“I didn’t know any recording engineers,” says Susan Rogers, when asked what inspired her to get started in the audio technology business.

“And the ones that I saw were all male,” she continues. “I probably read the name of a woman or two like Leanne Jones and Peggy McCreary on the back of records eventually. You wouldn’t see them very often and it just didn’t seem very likely for someone like me who came from a lower middle class, working class background [could become an engineer]. I didn’t know any musicians and I didn’t know anyone in the industry.”

Against all odds, Rogers, a music fan and recording technology enthusiast “studied like a fiend” on her own by night and secured a job at Audio Industries Corporation in Los Angeles where she trained as a maintenance tech by day.

“They were right across the street from A&M Records and just south of Sunset Boulevard, so right in the middle of Hollywood,” she recalls. “They sold and serviced the top audio equipment. The most popular brand was the MCI console and tape machine.”

In 1980 she was hired to work at David Crosby and Graham Nash’s Rudy Records, where she stayed until 1983, the year Prince told his management that he wanted to recruit a new technician from either New York or LA.

After a successful interview, Rogers was on her way to Minnesota to be Prince’s staff engineer, a position she held until 1988, before going on to work with the likes of the Jackson family and Talking Heads’ David Byrne.

Rogers is now a Professor in Music Production and Engineering at the Berklee college of Music as well as the director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory. She holds a doctorate in psychology from McGill University, where she studied music cognition and psychoacoustics.

Here, Rogers recalls what it was like working with Prince on some of the most iconic tracks of the ‘80s…

You started out as a technician and not an engineer. Could you tell us about that?

I overheard someone say that becoming a maintenance tech is a sure way to always have a job and that was what I wanted. I wanted in and I wanted to stay in so I started investigating what it entails and then I saw an ad in the back of the LA Times that said, ‘Audio Trainee Wanted’. That just couldn’t have been more perfect. This company, Audio Industries Corporation, had no more than a dozen people, but there were three or four technicians in the big tech shop there who installed this equipment in recording studios and repaired it. They took me under their wing. I learned from them during the day and I studied electronics, studio installation and recording techniques.

After Audio Industries, you went to work with David Crosby and Graham Nash in Hollywood…

They had a studio and I was going there frequently because their equipment would break, like equipment does. They were right up the street, on Sunset Boulevard in a place called Crossroads of the World and the studio was called Rudy Records. It was actually called Rudy records because Rudy was a dog that had belonged to David back when they had all lived in the San Francisco Bay area. Graham and David bought this studio and I think Steven [Stills] maybe had a piece of it as well. It was this one room in the heart of Hollywood. Beautiful location. They invited me to leave my job and become their regular full-time technician, taking care of their equipment and keeping it running. That was the next step as a professional, because that allowed me to be on sessions occasionally as an assistant engineer.

Did they have an MCI console in there and what other equipment were you using?

They had the big JH- 500, which was MCI’s top of the line model. They had the JH 24 tape machine, which is like if you’re thinking of cars as an analogy, it’s kind of like a Ford or a Chevy. Not a bad machine, but not a BMW or a Lexus. The monitors were custom designed by George Augspurger who did a lot of work in Los Angeles. It was a one room studio, but it was a large one and we had a lot of folks from the West Coast crew come through and that would include Bonnie Raitt and members of the Eagles and folks like Art Garfunkel and Jackson Brown.

How long were you there for?

They hired me in around 1980 and I left in the summer of 1983, when I went to work for Prince.

How did you end up working with him?

It was my lucky day. John Sicetti , an old boyfriend who was chief tech at West Lake Audio heard from his boss, Glen Phoenix that Prince needed a technician. He was just coming off the 1999 tour. I believe the movie Purple Rain had received the green light so he had a lot of work to do. He was going to be making a film, he was going to be making this soundtrack album. He was going to make this big move onto the world stage. The technician that he had working for him at the time was a local Minnesota guy who had not had the experience of working at a professional level where the turnover is really fast and the pressure is really great. Prince told his management to get someone from New York or LA.

The management went to West Lake Audio and said, Who do you know Glen? Glen went to his technicians and said, Guys, anybody want this job? Nobody wanted to work for Prince at that time because he was considered kind of a freak and it was Minnesota. They didn’t want to leave their Hollywood jobs. Right away John said, That’s Sue’s job, that’s my girlfriend! He had this Boston accent. It’s Sue’s perfect job! So he called me, he and I had gone our separate ways but he called me and said, Sue the dream job is waiting for you. Prince is looking for a tech. That was the moment that changed my life.

I called Glen and said, Glen, that’s my dream, he’s my favourite artist in the world, how do I get this job? Glen and I had a conversation, he asked me questions about the technology. Glen and I knew each other. He knew that I knew this stuff. I could handle it. Even all by myself out there with no support industry in Minneapolis, if it broke down in the middle of the night, I could fix it. Prince’s management interviewed me and we agreed on a salary. They leased a car for me. I packed up my stuff and off I went.

Were you the only full time member of recording staff working with him at that time?

Yes I was. At that time this was before Paisley Park was built. He had folks who were on retainer to work with him on tour that included Rob Colby who’s now a famous front of house engineer and the great LeRoy Bennett who did his lighting. Those folks were on retainer because they worked for other artists. I was the only one who handled the studio equipment and Rich ‘Hawk Eye’ Hendrickson handled the stage equipment. He set up and tore down and maintained the stage equipment so that Prince could constantly be rehearsing. He handled things like guitar amps and stuff and I handled the recording studio duties. When Prince brought me in, his home studio was in a small bedroom in his house where he lived and he had some of the Purple Rain album already recorded. I came in and helped him finish the remaining tracks. It was a functioning studio. It was a decent studio but it was very small, you couldn’t do much there. It was a one room control room, so you couldn’t record drums or a whole band . When Prince was working on songs like Darling Nikki that were machine driven, he was playing all that himself. He can do that at home and he did. He recorded that from home but anything bigger, we needed to be out in Los Angeles at Sunset Sound. So when we worked at Sunset Sound in LA, Prince liked working with me, and Peggy McCreary. Peggy was a staff engineer at Sunset Sound. Later on, David Leonard also came to work at Sunset Sound and Prince liked having David around too. David and Peggy eventually got married so Peggy is credited as Peggy McCreary on some of those records and Peggy Leonard on some others. When we went out on tour, a British engineer named David Tickle was Prince’s FOH mixer for Purple Rain and he is credited with coming into the studio and doing some work with us on the Purple Rain record.

Do you remember the first session you worked on?

Yeah, the first tape he had me put up was Darling Nikki. I had just gone to work with him, I had been with him for about a week and I had been doing tech work because his studio was in disarray and he needed a lot of things repaired. I did this tech work for about a week while he was upstairs. I could hear him taking meetings and doing choreography, I could hear him playing the piano, which was right above my head. Playing Purple Rain and The Beautiful Ones and Computer Blue. He was aching to get back into the studio but I had to install the console, repair the tape machine. It was a lot of work to do. I was all by myself. I worked day and night and got that done.

The first tape he had me put up was Darling Nikki. He said, Get a rough mix and then he left the room. I’ll never forget that moment of pushing up those faders and going, Oh my god. I can’t believe this. He had these big West Lake monitors in the wall there, five, six foot away, and under my finger tips in my control is Darling Nikki. It was a blast out of the speakers and I couldn’t believe it. Being a professional listener, I had this experience of thinking, Oh my god, what’s it going to be like when fans hear this? This is amazing. You’re doing that thing where you’re looking around like, Is anybody else hearing this? Can you believe this? This is going to be great! The first recording he had me do was for Jill Jones and that was on this song called Mia Bocca. He had me put up a vocal mic because Jill was coming to do a vocal so again pushing the tape and getting a signal ready to do a vocal. That was the moment I realised he expects me to do the engineering as well as the tech work and it was frightening, this wonderful revelation.

Do you think that when they were bringing a tech in initially, that he had it in his mind to bring someone in who can do both, fix everything as well as be an engineer?

Certainly. He just didn’t realise there was a distinction between those two jobs and why should he? He assumed if you were technical and knew the equipment and you could repair it that you could do the job of rerouting the signal. I don’t think he necessarily regarded engineering as an art so much as a skill set. He knew the surface level of the console like people can easily do. It’s easy to twist the EQ knobs to shape the signal. It’s easy to push up the fader to change the gain. It’s easy to turn the pan pot left or right but he didn’t know signal routing on a deeper level. He didn’t fully understand the patch bay, he didn’t set things up from the get go, he needed an engineer to route everything for him to do that technical work. He needed someone to be his hands in that sense because his hands were busy with musical instruments and his thinking was focused on the musical aspect of it. He needed someone else to help him out with the sonic aspect.

Did his studio skills improve over the years or was that not something he was interested in?

It’s not something he was interested in. He reached the stopping point and beyond that, he didn’t want to go. He just wasn’t interested. I can see that today when I see my students working with Pro Tools. They have no interest in it because they don’t need to know the visual audio shortcuts, they don’t work with it any more. I recognise that you reach a point and it’s like, I don’t really care to know. I’ve got people who will do that for me. I remember one time in the studio he asked me how to make a razor blade edit. He was really cautious about that. As soon as I showed him, he picked up the blade and he said, No, you do it. Maybe he didn’t want to risk cutting his fingers, you don’t cut your fingers when editing. The point of the blade is nowhere near the tip of your fingers. He didn’t want to know.

He must have had a lot of respect for what you did then?

It’s hard to tell if he had respect because he wouldn’t compliment us directly, including his musicians. He was not very forthcoming with compliments but there were a few times, if he wanted you to know he approved of you, he would tell someone else that you were doing a good job. He’d usually tell them in earshot of you. He might say [to someone in the studio], Susan gets me, she knows what I’m all about, or he’d say, The only one with any energy around here is Susan. I’ve got a couple of birthday cards that he signed for me with half compliments. That’s who he was. If he approved of you, you kept your job. As long as you had your job that meant you were good in his eyes.

