Mix and Zen with Bob Power: Musings of an NYC Music Master

FASHION DISTRICT, MANHATTAN: If you could burrow inside the mind of Bob Power, chances are it would sound mighty good in there. For this softly-spoken but hugely influential member of the New York City production scene, music is always the message.

Certainly, just the track record of this multi-multi-platinum GRAMMY-nominated, Emmy-winning producer/mixer/engineer composer/professor/Yoda would be enough to warrant an interview: dig on D’Angelo, Chaka Khan, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ozomatli (2002 Grammy “Best Alternative Latin Album”), De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Miles Davis, the Roots, Macy Gray, Curtis Mayfield, David Byrne, Spike Lee, The Brand New Heavies, Maceo Parker, Pat Metheny, KRS 1, Run DMC, PBS, Coca Cola, Mercedes, AT&T, and the hundreds more people and things that grace his client list.

But the impetus to reach out, and have a pow-wow in his cozy downtown mix suite is bigger than that. Even a shallow investigation into the NYC music and sound creation landscape will uncover a Disciple of Bob. What top audio pros can name him as a mentor, motivator or friend? It’s easier to count the ones who can’t.

The longer I talk to music pros around NYC – producers, engineers, mixers – the more I hear, “Bob Power taught me this. Bob Power was my mentor and he said that.” So many roads seem to lead to Bob Power. Why is this?
I very humbly respond that it’s often difficult for me to say, “I know best.” My way of doing things is only one way of doing things. What you’re hearing is  partly due to longevity. I’ve been doing this for long enough, and I try to be supportive of people coming up. Still, I’m amazed by the fact that you say that.

It’s odd to look up and realize that you’ve been doing this — recording and producing music — for 40 years. I started out playing, and I played for a living for 20 years with  guitar as my primary instrument. I scored TV for seven years on the West Coast, then came back to New York here where I got heavily into industrials and jingles – then from the late ‘80s and 90’s, almost exclusively records. I was trying to do both for a while — big records and scoring for big clients like AT&T and BMW, but it was killing me.

If there’s a thread that runs through all this stuff, it’s that I have seen audio production from all of these different angles. Many of them are musical — purely musical – and many of them are technical. Both are fascinating for me: I grew up as a musician, and I have two degrees in music. A dirty secret is that I’ve never taken an engineering course in my life.

Nonetheless I’ve learned a great deal about music engineering and music recording. One thing I’ve realized teaching music and recoding is that you have to think of it as music first. I often get asked, “Wow, I love your kick drum sound. How do you record it?” But music is a moving target, and people forget about that. So when people get into electronics and physics, they forget that every day is something different. A C9 is never the same twice.

I’ve come to a place with producing, recording and mixing music that is very music-oriented. At the same time,  I happen to love things where the sound itself is as interesting as the music is. But the music always has to come first.

What’s the opposite of that? If the music isn’t coming first, then what is?
Engineers on the way up sometimes put themselves and their engineering into the process too visibly, and it can get in the way of people’s creativity. I can only say that because I did that a lot, myself. Now, it’s more important to me to make the recording process as transparent as possible.

It’s all about understanding the part of the process you’re in at any given moment..When I’m writing, I have to force myself not to perfect my parts. I do a lot of programming and sequencing, and not perfecting is a very conscious decision. It reminds me of what I have to do with someone who’s in creative mode. I keep things moving forward.

Momentum – creative, musical, and productivity – are key. The only time you’ll see me getting steamed is when people are on the studio floor (during a session) and some piece of gear isn’t working, because the creative energy of those players is the most important thing at that time. It’s the same as asking someone to play something too many times – the spark, the vitality goes out of it.

We don’t listen to records to hear the right things in the right place. That’s nice, but with the mechanics of records – taking soundwaves into the transducer of a mic, storing it onto an analog or digital medium, and then doing the reverse trip to listen back – being able to hear any emotion in that is a modern miracle. That’s the thing that’s kept so many of us recording geeks so amazingly fascinated for so long.

Turning off that “perfect” button is definitely something I have a hard time doing. How do you manage to do it?
I have learned that perfect is not always good. As musicians, when we come up and try to get our chops together, we lose sight of the inner push that makes the music come alive. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some real genre-bending, genre-creating artists, and realizing that they were right about a lot of things they pushed me toward. They didn’t want it perfect — perfect was too 1987!

All the musical experience one has contributes to who you are as a music practitioner, whether it’s as a recordist or a player. As a kid, I beat the guitar with some guts. It may not have been in tune, but my primary impetus at the time was feel. You do something for enough years, all that stuff coalesces.

Another thing is that my taste in what I like to listen to has veered from perfect. Perfect is nice – I grew up listening to and loving Steely Dan like many people – but what I try to do now as a music producer is to make music breathe. Among other things, I’m really into dynamics, which is not to say I don’t like compression: I may master things loud. It has to be competitive, for what it’s worth.  But what I’m talking about is musical dynamics; how an arrangement unfolds.

There needs to be an inner dynamic to a song where it’s allowed to rage and sit back, rage and sit back, An example is the contrast between the chorus and verse; it’s part of the drama of music.

Another big issue – the expression I use- is, “I don’t hear any blood on those tracks,” — it’s a nod to the Dylan metaphor. The most compelling music I hear has the blood. It doesn’t even have to be screaming; it can be soft. It can be Kate Bush. But you need to hear the emotion, the blood behind it.

That’s a vivid way of putting it. Can you point to a project that you’re currently involved in that’s calling that out?
Every gig is about that. #1, as a producer, I don’t take gigs unless I think someone has something special to say. If I do, I expend all my energy going where they live. One long-standing relationship I have on a musician and human level is Meshell Ndegeocello, who’s influenced me tremendously as a person and a musician. There are certain things she does that she doesn’t necessarily try to do, but  like any great artist, that’s just what and how they do.

All the people I’ve worked with – D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, COPE – their music has taught me lessons about things, and not always verbal lessons. In my relationship with Meshell, certainly what she does musically and what I do as a mixer work together very well. If you listen to (the 2003 album) Comfort Woman, that’s a good example of that. In general, we have a great mutual respect for what the other does. For most of her music making, I stay out of the way and let her do her thing.

She knows what my proclivities are as a mixer, and lets me get it to a certain point. What I say to most of my clients is, “Let me work with it for a while, then get it to a point of departure,” like “This is what I meant to do.” Then pick up from there.

I think it’s debilitating for an artist to hear a kick drum for an hour – and I don’t do that anymore either. Now, I tend to work in concentric circles. I used to say, “Gotta get the kick perfect. Gotta get the snare perfect.” But I’d say the results and process are so much more rewarding if you get to a state of niceness, do a circle around, then circle around again.

That’s an important theory of creativity for me. It allows us to:
#1 – stay fresh,
#2 – not lose sight of the big picture, and
#3 – the next time you come back around, it’s as if you’re hearing it for the first time. That allows you a much greater degree of objectivity. It allows one to be spontaneous where that is called for, and clinical where that is called for.

Has there been an evolution in your tools – or the way that you’re applying them — to get there?

Whether you use a shovel or an EQ, if you do something for 40 years, you change the way you do things. For me, without a doubt, the biggest evolution is digital – which is not to say that I’ve given up on analog.

My viewpoint on digital mixing is that the tools are there, and our biggest job as practitioners is to stop complaining that “it doesn’t sound like analog.” It never will! And there are some things that digital does better.

I made a commitment to digital three or four years ago, although today I don’t mix entirely in the box. I have an expensive two-buss chain with Pendulum, Tube Tech, API, Prism gear. But if I’m mixing in my studio, I don’t use analog inserts on individual things. I may, if something is very poorly recorded – which is more often than not these days – send that out and record it through an analog chain of my own. I’ve found that with the tradeoff of what one gains through the fattening-up process of one pass in, one pass out – there’s no contest versus not doing it.

