Summing Up: Quad Launches Studio Q1

MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: Blink, and you might miss it. The action in the NYC studio scene right now is raging fast and furious, with noteworthy new rooms opening up at a pace almost too fast to keep track of.

The latest big-time addition to the cityscape: Q1 at Quad Recording Studios. The flagship revision to this storied facility, Q1 represents the latest evolution in NYC’s world-class studio offerings for artists, producers, mixers, and songwriters in search of new creative options and inspiring surroundings.

With its arrival, the fascinating timeline of 723 7th Avenue gets yet another update. The seeds of this new room were sown in Quad’s 2010 sale of its 8th floor — emerging lean and mean, Quad President Ricky Hosn and his staff embarked on a $500,000 overhaul of its remaining territory, the 3500 sq. ft. 10th floor.

Ask Hosn about the current NYC studio climate, and he’ll readily admit that navigating the scene is more challenging than ever. “It’s kept us on our toes,” he says, “and restructuring the place was essential for us. Quad was five floors at one point, but the market won’t sustain that anymore. We had to reinvent ourselves, to move in step with a changing of the times — we feel we have the right formula now.”

Making the Update
The results of the remake are as easy to see as they are to hear. Visitors step off of the elevator directly into the atmospheric Qlounge, complete with a pool table, bar and a carnivorous fish tank (show up for feeding time – if you dare). Those familiar with the powerful audio pod previously known as Studio D – now Q2 – will be happy to know that that room remains intact, although it is equipped with a new lounge that flanks it to the left.

Also with a brand new lounge is the latest addition Q1, a space designed to make all kinds of waves. At 320 sq. ft., the comfortable Larry Swist-designed control room may seem slightly compact, but once the advanced functionality and exhilaratingly loud and accurate acoustics have been experienced, size no longer matters.

To the contrary, Q1 is already making a big impact with its extreme flexibility, both in workflow and capabilities. “In the past a studio would have a mix room, a production room, a tracking room,” Hosn explains. “We said, ‘Let’s put all three together, and make a room where any producer, engineer or artist can walk in and feel at home.

“That’s the approach we took. There’s a producer’s desk in the back where you can sit, listen accurately, and work. The producer or artist is never sitting too far from the controls and the engineer. It’s geared around the artist and production, and that’s the trend we see: A lot of producers are handling the whole project, and we built it around that reality. It’s the same principle we had with creating Studio D five years ago, but we made this a bigger format, with better gear and a much bigger live room, so you really can handle any kind of music project.”

Outfitted with oiled walnut wood appointments, Swist’s pleasing design employs generous views to the outside and the adjacent control room, providing Q1’s users with an expansive experience while they work. “Windows were essential: You’re in Times Square so take advantage of it,” Hosn says. “Both the live room and control room have windows out to Times Square, and the window between the live and control room is bigger than most windows in the city. You feel like you’re right next to the artist — it just feels like one big room between the control and live room.”

Once clients get settled into the welcoming environment, things get increasingly interesting. While the ICON control surface won’t raise any eyebrows, the Pro Tools HD 4 Accel 9.0 system is to be expected, and the comprehensive list of plugins is de rigueur, where the signal can flow from there is unique: three different summing mixers – a Chandler 16 x 2, SSL X Logic 16 Channel, and a Manley 16 x 2 Custom mic/line – flanked by a who’s who of outboard gear.

“We had the opportunity to go with a typical analog desk, but we said, ‘Let’s do something different and get creative with the equipment,’” Hosn says. “We focused on summing, with three summing mixers to give the engineer more of a choice for the sound. This is the best of the summing world: Chandler comes from the old EMI consoles, SSL is the industry standard, and we have something different in the Manley mixer, which is amazing on vocals. As far as outboard gear, we went for — not vintage, but brand new — Chandler, GML, SSL, Manley EQ/compressor, and of course the Universal Audio units like the 1176 and LA-2A.”

For monitoring, a pair of Augspurger Dual 15” main monitors, custom built by Professional Audio Design, supplemented with 2 subwoofers, throws down the gauntlet for mega volume listening in NYC. In a recent visit listening to hip hop, pop and rock through these speakers in the tight, well-tuned room was a sonically exciting experience, revealing extremely high levels of full-frequency detail cleanly across the stereo field. For those who need to craft, check or just feel their mixes at massive SPL’s, Q1 may well become a mandatory stop on the way to the mastering lab.