What was happening at that point in terms of the technology you were using and the studio?

There were advancements that were not helping me because he wouldn’t use them. Things like automation, console automation. We could’ve recorded mixes if we used automation but he wouldn’t use anything that was slow so that was just for him, we mixed by hand. Another advancement was the popularity of the SSL console. Solid State Logic had built-in compressors and limiters and noise gates on every channel strip, that would have helped us immensely. But he didn’t want to move off of the ATI console that he was fond of at the time when I was with him. Eventually an SSL went into Paisley Park, but when I was with him we were using old fashioned stuff. Another advance was this tendency to lock two tape machines together to synchronise them so you had 48 tracks, not 24. I asked Prince about that once but he just shook his head, he wouldn’t have anything to do with it because it was too slow. The great thing about that for him was that if you’re limited to 24 tracks, it means that your arrangement must be constrained by 24 tracks so while other people were piling up their mixes and arrangements and getting these big walls of sound. Prince knew if he couldn’t make a concise musical statement with 24 tracks, he’d have to go back in and rethink the track. It really makes your arrangements very efficient. Fewer instruments have to carry more and say more.

He was a bit of a control freak then?

Yeah, he really was. He said to us once, The only asshole around here is me. And he was. It was 100% true. He was 100% in charge of every aspect of his business, not control for the sake of control. He needed control for the sake of efficiency. He wasn’t one of those personalities that wanted to be a ruler or a tycoon. That was not Prince. He was not a lordly type. He was a working man. He had a strong work ethic. He could do more work in a month than people did in a year. He really, by order of magnitude, worked more than others so he needed a level of efficiency to allow him to keep up that pace. In that sense he controlled us so the machine would run efficiently, so it wouldn’t break down.

Have you seen anyone else like that in the studio?

No. You see fragments of that. You might think of a young Mick Jagger who was on fire, great songwriter, great vocalist but you’re not going to see him give you that performance on guitar or piano but another musician would. Imagine Keith Richards and Mick Jagger rolled into one, now we’re getting close. You might see people who have abilities on many instruments and can also sing and write but they don’t achieve mastery to the degree that Prince does. They don’t write as well, they don’t play as well, they don’t sing as well. The phenomenon of Prince was the number of things he was world class great at and where he set that bar. As a guitar player he could compete with any of them, as a piano player with any of them, as a vocalist with any of them, as a writer, with any of them. He was the best at many different disciplines and that’s extraordinary.

You must have had a lot of offers to work in other studios after those first few records but why did you decide to leave and why didn’t you continue working with him?

We had reached our breaking point. We reached critical mass, the times changed. Paisley Park had finally opened its door and there are several studios at Paisley so for the first time there needed to be a staff of engineers, not just me working for him in Minnesota so we had Sal Greco as our chief tech on the Purple Rain tour. Sal was a far better technician than I. Sal took over the tech duties while I took the engineering duties, but now at Paisley Park we could have more people, new people and the operation was growing. I had reached a breaking point where I couldn’t take it much longer.

I had no personal life, going on five years and we hit an impasse one night late in my tenure with Prince when he tried to reach me one night in Los Angeles and I was on a date. I had met a guy, another technician and this was one night in years where Prince couldn’t reach me and he was furious about that. So the next morning he called me into a private room, a vocal booth on the Hollywood sound stage where we were working at the time and he and went toe-to-toe in this tiny booth and he was livid. I realised, you know what, there need to be nights where you can’t find me. We realised we couldn’t carry on this way. I needed a life and he needed someone on call 24/7 and I couldn’t do it anymore. That was our mutual breaking point where we decided we better go our separate ways.

What were the next studios you worked in and projects you were working on?

I was really at a loss. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I didn’t know if anyone would hire me. The only engineering I had done for all intents and purposes had been with Prince, so I didn’t know if anybody would want his sound. Why would they? We were working in an old fashioned way and for another thing, he had a unique sound. He liked a certain brightness in the upper mids and it was a sound that wasn’t necessarily the best, so I didn’t know if anyone would hire me. Much to my surprise, the first artist that did was Jesse Johnson. I worked for Jesse Johnson at the time in Minneapolis but the first one outside of Minneapolis who hired me was the Jacksons, so I went to work for the Jacksons out in Los Angeles. I stayed at their house in the family compound on Havenhurst Boulevard. This was while Michael was building Neverland Ranch. Michael was on tour and I worked with the Jacksons on the album 2300 Jackson Street. I stayed at their house for a few months and it was a very strange comparison comparing Prince with the Jacksons and sharing stories and learning how the Jackson family, Michael in particular but the others as well reached the same pinnacle that Prince did at the top of the pop and R&B charts. Two very different paths.

Prince was so homegrown and they were the product of an industry, they were the product of Berry Gordy and Motown. An industry with session musicians and mentors like The Supremes and Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. Prince got to that point by himself, with a motley crew let’s say of these handpicked young individuals who had no experience whatsoever in that sort of thing. They were good people and I enjoyed my time with them. After that I got a manager and I stayed in Los Angeles. I worked on a lot of alternative records as an engineer and a mixer, alternative indie records and eventually started producing and had a hit with Barenaked Ladies in 1998.

At what point did you decide to do your PhD and teach?

I didn’t know what I wanted to teach. I wanted to become a cognitive ethologist and I hoped to investigate consciousness in non-human animals. I was and still am keenly interested in the nature of consciousness and the nature of intelligence and neural systems. How our neural activity gives rise to thinking, can give rise to original thought of decision making or attention or categorisation. I’m very interested in that but because my career as a scientist was going to be extremely short, I didn’t earn my PhD until I was 52. Because it was going to be short, it made much better sense I was told to enter the field of music cognition, music perception and contribute what I know of music making and human interaction; what I know on a practical level on the scientific conversation on music interaction. That’s what I did and that fortunately led to my working at Berklee.

Berklee is the only place in the world where I can be around 5,000 young musicians. I can teach record production which I do, analogue tape recording which I really love but I also teach psychoacoustics and teach music cognition so I get to teach in the sciences and also in the technology and the art of record making. That’s a fun conversation to have, both those perspectives.

Do you miss working in a studio full time?

I miss it greatly. I love record making. I really love record making. It’s hard as hell, when you’re doing it at the highest level, just like you can love basketball or baseball or football or something, you can really love the game, be a student to the game and love getting up on weekends and playing it. But there’s a big difference between doing that as an amateur and doing it professionally. Doing it professionally adds another layer to the task and to the concerns. How do you make money? How are you competitive? How do you win the game? I love it now at an amateur level. I’m glad I’m not doing it for a living. I like being a scientist. I like being a professor and I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I love preparing young people to enter the field, to pursue this competitively. If I had the bandwidth to make records for the fun of it, I would enjoy doing that because man it really is fun. It’s fun until the heat gets really hot in a professional competitive environment and that is much tougher.

How does it feel now to have work done on records like Purple Rain? It must be a really weird thing to look back on and have been involved in because of that legacy.

Yeah. I’ll never be able to evaluate them truly objectively. There are memories and emotions associated with that. All the work we did in there was just like so much work we did in that time. All of that, the sounds of those tracks are filtered through a body that was deprived of sleep. A body that was working on all cylinders just to ensure that the next song would get recorded.

We would stay up for 24 hours recording a song and this happened frequently, he would go, Fresh tape! You’d have to bring up a reel and start all over again. It might be 6 o’clock in the morning let’s say and you started at 10am the day before, you’ve worked for 20 hours on your feet. Intense work, creating a song, getting it mixed, getting it finished, getting the tape box labelled. You’re ready to get a few hours of sleep before you start again and he’d say, Fresh tape which meant you’d start a new reel and just go right in and start all over again and you might work for another 20 hours before you get a shower and some sleep.

So all of that music is filtered through this distorted filter of pride and joy and love and excitement and exhaustion and hope and that ringing bell of what the hell just happened? That’s an organism that’s under a degree of stress. When I listen to those things now it arouses some of those feelings, a trace of them. It’s really hard to hear Prince’s music from that period the way I would have heard it as a fan, which is why I feel it’s important for me and his musicians and everyone who knew him and worked with him, for us to talk about it.

I think it’s important for us because it makes a good contribution when we can help paint a picture for people for what it was like to be next to that guy when he was going from instrument to instrument, watching these songs take shape at light speed compared to other people. Most people would take a week or two weeks to craft a single, he’d take a day, 24 hours. It was amazing and he would do it over and over again. That’s the long-winded answer.

The short-winded answer is, I always feel pride, quite a bit of love and I feel an obligation to talk about him and make sure he’s not forgotten.

The post In the studio with Prince: Susan Rogers on recording: “He was not a lordly type. He was a working man. He had a strong work ethic” appeared first on Audio Media International.

As Wakefield’s Tileyard North approaches completion, the team are keen to warmly receive creative businesses, entice talent with TYX, and establish the heart of a fresh and collaborative community.

Since the very inception of Tileyard, a vision of a tightly-knit community where work, networking and socialising are blurred, has been a fundamental aim. “Our focus is on building a community. And, it’s the curation that creates the community.” Nick Keynes explained to us recently, “If someone wants to take up space at Tileyard the most pressing concerns for us are ‘who are you?, what do you do? And what will you bring to our community? That’s far more important than the rent that you’re paying. We want to know what value our tenants can bring beyond paying for the space.”

