The Presonus StudioLive 24.4.2

So much has happened here since my last post that I’m not sure where to begin. First, my setup has totally changed. When last we met, I was working through an Allen and Heath Zed 24 connected to two Behringer ADA8000′s and a Presonus Firestudio. Well, in the middle of a commercial project, the Firestudio up and died. Well, not exactly died. It refused to communicate with the computer, so I guess maybe it went on strike. A few emails back and forth to Presonus and the unit was on it’s way to meet it’s maker for repair. While I was happy that Presonus stood behind their gear, I still had a job to finish and no interface. Plus, I had no idea how long the repair would take.

Once again, I went back online to look for a solution. Dang, the choices have grown exponentially since I last did that. Because the Presonus Firestudio worked so well for me for so long, and since Presonus’ customer service was good to me, I figured I’d see what they had going on. I could always use a second interface for remotes. What to my wandering eyes should appear? The Presonus StudioLive! At first I thought it was just a digital board, not an interface, but I was attracted to it because it was just so cool looking. Then, as I began reading the description, it slowly dawned on me that this was (wait for it…) a digital mixer and a firewire interface rolled up in one sleek and sexy unit! Oh, the sweet temptation…

How much does it cost? Where can I get one? Are there any reviews? Ooooh, look, YouTube videos! Tape Op has a review! My ritalin-deficient brain spun in a total ADD euphoria. So many questions, so little time. Who needs sleep?

Wait-$3,200.00 for the 24 track version?! Well, that snapped me out of it. Talk about a buzzkill.

But over the next few days, during which I should have been turning out work, I began to see the StudioLive as an elegant, if expensive, solution to my problem. I mean, here I’ve cobbled together a bunch of disparate pieces of gear to do what this one unit can. I’d just learned the hard way that if one piece of this chain goes bad, I’m literally out of business. Even at it’s best, my current setup was such a tangle of snakes, insert cables, lightpipe cables and power strips that it was hard to keep track of which went where. Organization is not my strong suite. I decided to take the plunge- but I wanted to see one in person.

I began to call around. No one had one, except the Guitar Center all the way the hell down in lower Manhattan. Oh well, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. Now, I know that I totally slagged Guitar Center in my post about the Allen and Heath board, but I gotta tell you that Trevor, the sales rep I dealt with, was really on it. He knew what he was talking about and he respected me as a professional. We worked out a trade-in on a vintage Neumann U-87 and a Fender Super Reverb, which brought the price down to a much more manageable figure. I drove down to Guitar Center and left with the Presonus StudioLive.

The vintage U-87 I traded in for the StudioLive

While I wasn’t thrilled by having to part with the Neumann or the Fender (both of which I’d gotten from my Dad), I had to be honest with myself; these things were just sitting unused in a closet. I’m in business and sometimes you have to make tough decisions. I can only justify keeping gear that I use.

The StudioLive in the dark-"Ground control to Major Tom..."

When I got home, I cleared out my old setup and placed the StudioLive on my desktop. Visually, everything changed. No longer did my workspace look like a Rube Goldberg project assembled by drunks. I installed the drivers and control software and connected the Firewire cable. I turned it on and, well, let’s just say that all those lights and meters sure look pretty. Logic 9 saw the StudioLive right away. I sat down to work and something in my brain clicked. I’d read that each channel on the StudioLive has (in order of appearance) selectable phantom power, selectable firewire connection, a high-pass filter, an expander/gate, a compressor (with selectable soft and automatic settings as well as threshold, ratio, attack. release and makeup gain), a limiter, and a four band fully-parametric eq. But it’s one thing to read about it, it’s a totally different thing to use it. I mean, it really hadn’t registered with me that it had all that- on every channel.

I kept waiting to find the catch. Over the years I’ve worked with so many pieces of gear that say they have this or that, only to discover that while they do have this or that, it can only be used in a very limited fashion-if at all. But there’s no catch here. And there’s no tiny screen of multiple menus to wade through in order to, oh I don’t know, change the compression ratio. There’s no typing in of values, no trying to work virtual knobs with a rotary encoder. You grab a knob-an actual knob-and turn it until you hear what you want. Seriously, there’s no funny business here.

The only potential catch is this: you can only use the inserts in the analog realm. If you want to use them in the digital realm, you’re kinda out of luck. But I don’t really think of this as a “catch” so much as I think of it as me not really understanding how digital boards work until now. I did find a workaround, if you’re interested. The StudioLive 24.4.2 has no fewer than ten aux outs. To use a piece of outboard gear, it’s as simple as running an aux out to that gear and returning it to another track. Then you just assign the track you want processed to that aux and pull up the fader on the return track. Not only is this an effective workaround, it’s kinda cool that you can blend the processed and unprocessed tracks to taste.