Design Assignment
According to Swist, whose credits include Tainted Blue, Premier’s Studio E, Eastman School of Music, SUNY Fredonia, and The Lodge, the directive for Q1 was to create a warm but contemporary look and feel. “We used a lot of sharp lines, and the sound has got to be there — the acoustics need to be spot-on because people are going to mix in there,” Swist notes. “The challenge today in an NYC facility is that you don’t have the cubic footage you used to, so you have to spend more time in the design phase ensuring that the room will translate in the outside world, especially with bass response. It also has to have a broad sweet spot. It’s easy to make it work right in the middle, but to make the room work for the producer standing next to you or in the back is a challenge.

“Most live rooms have an idiosyncratic quality to them: The great engineers find its good characteristics, the right places for the drums and mics, and use gobos,” Swist continues. “My approach is to keep it a relatively active room, and then you can come down from there. So Q1’s tracking room sits in a relatively live place: It’s good for drums, but reverb times can be cut down with gobos and more acoustical absorption. I think the live room is larger than most. It’s not huge, but then again most people are just putting in booths in a production suite today. This offers the ability to actually track a band. A lot of those rooms are going away, and this fills that void.

“Overall, the studio is something fresh, and you do have a really good initial emotional reaction to it. It’s positive creatively, and that’s what we were striving for. It’s like, ‘Wow, it feels nice and it sounds nice. We have a good combination there.’”

Under the Hood
Cleanly integrating Q1’s three analog summing mixers and outboard gear with the ICON was no plug ‘n’ play operation. “We wanted to do something focused on an easier workflow, quick mix recalls for engineers and easy accessibility for producers,” states Alessio Casalini Operations Manager and Chief Tech for Quad Studios NYC/Halo Records. “This improves the possibility to change little things fast and maintain top quality in terms of outboard gear and technical components like patchbays, wires, and connectors.

“The wiring of the whole studio and the patchbay’s layout were designed by Glenn Baughmann and myself,” continues Casalini. “We brainstormed in order to find the best result to yield a simple layout, one noted example being: The three summing mixers normalled to the multitrack outs, and the outs of those mixers normalled to the Stereo inputs of the (ICON) XMon (monitoring controller), and dedicated computer output to the XMon. Even the TV is on the bays.

“We started with the best quality wires and connectors, and used only two DB25 patchbays for connections with XMon and audio interfaces. All the other patchbays are soldered by hand and split to DL connectors panels.”

Connectivity in Q1 is obsessive: Every wallplate in the live room, control room and in the lounge are equipped with SpeakON plugs, Ethernet, instrument, MIDI, and BNC. “The goal being,” says Casalini, “to give the engineer every possibility, without trying to find a way around what he has in mind. In this scenario the artist, producer, and/or engineer will have everything accessible in the clearest way possible.

“New York City studios are looking to the future, and retaining our experience from the past. We expect that our careful planning yielded a room ninety percent ready for anything — with the client left only to decide the direction of the last ten percent.”

In Action
Online since June, Quad has quickly been breaking in Q1. Sessions include Engineer/Producer Andros Rodriguez (Shakira, Oh Land), Music Producer Rico Beats (Justin Bieber, Niki Manaj), and Universal Music Artist Stephen Marley. One frequent visitor has been the NYC engineer Stuart White (Alicia Keys, K’Naan), who’s gotten to know the room via mix sessions for the artists Borni, Fumibella, and Sunny.

“The mains are really smooth,” he says. “They sound good and balanced. The ProAc monitors I use a lot and they’re dialed in, very smooth on the top end. Having three different summing boxes gives you three different colors. The Chandler is really punchy, with a lot of transformers in it: It’s got color to it, with some punch when you drive it hard. I typically use that summing bus. The Manley is all tubes, which provides a fat tubey sound, and the SSL is a different color.”

According to Stu, Q1 met Quad’s objectives in smoothing out the NYC studio continuum. “I think in a lot of ways Q1 is bridging the gap between the old-style, large-format console style way of working and the new summing bus-style way,” Stu adds. “There’s not a large format console, but still a plethora of analog gear so you can mix with the speed of what we need today. You have clients that expect you to mix in the box for speed, but at the same time Q1 makes you and the analog purists happy by being able to sum in analog gear.

“I think it’s a new breed of room in that sense. A few years ago, most engineers didn’t want to mix on an ICON, they wanted a large format board. But Tony Maserati is working exactly this way, and he’s the one who kind of inspired me to do it: You’re mixing with faders, and tactile controls, so you can stay creative and not use the mouse so much. But if someone wants to come in and change the song, it’s very easy to pull your mixes back up. It bridges the gap between the older generation rooms and the newer ones that are all digital.”

Cue the Q
As New York production possibilities continue to morph, at least one thing is clear: As previously noted on this site, a subtle sense of cooperation is weaving itself into the intensive competition between NYC studios. Facilities are avoiding blatant duplication in favor of an overall sense of regional integration, where each new room creates a fresh niche, rather than further crowding an existing one. “You don’t want to build what’s already there, and then compete against the same thing,” Hosn says. “The key for us was to make it a top notch room at an affordable price.”