A big issue is that because the tools have become available to the Average Joe and Joan, and the user interfaces have been refined, there’s almost no such thing as a tracking engineer anymore. Thus the things that come to me for mixing are often not really easy to deal with sonically. The people are very well meaning, but as you know, things don’t always come out the way one intended.  When you boil it down, here are three things that you need to pay attention to in recording, and everything will come out pretty well.

Please remind us!
#1 – the instrument and the player. No one can do that much about the player – people are at the stage of evolution that they’re at, and that’s fine. But people don’t do enough to prepare an instrument for recording. Intonation, consistency of timbre, tonal uniformity across the dynamic range of the instrument are all big pluses in the recording.

The instrument is so often overlooked in the recording process. The band comes in, and everyone is unhappy and depressed because the guitars are out of tune. The drums don’t sound so good, the bass doesn’t sound so good. But more often than not, if you prepare the instruments you’re home.

When I worked with session musicians, I thought I was a great engineer, but then I realized these people’s instruments were chosen because they sound really good in the studio. My own guitar collection is 15 or so, for example, but there’s only five or six of them that I use in the studio.

#2 — the mic preamp. Everyone thinks it’s the mic, but I can make a really good record with a great preamp and the Shure SM57, my desert island mic. The Telefunken 251 is right on the heels of that.

#3 – mic placement. This is a longer story than we have time for right now.

A lot of people reading this probably agree, but wonder how this pertains to them if they’re using synths, soft synths – any manner of virtual instruments…
As one who did scoring for years and had racks of MIDI instruments that I had to reload, I know that virtual instruments are a huge factor in music – you turn on your computer, hit the space bar, and everything comes out.

The way in which virtual instruments fit into the above equation is about the intent in the choice of which ones you choose. You start to get to know the character of all the packages, modules, manufacturers – they’re all instruments of their own. There are four or five different Minimoog emulations, for example, and they all sound a little different.

But anyone who does a lot of recording knows that what specific instrument you pick for a given application is huge. I teach recording and arranging at NYU, and my students often grumble about the fact that I make them work with in-the-box instruments; and  expect them to sound really good. The real lesson is that, just as an orchestrator or an arranger with real musicians doesn’t write them something  that would be awkward – like certain notes for clarinet or tones for cello – you have to take the same attitude with virtual instruments. That’s where you say, “Wow, that patch didn’t sound good for fast runs, so I’ll use it for pads.”

It’s the same with digital sound processing tools. Even though the McDSP is my go-to EQ, the Waves packages have different characteristics that may, at a given time, be more appropriate. Just like guitars – there are things that I may go to more often because I know that they are very adaptable, other times because they have a very specific character. By now I know the character of my digital tools as well as the analog tools that I’ve used for a long time.

I’ve noticed that you bring up your post at NYU a lot, in this conversation and others we’ve had.
First of all, I consider myself very fortunate to be part of a higher education system. The Clive Davis Department, to a person, is full of fantastic human beings,and tremendously experienced practitioners who really care about the students first. But as with anything when you teach, you really learn as much as your students; You have to create succinct,  understandable terms for complex processes that you may have been doing intuitively.

I really think it’s important for teachers to break things down into simple components. For example, I love the astrophysicist who teaches you about the universe with a paper cup. I’m into that same type of immaculate simplicity.

It’s also nice to be able to interact with so many talented people and help them along the way. Teaching has informed my humanism, which, as I get older, becomes the really important goal as a human being. Fifteen guitars are nice. GRAMMY awards are nice. Stature is nice. But it’s really about helping people, and that informs everything I do now.

As an instructor, what are you observing about the next gen of music people that are coming up? Are we going to be in good hands?
I can only speak for the people at NYU. I can say that their musicianship and studio skills are off the charts. They know so much more about what it takes to make a good record than where I was at that age.

Things are so much open now. When I was growing up there were only four or five genres and a precise way of producing them. They are much, much broader in their visions than I am, and you just can’t believe the cool things they do.

So here’s the $500 question for Bob Power: Is this the best of times or the worst of times in music?
Both.

It’s a time of great, great change. With the consolidation of the majors, everyone is ruing the downfall of the record business. The main thing that’s really changed is the economic underpinnings of it. But out of changes, there’s always a new way that comes. In regard to the business of recorded music, I say to my students at NYU, “I can’t tell you how it’s going to be. You’ll be the ones to invent that.”

This is the best of times and the worst of times. Financially, the cash flow and throughput of the recorded music business has been decimated, literally by powers of 10. At the same time, there is a new order that’s forming. What is the revenue stream of recorded music is really the crux of that whole issue. On the creative side, though, because the tools are more affordable and the user interfaces are better, there’s a huge breadth of creativity that we wouldn’t have seen ten years ago from people making music.

On the dissemination end, the Web has leveled the playing field, because there are no filters out there anymore. That’s good and bad. No longer is it that only things in the mainstream system get through, but it’s bad because…where do you start in your search for your music? But that’s evolving as we talk. It’s as exciting as it is terrifying.

It really boils down to revenue streams for recorded music; that filters all the way down to bands and solo artists. If bands can’t sell their music online, and the idea is that one gives away their music which brings people to shows – that’s great, but who will they pay to record their music? If you want to involve people who are really good, that costs money.

Here we sit in one of the music centers of the galaxy, discussing all of this. Where does New York City fit into The Big Picture, in 2011?
What can you say? NYC is the most fascinating, alive, multi-faceted organism that I know. Just on that level alone, the music that comes out of here is going to be pretty interesting.

Even with the retrenchment of the major label business, I think that the New York/Nashville/LA markets will always support healthy industries in music. But being in those locations is less important than it was. Thanks to digital communications, I mix and master a lot of music for people I never see. And boy are they making some cool music! It’s unfettered. It’s not affected by the winds of trend. It’s a very pure thing. People are making music because they have to, they love to, and they want to so much – rather than because they want to be rich and famous.

That’s where we all started — and that whole concept is very important to the way I approach my relationships with my clients. No matter how tired you are, no matter how many times you’re required to do the same things over and over, you have to remember how great it was the first time you recorded music. How exciting it felt. We all need to remember that.

– David Weiss

Career Engineering: Allen Farmelo on Recording Cinematic Orchestra, & That Post-Pink Floyd Sound

CHINATOWN, MANHATTAN/FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN: What headspace are you in? For a music producer/engineer/mixer like Allen Farmelo, getting your talents to that sought-after place is all about finding yourself.

In the process of doing that, of course, people will find you — that explains why one of Farmelo’s fans is an artful outfit like Cinematic Orchestra, the engrossing British jazz/electronic/soul influenced outfit led by Jason Swincoe. The ever-evolving group recently called on Farmelo to engineer their upcoming release for Ninja Tune, a project that he executed in the semi-exclusive confines of Chinatown’s intriguing Mavericks Studio.

Whether working at Mavericks or mixing/mastering at his rapidly evolving Fort Greene facility, The Farm, Farmelo’s primary angle – a sound he gravitates to that he calls “Post-Pink Floyd” – and artist-centric philosophy shows how an NYC audio pro gets on the map. As his list of credits grows (The Loom, Second Dan, Cucu Diamantes, Jonah Smith, Ian Gillan, The Cabriolets, Jesus H. Christ), so does his insight on what makes today’s music, and the business of it, tick.

You’ve been working a lot with Cinematic Orchestra the last few weeks. How would you describe that workflow?
I wouldn’t say it’s improvisational, but I would say it’s a very grand project that operates on a lot of different levels and that there’s a lot of exploration happening. Jason’s done a lot of writing beforehand, and he brings in musicians to flesh out the ideas. The writing is extremely intentional, and harmonically/melodically very plotted out. He knows the goal of those songs.

He’s an amazing producer because he manages to get people to do stuff that works for the song, without telling them what to do. Is he micromanaging? No. But is he getting the micro-details he wants out of people? Yes. So I’m watching him closely and learning from him.