But you know what? In the four months that I’ve had this thing, I’ve only done that once. The rest of the time I find myself using all of the onboard stuff. I’m not using plugins and I’m not using outboard gear. Everything goes through the board and whatever processing needs to be done, is done inside the console. It is quiet, clean and flexible and if you can’t work with that, you might need to re-think your process. Did I mention the internal effects? There’s a lot of ‘em but I find I use “natural ambience” and “church” most often. The amount of time I save routing things is pretty impressive.

Oh, one more thing: I told a legendary producer that my Dad used to work with about the StudioLive and how great I think it is. He said (and I’m quoting directly from his email-I cut and pasted his very words), “I am surprised that Presonus stuff sound(s) good. Every piece of their gear sounded bad. They are one company that does not have anybody with ears working there.”

I’m still puzzling over this, but I’m not wavering in my opinion about the board. I’ve got ears and I’m turning out much better work with this console than I was before.

Jonathan Kruk will be telling "The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow" this October in The Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, NY. I'll be providing a live score on the church's pipe organ.

This post is slightly off-topic, but I thought it was too cool not to write about. This October I’ll be accompanying storyteller Jonathan Kruk as he tells “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow” in The Old Dutch Church- the actual church named in that famous story. While Jonathan is telling the story, I’ll be providing the score on the church’s pipe organ. Awesome.

Even though the Old Dutch Church dates back to the 1685, the Organ  was installed in 1998. Nevertheless, I’m really excited about getting my hands on it. Actually, I’m excited about the whole project. Jonathan has been telling stories in the Hudson Valley since I was in high school (he hasn’t seemed to age, though).

Because the Old Dutch Church still has an active congregation, we’ll only have one afternoon of rehearsal available to us. Frankly, I’ve been a little uneasy about sitting down to a pipe organ without re-familiarizing myself with one. I’d played one or two in college, but that was twenty-plus years ago. What’s a guy to do?

I contacted St. Paul’s National Historic Site.  St. Paul’s is a very old church with a cemetery attached to it. Some of the graves date back as far as the American Revolution. The church itself was used as a field hospital during the Revolution. In fact, there are Hessian soldiers buried in the churchyard.

Every year, St. Paul’s re-enacts a Revolutionary War encampment. While not a re-enactor, I’m hired by St. Paul’s to play music from the period at the event. I also frequently present workshops on Colonial music to school groups. I briefly talked about this in my post about the Zoom H-2.

Every year, St. Paul's holds a re-enactment of a Revolutionary War Encampment

I like St. Paul’s for all of the above reasons, but my favorite things about it are the sound of the room and the pipe organ. St. Paul’s, obviously, was constructed long before the advent of sound re-enforcement. The ceiling is curved and the walls are very thick. No matter how quietly you sing or play, this design carries the sound. It’s so cool. That’s acoustics for you.

The pipe organ was built by Henry Erben in 1830. Originally the bellows were powered by a pump. The handle sticks out of the side of the organ. It took two people to play it; one to pump and one to play. Now the organ has an electric blower to power the bellows. From the bellows, the air is forced into pipes. Each key (or pedal) opens a pipe, which allows the air to flow through the pipe, causing it to sound. A pipe organ will often have groups of pipes which are controlled by stops. These control which pipes get the air. If you’ve heard the expression “pulling out all the stops” that’s a pipe organ reference.

St. Paul's National Historic Site is home to this Erben Pipe Organ, made in 1830

Yesterday was a great day for me. I got to spend the afternoon in that church playing that organ. There’s something really compelling about playing such a large acoustic instrument. You can really feel the sound waves vibrating around you. The entire building resonates. It’s not just the organ you’re playing; you’re playing the building as well.

Talk about analog!

Naturally, I brought my trusty Zoom H-2 along with me. I placed it on the edge of the choir loft and set it to record in surround. In this instance, that means that the front stereo mics and the rear stereo mics are active and recording. I turned it on and just let it run while I practiced.

When I got home, I took the card out of the zoom, put it into a reader and pulled the audio off of it. Now I had two stereo files, front and back. I ran these through my mixing console to blend them together into one stereo mix. The front, as you can imagine, gave me a drier, more accurate picture of the organ. The back gave me the room. Together, these conspired to make a really nice recording.

Once I had the mix I wanted, I ran the alt out of the board through a pair of Ampex tube pre-amps (there’ll be a separate post about those later) and then back into the computer. I loved it! Here’s a short improvisation I recorded. I hope you enjoy it.

And, hey, if you’re in Sleepy Hollow during October, come down to the Old Dutch Church and watch Jonathan and me do our thing!