The type of tenant curation marks the Tileyard team out as being more than just your usual property managers. Actively seeking out the *right* people to make a difference to the personality and inter-connected ethos of Tileyard, is more akin to recruitment than simply space-filling. This attitude is just as intrinsic to the populating of Tileyard North. The first member of Tileyard North’s Community building team, Katie Hopkins, explains to us how her new role is fixed on building relationships with the surrounding creative community, sparking conversations with possible collaborators and residents. “Engaging with creatives in the North and establishing key connections here in Wakefield, I look after our enquiries and get to know the artists, innovators and business leaders that are interested in calling Tileyard North home.” Katie explains, “I support and pitch ideas for campaign delivery, meaning my role spans social media management, design, and copywriting too – being involved in most aspects of communication as we gear up for our opening later this year.”

Beyond the rental of office space, additional elements of Tileyard such as Tileyard Education (explored in depth in our last instalment) and the TYX studio membership offer the means for a far wider range of talented people to get involved in the Tileyard community with the latter providing 24/7 access to the new studio facilities, almost like a gym.

A HOME FOR TALENT

While Tileyard North’s studios are nearing finalisation, down at the original Tileyard site in Kings Cross, a bespoke TYX facility is partly up and running, with several other spaces nearing completion. Many of its seven music production studios being harnessed by its pool of creatives. “We started building [TYX London] at the end of 2020” explains Jack Freegard, TYX’s Managing Director. “We opened around three months ago. Initially building began without any real idea of what it was we were building, until TYX kind of got superimposed into what it has now become.”

Jack tells us that the London TYX spaces serve as a test site – a proof of concept – for a model that will be next rolled out in Wakefield, and beyond… “We’re trying out different ideas, different types of rooms. We’ve got a room which we’re calling ‘the influencer suite’. It’s a content space really. You can do live-streaming, gaming, product demonstrations, interviews or podcasts. It’s a multi-use space. We’ve got a modular, multi-use desk, Black Magic Pro 4K cameras and Aperture lighting, so it’s all fully equipped for 4K live-streaming and recording. It’s all set up in a very easy-to-use way.” Also available are conventional flexi-desks and workspaces.

TYX is intended to be accessible to all, and welcoming to those who aren’t particularly technically minded. “The studios and spaces are as simple as can be. The production studios are set-up so it’s just one USB cable into your computer.” That being said, the studios are still kitted out with some choice gear, spanning Neumann KH310 monitors and TLM 103 microphones, Prism Lyra 2 interfaces, a dense microphone locker full of classic condensers, and a synth trove stocked with the likes of the Moog Grandmother, Arturia’s Polybrute and much more.

The flagship space of TYX’s London complex is undoubtedly the Atmos suite, which will soon be mirrored at Tileyard North. “Tileyard North will have an Atmos room too. In the TYX London Atmos room we’re now doing Atmos referencing for labels and record playbacks. Apple have been coming in here doing playback sessions for TV series and things like that. A lot of the time it’s the people who might be mixing at home using headphones but they’re coming here to get a proper Atmos reference and to finish it off.” Says Jack.

A BIG DRAW

Even more than the original site, the Tileyard North team have gone the extra mile when it comes to establishing a vision of how Wakefield’s new creative hub will embrace businesses. “From a communications perspective, it’s been valuable to develop strategies and material aligning the Tileyard London voice with the personality of Wakefield and the site itself.” Katie tells us. Before revealing that interest in the yet-to-be-completed site is rising daily. “We have had a huge amount of interest in space at Tileyard North, whether that be our creative office spaces or music studios, and we have even been inundated with event enquiries as we look forward to hosting live experiences in our event spaces on site. As we continue to announce more residents joining the community, I can only imagine the pull the hub will have for other businesses, freelancers, artists, and musicians here in the North.” Katie says.

Beyond the offices, workspaces and TYX studios, the draw of bigger industry events will also be pivotal. “We’ll be doing large scale concerts, award shows, food courts and things like that.” Jack Freegard explains. “We don’t want Wakefield to think that this is a London company that has come up to the North and is imposing itself on the community, we want to embrace the community. It needs to be owned by the community and that’s very much ingrained into our hiring policy. Further community managers will be from within that community, managing the growth of our creative spark that already exists in the north of England.”

This is confirmed by Katie. As first of the locally-recruited community managers, she has already been heavily invested in Wakefield’s creative scene for years. She tell us of the strength of the city’s talent, and how their already-collaborative spirit will slot in well with Tileyard North; “We realise that there really is a force here in Wakefield for music and the arts, and a passion and love of support for one another. We hope Tileyard North will bring these like-minded people together, inspiring meaningful conversations and creating cross-industry connections with our residents. Of course, we’re aiming to facilitate collaboration between our residents at Tileyard London and the future residents at Tileyard North, closing the gap between the North and the South.”

A NEW DAWN

While the Rutland Mills site itself is still requiring some further development before it can open completely, the day that Tileyard North’s phased opening can get underway is drawing closer. With all eyes on the first Education cohort beginning their studies in late 2023, prior to that, a series of events and previews will undoubtedly pique the interest of the northern creative sector. “Connections are hugely important. When you’re approximated together you get happy accidents.” said Nick Keynes, “[At Tileyard] you’re constantly bumping into people everyday and you can ask them what they do – forging connections that will likely come in useful. They’re beyond meaningful. What Tileyard is fundamentally about is talent incubation and we want to create an environment where talent can thrive.”

We’ll re-visit Tileyard North once the site gets up and running, but for now, we suspect that, this creative hub, built on the interconnected ideas and enterprise of businesses, students, artists and producers will give the North’s talent a space to grow.

READ MORE

Inside Tileyard North: Part One –Waking the Mill

Inside Tileyard North: Part Two – The Education Eco-System

The post Inside Tileyard North: Part Three – Community Curation appeared first on Audio Media International.

The first phase of Tileyard North’s launch will be spearheaded by Tileyard Education. Built on the sturdy foundations established at the original site, TYE’s industry-oriented postgraduate courses will allow students to get hands-on experience inside the thriving and ever-growing Tileyard eco-system…

While at first glance, some might incorrectly perceive the new Tileyard North site as merely a stable of swanky office spaces and studios, the integration of Tileyard Education makes Wakefield’s new creative industries hub a far more welcoming and connected space. Those looking to get a foothold within the music industry are able to study side-by-side with the very labels, producers and management companies that they aim to one day work for.

Bringing Tileyard Education – already a massive part of the original site’s landscape – into Tileyard North has been carefully overseen by the Head of Tileyard Education, Harry Leckstein. Education will have its own designated building (now nearing the final stages of completion), as well as access to the raft of studios that will be part of the TYX membership. We asked Harry what those initial courses were likely to encompass “We’ll mirror our ‘hero’ courses at North” Harry explains, “Commercial Songwriting, Music Production and I’m thinking Music Business. We are also in the process of validating a new program in cert 18 bracket that will equip students with the skills they need to manage the back end of stuff, which is the glue that holds these businesses together.”

STAFF ROOM

Though being part of a bustling community is enough to set Tileyard Education apart from many of its more isolated rivals, Harry details to us that this ‘plugged-in’ philosophy extends to within the classroom itself. With three core USPs; “The first USP is that you’re taught by professionals as opposed to professional teachers (not to disparage professional teachers at all!) but the people who are pro at what they do that come in and lift the lid on their processes. We have producers and engineers for people like Mark Ronson and Noel Gallagher, and we take apart tracks using a DAW. So students can see all the intricacies of how they got a certain sound, and how a commercially released song was put together, by the people who did it. That’s real gold dust.”

The second USP, in Harry’s mind, is Tileyard Education’s engagement with live commercial briefs; “There’s anywhere between 50 to 100 live commercial song briefs in and around the Tileyard community.” Leckstein tells us, “Sometimes it’s emails that come to people from labels and publishers. So these live briefs are active real-world requests for commercial music compositions, sound beds and so forth.”

Harry explains that these briefs could span five-ten second melodies for advertising agencies, or fully blown-chart-aimed pop productions. “All our students and our alumni work to these live commercial briefs. It’s something a lot of other institutions can’t get their hands on. I’ve spoken to lots of people who’ve taught at other institutions, and you might get old briefs that are (by that point) unable to be sent off and actually used. Our students are potentially getting paid for their work, learning about the jobbing income of a commercial writer/producer/artist. We’re getting people working in the industry straight away. That’s a very key USP.”

The third pillar of Tileyard Education is perhaps the most attractive, and it’s the fact that every single one of its students gets assigned a professional mentor who works within the industry. Students meet them one-on-one on a monthly basis. “We’ve got so many good people who want to give something back.” Harry explains, “It’s a 45 minutes or so, once-a-month catch up session which isn’t a big ask of the mentors, but it’s so valuable to the mentee. We always tell our mentees to ask their mentors what you can do for them – Help with organising their week, or help with their socials or things like that, just getting more plugged in to a professional’s world.”

A NEW HOME

Within the Tileyard Education space, will be class and lecture rooms, writing rooms, study areas and more, while the studios – free for use by Education students – will be housed over in the nearby block where TYX will be based. This encourages students to not move around the site, and not spend all their time within the campus block. Students have the opportunity to be in that block and engage more with the main community.” Says Harry, “Then of course our Business students will definitely have the opportunity to put on events in the courtyard and the new event spaces.”

A major beacon of Wakefield’s musical clout, the multi-venue Long Division festival has shone a spotlight on the area’s best grassroots artists, as well as inviting such luminaries as The Cribs, Billy Bragg and Asian Dub Foundation to headline. It’s also something which Harry has forged a close bond, hoping to plug the students into Long Division’s network of venues, and, in exchange, inviting more of Wakefield’s music scene into the Tileyard fold. “What’s brilliant about the way everything works in London is this seamless integration with the wider community.” Enthuses Harry, “You don’t just have students wearing a lanyard and left in one building, never seeing anyone else, it’s all really integrated. We’re definitely going to replicate that in the north.”