Cinematic’s not like the Beatles where you have the same four members, and without one of them you’re done. Jason’s brought in people he feels will contribute to that particular song in the way he thinks it will happen best. Different singers for different songs, that kind of thing. So far it’s a bit of a different-sounding record than the previous one, and I think the lineup will reflect those changes.

So what’s it like coming into the project as an engineer? Do they let you do your thing, or is it a collaborative process?
Jason knows what he wants to hear, he is extremely good at communicating it, and he lets me achieve that. He can sometimes get right down to the gear. They were working at Livingston Studios in London, using those Coles 4038s as the overheads. He described that setup, and I did that here to get the specific sound that worked well when he tracked in England.

So sometimes he’s very specific, other times he’ll describe a vibe or metaphor to get what he’s looking for, and then the way I achieve that is up to me. Mixing the Grey Reverend record that Jason produced was a lot like that, where both Grey and Jason would articulate well what they wanted from the record. Then I sent them home, said, “Let me do this,” and then let them come back.

My first stab was good on about 70% of the material — and then fell on its face on the other! We talked about that, and they were very good at articulating what they wanted changed. So we freed up some things in the mix, found the center of the record, and let those things happen. As the record went on, I was able to take more ownership of the aesthetic. So the collaboration is very easy and open.

So is it easier to go into this project now that you’re in the same headspace? Are there traditional references to other records he’s listening to as far as the approach, or is it like you’re already aware of what he likes based on the past experience?
Jason has written amazing, amazing music that is dictating everything about what follows. The songwriting is so strong and beautiful that everybody else is just there to serve that song – including Jason. I don’t feel any references to anything outside of those songs happening at all. Instead we’re coming from the center of those songs. And when you hear them, they all have their own character, life, logic, feel, tonality and beauty that’s obvious from the get-go, even when they’re just played on acoustic guitar. You say, “That’s freakin’ beautiful. Let’s make it more beautiful.”

How do you go about taking the song further at that point?
So everything from changing a mic to subdividing a beat to figuring out how to lay a crash down is there to serve that inner logic. Jason makes sure we’re there to serve that inner logic and the inner beauty of the song, and he communicates it very easily. You have the songwriter, the vision, and the songs are giving you tons of information from that.

You don’t have to do that much to know how to get the studio to sing properly for the song, and that’s where I feel I’m trusted to make some good choices along the way. It can be something as simple as, “Wow, slow tempo – let’s raise the overheads and let the drums sing a little more,” or for more complex patterns I might think, “Let’s get things a little tighter.”

For me, setting the tone on the guitar amp is instinctively informed by the guitar pattern. Since we feel very much in tune with the music, we all kind of trust each other aesthetically and say, “OK, let’s make this happen.” There’s not a lot of discussion about this stuff. It’s kind of obvious when things are working or not, everyone’s got great ears.

The thing that’s refreshing about working with these guys is that there’s no ego to get in the way of this discussion, so it’s an aesthetic conversation at all times – a really clean and artistic conversation.

That sounds like a rewarding way to be recording. Why is this studio a fit for this band and record?
Well, Maverick’s fits any project really well, as long as you don’t need to record forty musicians here. I had thirteen here once – that worked surprisingly well. That was a big, amazing, raucous New Orleansy anti-war album. So Maverick’s can kind of do that. We did the strings for Grey Reverend’s upcoming album here – we had a quartet in the main space. I did the whole Loom record, Teeth, which was a six-piece band all playing in the room together. A lot of people come to just do drums. It’s a very versatile space, and as long as your mics are in phase, you’ll sound good. There’s really no crappy-sounding place in here. For the Cinematic record, there’s just something wonderful happening between the songs and the room sound. They match beautifully.

It feels that way. What do you think about the “open concept” (studio in the round) format here?
I’ve been on two Tape Op Conference panels with other people talking about open concept studios, so I’ve thought a lot about it. And of course the most famous reference is Lanois. The number one benefit of it is being able to speak face-to-face with the people you’re working with and not through a talkback system. The alienation of a talkback system is apparent as soon as it’s taken away. It’s so nice to pull off the headphones and talk to the person you’re speaking to.

The drawback is there’s no room for bullshit. Everyone has to be reverent to the music happening. You can’t rattle your keys, text your boyfriend, read Vogue – a lot of what normally happens in the control room can’t happen here. So if you’re not into being reverent, you have to go into the back room where there are no speakers. You’re either in or out.

I didn’t realize I was paying so much attention to what was coming out of the speakers – instead of to the musicians – until I started working in an open studio. It’s a positive for me, but not for everyone – my friend Joel Hamilton jokingly calls us a bunch of hippies that like to sit in the same room together, and he’s kind of got a point as it can be pretty touchy-feely. But the other most obvious benefit is the amount of space I have. We have one of the biggest control rooms in NYC, because we have all this space, and when we’re tracking we can subdivide it any way we want.

If we’d had a separate control room, we’d be like a lot of little studios, but instead we’re like a good midsize studio here. For a facility our size, we have a really big control room and a really big live room. They just happen to be the same space – it’s an incredible way to take advantage of small spaces.

That makes sense. What guides the gear choices here?
First and foremost, we have pairs of everything in the studio: Coles 4038’s, Royer 121’s, RCA BK 5As, Beyer M 160’s, Shure SM7’s, Elux 251s, 87s, 84s, 441s…a pair of everything. The point being that we are really ready to put up a pair of anything on any source, so we are really versatile when recording drums. We can get any flavor stereo overhead and room sound we want.

We used to have a mishmash of preamps, and then came to realize really quickly that we love API, and miss the glue/consistency of having the same preamps working off of a console. So we have 16 of the API 512s. We do have other pres – the Chandler, a pair of original 1073 Neves racked up by Brent Averil…but we have far fewer flavors then we used to, and we love it. We’re thrilled to have the same preamp on everything, because when you bring up the faders it all sits together tonally. We went through the “We could have a little of everything phase” and grew out of it.

We have a lot of really interesting compressors, and a lot of really standard standbys. We have two Purple MC77s, two 1176s, and a pair of DBX 160’s that used to belong to Johnny Cash! We have a pair of Distressors. Where we deviate is the API 2500 – I mix through that 2500 almost exclusively. I have one in my studio in Brooklyn, The Farm, and I have one here that’s always strapped onto my two buss. It reminds me not to over compress and to cascade from the individual channel compressors into that bus compressor. I work with it on all the time, so I know where I’m going to land compression-wise when it comes time to mix.

And there are other non-standard compressors here. We just got the Airfield Audio Liminator Two, which is a beautiful piece of kit, and this Gyrotek Varimu Tube Compressor is stunning – handmade in Denmark. So we have a lot of neat flavors on the compression side, and again, everything is stereo. We have two of everything, so you can run any pair of mics through any pair of pres/compressors.

Do you also mix here, or at The Farm?
I used to mix here, and then I had to mix back at my place because of a scheduling thing – this was like in 2006. So I recorded a record for Rachel Z., which featured Tony Levin, and other great musicians, and due to scheduling and some technical issues I ended up with mixes done on the console here at Mavericks, some summed in Pro Tools here, and some mixed in my room in Brooklyn. When we got to mastering, there were definitely differences – and the analog summed mixes were way better – but my mixes done at home were sounding really good. They were right up there. It was weird: I went to the news stand across the street from my Brooklyn apartment and saw that Rachel’s record was charting in Billboard, then I looked up at my window where my mix room is and said, “Wow, a new era.” So I did what everyone else did: I put together a mix room.

And now my studio, The Farm in Fort Greene, is a serious mixing situation. I have a lot of outboard gear, the Crane Song HEDD which I’m using to print my mixes off a Studer A-80 1/2” machine; a fully acoustically treated room. It’s pretty ideal and I’m doing pretty much all of my mixing there. That allows me to work within the budgets that are coming my way, allowing me to offer better deals to my clients and make a living at it.