Allen & Heath's Zed 24 fit all of my needs into a small package.

While it’s all well and good to use this gear I’ve inherited, it turns out there’s stuff needed to make the gear useful. Here’s my list so far:
Extra Inputs and outputs: Behringer ADA 8000 (2) Yeah, I know I talked a little about these in my post about the Urei 546, but I’m bringing them up again here since they’re the gateway into the analog realm. My plan was to have as many analog outs as my system could sustain. When I priced out extra I/O, I realized that I also needed units that my business could sustain. I had read about the Behringers in Mix magazine, when they did their article about analog summing. I got these two units in a scratch-and-dent sale (Dad would have been proud, he never paid full price for anything). They connected easily to the Presonus Firestudio through the ADAT lightpipe ports and I was off and running. From there, I routed the audio through…

..The Console:

Dad had a 12 channel console that was built by the CBS techs to do remote recording. According to Dad, this console was used to record the New York Philharmonic. When I was doing the singer/songwriter thing in the early nineties, Dad recorded demos of me and my band, using this console and a DAT machine, live to two-track. When I started going through Dad’s gear in North Carolina, that mixer was the first thing I looked for. It still had Dad’s handwriting from those demo sessions on the label strip above the faders (Jim’s VCL, Jim’s GTR etc.). As if that wasn’t compelling enough, the vintage API 550A’s in the EQ section got me pretty excited.

The thing about this console though, was that even though it was “portable”, it was still huge. This was built long before “small format” consoles were developed.  It also needed to be connected to an enormous rack that housed the preamps and the I/O section. Nothing was labeled. It seemed like the guys who built it were the same guys who used it and they didn’t feel the need to explain what did what. Also, the ginormous elephant trunk cable that went between the rack and the console seemed to have gone missing. As interested as I was (and am) in this console, it was way more than I wanted to take on at the time. I decided that I’d deal with it later. Of course, I pulled a few of the 550A’s out and brought them back north with me to put in a Lunchbox. But that’s another post.

I still really wanted to try mixing outside of the computer. It was just too easy to start clipping in Logic. If the channel itself isn’t clipping, the master bus is. I got tired of pulling back the faders or putting limiters across everything. It’s just too easy to run out of headroom. Even so, I knew I could still cook up a million excuses not to get started (“I don’t have a good mixer”, “I don’t have any outboard gear” etc.). I decided to jump in with the only mixer I had, a Mackie 1604 Classic.

I didn’t have particularly high hopes for the Mackie, mostly because of all the negative posts I’d read on message boards. The lesson? You gotta try stuff out for yourself. I was really shocked at the difference in the sound coming through that board. It’s not that it sounded so great. In fact, it sounded terrible. Well, I sounded terrible. Suddenly, I could hear mistakes that I hadn’t known were there. I could hear flubbed notes, bad timing, the chair squeaking, the train going by, leaf blowers – I suppose I should have been discouraged by this, but I was thrilled. I immediately got to work fixing it all. You’d be surprised how much those things can improve a mix. (It’s not like I didn’t know that these things shouldn’t be in a recording, it’s just that I wasn’t aware of them while mixing in the computer).

The next surprise was how much less reverb seemed to be needed. In Logic, I usually set two stereo auxes with different sized “rooms” from Logic’s presets. The first is “Wooden Room”  (a nice short reverb) and the second is “Nice Vocal Room” (a longer reverb). I set these channels at unity and ran busses from the audio tracks, adjusting the busses on each track as a mix. When mixing through the Mackie, I was sorely tempted to leave the mix dry. There just seemed to be more space in the tracks. In the end, however, I routed Logic’s reverb channels into the stereo auxes on the Mackie, adding the reverb “outside the box”. As it turned out, I only ran the vocal tracks through the reverbs (and just a little bit, at that). This also made for a much more detailed, less cluttered mix. Cool.

I suppose I could have happily mixed through the Mackie for some time, but I quickly ran up against some of its shortcomings. First thing I noticed was that the faders are really short. I found it hard to get levels exactly where I wanted them. I suppose I could have set them at unity and used Logic’s mixer to get where I wanted, but that defeated the purpose of the exercise. The second problem was that the Mackie only has six XLR inputs. That seemed like it would cause problems later on.

Well, now what? I started looking around the net for other, more “professional” boards. I looked at Soundcraft Ghosts on Ebay. They were sorely tempting, but still pretty big for my very small space and priced between $3,000 and $6,000, a bit steep for an experiment. I also saw a Soundcraft 1600 for next to nothing on both eBay and Craigslist. It turns out that the studio that was selling it was just a few towns over from me. I talked to the owner and, again, was sorely tempted. This board is way larger than the Ghost and the reason it was selling so cheaply was that “there was untraceable noise all over it”. I realized I was losing my mind and decided against it.