BAND CAMP

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, Tileyard Education began running online songwriting camps for its students who were then working remotely. Though 2020 was its inaugural year, these songwriting camps proved exceptionally rewarding for those involved. “There were 14 people on it, and it’s the only camp that we’ve ever done, physical or online, where we had 100% cut rate. So all 14 people got some sort of cut for their songs.” Harry tells us. “That’s people in different rooms all over the world, getting online for four days and writing to brief. Yet there was a 100% strike rate.”

These online songwriting camps also provide a solid opportunity for Tileyard North’s cohort co connect with those based in London. “All our MA songwriting and production students had three to four days of songwriting camps built into the program. There’a sort of icebreaker one in the second week where students can just get to meet people and get thrown in the deep end. With those things happening at the same time in Wakefield from 2023 onward, there’s more chance to mix and match, and for North students to collaborate with London students. So that’s pretty key.”

Songwriting camps could also prove to be the route in which the local education community can engage with Tileyard. Harry hopes that a new creative songwriting work experience program could attract the interest of Wakefield’s musically-leaning students. “We’ve basically reached out to a bunch of colleges and schools there. There’s a provision for schools to do a certain amount of off-site work experience hours. So we have a creative songwriting camp work experience program, so a school can come down and take a whole building with 20 to 30 of their students, and over the course of three or four days they’ll have a real-world songwriting camp experience with a workshop and live briefs. They’ll learn how to be commercial songwriter/producers. We’re quite excited about that.”

A WAKEFIELD WELCOME FOR TILEYARD EDUCATION

Though the first academic year is scheduled to begin in September of next year, Harry is keen to emphasise that a series of free-to-access open evenings will be taking place over the next 12 months, allowing people the chance to view the spaces, meet the swelling number of tutors and network with those set to play a key role in Tileyard’s growth.

Looking beyond the 2023 course kickoff, Harry foresees Tileyard Education growing into ultimate academic pathway for north-based creatives. “I hope it brings more opportunity for those aspiring to a career in the creative industries.” Harry tells us, “To connect in a more practical, industry-connected way. That’s what we bring to the table, approaching education in the same way as apprenticeships in some respects. We’re approaching higher education with an industry-led, career-focused approach. I think that’s really exciting. A student can land a cut while they’re studying – and they’ve effectively begun their career. That ability to start and develop your career while studying makes us stand out.”

Inside Tileyard North: Part One –Waking the Mill

Inside Tileyard North: Part Three – Community Curation

The post Inside Tileyard North: Part Two – The Education Eco-System appeared first on Audio Media International.

http://audiomediainternational.com/inside-tileyard-north-three/Transforming a formerly dilapidated mill into a creative powerhouse, Tileyard North has been a dream years in the making. As the Wakefield-based site nears completion, we get the inside story of its evolution into the North’s new musical hub.

On the outskirts of Wakefield town centre, stood the long-abandoned shell of a former mill complex. Formerly a thriving hub of spinners and weavers from the late 19th century onwards, the imposing sprawl of the 9-building Rutland Mills had found itself gradually phased out of use over the ensuing century. While its myriad factory buildings would serve the needs of dancers and artists in its later life, the mill was, sadly, inevitably deserted in 1999.

The 135,000 square foot site, Grade 2 listed site lay dormant until the day Tileyard co-founder Paul Kempe, noticing the site on a visit to the neighbouring Hepworth Gallery, realised he’d just clapped eyes on the very location that he and the rest of the Tileyard team had been searching for.

Foreseeing how the site could be refreshed, enhanced and re-shaped into the North’s very own version of London’s booming creative cluster, Kempe and fellow co-founder Nick Keynes set to work on envisioning how the site could be reconstituted “After two or three years of planning and funding we started work.” Keynes told us recently. “The buildings were in such a state of disrepair that they weren’t viable initially. But we really had the appetite to invest in the site, but we needed some support. The local authority helped and we raised funds.”

Being a short distance from the northern metropolis of Leeds was undeniably attractive, as well as the fact that Yorkshire as a whole swells with labels, music services and creative companies. The establishment of Tileyard North further strengthen the bonds between Leeds, Wakefield and other northern creative companies, as well as that original Kings Cross community. After all, it’s barely a two-hour train ride from Kings Cross to Wakefield. “Making sure we support the local region was crucial” explains Katie Hopkins, Tileyard North’s first Community Associate, “Informing the Wakefield-based creative community of our plans for the space and making sure they really understand the mission of Tileyard North and our passion for the northern creative scene has always been key in the process.”

BACK TO LIFE

The first of the numerous phased steps toward converting the 9-building site began when property development company City and Provincial acquired the site in 2019. This company, established by Paul Kempe, procured the original Tileyard site back in 2011, and directed the process of refurbishing Rutland Mills’ various buildings. Though the life-freezing COVID pandemic slowed development, a flurry of activity over the last two years has now brought the project back up to speed.

Early visualisations of how the space would look feature a central courtyard, ready to be harnessed as an event space, food court and social area, which many of the Tileyard North offices and studios would circle. The majority of the office spaces are aimed at businesses, and will be available for private lease. This includes several huge spaces that span the whole floor of several of the buildings. There’s also an 800-capacity event space, a 400-capacity event space and a top-tier gourmet restaurant – The Yorkshire Brasserie – set to mirror London’s Vinyl Cafe in terms of atmosphere and as Tileyard North’s all-important social/work hybrid space.

One of the first areas to get completed was a building given over entirely to Tileyard Education, the validated postgraduate and professional education initiative that is currently thriving in Tileyard’s foundational site. Harry Leckstein, the Head of Tileyard Education, details this new Wakefield-based campus; “We have designated space that includes writing rooms, tech labs, classrooms and recording studios. We will be offering the first of our suite of programs up there in September 2023.” We’ll dig deeper into Tileyard Education’s new centre in our next instalment, but Leckstein stressed that the launch of Tileyard North’s Education centre was no southern invasion. “We’re very keen to involve the community. We’re not just bringing down a load of our staff and resources from London. We’ve reached out to a lot of people up there who’ll be module leaders, teachers and mentors. We’re going to get very plugged in to local schools and colleges to give students that experience of a pro community. Then, they might be inspired to come and do a course.”

X-FACTOR

For those not looking for a workspace or to enrol on a course, one of the most attractive offerings that both Tileyard London and Tileyard North will begin rolling out soon is TYX, a new membership-based model wherein subscribers can book time in any of Tileyard’s music studios, content creation spaces, podcasting production or photography studios. Already launched in London, TYX is intended to give access to high quality gear and tech for just a small subscription fee, to those who’d otherwise have to fork out a hell of a lot more money to work in an equivalent environment.

Jack Freegard, the Head of TYX goes into detail on how it will play a major role at Tileyard North. “It certainly is becoming an important piece of the puzzle for Wakefield.” Freegard explains, “It will definitely give individual creatives around the north of England the opportunity to plug in to that space without having to take out a whole floor. The co-work aspect is also a big part of how we intend to bring the community together. We’ve got two floors. One floor will consist of membership studios, another photography studio, and one floor which is co-work space. It’s a community-focused enterprise. With TYX we’re taking the core values of Tileyard and making a business model that can be replicated elsewhere.”

Jack’s intent is that these TYX studios aren’t just aimed at those who know how to use pro-end equipment, but instead keep interfacing simple and accessible. “The whole approach is so that even if users aren’t technically minded, the studios and spaces are as simple as can be. The studios are set-up so it’s just one USB cable into your computer.”

Despite the simple plug-and-play approach, TYX sports some seriously solid hardware, as Jack detailed when he showed us around one of the finished London spaces (including the sumptuous Atmos studio), he highlighted some of the gear contained within, “We’ve got a Prism Lyra 2 interface the and MIDI keyboard is Arturia KeyLab. Everything comes up via the USB cable, whether you bring a MacBook or PC laptop it doesn’t matter. You don’t need drives. We’ve got Neumann KH 310 monitors and a Neumann TLM 103 mics in each room here. We’ve also got a mic locker with all the usual suspects, we’ve got a couple of 37s, 58s and the like. They’re all free for members to use but it will be first come first serve.”

Jack is passionate that TYX could be a great entry-point into the Tileyard eco-system for neighbouring creatives in Wakefield; “TYX gives people an access point into the Tileyard North community, without having to commit to space. We’re giving them access to facilities that they’d normally see in London up in Wakefield. It also gives them access to many of the events that we’ll be doing. Networking events, seminars, talks, concerts and much more.”

In the next instalment of our Tileyard North deep dive, we’ll look more closely at how the Tileyard Education’s rollout in Wakefield will open new doors for north-based students, and how the Tileyard community endeavours to grow and embolden a truly global community of musicians, artists, creatives and performers.

For more information on Tileyard North, head to tileyardnorth.co.uk

Inside Tileyard North: Part Two – The Education Eco-System

Inside Tileyard North: Part Three – Community Curation

The post Inside Tileyard North: Part One –Waking the Mill appeared first on Audio Media International.

Few companies can boast a founder who is regarded as the Grandfather of synthesis. The history of Moog synths proves that the company’s impact is the result of  inspired design choices.

If you’re old enough to be of an age that grew up watching bands on TV shows like ‘Top of the Pops’, you may well have played the weekly game of spot the name on the back of the synthesiser. While many acts merely borrowed synths from the TV hinterland or prop store, it didn’t stop children of a certain generation picking off brands, to indulge themselves in a sort of synthesiser train spotting.