That said, mixing here at Mavericks is a wonderful experience. We’ve got the Studer two-track, the center section of the Neotek, which is modified by Purple Audio, sounds wonderful. That console is like the mid-size luxury touring sedan with a badass racing engine in it.

We hear you’re putting together an interesting new console for The Farm. What was the concept, and how is it coming together?
The concept is to have an API Legacy console built from their amazing 7600 channel strips, which each have a 550A EQ, 225L compressor and 212L preamp along with four busses, four aux sends and infinite routing possibilities.

I realized after working on the big Vision console up at NYU’s Clive Davis school and then, days after, tracking at Mavericks with all API 512 preamps that API was a sound I could very happily commit to. But I couldn’t afford, nor did I really need, nor did I want to maintain, a full-on Legacy or Vision console.

The API 7600’s all connect to the 7800 Master Module to form a true, discrete Legacy console with as many channels you want or can afford. So I bought a pair of 7600s to try on a mix session and within about three minutes I knew I’d found my channels, and when I summed through the 7800 Master Module, I knew I’d found my console. Problem was I had to get it built.

Francois Chambard of UM Project in Greenpoint came on board, and our goal was to defy the look and feel of traditional consoles – which to my eye look like either Cold War-era military equipment, a dentist’s office, or some leather bound thing you’d expect Ron Burgundy to tell you he mixed his jazz flute on. I’m a really visual guy, and none of those inspire me, nor did I really want to spend the rest of my career behind one.

Instead we found a great blend between Francois’s sense of modern design and my own fascination with the landscape, architecture and design of Iceland. It’s going to look really different, yet it has the ergonomics of my favorite consoles all bundled together with space for over twenty-four channels, eventually. I couldn’t be happier, and Francois is a bad-ass designer. There’ll be racks and diffusors to match, I’m sure.

Sounds amaaaazing. Switching gears, let’s talk about the NYC recording scene. How would you describe what’s happening here?

There is an incredible energy around making records in NYC right now. Specifically in Brooklyn, there’s an incredibly good, positive foundation of recording happening.

Five years ago we were in distress a little bit, we were watching the big studios close. Now Avatar is still there, Sear Sound is still there – Walter RIP – they’re booked solid. Magic Shop is still there. These amazing rooms that really held close to their missions are still operating and they’re there for us to go in and use as needed. The new era is here, and we’re all relaxing into it.

The market crash happened in 2008, which was a grim year for everyone, but we got used to it. Now it’s a community of people making records. I see NYC as a place that adapted swiftly to a new model, and everyone’s got a room with an increasing amount of gear in it. Between the bigger studio and your own space, records are being made wonderfully that way. There are fewer places to get an orchestra recorded, but a hell of a lot of places for an acoustic guitar overdub!

The big loss is community. That’s not an original thought, but I do miss the community of being with a lot of people doing what you do. Writing for Tape Op helps, being on Facebook helps – when you have status updates, you feel like you’re in a conversation. I find I have to make an effort to find people who do what I do. It’s an effort, but it’s worth it.

So there’s a lot of obstacles to overcome, but musically I think NYC is bringing together the sophistication of indie, jazz and “new” classical music with the street levelness of the rock scene – now it’s almost the norm to have a string quartet on your record. I like seeing those worlds coming together. Maybe because no one can make a living at it anymore, we’ll all play on each other’s records! That cross-pollination is really exciting: Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire used a lot of NYC string players on their last records, and you can feel a new kind of sound emerging nationally that has a particular stamp on it that, to my ears, says “Brooklyn.”

You’re from Buffalo originally, right? How did you work your way up as an engineer in the NYC studio scene?
I’m very much a self-taught guy. I had a bit of experience working at Trackmasters in Buffalo, now called Inner Machine and owned by the Goo Goo Dolls. It’s an amazing room, designed by John Storyk, and the Goo Goo Dolls are currently packing it with amazing gear. That studio is absolutely iconic in Buffalo’s music scene, and my first time in there I was playing keyboards in my highschool jazz band. We were badass that year, and then all the great players went off to college. It’s funny, I heard that recording recently and thought, “whoh, that’s amazing.”

Anyways, that first experience in a real studio had me hooked, and I soon after got a four-track and had at it. But where I really learned was in the DIY hardcore scene of the late ‘80’s. I did a record at Trackmasters in 1989 with my band RedDog7, then helped some friends make records there. I was kind of producing, but I had no idea that’s what I was doing. We made some seriously good sounding records, actually, and I was obsessed with getting good sounds – I knew guitars, amps, drums, cymbals, strings and even obsessed over sticks and picks. My head was way up in it from an early age, and I was thinking from the player to the instrument to the mic, which I now know is the right way to think.

Then we had a band house for a while, and and then this whole basement situation with the Mackie board and DAT machines. We made deals and acquired gear, recording, doing live sound and playing gigs, and then running this little DIY studio. That’s where I really cut my teeth as a recording guy, struggling to get a decent sound outside of Trackmasters. Over time in Buffalo I had the chance to become a bigger fish in a small pond, which is a nurturing environment, but that pond got too small. It was time to move on, so I came to NYC.

What’s your take on producing? You seem to have a studied approach to that role.
My philosophy of producing is that I try not to carry around any pre-ordained philosophy, but instead to generate a philosophy for the project in collaboration with the artist. I call that “guiding principles” – a very intentional guiding philosophy I try to lock in on and externalize for the project, in case we get lost.

For example, I’m doing a children’s record with the Brooklyn-based artist Shelley Kay, and we have two guiding principles. One is, “Fuck Romper Room”, and the other is “Playful Minimalism.” Fuck-Romper-Room is easy – that means that whenever we’re getting into the mamby-pamby kindergarten shit, hit the red STOP button. And “Playful Minimalism” means that when we’re confronted with a decision we ask: Is it playful? It is minimalist? Those two words show us the choice to make. Between two drum patterns for example, if one is more minimalist, that’s typically the one to go with, and the result comes back closer to our original artistic intentions to keep the production clean.

Another artist that I’m working with, the guiding principle is “Sincere Otherworldliness.” I’m putting him through the paces as a songwriter. He’s been struggling to get his sincerity out, and the otherworldliness is an outwardly-stated goal of his to create a sonic world that’s very different from reality, another world one can enter into. To bring those two together is difficult – if you’re too sincere, you can’t get it spacey and amazing, but if you’re too otherworldly, you can miss being right there with the listener, making it sincere. These principles are meant to be challenging.

In production it’s very hard to stop saying, “I like that, I don’t like that.” If that’s going on in the conversation, you’ll never get to the heart of the matter. If you get past “I like that, I don’t like that” and closer to stating what you want to achieve, something like a guiding principle starts to open up, and you have much more productive conversations about what’s happening.

In my work, that’s the best thing I can give to their project: an open, comfortable dialogue about things, but with structure instead of just being completely wide open. One of the functions of the producer is to help the artist specify what they’re doing, and not be all over the place. Not everyone is making their fifth record and bringing all that experience to the table. A lot of people are making their first or second, and I have to be intentional about my role, because if I don’t we get sloppy.

How did you get to be like that as a producer? It sounds like you’ve evolved in that role, just as an artist does with their music.
It’s not a new idea to find artistic growth as a producer, I don’t think. I have to attribute my own growth partly to Bob Power, one of my mentors. He always says it’s about getting to a place where you’re letting the music make decisions, and I know exactly what he means. That idea inspired me to ask, “Well, how do you get to that place?” Like most great ideas, it’s not complex, but it can be a real bugger to achieve. There are so many things that can get in the way, like ego, fear, imagined or real audiences, commercial pressure, well disguised self-sabotage tendencies – basically anything external to the actual crafts of writing, performing and recording music. For me, to get to that place where the music is speaking clearly requires a pretty intentional approach to how I talk about the work being done, and that’s where the guiding principles idea kind of came from.