What I needed to do was sit down, list the features I was looking for in a console and see if such a thing existed. Here’s what I came up with:

100 mm faders: Hell yes. Dad’s console has silky smooth (and dang big) API faders on it. I wanted something like that.

XLR’s on every channel: To me, it was a connectivity issue. I got pretty tired pretty quickly of looking for ways to connect XLR outs to 1/4 or (God forbid) RCA ins and vice-versa. I’ll post more about this later.

Serviceable EQ’s on every channel: Sure, I’d just inherited a bunch of cool EQ’s, but I had (and still have) no guarantees that any of this stuff is in working condition. I just wanted to be able to shelve off a little high or low end without having to rely on potentially questionable gear. Besides, even though I’m calling this an experiment, I still have to turn out work.

A guarantee not to be DOA: Sure, it’d be cool to buy some groovy vintage console, but the likelihood that it would arrive in my studio with no issues was pretty slim.

Flexible I/O: Well, there’s really not a lot to explain here.

Affordability: As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m running a business here and I have to watch that bottom line.

More Channels: What good is having 24 analog outs if I’ve only got a 16 channel board?

Size: I’ve got a small room and not a lot of desktop space.

Is all this too much to ask? I was getting worried that such a thing didn’t exist. Tape Op Magazine had an article about Dan Garcia and the custom console that he’d built for himself. Well, that’s one way to go- but again, I could see myself getting mired in a project that I’d never finish.

What’s a guy to do?

I hit the net and started searching in earnest. It wasn’t long before I found exactly what I was looking for: the Allen and Heath Zed 24. As it’s name implies, it’s a 24 channel 4 bus analog mixer (16 mono channels, 4 stereo). It’s got 100mm faders, stereo returns, xlrs on every mono channel and (weirdly enough) a USB port. So how much does something like this set me back? I hope you’re sitting down. $699.00. No, really. I sold off a guitar and a keyboard and it was paid for.

So, where can you get one? That’s another story. I called Sam Ash. “Oh, yeah, we’ve got that.” So I went up to the store only to find that they didn’t. They completely denied telling me that they had it in stock. Whatever.

Guitar Center’s website also said that the location near me carried the Zed 24. When I got there, surprise!, it wasn’t in stock either. The pro audio sales guy had the balls to tell me, “You don’t want that.”

I admit it. I hate being told what I do and do not want. I hate being talked to like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the guy who’s actually making a living doing music. It’s my recordings that are being played on television. Don’t tell me what I want.

Even so, I kept my mouth shut and decided to see what the GC guy thought I might want. Everything he showed me had tiny little faders on it, very few XLRs and felt crummy. When he finally pulled up the Zed 24 on GC’s computer, even he was shocked by the Zed’s feature set-especially given its price range. “We can order it for you, but it’ll take a few weeks.”

Screw that. As much as I like to “shop local”, the local shops were useless. Musicians Friend had the Zed 24 in stock, free shipping with an Audio Technica dynamic mic thrown in for good measure. I got it in three days.

It was a leap of faith. I had never actually seen the Zed 24 in the flesh.

I don’t know why Allen and Heath seems to be keeping this mixer a secret. I haven’t been able to find much information about it. There are a bunch of mixers in this series in all kinds of different configurations.

With the console set up, I began mixing in earnest. The first project I worked on was a CD of the music I do at historic sites. I had made a short run of these a year earlier, mixing in the box. It had been a rush job so that I’d have product for a festival I was doing. I wasn’t exactly happy with the end result but it would do. Now, with more time, I would re-do the mixes.

Sitting at the console, playing with knobs and faders, I suddenly found myself having a suspiciously familiar experience. In my rush to get this CD done, I left a lot of takes in that I shouldn’t have. There’s no fix for that except to redo the tracks. So I did. But now, I was monitoring through the board as well. How is that different? Well, in Logic there is a setting for low latency monitoring. While it’s good, there is still some latency. I hadn’t realized how off-putting I’d found that to be. It’s an issue of focus; even though I wasn’t conscious of the latency, it was distracting enough to affect my playing. Monitoring through the Zed felt more natural. I didn’t have to adjust my timing to match the other tracks.

Once the offending takes were re-done, I got back to mixing. I was still puzzled about why mixing on a console was so different from mixing on a computer. Then it hit me. When I mix on the computer, I’m looking at two monitors. There are all kinds of things going on there; wave forms scrolling by, meters rising and falling, eq analyzers gyrating- it’s another level of distraction. My console is at a right angle to all this. The computer monitors are to my left and behind me. There’s nothing to look at. I’m just listening. Really listening. Um, duh.