While brands such as Roland were more fashionable in the 1980s, the occasional appearance of a synth with ‘Moog‘ branded on the back felt more enigmatic and mysterious. Some years after,  when referring to ‘a Moog’ without any sense of who or what it stood for, a professor of this writer’s declared, “It’s pronounced ‘Mogue’, as in ‘vogue’, after Dr Robert Moog”. It quickly became apparent that Robert (Bob) Moog was in fact the innovator of the synthesiser form that we now consider to be the most mainstream.

MOOG SYNTH HISTORY: CHAPTER 1

The story of Moog’s history begins with the birth of Bob Moog in New York, in 1934. The son of George Moog, an electrical engineer, Bob was taught basic electronics by his Father from the age of 10. So began a life-long interest in technology, through various hobby-based electronics which included radios and very basic organs. Throughout his early school years, Bob picked up countless academic awards, leading to his attendance at the Bronx High School of Science. It was here, aged just 15, that Bob built his very first theremin, an instrument and device which would stay with Bob for many years to come.

The accidental invention of Russian scientist Leon Theremin, this instrument had plenty of interesting value, not least for it being played without actually touching it! The theremin requires the performer to wave their hands above it, with the proximity of each hand controlling the volume and pitch of an electronically generated tone. The concept started life as an experiment into burglar alarm technology, with the amateur cellist Leon quickly realising its unique musical potential. Moog was enthralled.

Bob Moog graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1952, celebrating his departure by building multiple theremins and electronic organs, which he dubbed ‘Moogatrons’, for a demonstration as part of the school’s fair. Bob was accepted into a five year degree course program at Queens College and Columbia University, specialising in electrical engineering and physics, at degree level.

MAKING HISTORY

A year later, in something of a Father/Son enterprise, Bob and his Father George embarked upon their first commercial product; another Theremin, but with a model number of 201. Bob’s father was something of an amateur carpenter, so while Bob concentrated on the electronics, his father crafted the casing for the units. This was the first product to be produced under their own brand name of ‘Ramco’, later rebranded as R.A.Moog Co.

What followed over the next few years was a sustained success story, where Bob refined his theremin designs, and refined the product line. This period of research and development led to the production of the Melodia Theremin, which became his most successful Theremin to date. Although still being assembled in a slightly Heath-Robinson manner, allegedly on a kitchen table, the success of the Melodia provided Bob with much needed funds for further research and the opening of a R.A.Moog store, in Trumansburg.

Shortly after this, Bob attended a Music Convention in New York and met Herb Deustch. The two went on to collaborate on the concept of using voltages to control electronics to create sound, leading to the announcement of the first voltage controlled modules, at the AES convention in 1964. These devices attracted much interest, with boundary-pushing composers such as John Cage contacting Bob, with a view to harnessing this new technology in his compositions. In fact, Bob created electronic devices, not a million miles from Theremin technology, to sense the movement of dancers for the Cage work Variations V.

The trajectory of Bob’s technologies, as part of his collaborations with Herb Deutsch, led to the development of what is considered to be the very first standardised synthesiser systems in synth history. Three units were released in 1967, simply named Synthesizer I, Synthesizer II and Synthesizer III. In something of a groundbreaking moment, this marked the very first use of the term Synthesizer.

MOOG DEVOTEES

A tsunami of endorsements from musicians and composers followed. The Beach Boys had famously used one of Moog’s Theremins on their track Good Vibrations –  although they technically cheated, by playing the instrument with a ribbon controller, rather than waving hands in the air. Other early Moog adopters included The Doors and The Monkees, but it was the groundbreaking album Switched on Bach (1968) which marked a big moment in Moog synth history. Wendy Carlos had originally worked on a demonstration for Bob, creating an arrangement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3. The resultant recording was played at the AES Convention in 1968, with Bob Moog recalling that “…poker-faced engineers had tears in their eyes”. upon hearing it for the first time. Moog’s synth prowess was proved.

The recording of Brandenburg No.3 become the highlight and final track of the first Switched on Bach record, but the album had its fair share of critics. Many classical musicians were uncomfortable with the notion of translating Bach to electronic instrumentation, from its original acoustic form. However, there were plenty of futurists and supporters; celebrated pianist and Bach specialist Glenn Gould defended the recording, citing it as “….one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation, and certainly one of the great feats in the history of ‘keyboard’ performance.”

By 1969, Moog had constructed a Modular Vocoder for the University of Buffalo, and completed a state-of-the-art Electronic Music Studio for composer Joel Chadabe. As if Moog’s instruments required any greater acceptance, Switched on Bach won two Grammy’s and the Beatles featured a Moog IIIP on their final album Abbey Road.

SCALING DOWN

There was a degree of complexity to Moog’s earlier instruments. All his systems were modular in design, requiring technical knowledge and prowess to utilise the instruments to their optimum level, and that’s before you even got to the price tag! These systems were far from cheap, and with popularisation of the concept, there was clearly an appetite for something more affordable.

With almost biblical proportions, it came to pass in 1970 that Moog would introduce the instrument which has gone on to become the most highly regarded synth of all time; the Minimoog. For the first time, you could buy a synthesiser which was not modular (didn’t require patch cables), was portable and relatively affordable. Now we have to examine those last two points; as the Minimoog only had a 44-note keyboard, it was half the length of a traditional piano keyboard. This didn’t really matter, as it was monophonic (playing one note at a time) but it was stacked full of discrete circuitry, and it still weighed in at around 13Kg.

When it first went on sale in 1970, a Minimoog would sell for around $1595. In today’s money, that’s around $11000, so while it might have been cheaper than a modular system, by quite some margin, but it was still an enormous investment, and out of reach of many ‘normal’ musicians.

The Minimoog has sealed a place in synth history, and for good reason. Firstly, it sounded amazing! This was in part due to two elements; the oscillators and the filter. The style of synthesis that Moog developed became known as subtractive synthesis. This means that you start with an oscillator which produces a tone, which in most cases will be relatively rich and bright, as a result of its rich harmonic makeup.

The Minimoog had three oscillators, all of which used voltage control to change the pitch from the keyboard. This means that it sounded terrifyingly enormous! Gary Numan often mentioned that the first time he heard a Minimoog. He walked into a studio, played a note, and the whole studio shook! Spurring Numan to switch his musical direction from punk to electronic, in a matter of moments.

The second element that shapes the tonal construct of the sound is called a filter; also placed under voltage control, the Minimoog filter eliminates harmonics from the top-down, referred to as a 24db Low-Pass Ladder Filter, and has become synonymous with the overall timbre of the instrument.

MOOG SYNTH HISTORY: AT A CROSSROADS

Moog Music were flying high during the seventies. Keith Emerson could be seen in a rock stadium near you, with a behemoth of a Moog modular. Smaller and more affordable instruments, such as the Micromoog became popular, but there was trouble brewing.

During the latter phase of the 70s, Moog were not the only cool-company in town producing synthesisers. Companies such as ARP and Sequential Circuits were also producing very desirable synthesisers, using techniques which would allow for more affordable manufacturing. There was also a desire for Polyphonic machines, and as the eighties dawned, so did the age of digital. Companies such as Roland introduced mass-produced synths, at ever cheaper price points, with the market forcing Moog Music into bankruptcy in 1986. While it took a further seven years for all stock to be liquidated, there is one thing that Moog had on their side; they had the legacy of  the name Moog, it was only a matter of time before the tide turned back in their favour.

The 80s delivered a seismic shift in the sounds that musicians and producers wanted to use. Analogue fell seriously out of favour, and the digital stylings of the Yamaha DX range was in. Exacting, clinical and sharp were the sounds at this time, consigning the analogue old-guard to the second hand ad’s. And this is where they stayed, until a handful of musicians realised that those Minimoog’s were suddenly affordable and plentiful in supply. As the 90s techno scene in Detroit flourished, so did the reemergence of the sound of Moog, along with drum machine relics, such as the Roland TR-808 and TR-909.

As retro-flavoured fashions led demand, Moog synths rose from the ashes. There was a small matter of legal wrangling, requiring the buy-back of the company name. This was complicated further by the brand being exploited in different territories. A company in Wales purchased the brand in the UK, and was continuing to produce what has become known as the ‘Welsh Minimoog’. Eventually Bob regained his moniker and branding, started up a factory, and started producing new units for the first time in years.

One of the first of the new models was The Voyager; billed as the Minimoog for the new century, it gained considerable advantages over the original Mini, but appeared to lack the now familiar sonic grunt. Almost by way of response, Moog started producing affordable, high quality synthesisers, with improvements across the board. Elements such as a built-in overdrive circuit (to bring back the grunt!), 4-stage envelopes, dedicated LFO and patch memories. All facets that appeared on the Sub/Phatty range, bringing the sound of Moog to a new generation of electronic musicians.

But Bob always liked to return to his roots, and Moog continued to make them theremins too. Apart from the basic model, referred to in theremin circles as the ‘Standard’ model, the Etherwave Pro emerged in 2004. Its zen styling and capable feature set made it a hit for any serious thereminist, somewhat completing the circle for Bob, before he sadly passed away in 2005.

MOTHER OF ALL

Recent years have seen Moog adapt to market and commercial music trends, with an embrace of their vintage roots, coupled with current studio connectivity.

The Eurorack form-factor had been around since the 90s, bringing affordable modular systems to a smaller and more bijoux design. This format really blossomed in the twenty-teens, and Moog were there, with the introduction of the Mother 32 semi-modular synthesiser. For a mere few hundred pounds, you could place a Moog filter and oscillator right at the heart of your Eurorack system, or connect it to your DAW through MIDI. Further units followed, allowing drum sounds and abstract poly-rhythmic creations, employing units such as the DFAM and Subharmonicon.

The production of the semi-modular Grandmother and Matriarch synthesisers, uniquely turned to the 24db Filter 904A design originally found in their early modulars, while providing a standalone synthesiser with modular-style patch points.