More and more of us producers are doing the A&R job of developing artists and their material. If we don’t have record labels, who will do all the development work? It turns out to be the record producer in a lot of cases. It’s a big part of the job. So if I can obsess about a compressor as an engineer, I hope I can also obsess about the dialogue that’s going to shape decisions about the album as a producer. That’s been a big area of growth for me, to enter into dialogue about the work with more and more clarity. It’s really fucking hard work, but when it pays off it’s amazing. I even read books about collaborating, about creativity – whatever I can get my hands on that I think might help. Right now it’s where I’m focusing my professional growth.

That sounds like amazing guidance to be able to provide throughout the process…
Yes, although I should also state that all of that development of the guiding principles, and doing the artist and material development, happens long before we hit record. It’s like pre-pre-production. It goes on long before I’m getting things ready for the actual recording date. It’s more of trying to figure out what the vision of the artist is, and helping them shape it. I’ll say it again, it’s not easy. It’s not the easy path of just saying “I like this, I don’t like that.”

The other thing is the kind of music I’m working on can call for this kind of approach. I’ve more recently committed as a mixer/engineer/producer to this specific vibe within modern rock music that I call post-Pink Floyd. Don’t take that term too literally, but one day someone asked that inevitable question “what kind of music do you work on” and I just said it – “post-Pink Floyd.” What I meant by it is this thread of really innovative, beautiful, spacious, compassionate music.

Pink Floyd had incredible empathy, beautiful spaces, beautiful sounds, and brought in influences of jazz and classical without doing them overly in the music. The ideas they brought in were so involved in empathy – it wasn’t, “Let’s go shake our butts and hump each other and party all night long.” Instead, they were dealing more directly with the human condition, and I just wind up working with a lot of artists who seem to have somewhat similar goals lyrically and thematically. So it’s not really about Pink Floyd in particular, but if I had to point to a moment in rock history where this compassionate, open, spacious music began, I’d say “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Cinematic Orchestra exemplifies it. Radiohead and Sigur Ros exemplify it. Elbow’s got it. Peter Gabriel’s work with Lanois has it. In fact, Lanois seems to get it out of people in general – he got it out of Dylan, perhaps for the first time. I work with a lot of artist who seem to want to work towards the aesthetic that are embodied by those examples, even if those records aren’t particular influences. Cinematic Orchestra is an honor to work with, because I feel that they’re harmonically, musically, thematically within that realm. I think they’re masters of space and compassion, and I think the record they’re making is going to blow people away. But that post-Pink Floyd thing comes in a lot of flavors. In American bands I’d include The National, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, Wilco does it do a degree, and especially Band of Horses. The Loom, whose record I produced, fits under that umbrella for me, even thought they sound nothing like these other bands, really. Again, it’s not really a particular sound, but a set of harmonic and thematic threads that run through the music.

It’s a hard and awful thing to have to put into the limitations of language something you feel and know so intuitively, but I guess that’s the exact challenge I’m putting on the artists I work with when trying to get positive dialogue happening about projects. In a way, post-Pink Floyd is my own kind of guiding priciple as I try to intentionally steer my career in a specific direction. I should probably work harder on clarifying that!

That sounds like an expansive genre to hang your hat on – what else is on the Post-Pink Floyd horizon for you?
I’m currently producing two records that are definitely going to carry some of that vibe. One is with Austin Donohue, who is writing some amazingly beautiful stuff, really finding his themes. He’s the Sincere Otherworldliness guy. The other is with Diana Hickman, who I think is writing some of the most innovative material I’ve heard in a while – like Joni Mitchell and Bjork go SCUBA diving together and surface with a record. Both of them are working their asses off, doing a ton of development work with me. Those will get done this winter.

I’ve also become inspired by Iceland as a place for music and making records. It’s a very sparsely populated, lovely place that just doesn’t go to war or pollute very much, and their landscape and relative remoteness lends itself to music that is really quite unique. When people settled Iceland, they didn’t colonize anybody, and it just doesn’t have this scarred past which so many other places rife with conflict have. It’s quieter. You can feel that lack of conflict and that quiet, and a sense of expansiveness in much of the music there, even when it’s erupting like a volcano.

At least that’s what my tired NYC ears hear. I just went back there in October to the Airwaves Music Festival in Reykjavik and saw amazing bands every night. I’m talking to one in particular about working together, and I really hope it starts to happen for me over there. I’m very interested in putting my foot on that other piece of land.

– Interview by Janice Brown and David Weiss

Five Years Of Cantora Records: From MGMT To Bear Hands

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN: At Cantora Records HQ, aka The Rumpus Room, there are at least five guys jammed into a small office overlooking the BQE and the New York Harbor.

This is mission control for a tight roster of bands that includes the Brooklyn-based Savoir Adore, Francis and the Lights and Bear Hands, and amid the obvious hyperactivity of the day, we’re getting a tour.

Led by a triumvirate of Will Griggs, Jesse Israel and Nick Panama, Cantora Records is an innovative indie-pop label and fully functioning creative collective with in-house recording studio, photo/video stage and roster of producer/engineer, designers and filmmakers.

These guys formed Cantora in the Spring of ’05 to put out MGMT’s Time To Pretend EP and help build the band to indie superstardom. Five years later, they’ve earned a solid reputation in the indie music scene by following the righteous road somehow still less traveled — they only sign bands they absolutely love.

We sat down with Griggs, Israel and Panama and got the whole story — read on…

From what I read, it seems Cantora started at NYU. That right?

Will: Jesse and I were at NYU — I was studying music business and Jesse was studying film — and when we all met up and started this company, Nick was still in high school in LA. But the company did actually form at NYU. We had our first powwow in Washington Square Park.

Tell me a bit about what led up to that meeting?

Will: My cousin was a year above me at Wesleyan and my freshmen year he took me to see this band, The Management, which became MGMT. At that point they didn’t have any official releases — they were just giving out burned CDs. I brought it back and played it for everyone I knew because I just thought it was the most addictive music I’d ever heard.

Jesse and I were roommates and at that point we weren’t sure what we wanted to do — manage bands or put out records or what — but we knew we wanted to work with this band in some way. Around that time, Nick also caught wind of them out in LA and connected with us through a mutual friend.

How did it go from this idea of wanting to work with them to reality?

Will: We started helping them out here and there with shows on a casual/fan basis, but then a couple of opportunities came up that were a catalyst to making the band and our relationship more official — they were invited by Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal to open for them on a pretty substantial tour. It was at that moment when there was a real opportunity to support them — print up some CDs and some tee shirts, etc.

And that’s when you guys actually came together, organized as an actual company?

Will: Well that’s when it became clear to us that this was what the relationship with the band was going to look like. We knew they had these great songs so we got them into a studio and printed up some real CDs so they’d have something to sell on the road. It all came together really naturally. We had a buddy who was working in a studio who could help out with recording/production — our friend David Perlick Molinari, who’s now in French Horn Rebellion.

Jesse: Having an actual product made it all real and with that in place, we decided to start the record label and figure it all out as we went along.

So there wasn’t necessarily a grand plan, a real vision for how you wanted to run the label? Like contrary to what you saw going on out there?

Nick: No, we had not the faintest idea. Even when we signed MGMT, we were unsure whether Cantora was going to be a record label or a production company, we really didn’t know. There was no long-term future grand vision that we had. There was no business plan; we didn’t fund raise. We each pulled out $600 to get tee shirts and CDs made. And we didn’t really know where it was going to lead — we were just thrilled to be working with this band and doing something that was a little outside our comfort zones.

And so you did that first release with MGMT, Time To Pretend. What was that like, watching that just totally take off?

Will: It was an unbelievable learning experience on a number of levels. It was amazing seeing it spread from friend to friend, just by word of mouth. We didn’t hire a publicist, we just put the thing out so they could sell it on the road.

Nick: And we barely put it out. There was no digital distribution or physical distribution. It was just Paypal through the website and the band on tour selling it.