So maybe there is no “analog magic”. Maybe the math works out in the digital domain. I don’t know. I don’t care. For me, just being free of those visual distractions is reason enough to work this way.

I’m not prostelytizing. I’m describing my experience. Your mileage may vary.

Back in June, my wife, our dog and I took a long drive from our home in Westchester County, New York to Lake Lure, North Carolina where my Mom still lives. The plan was to wade through the storage units where Dad kept his gear. We would catalog what was in there and take some to use up here. One of the families that I teach generously offered us their (large) pickup truck for the trip.

A family I teach loaned us their truck to make the epic journey to North Carolina and back

We started out early in the morning and, a day and a half later, we were in Lake Lure. One of my sisters came up from Atlanta to help out. Thank heavens. We opened up the storerooms and were met with this:

This was just part of the mind-boggling mess we were greeted with.

Um, holy crap. The pictures really don’t do it justice. They also don’t convey the dust and mold. The storage place was fine- cool and dry- everything you’d want to store this kind of equipment. The problem was that before the move to North Carolina, Dad had been storing this stuff in the basement and garage of the house I grew up in. The house with the garage and basement that was prone to flooding. Ugh. The gear was spread out over three storage units, stuffed to the gills.

Inside one of three storage units. This one was about halfway emptied out when this picture was taken.

I promised my Mom that between what gear I took home and consolidation, we could fit it into two units and save her some money. And that’s exactly what we did. We loaded up the truck with as much as we could fit, took some stuff to the dump and we were down to two units. The next day, we headed back to New York.

Back home, it was time to start putting some of this stuff to use. I have to admit, I had some seriously mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I was kind of excited about getting my hands on some great old analog stuff. I was looking forward to finding out what all the fuss was about. On the other hand, well, I guess that it really cemented for me the fact that Dad was actually dead and gone. I think because we lived so far apart and didn’t see each other regularly, there wasn’t a constant reminder of his absence.

I brought some pieces into my studio; a couple of eq’s, a compressor, a two-track reel to reel, and set about testing it out. As you can imagine, some of it worked, some of it didn’t. For a while, I was really focused on getting things working and on patching it all together. But then something strange and totally unexpected happened. I found myself spending less and less time in the studio. It wasn’t intentional, or at least it didn’t feel that way, but the evidence was clear; the computer was never turned on, there were cables everywhere and the whole place took on an abandoned look. It got so that I only went in to get instruments or gear that I needed for gigs. When I was done, I’d just toss the stuff back into to the room without actually going in. I kept the door shut.

Outside of the studio, I had no energy. I was tired all the time. Some days, I couldn’t get out of bed. I started to gain weight really fast. I was carrying this constant sadness. My wife was getting worried and insisted I see a doctor.

“Well, there’s good news and bad news.” the doctor said, “Your tests are all negative, so we have to look elsewhere. Are you depressed?”

“Um, I don’t think so.”

Turns out I was wrong.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of my recovery. I’ll just say that I’ve never experienced anything like this and I hope not to again. This was, without a doubt, the worst Summer I’ve ever had. I’m very grateful for modern medicine and the people who practice it.

In an effort to get back to work, I removed all of Dad’s gear from my studio. I’d had ten years of producing music without it, I could probably go longer.  For a while, I thought that I’d get rid of it. My mom offered to get someone in to remove the remaining gear in North Carolina. I briefly considered getting out of music all together. My doctors advised  me not to do anything rash.

As the depression began to lift, and I found myself back at work, I would occasionally think, “I really need a good eq for this.”. Then I’d go get one from storage and patch it in- with no ill effect. Inspired by this, I got back to planning my integrated studio. It’s more or less up and running now, but of course it’s a work in progress.

Just like this blog.

The Zoom H2 Handy Recorder and Accessories.

This is not an entry about analog gear, or even high-end gear at that. This post is about a little digital piece of gear that was my Dad’s. It’s also about changing technology.

In 2006, I bought myself a Zoom H4 Handy Recorder with the idea that I could surreptitiously record my performances and post them to my website as podcasts. I didn’t have high expectations for the quality of the device, but it seemed to me that, for this purpose, it would be more than sufficient. Up to this point, I had been using a MiniDisc recorder, which was awkward and kind of a pain to work with. The discs could only hold 74 minutes of audio and were prone to dropouts. The only way to transfer audio from the minidisc to a computer was to route the headphone output to an input on my Digi 001 and play the disc while recording in ProTools. It was time consuming and awkward. I thought, at the very least, that the H4 would speed up the process- not to mention that it would hold more audio.