As Ricky Hosn points out, the big winner in the friendly NYC studio arms race are music’s avid listeners, whose insatiable appetite for new sounds are increasing yet again with the availability of Spotify in the U.S. “Who knows what the next big record will sound like?” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity to come up with something that hasn’t been heard yet.”

– David Weiss

Rob Shore: Maximizing Music Business Management

MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: How do YOU manage? If you’re a band or solo artist working above a certain level, then you do it with a business manager like Rob Shore.

Straight from Madison Avenue, Rob Shore and his team oversees monetary matters for a diverse roster of 35 artists, including As I Lay Dying, Flyleaf, K’naan/, LCD Soundsystem,  New Found Glory, Portishead, Slipknot, The XX, and Wolfmother.

Shore opened his own practice after spending 16 years – 1988-2004 – handing the business management for all the acts on Sanctuary Management.  During that time, Shore saw the Power of Metal firsthand with juggernauts like Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Poison, and Dream Theater to look over.

SonicScoop got a reminder of why they call it the music biz – as in business – when we sat down with Shore.

Q: You’re quick to stress that you’re a business manager, as opposed to a creative manager. What do you mean by that?

A: Although Business Managers and Creative Managers work closely together, they’re two totally different jobs.  Creative Management is 24/7, there’s a lot of guiding the artist and Creative Managers weigh in on every decision in the artist’s career.  Most of these are grey areas, with no absolute right or wrong choice, like deciding which producer to use for a record, or which singles, what video director, or what record label to sign with.  These are primarily a Creative Manager’s job, and none are particularly easy choices.

That’s the thing I like about business management: There’s not a lot of grey area, it’s mostly black and white.  We work within the deals that have already been made, so, for example, when money is due from a merch company or publisher, the Business Manager makes sure that the funds collected and spent are contractually correct and in the best interest of the artist.  The Business Manager oversees the finances of touring, merchandising, publishing royalties and keeps artists’ financial interests in their mind at all times.

Q: What are some additional differences between business and creative managers?

A: My analogy is that a creative manager is like a heart surgeon, and a business manager is like a dentist. It’s not as exciting to be a dentist — but no one calls a dentist at 4 AM to have their teeth cleaned. A heart surgeon gets called 24/7.

Unlike the Creative Manager, the role of business manager in most industries isn’t necessary, because the owners are usually the ones who look after their money.  In our case, it’s often not in the interests of an artist to oversee what we do because it’s not an efficient use of their time – and can be almost impossible while on tour.

For example: Is it more important that an artist find the proper insurance, or focus on songwriting, which will probably lead to more success than making sure his insurance is in place?  Both are important, but many artists find the best use of their time is to hire someone else to deal with things like insurance, so they’re free to create.   This defines what we do, why we’re necessary.

Nothing we do is brain surgery, but there are tricks of the trade: every country has different touring laws for different bands, and unless you know how to minimize taxes, you’ll pay full rate everywhere you go, and it makes it almost impossible to tour on a tight budget.

Q: So, in contrast, what are some of the things that a business manager handles?

A: That includes artist royalties, merchandising, reviewing deals, and making sure the tour runs smoothly so the artist is not missing out on any revenue that’s coming to them.

We make sure that taxes are paid properly, from the IRS to foreign states. We basically protect the artist from any kind of financial situation. It’s incredibly humbling that we’re trusted with tens of millions of dollars belonging to these artists. But we’re certainly not a bank. My practice is a word-of-mouth boutique, more user-friendly and service-oriented.

Q: If I’m an artist reading this, my question would be, “At what point do I require a business manager?”

A: What usually happens is that we are brought in when a record deal is signed. The creative manager may have brought them to the record company level, but a business manager isn’t needed until there’s money to manage. So in the band’s early days, where they’re playing for $200 a night, my services probably aren’t necessary.

I’m usually brought in after manager and lawyer are in place when either a record deal or tour is about to happen. The lawyer has worked on the deals, the deals go through and entities, like a LLC or partnership are set up, depending on the individual’s need. After that, we usually get involved. The point of doing this in this way is to get bands in the right position.

It’s not a bad place to get involved. It could be two to three years into the process, when the artist is ready to go to the next level. But there’s definitely times when it would have been better for us to get called in sooner. For example, if a band has been signed, and if they’ve done a tour already, things may have gotten messy. Tours happen, funds are distributed, years go by and tax records get confusing. It’s difficult to recreate what happened in a business after the fact. That’s why I’d rather be involved from the first tour on.