Will: But it was unbelievable to see how powerful word of mouth can be when you have content that’s really compelling. I’m from Virginia and had a lot of friends at UVA and I could see they had a pocket of fans down there. And people were really enthusiastic about the music. There was an a capella group at UVA that was singing “Kids.” And there were all these little pockets of fans popping up on their own all over without much of a promotional push behind it.

Jesse: The moment when I really knew we were onto something was when they played Princeton. They’d been invited up to play one of those fratty weekend extravaganzas. So we went out there with the band and this is still at a point when they were pretty unknown. But at Princeton, this was a big deal. And when they played the song “Kids,” it was insane witnessing what happened — all these preppy Princeton kids in their seersucker shorts and pastels just LOSING their minds, going crazy over it. And we were there, with our beards and grimy clothes — totally out of place — just taking it all in. It was amazing.

Awesome. And then you got to have the experience of a major label coming into the picture…Was that intimidating at all? Did you feel you had a lot to learn, quickly?

Will: You know what, it wasn’t intimidating because we just had no context for it. It was just another opportunity presenting itself. And also the band still wasn’t thinking of themselves as career musicians. They were never in that mindset of needing to make it as rock stars or anything. They just saw it as a cool opportunity.

Jesse: They were writing songs to fit a genre and having fun with it. It was like dorm room fun to make these songs they thought were the catchiest, cheesy pop songs they could write. They’d never really taken it all that seriously.

What about Cantora? At that point, as MGMT’s popularity was growing, were you starting to look at other bands?

Will: No, we didn’t start looking for other bands until everything with MGMT and Columbia was settled. At that point, we started looking at what had happened and saw that we actually had a real record label here!

So who was the next band you signed? And at that point, what were you looking for?

Will: The next band we signed was Savoir Adore. For me it’s about what do I get addicted to? What can I not help but share with everyone I know? I feel like if there’s one thread that ties together all the artists on our label it’s great songs, and an adventurous and forward-thinking approach.

Most of what we have on our label could definitely be called pop music in some way, but they’re all artists who are doing something new with it — a new twist, their own sound. But we spend a lot of time working on each band, so it’s really about whether or not we love it enough to spend the next many months or years working on it without any guarantee of success.

You just have to be passionate about the music, or else you’re wasting your time. If we looked at it from the perspective of ‘will this make us a lot of money?’ this would be a very different company. Not to say that the stuff we put out doesn’t have a wide appeal…

Are there other labels out there that inspire you guys and how you build your business?

Jesse: XL is a label that’s done a really good job of branding themselves and that’s something that we’ve always focused on. Obviously the music that we put out is #1, but we’ve also always felt that it’s really important for Cantora to have a presence in the music space as well. Not to just be a silent partner in an artist’s release process — but to build our brand so that as more artists come to our label, we have a built-in fan-base and a built-in brand that already means something.

Nick: I’d say French Kiss is another label that’s just killing it. They’ve been around for awhile and they’ve been able to transform themselves from this proto-pop, post-punk label to today, where they’re putting out Passion Pit, Local Natives, Antlers, Dodos, Freelance Whales, Suckers, etc.

Will: To me, a label like Merge that can be fully independent yet able to scale with a band like the Arcade Fire, and still be that label where you’re interested to check out whatever they’re putting out there. That’s the kind of label we want to be — a label whose releases audiences will check out because it’s a part of what we’re doing and they like what we’re doing.

Jesse: We’ve all experienced that on some level as fans. I was really into hip-hop when I was younger and when I was in high school, Definitive Jux, is what did it for me. If something came out on that label, I was excited about it. And part of what I think about with Cantora is how to connect with that younger me, and that excitement I would feel around Definitive Jux and everything they did.

So what do you guys actually do to build your brand, outside of just working each release?

Jesse: A big part of it has been to build our brand outside of just the artists we’re working with, to cultivate the music community here in NYC and in LA, through Cantora Live and Cantora Creative.

With Cantora Live, we’ll put on a show every month or six weeks where we pick a cool venue and invite bands we really like who aren’t signed to Cantora as well as a couple who are and put on a showcase. Sometimes there’s not a single Cantora band on the bill and that’s a way to reach out to even more fans, a way for Cantora to be a part of something else that’s meaningful and cool.

And we also do a similar thing with our production company, Cantora Creative, where we’ll create video content for artists — some on our label, some not. Or this new web series we’re working on called “Show Me,” where we’re doing these :90 shorts with 10 of our favorite bands showing a band leading up to a performance.

You also have some facilities here — a recording studio and in-house producer/engineer, rehearsal space, video stage — do your artists come in and record here? How do you and your bands benefit from you having these things?

Will: Having the resources here adds to our ability to be as nimble as possible and be able to act quickly when there’s an opportunity or an idea that we think is cool.

For example, we invited Francis and the Lights to play our CMJ show a couple years ago, and they mentioned they had a couple new songs and wondered if we wanted to team up and do a single to release at the show. Because we have a studio in-house, we were able to bring the band in here and they recorded with the head engineer Albert DiFiore and we were able to turn it around in time for the show. And that was the beginning of a relationship that lasts to this day — we just put out his full-length debut this summer.

Also, with Bear Hands, we did a live video shoot here, called it the “Rumpus Session.” And we invited a bunch of friends and some press down, had tacos and beers and the band played a few new songs. We shot it and put it online. We weren’t thinking ‘how can we make money off of this?’ it was more about this being a cool way to debut some new songs.

Awesome. So, now that you’ve been at this a few years…what do you think about what’s going on in the music industry right now and what opportunities are out there for a label like Cantora?

Will: On the one hand, the collapse of the music industry and the lower point of entry in terms of the cost of recording and online distribution means we can have the same distribution reach as any label on earth via the Internet but the flip side to that coin is that so can everyone else!

So it means we have to be spot on about the bands we want to work with and able to continuously develop our fan-base and artists so that we can stay competitive at a time when anyone can put out a record and the market’s completely flooded. We’re playing with different approaches and different ways to create and put out content.

It’s clear that the excitement surrounding music has never been more intense than it is now — it’s just a question of how to package music and get it to people in a way that can keep a business like our growing at a time when music fans can pretty much get whatever music they want for free.

If there’s clear growth in one area of music it’s music discovery. People are thirsting for reliable sources of new music. Hopefully we can continue to establish ourselves as one of those reliable sources.

What’s coming up next for Cantora?

Nick: We just debuted the full-length from Rumspringa, Sway, and we’re excited about that. We have the new Bear Hands record, Burning Bush Supper Club, coming out on November 2. The Francis and the Lights record It’ll Be Better came out over the summer so we’re still working that. And we have a new artist, Emil & Friends — it’s fantastic, lush, dance-poppy music. Check it out!

For more on Cantora Records and their entire roster of artists, visit www.cantorarecords.com. And check out their latest release, Bear Hands’ Burning Bush Supper Club on iTunes.

NYC Hip-Hop’s Next Wave: Illmind On Career, Community & New Collaborations

Those who know hip-hop understand that it is largely a community oriented music genre. With the help of global web agents like Okayplayer and blog sites like 2dopeboyz and HipHopDX, this community has been able to considerably expand its reach. At the forefront of this movement locally is hip-hop veteran Ramon Ibanga, Jr., better known as producer Illmind.

A tri-state-area native, Illmind has an ear for unique beats and an enviable work ethic, the magic combo that’s gotten him in the room with some of hip-hop’s brightest figures. Since beginning his production career with underground groups like Little Brother and Boot Camp Clik, Illmind has of late found success on the mainstream level with artists such as 50 Cent and Eminem.

In his rise to the top of the producer chain, Ill is quick to credit his relationships with other prominent members of the music industry, among those most notable, G-Unit Records president Sha Money XL.

Beyond his vast work as a producer — and recent projects with Brooklyn rapper Skyzoo and Redman — Ill has been working diligently to promote his recent event-planning venture, Beats Love Alcohol Party (B.L.A.P.), while also playing the role of professor at the Clive Davis School of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

With his B.L.A.P. showcase, which allows producers a unique opportunity to play their catalogs directly to live audiences, Illmind has created an environment in which professionals can get together while honing their craft. These events — billed “Where the MPC Becomes the Turntable” — foster a sense of community amongst producers, new and experienced.