Here I'm doing an Early American Music Workshop at St. Paul's National Historic Site in Mount Vernon, NY. You can't see it, but I'm using the Zoom H2 to record the workshop (it's hidden behind the guitar). Photo by Mikey Colon

The first time I used the H4 was at a school I was visiting to do a Colonial music workshop. For these jobs, I show up in Colonial clothing, with reproduction instruments. I play and interpret music from that era and a good time is had by all. I set the device up behind me (I didn’t want the kids to play with it), pressed record, and went about my business. No monitoring, no setting levels- it’s like taking a picture with your eyes closed. I’d see what I’d got later.

At home, I transferred the audio to my computer via the USB 2.0 port on the H4. It was quick and painless. I imported the audio into ProTools LE and listened. I was really impressed. It was a very accurate reproduction of the experience. It sounded like I was talking and singing in a classroom, which, I remind you, is exactly what I was doing. I could hear the students’ questions, I could hear them moving around and dropping things. I could hear, with startling clarity, the number of times I answered with, “uhh…”

That Christmas, I told Dad about the Zoom H4 and how happy I was with it. When he got back to North Carolina, he bought one of his own and began recording every concert he went to. He was sitting at the kitchen table, holding the H4, staring at it. “When I think about all the equipment I used to drag out to record…” he trailed off and finally said, “and this is better.”

He used the H4 to record concerts at UNC Asheville, prompting them to buy an H4 of their own.

When Zoom came out with the next generation Handy Recorder, the H2, Dad had to have one of his own. He ordered it before his cancer diagnosis. By the time it arrived, he was too sick to be roaming around recording concerts and told me to bring it home. I did, but I told him that I’d return it to him when he got better.

I’ve been using it ever since.

Every Spring, the choir at Temple Beth Shalom in Hastings, New York performs a concert. The program is always an interesting take on Jewish music, from modern composers to traditional music. I began recording the choir and their concerts over ten years ago. Dad helped me with the first one. We went in armed with a Sony DAT recorder, and a bunch of mics. Dad had wanted to go full-on with Neumann 87’s up front and Scheopps placed as spot mics. This would have been optimal, but the mostly amateur choir was getting uneasy with all these mics around. The choir director didn’t like the look of the mics. This was primarily a concert, after all, not a recording session. I had brought with me a pair of Crown PZMs which I set up in front of the choir, on squares of wood placed on the floor, about six feet apart. Dad was really skeptical about this setup, but the audience had no idea that there were recording mics and the choir seemed to forget as well. Once the concert was underway, Dad put on his headphones, listened intently, then turned to me and said, “Well you’re just damn lucky that worked.”

One of the Crown PZMs used in the Beth Shalom recording.

The recording turned out really well and I’ve been doing it ever since. Over time, my role with the choir shifted. It started out with me playing accordion or mandolin on one or two of the concert pieces. Before too long, I was a full-on member of the choir, singing in the tenor section and backing up soloists as an instrumentalist. The choir still needed to be recorded, though. I was uneasy about recording them without monitoring, but you gotta do what you gotta do. That’s where the H-2 comes in. It can be mounted on a mic stand, which I did. Ideally, I would have liked to have set it just behind the conductor, over her head, to pick up what she’s hearing. Instead, I set it up in about the third row. It would have to be a little to the right to keep the center aisle free. I turned it on about five minutes before the concert and hoped for the best. Here’s how it turned out: Kol Dodi , arragned by Elliot Levine.

Here's the UREI racked up and connected to a PreSonus FireStudio and two Behrninger ADA8000s.

It’s never as easy as you think it’s gonna be. I figured all I’d have to do is route the audio out of the Presonus FireStudio into the UREI 546 and then back into the FireStudio. How hard can that be? Well, I’ll tell you.

The FireStudio, being a semi-professional grade device, only has TRS outputs on it. The UREI, being a professional grade device, only has XLR connectors. I suppose the easiest way to connect them would have been to get cables with TRS on one end and XLR on the other, but that would really only work for this instance and I’ve been thinking farther ahead to when more of Dad’s gear gets in here. What I needed was a device that would increase my inputs and outputs (preferably using XLRs) without putting me in the poorhouse. This isn’t a hobby for me. It’s my business and I have to keep costs down to make a profit.

The TRS connectors are in the top right of the picture. The XLRs are below.

After casting about on the Internet, I came across an article originally published in Electronic Musician Magazine and later archived on their web site. The article, “The Sum of All Tracks” was published in 2006 and discussed their investigation into analog summing. Analog summing, for my less geeky readers, is a mixing process by which the individual audio tracks are routed out of the computer and into either an analog mixing board or a summing box . Then they are then combined and fed back into the computer. This is much like how audio tracks were mixed before computers. Individual tracks of a multitrack tape machine were routed through a mixer, mixing those tracks together and feeding the output to a two-track tape machine. This has been kind of a hot topic for the past few years. Much like the “tastes great/less filling” debate of light beer drinkers, this one doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.