Two more recent products look back on Moog’s synth history and also cast their eyes future-ward; The Claravox Centennial Theremin is a brand new instrument, oozing retro and vintage charm. Being a Theremin, the technology is largely unchanged, other than certain improvements to enhance the performance experience, but as an instrument and period piece, it’s sublime. It’s very Moog, with a hint of Art Deco, placed upon a wooden tripod.

Meanwhile, Moog’s musical nemesis, the polyphonic synthesiser, has finally received the Ashville treatment, with the release of the Moog One synthesiser. Available in both 8-note and 16-note polyphonic formats, it’s a synth with huge capabilities and sound. Loaded with three oscillators per voice, filters, envelopes and modulation routings which are comparable with any modular synth, its name says it all. It is ‘The One’, armed with plenty of modern credentials, shored up by that classic sounds from Moog synth history. It’s not cheap, but then it’s less than the comparable price of a Minimoog from the early 70s, arguably with greater musical capacity.

MOOG SYNTH HISTORY: CONCLUSION

If there’s one overriding point, it’s that Moog has the most distinguished history in the history of synth design, and that legacy continues today, with a product range of highly prized synths and theremins, including a homage and reissue of the original Minimoog. One only has to look at the recent success of their Minmoog Model D app to recognise their god-like reputation. Moog’s history of synths features on music from jazz to rap, and from indie to pure pop. It’s classic, laden with high-grade sounds and components and quality assured. Hand assembled in Ashville, USA, Moog are the company that invented, mutated, made it through the dark times and rose again, almost like a sine wave repeating its cycle.

One devotee of the Minimoog, Rick Wakeman, was contacted by an actor friend, who had purchased a Minimoog for home use back in the 70s, and was concerned that it wasn’t working properly. Rick loaned it from him, only to struggle to locate any problem. Upon calling the actor to ask what the issue was, the actor replied, “it only plays one note!” (As monophonic synthesisers do…) With a Minimoog, you only need one note to make the floor shake! Just ask Gary Numan.

The post Gear Pioneers: Moog’s Synth History appeared first on Audio Media International.

Beneath his somewhat enigmatic appearance, Charlie Watts provided the solid rhythmic backbone for The Rolling Stones, for nearly 60 years. His identifiable sound, like a pulsing engine room, will forever be associated with one of Worlds finest, and longest lasting rock and roll bands. He was one of only three members of the band to appear on every single Stones album, along with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Start me up

Watts was born and raised in London, living in a pre-fabricated house, designed for families who had the misfortune to find their houses destroyed during the second World war. While this scenario offered a degree of tribulation, it did allow an introduction to his then neighbour and eventually lifelong friend, the jazz bassist Dave Green. Charlie became consumed by jazz, interested by all aspects of the musical genre, but with a particular obsession for be-bop and cool jazz, admiring artists such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Art Blakey.

His jazz interest quickly developed, driven by the the popularity of the 78 gramophone record, allowing Charlie to endlessly listen to jazz recordings, within the confines of his school-boy bedroom. His parents bought him a drum kit, at the age of 13, which allowed him to practice his art of drumming. Apart from the rudiments, Charlie would play along to his jazz records, driven by the dream of playing with the jazz greats. At the age of 14, he bought himself a Banjo, but rather than obsess about the harmonic aspect of the instrument, he decided to turn it into a snare drum. 

Surely no surprise then, that Watts’ first band was a jazz combo. The Jo Jones All Stars featured Charlie alongside Dave Green, playing plenty of standards, in a predictable bop-inspired format. Given that other band alumni included Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, it’s clear that his credentials and talent at such a young age, allowed him to mingle with the great and good from the hipster World of London jazz.

Art, jazz and rock

While at school, Charlie also developed an interest in art and design. While ultimately his love of jazz and drumming would win the battle for attention, he was a talented artist, who continued his studies at Harrow Art School. By way of subsidising his real passion, Charlie secured a position at the Charlie Daniels Studios, in 1960. One of London’s numerous advertising agencies, his daytime work ultimately gave way to his nighttime passion. London was undergoing a ‘Blues Boom’ in the early 60s, during which time Watts was lured away from jazz by Alexis Korner. His band, Blues Incorporated, became one of the most influential groups of the era, becoming a vital component in the development of British rock. It was during this period that fellow Blues Incorporated member Brian Jones, introduced Watts to the young and emerging Rolling Stones. Their original drummer, Tony Chapman, had quit the band, leaving a vacancy for Watts, that would change his career forever.

Musical Stones

While the ill-advised might be tempted to overlook the complexity of drums in rock, it’s important to consider how The Rolling Stones would have sounded without Charlie Watts. His ability to propel the groove and feel, with his driving foot on the bass drum and up-front hi-hat pattern, balanced effortlessly by the snare backbeat that would nestle right on the back of the time. His playing often adopted a sense of urgency that sounded laid back. A contradiction of sorts, but a musical feel that was effortless, doubtless harking back to his jazz leanings and analysis of the greats from the US. 

Couple this with the locked-in bass playing of Bill Wyman, and the duo formed the perfect backbone for the guitar flourishes of Keith Richards, and exuberant flamboyance of Mick Jagger. As Watts once said, it was the beginning of a forty-year career staring at Mick Jagger’s Bum!

While Watts might have been a member of the biggest rock and roll band on the planet, you would never have known this from the size of his drum kit. As drum technology forged ahead throughout the decades, Charlie Watts stayed loyal to his jazz roots. There were no racks of toms, huge bass drums or gongs, just a classic jazz kit, from the likes of Ludwig or Gretsch. It proves the point that a good musician has no need for extremes, when the basics will suffice, and nothing states this more than the minimalism of Watts’ playing and kit. As Miles Davis once said, “It ain’t what you play, it’s what you don’t play” which sums up the Watts credo perfectly. You only have to listen to the opening few bars of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ to hear this in action. It’s strait-laced, but effective, in just the right amount, with an impetuous groove which feels laid back and effortless. 

Technically speaking, he played with a traditional open grip (holding the drum sticks) which is a technique favoured by almost all jazz players. This involves the creation of a fulcrum point, allowing the stick in the left hand (if played conventionally) to pivot and bounce on the drum head with a minimum of effort. Perfect for quiet playing, but once unleashed, those powerful back-beat thwacks sound musical, as well as loud.

As any jazz drummer will cite, playing with an open group allows far more tonal variation and subtle nuance. Listen to a chorus of ‘She’s a Rainbow’ and the 16th-note swagger and subtlety oozes from every drop stick, at the end of every bar. You could call this a delicate nuance that is easily missed, but it’s those finer details that make the music groove. ‘She’s a Rainbow’ is not really a shuffle or swung, yet the spirit is there by inflection.

Back to jazz

While the 80s would see Charlie have something of mid-life crisis, as he momentarily turned to drugs and alcohol, it also saw a low point in his time with the Stones. In a now legendary exchange, Mick Jagger once called Watts ‘my drummer’, before Watts pinned him against a wall and told him, ‘you’re my singer’. It was a thankfully brief but all too accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be in a passionate rock band. All those hours of sitting around before sound checking and going on stage, followed by the elation of the huge gig. Watts often kept on playing, while female groupies draped themselves around his neck. No mean feet for anyone playing a physical instrument such as the drums, but underlies the ups and downs of a rock band, from the very highs to the über lows. 

By way of distraction, Watts returned to his first love, during the latter years of the 80s and early years of the 90s, with two distinctly different jazz projects. 

The Charlie Watts Big Band, also known as Jazz Orchestra, was a self funded project which resulted in a super-sized big band. Any thoughts of Ellington or Miller-esque proportions were lost, as Watts hired a plethora of all-stars from the British Jazz roster which included Peter King, Stan Tracey, Evan Parker, Courtney Pine and Harry Beckett. Taking the traditional big band concept, but almost doubling its number of horns, Watts inflated the rhythm section to three drummers and two bassists, as well as two percussionists. They mainly performed standards and big band classics, from Count Basie to Benny Goodman, as part of a Worldwide tour. It was unsurprisingly loud and musically chaotic, but swung with enormous vigour, even if at times there were moments of rhythmic hiatus, from the vast number of players within the ensemble.

His next early 90s Jazz project was a beautiful homage to Charlie Parker, from the Charlie Watts Quintet. ‘From One Charlie’ called upon a biography and book of drawings by Watts, which he had developed while at art college. In the more controlled setting of a quintet, the group featured Peter King on alto sax, alongside the then rising star, Gerard Presencer, on Trumpet. Of course, it also featured long-time friend Dave Green on Bass, by way of closing the friendship circle.

The Legendary Stones

The last twenty years or so saw the Stones propelled to a status where few bands reside. They would come out of hibernation, announce a huge concert, sell it out in minutes, and never let the public down in performance. It also gave time for us to reflect on Charlie’s enormous contribution to music. While this is most notable in the rock arena, he contributed to the artistic direction of the band, designing covers and stage sets. He had a passion for vintage and classic cars; he would sit in them by way of enjoyment, because he was unable to drive. 

But it’s the legacy of a smart dressed man, influenced by the vintage era of jazz, that informed him musically and stylistically. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, along with his fellow Stones, before being inducted into the Modern Drummer Magazine Hall of Fame in 2006. Enigmatic and intensely private, he remained ever faithful to his wife Shirley, who he married in 1964.

Drum legends don’t come much bigger than Charlie Watts, even with the smallest of jazz drum kits.

The post Charlie Watts Obituary – By Dave Gale appeared first on Audio Media International.

Hailed as next-generation virtual theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Dream, which streams March 12-20, is a live performance that combines motion capture with an interactive symphonic score.

Inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dream promises not only to be a technical tour de force, but a pointer to how live virtual performances could evolve moving forward.