We had a chance to talk to Illmind about some of his recent projects, collaborations, and how he has been able to successfully utilize community and industry relationships to create opportunities for himself and for those around him. Check it out:

Where did you grow up?
Early childhood was in Newark, NJ, then moved to Bloomfield, NJ.

How did you get started creating beats? What kind of equipment did you start on? What do you primarily work on now?
I started messing with beats when I was around 12 or 13 years old. My dad is a musician and he had all sorts of equipment. I remember he had a [Roland] KR-4500 performance keyboard, and that’s what I learned MIDI and sequencing on. When I got older (around 17) I got Cubase, an Akai S20, SP-1200, and soon after a Boss SP-303. Today, I still use the SP-303 and S-20, but do everything on my Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard.

As an Asian American, you’re an obvious minority in the hip-hop community. How would you say your Asian background has impacted your work and ability to get work?
The Asian thing has actually been a blessing, believe it or not. It’s given me the ability to overcome greater odds. The stereotypes were always there, but I think people respected me more because there were very few of us doing it. It’s still pretty rare today (Asian producers), but we’ve come a long way and there’s definitely talent out there. All I know is, people remember me more because I’m Asian.

What was it like getting started; how did you promote your beats and gain contacts?

Back in like ’99 or 2000, I started posting my beats on various online forums, one being www.undergroundhiphop.com. People liked my stuff and I slowly got my name out there. One thing led to other things and the rest was history. Back then posting beats online was a new concept. I was literally on dial-up, uploading beats at low quality bit rates because them shits took too long if they were high quality.

After working with more underground or lesser-known emcees, what’s it like working with G-Unit?
It was life changing. I got down with D Prosper and Sha Money XL, who were both pretty much running a lot of G-Unit’s operations at that point. Sha Money XL managed me for a few years, and that was that. It was definitely a learning experience for me. I appreciate those guys so much, to this day.

Having worked with a lot of different style artists, how do you define your sound?
I can’t define my sound. What I can say is that it’s honest, musical, and inspired/channeled from a “feeling”. When I say feeling, it’s that feeling you get when you hear a song that you LOVE so much, but don’t quite know why. It’s an emotion that evokes when listening to sounds. I try to channel my inspiration from that emotion and translate it into the music that I create. I was always fascinated by music, feeling, and vision, all in one. When I’m creating music, I’m actually envisioning things as I’m going along, like places or people.

I want to shift a bit to the New York scene. How’d you get setup teaching at NYU? How was that experience?
A few years before I started working at NYU, I was teaching music production at a non-profit organization called Harlem Children’s Zone for a few years. I knew I had a passion for sharing my craft, and really wanted to take that side of me to the next level. A mutual friend of mine introduced me to the guys over at NYU. They had a position open, so I prepared for it, and got the gig. NYU is as official as official can get, so I’m appreciative of that opportunity. The kids are great and the staff is amazing. I learn something about myself every time I teach there.

Do NYC guys work together and collaborate often; is there a kind of NYC producers’ community?
Unfortunately, there isn’t much of that going on in NY. I think overall though, there is a sense of community amongst producers, globally. We respect each others’ crafts and continue to inspire each other. To me, if you got dope beats, you got dope beats. Doesn’t matter who you’ve worked with. I get inspired all the time.

Can you talk a little bit about the BLAP project you’ve been putting on?
B.L.A.P., which stands for Beats, Love, Alcohol, Party, Is a LIVE producer showcase that me and my team started. It’s open to ALL producers, in NYC or not. To piggy back on your last question, I started this showcase/party for that very reason. To create a platform of COMMUNITY amongst my fellow producers, whether up and coming or established.

The cool thing about my event is that it’s not your regular producer showcase. It gives producers the chance to play a large catalog of their music directly to the consumers, in a club/party atmosphere, just like a DJ would. It’s pretty addicting. If I had the choice, I would participate in my own event every month, but that wouldn’t be fair.

What local venues or studios have you been working with to promote BLAP and BRL?
Right now we’ve done showcases at Forbidden City, Katra, and PNC Radio, all in NYC. We definitely have BLAP lined up nationally in the coming months. [Last week, Illmind brought B.L.A.P. to Portland, Oregon] After that, we are taking it overseas.

What are you working on in the near future? Anything with local guys?
I have a lot of things going on right now. If I name them all, you might think I’m being pretentious, so bare with me, because I’m not trying to be! Me and Skyzoo have a full album dropping on Duckdown Records in October, called Live From The Tapedeck. Super proud of that project. [Watch the Skyzoo & Illmind "Speakers On Blast" music video!]

I have my first official instrumental album coming out in October as well, through [Brooklyn-based] Nature Sounds Records, called Beh!nd The Curta!n.

Also, I’m working on a handful of major placements, most of which I can’t comment on right now. I have a huge record with Redman dropping in the next month, which is his first official single to his upcoming album on Def Jam. I’m working with a brand new super group called Sun Tzu, consisting of MC Roscoe Umali, and two of the biggest pop stars in Korea right now, Drunken Tiger & Yoon Mirae. Look out for that single soon.

I just released a free project called Smokey Robotic, along with four other members. It’s pop, dance, electro, and hip-hop, which means we had a hell of a good time creating it! I’m also releasing a project with my crew, FORTILIVE, which consists of me (on the beats), MC Mushmouf and MC Slo-Mo, both from Hawaii. This is long so I’m going to stop right there, but I do have a handful of projects from some up and coming artists that I’m very excited about. Stay tuned!

— Alex Edelstein

For more on !llmind, visit www.illmind.biz and follow him on Twitter @IllmindProducer!

Sennheiser Sound Academy Studio Recording Seminar At The Fuse Box @ Manhattan Center, 8/11

On Wednesday, August 11, the Sennheiser Sound Academy will host a session on key recording techniques, concepts and practices at The Fuse Box @ Manhattan Center Studios.

Jim Anderson, past president of the AES and a professor at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU, will be the guest engineer for the tracking portion of the seminar.

The seminar will be led by Sennheiser’s Chris Spahr, who oversees national market development for live sound and studio markets. Spahr has performed live sound work for concerts, corporate functions and theater applications, and spent five years as a staff engineer at Criteria Studios in Miami, FL working on music, TV and film projects.

Following are details on time and location:

When: Wednesday, August 11 between 10AM and 5PM

Where: The Fuse Box @ Manhattan Center Studios
311 West 34th Street
New York, NY 10001

This seminar will speak to recording engineers who want to develop a firm understanding of studio technique as well as those who simply wish to brush up on their studio basics while picking up some useful new tips. The course highlights basic microphone techniques and advanced studio recording concepts and practices.

The Sennheiser Sound Academy seminars are $149 and include lunch, swag, informative workshop materials and a $50 coupon toward the purchase of any Sennheiser product. To learn more about the seminar or to register, please visit Sennheiser’s event page at http://www.sennheiserusa.com/aboutsec_events.

Studio Architect John Storyk of Walters-Storyk Design Group Lectures at NYU

Top NY studio architect John Storyk,  Principal/Designer of Walters-Storyk Design Group recently delivered a well-attended lecture to students at New York University’s Steinhardt School.

During the talk, Storyk traced the history of recording studios, from the white lab coat days of the 1940′s and 50′s through the introduction of the first more accessible artist’s studios like Electric Lady (penned by Storyk for Jimi Hendrix).

Also discussed was the demise of the “mothership” studios (e.g. Sony & Hit Factory), but with assurances for the audience that there would always be a place for large “destination” and/or large live rooms capable of hosting large groups or orchestras. The ongoing trend towards small, more powerful home-based studios was also examined.

An avid lecturer, Storyk appears frequently at schools throughout the nation including Yale University, Columbia, Ex’Pression College, SF; Full Sail Center, Orlando and Berklee College of Music, Boston, where he is currently adjunct professor of Acoustics and Studio Design.