Anyway, the Electronic Musician article tested three different setups. One was “in the box” (meaning that it was mixed entirely within the computer). The second was the “budget” setup involving two Behringer Ultragain Pro ADA8000s. The third was the “expensive” setup. If you want to know more about it, you can read the article. I went with “budget” and found two of the Behringer units in a scratch and dent sale. Behringer seems to have a pretty bad reputation on the message boards but, I’ve got to tell you, everything that I’ve used by them has worked well and does what it claims to do (and I’ll remind you that the subtitle of this blog is “Vintage high-end analog meets modern low-end digital”).

Once the Behringers arrived, it was a simple matter of hooking up the ADAT Lightpipe connectors from the Presonus FireStudio to the ADA800s. Suddenly, I had 16 XLR outputs and, coupled with the Presonus, 24 XLR inputs. Nice.

Here are the ADAT connections on the back of the Behringers. Note that you can choose 48k or 41k when the unit is used as a master. As a slave it's only 41k.

The next step was to take an already existing mix and run it through the UREI 546. I opened up a new Logic Pro session and imported a mix I had just worked on, the title track to my up-coming CD “Restraining Order”. I routed the output to outputs 23 and 24, happy to note that Logic recognized the Behringers without me having to lift a finger. From there, I ran XLR cables out of the Behringer and into the UREI, then out of the UREI and into the Presonus. I opened up a new stereo track in Logic and assigned it the inputs from the UREI. It was time to play.

As soon as I hit Play in Logic, something terrible happened. The song was playing, but it had this terrible digital distortion. If you’ve never heard digital distortion, consider yourself lucky. I was considering putting an audio sample in here, but that’s just cruel.

When these unexpected things come up, I’ve learned not to panic. I just shut everything down, leave the room and think. When you’re staring at a screen and hearing what sounds like TOTAL COMPUTER FREAKOUT!!!, it’s hard to be rational. It’s just time to do something else.

At some point in the day, it dawned on me that what I was hearing was indeed TOTAL COMPUTER FREAKOUT!!!, and here’s why: I was so pleased that Logic “saw” the new Behringer units that I never went in to check the settings. Duh. The Presonus’ default word clock setting is 48000.0 hz. The Behringers can only operate at 44100.0 hz. Double duh. Once I fixed this, I was good to go.

The UREI had no issues whatsoever. It was clean and quiet. I had a lot of fun just turning the dials and affecting the sound. Usually, when I’m eq-ing on the computer, I think in terms of numbers and frequency. I’m typing in figures into the input fields on the eqs, or I’m using the mouse to manipulate knobs. Working the UREI was a whole different experience. It seemed much more akin to playing an instrument. It was much less visual and much more auditory. It had to be. I mean, sure the knobs said 2 or 4 db, but there was a lot of room for movement between the steps. Same with the frequencies. I found myself doing less thinking and more, well, listening.

And isn’t that what this is about?

I’d love to tell you all how much more fabulous the track sounded after I eq’d it in the UREI, but I can’t. I don’t think it sounded worse, I just expected more from it. But then there’s that thing that Dad would have said, “It’s not the gear, it’s the guy.” And, if one views a piece of analog gear as an instrument, this was my first time out on it. I should take some of the advice I give my music students, “Relax, you’re not playing, you’re learning.”

I hope you’re learning too. If you’re curious, here’s the before and after.

UREI 546 Dual Parametric Equalizer

Normally, when I’ve finished tracking a project in Logic Pro, I bounce the mix down to a hard drive and then import that mix into Waveburner for mastering.

Waveburner Screenshot

This has worked quite well for a long time and continues to work. It’s quick and easy and sounds quite good. I like the adaptive limiter, the metering, and the EQ is pretty useful. I tend not to do a lot of EQ in the mixing or mastering stages. One of the things my Dad drilled into me early on was the importance of getting the sound you want before you record, so it’s pretty rare that I have to do any “fixing” EQs. When I think back on weekend remotes that he dragged me to as a kid, there was never any EQ involved-just some Electro-Voice RE-15′s and an Ampex 3oo in a road case.

As for mastering, Dad had told me to find a spot in the 1.5 to 2Khz range by sweeping till it “popped”. “You’ll know it when you hear it.” he said. Once the spot was found, set it with the broadest Q possible and boost at 1.5 to 2db. “Any more than that and something’s wrong. I don’t know if you can do it with a computer- you need a nice EQ.” he was quick to add. I’ve always mastered with that approach in mind, even though I’ve been using software EQ’s. I’ve never had the opportunity to work with a “nice” EQ.

