! I’m so sick of hearing MP3s coming through people’s laptop speakers and you hear this tinny thing…and you think, ‘That’s the song?’ Why did I spend more than two minutes on the song if it was going to sound like that? So, I wanted to make something where if you wanted to crank it up on a huge system, you’d hear tons of colorful details and all these little things.”

Nonesuch Records released Homeland on June 22. Buy it HERE! The album is available as audio-only and as a CD+MP3+DVD (which includes the 40-minute documentary “Homeland: The Story of the Lark.” Anderson will perform “Another Day in America: Songs from Homeland & other stories” at Le Poisson Rouge, July 13. Tickets here!

Mario J. McNulty is represented by Joe D’Ambrosio Management.

Mics, Speakers, Decapitators At AES…Starting Friday!

AES NYC kicks off this Friday, and we’ve received advance notice on some new technologies that will be on display at the Javits Center. Check it out:

Bock Audio’s new AM 50 omni-tube microphone, designed after classical orchestral recording mics of the ‘50s, will be at the TransAudio Group booth (#555). The AM 50 will excel at capturing natural ambience of acoustic ensembles and large orchestras, and is well-suited for use in a Decca Tree configuration.

TransAudio will also be showing the new three-way studio control monitors by UK manufacturer ATC. ATC’s SCM25A Pros have been designed for positioning on a meter bridge or rack-mountable for broadcast apps, and incorporate a tri-amplifier generating 150 W RMS for the woofer, 50 W RMS for the midrange and 25 W RMS for the tweeter.

Prodigy Engineering (Booth #642) will be showing off its new remote-controllable mic pre for the API 500 Series, called Bella. Bella can be remote controlled from DAWs, including Pro Tools and Apple Logic, as well as from Digidesign ICON control surfaces.

Sound Toys (Booth #640) has announced a couple new plug-ins — the PanMan and Decapitator — which will be available in this fourth quarter of ‘09. PanMan is a rhythmic auto-panner plug-in, featuring a range of panning modes emulating classic analog panners, such as the PanScan and Spanner, along with completely new modes of panning.

SoundToys’ Decapitator is a dedicated analog saturation modeling plug-in. Based on years of research and analysis of vintage and modern classics from Neve, API, Ampex, EMI and Thermionic Culture to create accurate models of properly aged (and even abused) gear, Decapitator creates the sought-after “analog sound,” from subtle harmonic changes to extreme driven distortion.

Both PanMan and Decapitator will be available for TDM/RTAS/AudioSuite, Audio Units and VST for Mac and PC.

SonicScoop will continue to fill you in on exciting new technologies coming to AES as we learn of them, and actually see them on the show floor later this week!