Q: Can you give us some specific examples of mistakes like that made by young bands?

A: Here’s what not to do: Sometimes you go into a club and get paid $200, and they ask for the lead singer’s Social Security number, so they can say they paid someone. After two years there’s a ton of 1099’s with this guy’s Social Security number, and the perception in the eyes of the IRS is that he’s earned tens of thousands of dollars.

The reality is that 99% of those tours are losing money such that no taxes would be due. It’s important to keep track of expenses so they’re not stuck with a large tax bill. In that way, it’s never too early to set up a partnership or an LLC because it’s much easier from a tax standpoint for those things to flow through an entity. Keeping track of receipts and being organized is a good thing to do from Day One.

Another mistake made by young bands is trying to negotiate deals without the input of a lawyer or business management.  These people are just licking their chops when they’re dealing with a band that’s not represented well.  As exciting as it is to have a record deal it could be an albatross for many years if executed improperly.

Q: That’s very valuable. How about another piece of advice?

A: My personal pet peeve is that people don’t protect themselves with insurance. Once a crew person had an insurance policy finish on a Friday and a new one start on a Monday. He was doing carpentry work on a Saturday, got a small sliver of wood in his eye, and that ended up costing him tens of thousands of dollars for that lapse of coverage. We just make sure that all of our bands are covered for health insurance, because I’ve seen too many people – both in my personal and professional life – who were in the hospital not thinking about their health but thinking about their health bills.

In a similar vein, the majority of young band’s biggest asset is there equipment.  For a minimum of cost they can purchase equipment insurance, ensuring their gear is safe from water damage, theft, you name it.

Q: Since you’re minding the money coming in, what are you seeing as the increasingly dependable streams of revenue for artists?

A: The obvious one, and the reason I lucked out having so many metal acts to manage is that in the metal genre touring and merchandise can still be very lucrative.  My son’s in high school; his friends wear Slipknot t-shirts, however, that‘s not necessarily the case for a pop artist like Ke$ha.

Unfortunately, artist royalties from record sales is a 180-degree turn. In my earlier days, people would tour to sell records, and now it’s become more and more prominent that people make records to tour. The reason to tour is because that’s where profit is made, and that lends itself to merchandising. Endorsements and synch licensing are big, as well. It’s hard for an artist to make money on record sales when anyone can download their music for free.

Q: That sounds like an incredible amount of detail that you have to keep track of.

A: I have an incredible staff I work with, and we associate ourselves with great people: great insurance people, great lawyers, great tour managers; it’s a lot to keep track of, but when you work with great people it’s not as difficult.

Part of my job at Sanctuary was the survival of bands, and allowing them to live long enough to break. If RSA has a forte, it’s taking bands, and extending their life longer than other people might be able to.

I think part of this is managing tour support, for example. As record companies make less and less money, it’s tougher to get tour support out of them. So we work hard to maintain budgets, get what’s really agreed upon, and receive what’s needed to extend the band’s life.

That’s true not just for emerging bands, but ones that are perceived as successful as well. A platinum artist may want to have a baby next year, so they’d ask us what they need to live next year without touring. We might say, “The money runs out next November, so that’s when you’d have to go out and tour again.”

Q: You mentioned the intricacies of working financially outside the US, as well.

A: Most countries used to not have a clue as to how to tax bands coming in and out, but now everyone seems to be on top of it. In the US, it used to be a relatively easy process to get taxes waived, and now it’s nearly impossible. We’ve become experts on the intricacies of what the IRS really expects now, and that knowledge can make a huge difference for an artist at tax time.  We have a good working relationship with people at the IRS and close ties to professionals who handle taxes with bands overseas.  In many cases, the ability to minimize taxes in the US allows foreign bands to go on tour here.

Every country has their own game that needs to be played, and we know how to play the game while working within the legal limits and paying what’s owed – without paying more than necessary.

Q: We ask this a lot, but I’m particularly interested in your perspective: How do you see the music business in 2010?

A: I’m not sure if this is an answer to your question, but it is that bands can still be successful and earn a living in the music business.   If my experience can inspire anybody, it’s that I’ve seen bands go from a $500 gig to a $100,000 gig in a year. I’ve seen really poor bands seriously considering taking a $50,000 publishing advance, holding out a little longer, and then landing an $800,000 publishing deal less than 8 months later.

I admire people who have the guts to stick it out. People who took a big chance on music careers, and then got to the point where a record company is willing to put hundreds of thousands of dollars into them to make them successful , then playing in front of thousands of people. I’ve seen it happen that way: People didn’t give up, and they found success. That’s an amazing process.
– David Weiss