Thompson Studios, New Multi-Room Recording Facility, Opens in SoHo

Producer/engineer/DJ Louis Benedetti has opened the brand-new, three-room Thompson Studios in a former bank building in SoHo.

This handsome commercial facility – located on Thompson Street, naturally – comprises an SSL 4000G-equipped A Room, Neve 8108-based B room, and a savvy production suite. All are tied to a substantial live room and iso booths, with access to a full kitchen and lounge. Click for the virtual 360° tour of each room in this facility, created by Cheryl Fleming and Patrick St. Clair.

Based on the equipment list and images we’ve seen, the facility seems quite equipped to accommodate full band and vocal recording sessions, writing, mixing and audio post-production.

Along with the SSL 4000G Series console – fitted with Automation and Total Recall, and recapped and restored by 81series.com – Thompson Studio A has been equipped with Pro Tools HD3, Studer 827 24-track tape machine, and Boxer T5 Main Monitors, coupled by two Genelec 1094 subs, Yamaha NS-10′s, Genelec 1031′s and Auratone Speakers. An iso booth and robust array of analog outboard gear and keyboards, synthesizers, instruments and microphones, flesh out the room for production, tracking, mixing, overdubbing, film scoring and composition.

In Studio B, the Neve 8108 (also restored by 81series.com) is complemented by a choice of DAWs – Pro Tools HD3/ Logic/ Cubase – Barefoot MM27 and NS10 monitors, and its own vocal booth. Studio C is a comfortable writing/production room equipped with Pro Tools, Logic and Final Cut Pro and ties to the main live room and both iso booths.

Benedetti had apparently been searching for a space for two years before he landed at 54 Thompson. Following the completion of an initial buildout, the Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG) provided extensive design recommendations. WSDG architect/acoustician John Storyk and project manager Joshua Morris oversaw substantial improvements that achieved complete acoustic isolation and extremely accurate sound translation throughout the complex.

Thompson Studios is a welcome addition to a neighborhood that’s historically been populated by artists but short on world-class recording/mixing options. It will be interesting to see if Benedetti proves successful in attracting a loyal clientele from NYC and beyond.

Check out some photos of the space below, by Cheryl Fleming Photography. And visit www.thompsonstudiosnyc.com, email music@thompsonstudiosnyc.com or call 212-925-4400 for more info and to book time at Thompson Studios.

 

Steinberg Releases Neve Portico 5033 EQ and 5043 Compressor Plug-Ins

The minds behind the popular Cubase and Nuendo DAWs have added more greatness to the Steinberg family – with a heaping helping of Yamaha VCM technology. First off, if the “Neve” name doesn’t ring any bells for you, you owe it to yourself to scan these next few sentences:  Rupert Neve is legendary in the world of pro audio in the fact that, among other things, he is responsible for designing and producing the world’s first mixing consoles as well as the first fully functional automated fader system.  His consoles are still widely used today, most particularly for their legendary sound consisting of one of a kind preamps, EQs and compressors.

The new 5033 EQ and 5043 compressor emulate some of Mr. Neve’s most popular pieces of outboard gear by utilizing Yamaha VCM [Virtual Circuit Modeling] technology – essentially creating “highly accurate digital copies of analog hardware”.  The new RND plug-ins are available now in VST 3, VST 2.4, and AU format (sorry, no Pro Tools!) both going for $499.99 USD.  Want to know more features and specs from the manufacturer?  Read on my fellow audio fiends…

“RND PORTICO 5043

The Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5043 is a high-end compressor that brings the legendary Neve sound to the world of digital music production. Incorporating Yamaha’s VCM technology, this plug-in exactly reproduces the analog punch, warmth and clarity of the hardware original.

FIVE PARAMETERS FOR EXCEPTIONAL SOUND
Following the hardware equivalent, the Portico 5043 houses five essential parameters: Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release and Gain. A minimalistic approach, that allows to focus purely on the sound that needs to be processed. Thanks to VCM technology, the depth and sonic character of Rupert Neve’s analog sound is directly transformed into the digital recording environment — without the need to deal with dozens of parameters to get that signature sound.

FEED-FORWARD COMPRESSION AND FEED-BACK COMPRESSION
The Portico 5043 features two working modes: Feed-Forward and Feed-Back compression. These modes provide two entirely different compression characteristics to choose from. While the Feed-Back mode is more musical and sweeter, the Feed-Forward mode works with even greater accuracy.

OPTICAL FEEDBACK
The compressor also includes two virtual LED metering displays, showing the level of the input signal as well as the amount of gain reduction. Another virtual signal LED shows whether a signal is currently processed or not.