Today’s the day, though. One of the first pieces that I’ve brought into my studio is a UREI 546 Dual Parametric Equalizer. I was immediately attracted to it simply because it said UREI. Everybody’s played with a UREI 1176, software or hardware. This is a solid state EQ with four sweepable bands and an adjustable Q on all bands. It also has sweepable high and low cut filters on each channel. Best of all, the Q knobs are also push/pull pots that function as bypass switches for each band. It’s nice to be able to A/B the individual bands. On the back is a switch to that allows the unit to operate as a mono eight-band EQ, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The concentric knobs on the bottom control the frequency and gain, respectively. The knobs above are responsible for bandwidth and bypass. The top knobs manage the high and low cuts.

When I first got this home, it was dirty and moldy from having been stored poorly. I cleaned it up, plugged it in and nothing happened. Nothing. No lights. No nothing. Then I looked on the back panel and noticed that there was no fuse in the fuse bay. There was also no cover on the fuse bay. I scoured eBay and other sites, but couldn’t seem to find the right fuse cover. In desperation, I took it up to my friends at Ossinning Music. They don’t deal in this kind of gear, but they’re used to me and my crazy requests (“I need to figure out how to wear a bass drum on my back and make it playable..” “I need a banjo for a job tomorrow..” etc.) Two days later, they called me. “We’ve got a fuse and a cover. It powers up, but we’ve got no way to test it.” I didn’t care. I picked it up, brought it home and racked it. Now, I’ll find out if it works.

The fuse cover is the white square. Note the CBS Records inventory badge.

This unit is not generally considered to be a “mastering” EQ. I’m not remotely bothered by this, for a number of reasons. First, I’ve been mastering with software, for crying out loud. Second, Dad was a real believer in “it’s not the gear, it’s the guy”.  When Dad started out in recording, the engineers were building their own gear. It was a real “by hook or by crook” time-before manufacturers were meeting their needs. Engineering was a skill dependent job. If you were good, you could make anything work.

Dad, as you may have guessed, was really down on computers and how easy he thought they made things. But then something funny happened. After he retired, he moved down to North Carolina, where he got friendly with the music department at UNC Asheville. Wayne Kirby, the department chair, invited Dad to come down and speak to the students. “I don’t know what I’m gonna talk to them about.” He was actually worried that he’d have nothing to say after thirty five years in the business. When I asked him how it went he said, “I was gonna break it down by each decade I worked, but we only got through the first couple of years.” He was genuinely surprised by how many questions the students had and he seemed puzzled that he’d had something to offer them. “Well,” he said, “computers or no, you still gotta know where to put the mic.”

After that, he got himself an Mbox and a Dell PC and began to talk about transferring his reel to reels. When I started going through his stuff, the Mbox was still unopened and the PC, while not in the box, had never been set up.

Allright, enough talk. I’ve got an EQ to play with. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I come from a long line of obscure musicians and performers. My grandfather was a Vaudeville song and dance man that no one has ever heard of. I have a great uncle, or some such, (also named Jim Keyes) who had a big band in North Carolina that he wrote and published music for.

My father, Larry Keyes, is perhaps the best known of us. He was a staff engineer for Columbia Records for 35 years. He worked on some of their best known albums, from working as Tape Op on Dylan’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” to garnering a Grammy Nomination for Best Engineered Classical Recording (Gustav Holst, “The Planets” Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1975) and everything in between. He was one of the Quad engineers, back when that was popular. He made Quad mixes for Santana and Leonard Bernstein (“Mass” 1971).

In August of 2007, Dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died November 23, 2007.

Throughout his career at Columbia (and later, Sony) Dad would bring home gear that was rotated out of commission. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It had been his dream to build a studio of his own to work from once he retired. He never got a chance to fulfill that dream.

Meanwhile, I had been recording on my own. I had gotten a deal with a production library in 1999 and needed a way to record. Dad said, “Whatever you do, don’t get a computer. And if you do, for God’s sake, don’t get a MacIntosh.” Naturally I got a Power Mac G4 (400 Mhz) and pre-ordered a Digi-001 (they hadn’t quite come out yet) and I was off and running. Since that time I’ve moved on to a MacPro and Logic Studio 8. I’m using a Presonus Firestudio and Event monitors. All of my mixing and mastering has been “in the box”.

Since my Dad’s death, it has been my sad duty to catalog and examine all the gear he collected over those 35 years. My initial instinct was to sell it all off to get it out of my Mom’s hair. But every time I’m around his gear, I can’t help but feel Dad’s presence. Slowly, I’ll be bringing pieces into my digital studio and integrating them. This blog will be an account of that process. I have a lot to learn and a long way to go. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

-Jim Keyes