Pre-pandemic, the idea was to create Dream as a location-based immersive installation, Luke Ritchie, Head of Digital Innovation for the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra told Audio Media International “We were going to usethe d&b Soundscape system inside an abandoned department store in Stratford-Upon-Avon.”

The scope of this project is huge, says Ritchie. “Dream is the culmination of nearly two and a half years of R&D. Ultimately it was the £4m grant from Innovate UK that allowed us to formalise partnerships that had been developing over years into a consortium of 13 organisations. That funding has allowed us all to take the risk required to genuinely innovate, and there is a wealth of R&D that we have each pursued that will not even come to light in the final show, but we hope to share more widely across the sector.”

These innovations include spatial audio recording techniques for immersive formats (Augmented/Virtual/Mixed Reality), that create mixes able to give an audience full six-degrees of freedom (6DOF).

“For example, we recorded a string quartet in such a way that you could walk around the quartet in VR or MR and get close to each individual instrument, testing different microphone capture and spatialisation techniques.”

This in turn led to the development of audio playback technologies: “During this project we’ve experimented with mapping audio to volumetric image capture with Intel, and motion-capture, with Portsmouth University as a key component of Dream, for VR, AR and MR. Throughout all of this we’ve had to learn how to build musical experiences in real-time games (Epic Games’ Unreal) engines. For Dream we’ve brought on board Anastasia Devana as Audio Director on the project, who we first met in that post at Magic Leap, and she’s been such a fantastic person to work with.”

“Finally, a core aim for us was to try to reimagine composition for immersive formats. As well as being the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor, Esa-Pekka Salonen (pictured below) is a fantastic composer in his own right, and he’s genuinely curious in how we compose music for immersive worlds where the audience and performers can interact with and change the story being told.”

Salonen brought Jesper Nordin to the project, not only an orchestral composer, but also a coder, responsible for interactive music engine, Gestrument. It’s Gestrument that adds interactivity to the Dream production, explains Ritchie.

“Ultimately, Grestrument can allow a performer or audience member to play along to the music and remain in tune and in time. It can take any input, in this case motion-data from the actors, which then generates live music via MIDI of a particular melodic line. Creatively, we’ve worked with the cast to try to give each character a musical motif, so that their movements at key scenes can carry echoes of the music that is to come further on in the story.”

“Technically, we had the challenge of integrating this into a real time virtual production environment, porting Gestrument into Unreal Engine so that it could integrate with the environments, scenes and characters that we’re building. That also means that going forwards we could create another experience – a game, a VR experience or a show – in which audiences could interact with and alter a score or a live performance.”

You may also be interested in:

• d&b completes first event KSL Soundscape install
• We Make Events study: 43 per cent of live events businesses to close by June
• How does live come back? Frank Turner, Music Venue Trust and Concert Promoters Association speak out
• ‘If COVID hadn’t stopped European touring, Brexit would have’: Inside UK’s first live music industry body
• ‘The world has changed, buying behaviour has changed’: d&b launches new Subscription Series

This is the second time the RSC has motion captured a live performance in Unreal Engine, the first being its 2016 production of The Tempest. Dream will be performed with seven actors in a 7×7 metre motion capture volume, created at the Guildhall in Portsmouth.

So with live events still some way off a return to normality, does the experimental nature of Dream offer a glimmer of fresh hope for musicians and technicians?

“I hope that it does, but I think we’ve also got to be honest about the deep, lasting damage the pandemic will leave across the music industry. I have dear, talented friends who’ve had their lives completely up-ended over the last year. In fact the dates of Dream’s launch will be an anniversary for many of them of the last concert or recording they made. However, I do think that there is definitely hope. I think that this landscape needs musicians and music technicians to engage with it and start to make some amazing new experiences! I’d definitely recommend they try downloading Unreal and having a play.”

So at what point in this extraordinary process did Ritchie think: “What one Earth have I gotten myself into?”

“Several times!” he replies. “The thing that keeps me sane is the fact that we have an incredible team – which I’d love if you could credit. We’ve built a hybrid team comprised of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, Composer and Interactivity Designer Jesper Nordin, Audio Director Anastasia Devana, Sound Designer Alessandro Coronas, Immersive Producer Dan Munslow, Live Audio Producers Phil Jones and Carlotta Piccini, Audio Systems Tech and Playback Operator Dan Halford, Technical Producer Ash Green and of course our incredible Orchestra and its staff.”

Tickets to the 50-minute live online event are available here.

“2020 led to great growth, but we need to manage that in 2021”
Read the Audio Media International partner plan.

The post “The scope of this project is huge”: Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company’s interactive Dream machine appeared first on Audio Media International.

Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES), a physical and digital media archiving service for the entertainment industry, is using Prism Sound’s ADA-8XR multi-channel converters as part of an ongoing process to restore and preserve historically important audio tapes for its media and entertainment clients.

Many priceless recorded masters are in danger of being lost forever due to their age, their condition and natural degradation – a situation often exacerbated because tapes haven’t been stored safely. As a result, music labels and artists could see their valuable assets disappear.

IMES provides expertise and technology in media storage, tape restoration, digital preservation, and asset management to protect, preserve and maximise the value of clients’ content.

With over 22 million assets in its vaults, Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services division has become the go-to storage and preservation specialist for many of the world’s top record labels, film companies, academic institutions, and individual artists, and is a trusted partner to the GRAMMY Museum, the University of Southern California.

Principal studio engineer and lead for the Media Recovery Technology Program (MRT) is Kelly Pribble, a man whose music and pro-audio career spans more than 35 years. Pribble started as a studio engineer in Nashville and subsequently built and ran recording studios in the US, London and Brazil, working with a plethora of top artists and producers. In 2010 he brought his years of experience to IMES, setting up the company’s global remediation service to salvage audio assets that would otherwise be lost.

“My role is to preserve historical audio masters and work with problematic tapes that might be suffering from any number of issues, and try to bring them back to life,” he explains. “These priceless audio tapes come from all over the world and we are seeing some that are in a terrible state because of poor storage practices, multiple playings, or simply because they have faced the ravages of time.

“Sometimes they are mouldy, or they could be bound together or they might be suffering from a loss of lubrication–which means the tapes won’t play without remediation. You can’t play these tapes without damaging them even further, so we work with our clients to salvage the tapes and return them to their optimal form so they can eventually be digitized. We have a team of highly experienced engineers working in our studios in the US and Europe who inspect and restore these fragile analogue masters so that they can be preserved for posterity.”

Prism Sound’s multichannel converters play a key part in the restoration process, with several IMES audio preservation facilities having at least 24-channels of Prism Sound ADA-8XR conversion available.

“Every analogue master that needs to be transferred to a digital format is put through an ADA-8XR converter because we recognise them as the best AD/DA converters on the market,” Pribble explains. “Having the best possible equipment is part of our commitment to our customers – they trust us to deliver the highest quality audio, so we use equipment that we trust and can rely on.”

Featuring in many of the world’s most famous recording facilities (Metropolis, Abbey Road, British Grove Studios etc), Prism Sound’s ADA-8XR has been used on numerous high profile music and film recording projects including the soundtracks for many blockbuster movies. This multi-channel AD/DA converter can be configured in numerous ways to suit a wide variety of applications and it can also act as a high resolution interface for a wide range of Digital Audio Workstations including Pro Tools, Logic, Nuendo and Cubase.

“Prism Sound converters are so reliable and versatile,” Pribble continues. “When you are digitising historically important analogue tapes you want to be sure the converter is not adding or detracting from the sound of the original recording. With Prism Sound, we can be confident that the audio is of the highest quality and that it is exactly as it should be.”

Another format that is generating renewed interest in archived material is Dolby Atmos Music. This immersive audio format has taken off on music platforms such as Amazon Music HD and Tidal, which are now streaming thousands of tracks in Dolby Atmos. It’s anticipated that many more labels, producers and individual artists will want to create immersive audio content, giving new life and value to older recordings. For many this will involve remixing classic back catalogue material – and that means accessing original master tapes so that the Atmos mix engineer has specific stems to work from and control over individual instruments in order to re-combine them in a 3-D space.

“Dolby Atmos Music has really shined a light on the importance of looking after all tapes because it’s not just the final master you need to protect – it’s all stages of the recording,” Pribble explains. “We now have a dedicated – and very busy – Dolby Atmos stem room in our studio in New Jersey. Labels are pulling their original multitracks from the archive, checking that they are OK and asking us to create stems from these archive tapes so that they can send digital versions to whoever is remixing the track in Dolby Atmos.”

Pribble and his colleague Alex Tomlin, who is based in the UK, are engaging with record labels all over the world via webinars where they explain the urgency of the work they do and try to spread the word about how critical it is for the music industry to preserve its aging recordings. In a recent webinar they highlighted how Pribblw was able to salvage 54 two-inch masters from a major recording artist that would have been completely lost if he hadn’t stepped in.

“The tapes, which covered two albums this artist recorded in the 1980s, had been sent to another studio where the engineer was having problems because the tapes were bound together,” he says. “Luckily, the engineer had heard about my restoration work and contacted me for help, so I took a look and managed to get them all unbound and successfully transferred into a digital format, using Prism Sound converters.”

The post Iron Mountain digitises priceless audio tapes Prism Sound Converters appeared first on Audio Media International.

French trip-hop band Chinese Man has celebrated the 15th anniversary of its indie record label, Chinese Man Records (CMR), with a 360 degree video version of  ‘Hold Tight’, from its latest album Groove Sessions Vol 5, in binaural audio, in collaboration with RFILabo and SSL.

The Marseilles-based band blends hip-hop, funk, dub, reggae and jazz together, with a big emphasis on beats and samples. 

 RFILabo,  a division of French news and current affairs public radio station RFI, suggested the idea which quickly found favour.