RND PORTICO 5033

The Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5033 is a high-quality 5-band parametrical equalizer that brings the legendary Neve sound to the world of digital music production. Utilizing Yamaha’s unique VCM technology, this plug-in exactly reproduces the analog warmth and sonic finesse of its acclaimed hardware counterpart.

THREE FULL PARAMETRIC EQ BANDS WITH SUPERIOR PRECISION
The EQ includes three full parametrical bands: low-mid frequency, mid-frequency and high-mid frequency. Each band comes with adjustable filter-width, frequency selection and +/- 12 dB gain control for shaping the sound character with superior precision. Plus, one low-shelf and a high-shelf filter with frequency adjustment and +/- 12dB gain control allow to cut or boost high and low frequencies. By doing so, the VCM technology ensures that the behavior of the hardware and software model is exactly the same.

Apart from the low-shelf filter, each band also includes a virtual status LED, showing whether a signal is currently processed in the respective band or not. What’s more, the Portico 5033 provides an option to bypass all bands for quick A/B checks, and the TRIM knob allows an adjustment of +/- 12 dB for the entire audio signal.

THE DIGITAL ADVANTAGE
In the graphic EQ curve representation each band holds its own parameter point, which allows for simple and efficient manipulation of the frequency and gain values by moving the respective point with the mouse.”

Gig Alert: The Extended Piano Festival – Works for the Disklavier, Saturday, 4/2, at White Box

On Saturday, April 2nd at 8 p.m.,at White Box in SoHo, Steve Horowitz will celebrate the release of Stations of the Breath: Music for Disklavier (2010) – a disc highlighting the composer’s activities on the Yamaha Disklavier, both in solo performance/composition and in duet settings.

Live performers include Dave Eggar on cello, Elliott Sharp on guitar/bass clarinet, and a new world premier piece for Michael Evans on percussion. Read more about the creation of this unique musical work in the SonicScoop feature.

In addition to the live performances, Sharp and Horowitz have curated a body of installed works for the Disklavier to be presented for audiences to visit at their leisure during daytime hours, on April 2 and 3.  These will include pieces by composers Dan Becker, Anthony Coleman, Fred Frith, Annie Gosfield, Seth Horvitz, Dafna Natalli, Veniero Rizzardi, Frank Rothkamm, Carl Stone, Hans Tammen, and more.

Full Coordinates:

When: Live Performance Saturday April 2nd @ 8 p.m.
Gallery hours: Saturday from 12-4 p.m.; Sunday from 12-6 p.m.

Where: White Box, 329 Broome St., NYC

Tickets: $15/$10 for students/seniors and EMF members.

The installations are free of charge and open to the public.

Info: For more information on the event, please visit EMF Productions, email emfproductions@emf.org, or call (888) 749-9998.

Yamaha Disklavier grand piano provided courtesy of Yamaha Corporation of America.

More About the Artists:
Steve Horowitz’s 30-year career integrates his experiences as a bandleader with his explorations as a multi-faceted composer. Horowitz has a large catalog of music for traditional and unusual ensembles such as string quartet, woodwind quartet, orchestra, Disklavier, solo contrabass flute, and electro-acoustic chamber ensemble.  His music has been heard at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, The Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Miller Theater and The Kitchen in NYC. He frequently collaborates with other artists – joining forces with an eclectic variety of musicians such as electric guitar wizards Elliott Sharp and Henry Kaiser, saxophone greats Lenny Pickett and Ralph Carney, The Clubfoot Orchestra, Glen Spearman, acoustic bassist Tatsu Aoki, and the Balkan music ensemble Zhaba. In addition to his work in chamber and concert music, Horowitz writes music for dance, film, television, cartoons, and interactive media (video games). He wrote the score to the award winning film Super Size Me and served as music supervisor and lead composer for the television show I Bet You Will (MTV). Horowitz’s audio expertise was honored in 1996 with a Grammy award for his engineering work on the compact disc True Life Blues, the Songs of Bill Monroe, winner of the best Bluegrass album 1996, and in 2003 with a Webby for his work with Nickelodeon Digital. Steve can be found working and touring with his various projects, and has released 15 compact discs to date.

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Elliott Sharp has been a central figure in the experimental music scene in New York City for over thirty years and currently leads four ensemble projects: Carbon, Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. He has pioneered techniques of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction and has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, including Ensemble Modern, Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt, koto virtuoso Michiyo Yagi, pop singer Debbie Harry, computer artist Perry Hoberman, blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples, jazz greats Jack deJohnette and Sonny Sharrock, and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjouka from Morocco. Sharp’s work has been featured at festivals worldwide, including the 2008 New Music Stockholm festival, the 2007 Hessischer Rundfunk Klangbiennale, and the 2003 and 2006 Venice Biennales.  He has composed for video artist Nam June Paik and for filmmakers Toni Dove, Jonathan Berman, and Illppo Pohjola.  His sci-fi opera for teenage performers, About Us was commissioned by the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and premiered in July 2010.  Sharp’s work is the subject of a documentary film, Doing The Don’t by Bert Shapiro.