NYU’s Society of Women in Technology (SWITCH) Hold Inaugural Assembly

The Society of Women in TeCHnology (SWITCH) held its inaugural session Tuesday night (3/9) at the NYU Music Technology Program’s new facility within the Steinhardt School’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions.

A panel comprising music and technology educators, artists, innovators and trailblazers discussed challenges and opportunities for established and up-and-coming female audio and technology professionals.

The esteemed panelists included: Associate Director of the Music Technology Program at NYU, Agnieszka Roginska, Sound-Artist/Improviser-Composer Dafna Naphtali, composer/sound designer Isabel Diaz-Cassou, composer/musician Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols, multi-format artist extraordinaire, Phoebe Legere, composer/sound designer and audio engineer, Laura Sinnott, and composer and technologist, Michele Darling.

The educators in the room noted with enthusiasm how positive just assembling can be for female students and women in the audio technology industry, many of whom may feel isolated in classrooms and in the workforce.

“Statistics show that women make up only 27% of the technology or engineering fields, and 40% of those drop out after two years,” noted Roginska. “And these numbers haven’t changed from statistics reported 30 years ago.”

A lively discussion ensued, tracing the esteemed panelists’ histories to first sparks — when did they know they wanted to pursue careers in electronic music performance, programming, film scoring, sound design and sonic invention? What were the challenges and the career paths? How can young women be empowered and encouraged to explore technology and music production? Undergrads and pro’s in the audience chimed in. A movement was born.

The Society of Women In TeCHnology (SWITCH) is a student run club for women technology students at NYU, both graduate and undergraduate. SWITCH empowers women to succeed in technology related fields, be it academic or professional, with an emphasis on music technology and the industry and arts professions. SWITCH is made up of engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, educators and music industry professionals who strive to inspire and learn from one and other. Through SWITCH, women are given an opportunity to network, collaborate, and share ideas.

To subscribe to the SWITCH email list, please visit:
http://lists.nyu.edu/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=women-in-technology

And visit SWITCH on Facebook.

Scofield Session Launches NYU’s New Storyk-Designed Studio Complex

GREENWICH VILLAGE, MANHATTAN: NYU’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions at the Steinhardt School just cut the ribbon on a new 7,500-sq-ft recording studio and music production/educational complex. SonicScoop was there on opening day, and toured the new “James L. Dolan Music Recording Studio,” as John Scofield  & ensemble warmed up for the facility’s inaugural session.

This recording studio and research/learning center is a Walters-Storyk (WSDG) design (Electric Lady, Allaire, Jazz At Lincoln Center, etc.), made up of multiple sound-treated environments around a central control room that boasts a 10.2 surround monitoring environment.

The facility takes up the entire 6th floor of the Steinhardt building on W. 4th Street and its design allows multiple configurations — it can accommodate one massive session or several smaller projects and research activities for the Department’s Music Technology, Scoring for Film and Multimedia and Jazz Composition and Performance programs.

How’s that? Well, most rooms within the complex, including the lecture/lab rooms, have been treated for acoustics and patch into that one main control room, which also seats classes of up to 25. All told, there are six large isolated tracking rooms with variable acoustics. Plus, the studio ties to the 300-seat Frederick Loewe Theater via MADI (Multichannel Audio Digital Interface: an AES standard format that’s transmitted over thin fiber optic cable) and will likewise be able to record from NYU’s new Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal.

“We have MADI down to the [Frederick Loewe] theater, with 48 channels of digital and 32 channels of analog coming back up via fiber,” says NYU’s chief systems engineer/adjunct professor Tom Beyer.

“We’ll have MADI over at the Provincetown Playhouse as well, so we’ll be able to roll our remote case — equipped with four Millennia Media remote controlled mic pres and two SSL Alpha MADIs — down there and track 48 channels of audio from that room to our control room here.

“And on Third Avenue, we’re also re-doing a home for Jazz and Piano Studies. That’ll also have fiber, so we’ll be able to record that room from here as well. It’s great because we can work from this control room, a space we know really well, and control all the preamps from here. Just need someone on site to move the mics around!”

Providing The Academic Edge

In the control room, a 48-channel SSL Duality integrates with Pro Tools HD3 on a Mac G5, which also runs Logic, Digital Performer and Max/MSP. A Dangerous Music Monitor ST/SR and 10 Lipinski L-707 mains and L-150 subs provide a unique and cutting-edge experience in surround sound — the room can be configured for 5.1 and up to 10.2 surround monitoring.

“The 5.1 to 10.2 set up came about after a lot of brainstorming about essentially what would be the most flexible configuration,” says WSDG co-principle John Storyk. Dave Kotch, project engineer for WSDG and Masque Sound, which did the audio gear installation, notes of the Dangerous ST/SR, “Since the SSL only has 5.1 surround, we need this piece to make everything work with the Crestron control system and BSS Soundweb processors for 10.2.”

As for the Lipinski speakers, WSDG project manager Josh Morris adds, “I usually recommend a short list of speakers and the client will compare in critical listening sessions. When you don’t need to achieve urban music monitoring levels, a different universe of speaker opens up to you.”

Beyer adds, “Leszek Wojcik, the chief engineer at Carnegie Hall who teaches the “Aesthetics of Recording” class for us, hipped Paul Geluso [producer/engineer and NYU professor] and I up to these speakers; we went and heard them at AES in NYC two years ago and were really impressed. Paul subsequently bought a pair. We did some critical listening, and the Lipinski’s came out on top.”

No Opening Day Jitters

On opening day, the studio was producing a large-scale session with Scofield and ensemble in the main tracking rooms and NYU’s symphony orchestra down on the Frederick Loewe stage.

Off the control room are four tracking environments, which were set up with drums, bass and Scofield on guitar in the main tracking room, piano and horns in isolated rooms. A sliding glass-door isolates the piano room from the main tracking room (as pictured in Fig. 4).

“The live room features convex diffusion with variable acoustics on the sides,” says Storyk. “For instance, by recording piano with the door open, you’ll get a bigger, more open and live sound.”

According to Robert Rowe, vice-chair and director of music composition, Meredith Monk would be in session that night, and regular classes will start using the space in the Spring ’10 semester.

Special projects are already underway, however. Some Music Technology grad students have an interesting project they call “Birds of Prey” (fig. 4) set up in the 3D audio lab (which also doubles as one of the six isolated recording environments). The lab is a 16-channel surround sound environment, using (16) Genelec speakers and two Genelec subs set up on a reconfigurable grid, with multichannel miking, tracking and playback options.

Birds of Prey is a 3D sound experience, where the visitor interacts with the room and ambient sounds created in MaxMSP. One’s movement within the room, which is tracked by camera, triggers and amplifies different sounds, intensifying the immersive experience, which — to me — felt a bit like an underwater aviary. Cool!

AES U.S. Members Get Special Apple Savings

U.S. Audio Engineering Society (AES) members will receive special savings of up to 17% on the latest Apple products and accessories, according to a new pilot initiative AES has launched in conjunction with the Apple Association Member Purchase Program.

AES President Jim Anderson, also a producer and Professor/Chair at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School, notes, “We are exploring the possibility of expanding the program to other territories as well.”

For the time being, AES U.S. members visiting the Apple Store link at www.aes.org will find a number of exclusive options including: special member pricing on Apple and third-party products, exclusive promotions, complimentary shipping on all orders over $50, free engraving on all new iPod models, Mac customization and flexible business financing options.

“The AES is continually seeking new ways to benefit our members,” Anderson says. “When Apple approached us with an opportunity to provide special pricing on software and hardware from one of the most ubiquitous tool groups at use in contemporary audio production/post-production we immediately recognized a valuable added service.”

Go to the AES website for details on the 127th AES Convention, coming up at NYC’s Javits Convention Center Oct. 9 – 12, 2009.