“All RFILabo’s productions are in 3D sound,” explains Xavier Gibert, Responsable de l’Unité de RFI Labo/Innovation, “either in native binaural sound, or in synthetic binaural sound from the channel mode or the ambisonic mode. All the 360 videos that we produce are in dynamic binaural sound. That is to say that the sound space is coherent with the rotation of the spectator’s head.”

The track (full title: Hold Tight feat. ASM, Youthstar & Illaman) had the potential to be a great showcase for binaural audio.

RFILabo is a vocal champion of the format. It produces a music programme, SessionLab, in the format. The facility also records and mixes the electronic music concert series Séquence, broadcast on CultureBox (France Télévision) and RFI, in co-production with Milgram. It also makes documentary podcasts in binaural sound. 

“RFILabo’s work consists of producing binaural sound with minimal changes to conventional sound recording techniques,” explains Gibert. “The 3D sound should not change the creative process of the artists, a constraint we set ourselves at the beginning of RFILabo in 2012.”

The recording process is the same as for a normal recording, he adds. Microphones for the singers, lines for the machines, and returns for the musicians, and two System T S500 control surfaces and selection of Network I/O for recording and returns. 

“We keep in mind the same elements as for a stereophonic recording – rigor of the sound recording and comfort for the musicians. All the spatialisation work in the ambisonic domain is done in post production.” 

The RFILabo workflow sees the multitrack sound recording undertaken with the System T. Each track is processed as if for a stereo production. Recording is done in Pro-Tools. The spatialisation in the ambisonic domain is done downstream in connection with the 360 video, with the SSL Native plugin suite used to keep the sound colour of the take consistent throughout the process. 

“Our entire music recording studio is built around two System T configurations for sound recording and returns. The Dante architecture integrates SSL interfaces, KLANG headphones and DAD interfaces for all analogue peripherals. The advantages of the System T for this kind of production is the flexibility of the Network I/O stageboxes to easily manage the transition between ‘mic’ and ‘line’ levels, and to be able to make different ‘return mixes’ for the wedges of the DJs and the ear-monitors of the MCs.”

RFI has used SSL hardware since 2008, when the facility had its first console installed. System T has enabled it to keep the sound quality that it values so much while adding the flexibility and production capacity of a genuinely next generation audio production system. 

“We particularly liked the fact that this console, which was basically a broadcast type console, was able to evolve towards sound recording and music mixing,” says Gibert. “The other strong point is the ‘rehearse’ mode which allows us to switch to ‘mix’ mode very quickly after a recording, while keeping the same configuration.” 

“The integration of most of the functions in ‘touch’ mode is really well thought out and is largely completed with the use of knobs. We also appreciate the flexibility of the ‘Monitoring’ section and, of course, the fact that the quality of the dynamic and frequency processing remains faithful to SSL!”

And this is just the start.  Gilbert says he’s looking forward to future System T updates and enhancements to the binaural encoder.

“We have a project for a first live 360 in dynamic binaural sound! It will be a first!”

The post Trip hop band celebrates label anniversary with 360 video and binaural audio release appeared first on Audio Media International.

As part of its 10th anniversary, Austrian manufacturer LEWITT is soon to introduce what it describes as a truly unique, ‘revolutionary’ flagship microphone. Colby Ramsey recently took a trip to the company’s headquarters in the heart of Vienna, Austria, to get an exclusive first listen of the new model, which has been a decade in the making…

—

Ten years is not a very long time when talking about the lifespan of a business, yet it’s a long enough period of time in which extensive change can and may occur. This has certainly been the case at LEWITT, which is gearing up to celebrate its 10th anniversary next year with the launch of a new flagship microphone.

But while the microphone won’t be unveiled until 2020, LEWITT recently carried out a very focussed R&D process with the LEWITT Sound Survey, inviting everyone with a passion for sound to play a crucial role in its development using an online tool. Here, end users – who were entered into a draw to win one of the flagship microphones – were asked if they could hear the difference between various sound characters and which they prefer, allowing audio enthusiasts at every level to get involved in the “creation of a new microphone classic.”

At the end of September, AMI was very kindly invited to LEWITT’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and was given the chance to speak to its team of audio specialists, including CEO and founder Roman Perschon. The prototype of the new flagship microphone offering had been completed just one week before our visit.

“That was our challenge from the beginning,” says Perschon of the Sound Survey. “To find out what sound people are looking for. We wanted to really interact with our closest network here in Vienna – recording engineers and studios – as it can be quite difficult to nail down exactly what users are looking for in a sound.”

One really important thing is that LEWITT does all the electronics and microphone designs itself, so if something needs to be changed then it can be done without delay.

With the company’s 040 MATCH model for example, and as explained by head of product and marketing Moritz Lochner, “the measurement is essentially built into the microphone, allowing for quicker adjustment and automated measurement with audio precision software, which in turn allows for quicker production and therefore cheaper costs.”

Keen to find out more about what makes him tick, I sat down for some traditional Chinese tea with Roman Perschon – the company’s founder and CEO – in his office.

“I always had a passion for music and audio gear,” he tells me. “As a teenager I started out building my own speakers which are the ones you see over here [in my office]. It was a fun project and they sound horrible compared to today’s standards, but back then they were loud and did the job!”

Hungry to learn, Perschon decided to go and study electronics. He then worked at AKG, which he says was an interesting time for him: “At one point I thought to myself, there can be more interesting, more innovative, better-sounding microphones, and shortly after this I had the opportunity to found LEWITT,” he says. “In the early days it was difficult of course. We were only a handful of dedicated, very skilled people – a group of people who I was very lucky to find actually.”

LEWITT started out with a huge portfolio, introducing 16 microphones at the 2010 NAMM Show. Since then, it has further developed its lineup and in recent years has been quite successful indeed. “So I find myself in a sweet spot here, because it’s not a big corporation where all the great ideas get swallowed up in corporate structures,” Perschon explains. “At the same time, it’s not a boutique company, so we have the team and the skills to really take on complex engineering processes.”

Sitting pretty

After some time at LEWITT’s HQ, it quickly became clear to me that it is a great environment to work in and bring ideas to life. Roman’s team is diverse, to say the least, with a number of very experienced people from all different walks of life. “This makes it a very fun place to work, and is also the main reason why we can do our own designs,” he tells me. “Nothing we do is a copy of a copy – it’s all our own designs and we develop everything from scratch, which allows us to follow a very user-focussed approach. When we start a project, from the very beginning we invite recording engineers and musicians to sit down at the table and try to lay down what it is really about. How we can improve, how we can innovate, and it is these kinds of conversations that give us a really good understanding of the challenge ahead. Obviously then it’s our task to translate that into technical requirements and documentation, which then becomes the foundation of our projects.”

Being able to get in touch with the local and global audio community in this way is clearly very helpful and fruitful for LEWITT. At the same time, having a team of capable people who can bring its ideas to life is absolutely crucial.

Our conversation soon moved on to the kind of trends that Roman has been seeing in the microphone market of late: “First of all you have the global players, and what they do is basically reinvent their classic and legendary products,” he says. “Then there’s a part of the industry which tries to imitate these legendary, vintage microphones. I really didn’t want to go down that path, and instead wanted to do something new, something innovative and I wanted to do my own designs. I didn’t at that time see the need for another company doing another imitation of a legendary microphone. This was always an important thing for me, because I always want to bring true value to the end user – there is no other way to stay in it for the long haul.”

It’s an ever changing industry which has seen a lot of the big studios going out of business and a vast market of YouTubers, podcasters and bedroom recording guys emerge, which is the reason why LEWITT always wanted to make its products available to a broad audience. “That is also why we didn’t focus on going towards a boutique brand approach,” Perschon adds. “We wanted to offer the best performance to price ratio, and make our products accessible to a large audience. That’s why in recent years we have introduced products like LCT 040 and 140, which are incredibly affordable, high quality microphones.”

The right time

It actually took LEWITT quite some time to distill the right product idea. Its first years were spent bouncing back and forth suggestions about what it could be, “but we eventually got to the point where we could define it in great detail, make sure that we’re not doing stuff for the sake of it, and confirm something that really benefits our audience,” remarks Perschon. “Including them in the development process was very important and although it took time, it was a pleasurable thing to do.”

While the development of LEWITT’s new flagship mic has been ticking away in the background, in the meantime it has of course developed the LCT Series, learning more and honing its capabilities to share improved versions over the years. The new flagship model benefits from all of these processes and experiences. “Now we are at the point where it just feels right to introduce, and it just so happens that it coincides with the tenth anniversary – I’m really looking forward to getting it out there!”

There definitely seems to be a bit of a startup feel about the company and its people. Everyone in the office is excited for the future and really wants to get behind the brand, and it is a priority of Roman’s to keep it this way: “There’s a good reason why corporations have all these corporate processes, but I hope we can stay away from this as long as possible and maintain this startup vibe, because it’s such a nice environment to work,” he tells me. “It’s not employees, it’s colleagues and friends and it makes it really fun to be here.”

So upon reflecting on a decade of business, what does the next ten years look like for LEWITT?

“I think there are a lot of opportunities out there that one could focus on, but at this point in time I am really excited to introduce the new model,” Perschon reveals. “It’s been ten years in the making and it is such a pleasure to finally see this come to fruition. It’s definitely a big one for us, and very much defines what we are as a company. It offers tremendous freedom to the end user to adjust the sound in a very meaningful and enabling way. It is a cutting-edge technology product, and will be available at a very good price-performance ratio as well. It ticks all the boxes and it’s basically the essence of what LEWITT is and wants to be – it’s a dream come true actually!”

www.lewitt-audio.com

The post New Horizons: behind the scenes at LEWITT ahead of its 10th anniversary appeared first on Audio Media International.