Avatar Opens New Studio W

HELL’S KITCHEN, MANHATTAN: Avatar Studios announced that it has opened Studio W, a new 160 sq. ft. Pro Tools/Logic writing room. Acoustically designed by renowned Avatar engineer/mixer/producer Roy Hendrickson (Avatar Studio E, Studio G), the second floor studio was launched to provide an inexpensive but functional room for songwriters/artists to work out song ideas.

Studio W gives users access to the long list of vintage analog gear available at Avatar, and is also equipped with an adjacent vocal booth to make writing, pre-production and vocal overdubs all possible.

“Technically, Studio W has everything you need to write and produce songs at a very high level,” says Tino Passante, General Manager of Avatar Studios. “Aside from the standard Pro Tools, Logic, and Digital Performer DAW’s, there is a nice array of very powerful standalone keyboard workstations from Korg, Yamaha, and Roland.

“But it turns out the strongest feature of the room is the room itself! Anyone can buy a bunch of software and an interface and get to work, but not everyone has the privilege of working in a sonically accurate acoustic environment with proper isolation and treatment. Besides providing a properly acoustically designed professional studio, we took great pains to make sure the vocal chain was of really high quality.”

With the addition of Studio W, Avatar takes advantage of its ability – increasingly unique in NYC due to it’s size and multi-floor layout — to provide clients with “all under one roof” services. “Now there’s no reason to ever leave Avatar,” Passante explains. “You can come here from the ‘idea’ stage and take it right up to mastering with Fred Kevorkian.”

– David Weiss

No Fear of the Disklavier: Steve Horowitz, Robot Pianos and “Breath”

MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: Enlisting robots to do our dirty work is nothing new. Humans have been enslaving machines in some fashion or another since about 3:00 PM on the day the wheel was invented. It’s been uphill or downhill ever since — whatever you want to call it.

Composer Steve Horowitz has pressed plenty of tools into service in his lifetime – electric basses, Internet servers, Pro Tools rigs, PDAs, MIDI keyboards, Morgan Spurlock – but perhaps none so effectively as the Yamaha Disklavier.  An increasingly precise player piano (read the full details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disklavier), the Disklavier is the medium for Horowitz’s latest eclectic offering, Stations of the Breath.

At turns engrossingly complex, subtly subtle, and harrowingly haunting, Breath is a musical journey where Horowitz – whose deep portfolio includes everything from video games to live sound-to-picture orchestrations to film soundtracks (Super-Size Me) – takes us along for an astounding ride.

It would have been easy for him to simply program the Disklavier to perform the impossible over the course of its five tracks. Instead, Horowitz used its highly refined playback capabilities and natural acoustic properties to make his advanced musical visions possible. There’s a big difference.

“The Disklavier really transformed my way of thinking,” says Horowitz in the midtown Yamaha showroom, surrounded by baby grand, grand, and upright versions of the mechanical piano. “At first you start to ask the basic question, ‘Why not have a person play it?’ But after a while of working with it, it’s not about that at all. For me, really it was about using the Disklavier as a compositional and performance tool.

“It changed my way of thinking about writing, because I had previously only written chamber music with a pencil and paper. Now I’m writing this stuff with a laptop, lying on the sofa. I found it to be an immediate, engaging process. It wasn’t about, ‘It can do what no human can do.’ It was about helping me to get to a perfect, or wonderful performance of pieces that, as a pianist I would never be able to do. And the difference between physically in the space and hearing it come from a weighted keyboard, as opposed to hearing my composition come out of a pair of speakers, is profoundly different.”

Happily given access to a Disklavier in a family vacation home in Connecticut, Horowitz took advantage of the country solitude whenever possible to refine his Disklavier composing techniques and build Breath. Working on a Mac Pro notebook running Pro Tools LE, connected to an Mbox 2, Horowitz created pieces such haunting pieces as “Connecticut Nocturne, Moon Over Mudge Pond”, “Like Powder to the Light”, “The Ceremony of Souls” (featuring FLUX Quartet’s Dave Eggar on cello) and the contemplative closer “The Ghost of Juniper Ledge” (with contrabass flutist Ned McGowan).

Unabashedly focused on every other artist’s favorite theme – death – Breath (named for a Dylan Thomas poem), alternately plays with huge vats of space and daring darts of precision speed runs. You may have accepted that there’s only so much that the piano can do. Breath reminds us that humans influenced by artistic robots influenced by curious humans can give us something more.

“There’s a lot of studio manipulation going on, but it’s not to show off the technology itself – it’s just a way to construct gorgeous pieces,” Horowitz reiterates. “The ability to write what would be called ‘Western Classical Music’ has evolved in a lot of interesting ways, and if you can shed the baggage, what is that evolution? It should be this: A human doesn’t have to play it – which is baggage that a lot of people can’t shed. You find yourself in this middle ground. It’s a very subtle interaction between the digital and analog world which takes place, and in between is your composer brain.”

Recording a player piano should be a piece of cake, right? After all, a uniform performance is guaranteed. But getting Breath down to hard disk wasn’t easy. Afforded access to the Yamaha showroom in midtown for recording, Horowitz knew he would have to contend with potential noise from the street five floors down. To make matters tougher, the anticipated 9’ grand wasn’t functioning the day of the recording, forcing Horowitz and engineer Scott Hirsch to switch to a seven footer. Jackhammers sounding out from a new 5th Avenue construction project were a nice, stressful touch that morning.

Fortunately, Horowitz had come prepared with a pair of AKG C-1000 condenser microphones in case close-miking for recording into the portable Pro Tools rig was warranted. Although getting in very close to the piano hammers is not the traditional method, in this case it proved to be essential. “We were going to put big mics out and get the little details from the close ones, but it became the opposite,” he explains. “The C-1000’s sound good on anything. They’re super-directional, and I would have been super-lost without them. I had to ride the mixes, and it was a challenge, but at the end of the day the recording sounds fantastic.

“Everyone at Yamaha was amazing (click here for a sidebar Q&A on the Disklavier with James Steeber, Director at Yamaha Artist Services, Inc.). They gave us the space, technical support, and made sure all the pianos are tuned. They also have a pretty neat workshop going on: If composers are calling up and want to write for Disklavier, they can get time here.”

For  anyone wondering how much inspiration is left in the piano, Steve Horowitz has the answer: huge gobs of the stuff. “I know absolutely for a fact that it showed me a side to my music – writing and producing it – that’s really compelling,” he says. “At the same time, it allows the composer to be totally isolated. I like working with other people, but for this disc, I didn’t want anyone else around. This was a totally inward journey, because when you’re working with robotics you can have complete control of the instrument. It’s the canvas, you, and the paint. And that’s it.” – David Weiss

You can find “Breath” and the full breadth of Steve Horowitz at www.thecodeinternational.com. 

SIDEBAR: JAMES M. STEEBER, Director of Artist Services, Yamaha

Five questions for Mr. Steeber, Director of Artist Services, Yamaha:

Q: The Yamaha showroom seems like more than just a showroom for pianos. How would you describe the full scope of the facility’s purpose? How is that continuing to evolve?
A: Since we opened it in 2004, it has gone from a relatively static piano showroom to becoming a living performing arts center. For instance, today there was an artist photo shoot. Yesterday there were extensive piano rehearsals. The other day we hosted a daytime recital. Artists expect us to be there for them. The facility will continue to evolve around new products but will hone in — more and more — on what is meaningful. In our first years we hosted hundreds of concerts, not all of them serving our needs. It was fun, though.

Q: What do you feel the Disklavier represents in the family of musical instruments? Is this just a high-tech player piano, or something more?
A: It’s really a reproducing piano and is, hence, an open palette for artists to use in rehearsal, learning, and collaboration. It can even tweak one’s excitement for music itself.

Q: Has there been an uptick in the number of compositions made just for Disklavier? What’s the difference in composing for/with Disklavier than with a standard piano or other instruments, and why?
A: Yes, of course — if you build it, they will compose. With all the data handling Disklavier can muster, it’s really unlimited in what it can do. For a regular piano, you tend to think of hands (two, three, four) and feet. With Disklavier you think of notes and values – again, more like sculpting or painting.

Q: What particular niche of Disklavier performance/recording do you feel like Steve Horowitz’s new album represents? I asked Steve if he felt this was an evolution of the craft in some way, and he didn’t feel qualified to say. Perhaps you have an opinion on this?
A: I think it fits the evolution of the piano itself.  Obviously, Mozart couldn’t have composed the “Appasionata” in his time, as the piano he had was too limited. By that same token, Beethoven could not have conceived “Gaspard de la Nuit,” by the fact that his instrument lacked the tonal variety — and range — to encourage such orchestral sounds. Steve is using available resources to inspire him to test those resources. It definitely relates to the general evolution of the composer’s craft — along a grand tradition.

Q: Well put! Anything else you’d add here?
A: Disklavier is the principal reason I came to Yamaha. It was a miracle, if you will, that a company in modern times put so much passion behind a real leap in an area which is still yet specialized, all separate from the value of the simpler Disklaviers made for home use. Yamaha is to be eternally congratulated and recognized for making the Disklavier Pro and inspiring so much musical creation and even musical restoration. – David Weiss