How did you first get involved with the project?

Carl: The owner of The Upper Deck – a Major League Baseball player who would like to remain anonymous for professional reasons – was incredibly supportive throughout the whole process. I was contacted by the original owner of the house who was a contractor himself, and I was referred by a personal assistant of Joe Don Rooney of Rascal Flatts, because I’d built a couple of studios for him.

The owner’s big requirement was that they didn’t want to hear anything in the house. It’s a huge house and they wanted to be able to crank the guitars up without hearing it everywhere. In this instance, the studio was still connected to the house with an attic area, so I had to tell him: “it’s a house, there are a lot of things I can do, but don’t think you’re not going to hear it.” If it was separate from the house or if we were building from the ground up it would’ve been different. So that was the starting spec – they didn’t want any noise leakage into the neighbourhood which was very successful; you could still hear it in the house somewhat but it wasn’t terrible.

How did you go about meeting all of the technical requirements?

Carl: I ended up standing in this great space just wondering what I was going to do with it. There were nine-foot ceiling joists in what was going to be the tracking room, so if we could remove these joists, we could take advantage of this crazy 18ft ceiling with five dormers in it. But still, there wasn’t anything I could really draw out and say, “OK this is what we’re going to build,” it was more like a design-as-you-go process.

The control/mix room was more straightforward. It’s an unusual layout because there’s a staircase in between the mix room and the tracking space. It took a lot of ingenuity to get the sight lines perfect so you can sit in the chair and look directly at the drummer in that cove there. Then it was just a building a room-within-a-room approach. The windows were a big deal, especially the large window – the piece of glass on this weighed something like 700lbs. I had seven guys with white faces trying to forklift that up, because if you drop that thing you’re going to lose a foot! That was a big contention.

We were then able to take that space where the staircase is between the tracking and mix rooms and turn that into a entry vestibule/machine room/recording booth – That worked out really well.

Originally, the client mainly just wanted this as a place to jam with his friends – as a hobbyist he’s got an amazing guitar and amplifier collection. He said he might want to do some recording so it just morphed into an actual professional grade studio complete with a control room etc. because he was about to buy all this new gear. Someone else advised him about the 16-channel Tree Audio Roots Generation II mixing console, which worked out well, because it’s a great console for an amazing tracking room.

My only part of the gear was the PhantomFocus System – which is the star of the whole studio – although I did design the desk that the Tree Audio console sits in with Nashville’s Sound Construction. I was trying to get it as low as possible because when a console comes up high it really affects the monitoring. I often design my mix rooms from the monitoring outwards.

Was it a smooth collaboration with the other parties involved?

Carl: People are moving here to Nashville all the time so there’s a tremendous amount of building going on. For this reason it’s hard to get workers – one challenge was getting the dry wall up. We had to sandwich a layer of 3/4-inch MDF and two layers of 5/8-inch sheetrock, so that’s three layers and two inches of thickness being applied to a very unusual chopped up ceiling that’s 18ft high. It took a couple of months just for dry wallers to come in. It would’ve happened a lot faster but we were at their mercy because it was such a challenging job.

The original owner of the house was a contractor so he ended up being the contractor for the project. He had his electrician come in and I just had to work with them rather than some more seasoned studio guys, so this was a slight challenge but it worked out.

Could you tell us more about the PhantomFocus System you installed?

Carl: The client was playing baseball all summer so I had to use the mix room as a lab for my monitors. I developed them further and came up with a new model there. I believe there’s nothing out there that can do what this system does – it’s a very applied and proven process, and typically takes around two days to set up. The hardware consists of a pair of PFM ICE Cube-12 subwoofers, a PFS 4800 digital processor, the PFS stands, four PFM MonoBlock 2200 amps, PFS Monitor Stands, and of course the monitors themselves, which in this case were PFM HD bi-amp models.

Auralex Acoustics were also involved and we used the Carl Tatz Signature Series products. It’s mostly in the mix room and there’s a few things in the tracking room too, like the canopy over the drums, which houses a stereo pair of Crown PZM microphones, with another two in the high ceiling. I’ve built a lot of custom studios and I just like the idea of this architectural look, which I came up with in this case by using the Auralex panels. It gives my rooms a unique look compared to other studios – in this case the client was blown away. The outboard gear meanwhile was recommended by the owner’s friend, and included two API 500 series lunchboxes, a Briscasti M7 stereo reverb processor, Eventide H8000FW multichannel effects system and more.

What made this project particularly unique?

Carl: The space was so unusual. Tracking rooms can be crazy and this was certainly going to be crazy with so many angles making it that much more difficult. One gift we had in the PhantomFocus mix room was that behind the back wall, the roof line continues for another six feet or so, so there’s this big cavity into which I was able to put my axial mode absorber and a bunch of other absorption stuff, turning it into a huge bass trap. So even though the room is small, the low end in the room is breathtaking. It’s not what you expect, and that’s what makes it fun!

The post Amazing Spaces: Inside The Upper Deck appeared first on Audio Media International.

The January | February edition of Audio Media International is now available online.

In this issue, Colby Ramsey discovers how the Bohemian Rhapsody sound team came up with a riveting soundtrack for the blockbusting Queen biopic.

Carl Tatz talks us through The Upper Deck, a custom designed, NAMM TEC Award-nominated recording studio, we hear from mixer and sound engineer Dom Morley about his pro audio education venture The Mix Consultancy, and Daniel Dylan Wray catches up with producer and engineer John Congleton about his influences, studio setup and eclectic approach to making records…

In this month’s interview, Tara Lepore reports on the realistic soundscapes in docu-drama A Private War, while our product review section features some of the latest offerings from Sanken, Sonarworks, Samplitude and Warm Audio.

And don’t forget, you can get a roundup of all the action from Anaheim in our NAMM 2019 review towards the front of the mag, followed by two fascinating opinion pieces from Rimshot Studios’ Mike Thorne and Calrec’s Dave Letson.

Read all this and more in the latest issue of AMI online, here.

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Auralex Acoustics is offering two seminar sessions as part of the AES@NAMM Pro Sound Symposium: Live & Studio, held concurrent with the 2019 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, January 24-27, 2019.

Both sessions will be held in coordination between Auralex and studio design firm Carl Tatz Design.

Carl Tatz himself, alongside Auralex’s Robb Wenner (marketing manager/artist services), will explain strategies and solutions for making dramatic improvements to existing monitoring systems and troubleshoot common issues, such as:

• Getting the centre image correct
• Getting the low end accurate
• Subwoofer placement
• Being confident with your mixes

These sessions will take place at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel’s NAMM U Education Center on the fourth floor, room C2. The first session will be on Friday, January 25, from 4 to 6pm, and the second session will be on Saturday, January 26, from 4 to 6pm.

Registration for The NAMM Show and AES@NAMM are separate; visit https://www.namm.org/thenammshow/2019/badges and http://www.aes.org/events/AESatNAMM/2019/ for more details. 

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Carl Tatz Design (CTD) has received a 34th Annual TEC Award nomination for studio design for the recently completed The Upper Deck, one of its most unique and impressive studios to date for a prominent MLB player who spends off-season with his wife in their Nashville, TN home.

Highlights include a PhantomFocus MixRoom featuring Carl Tatz Design PFM 2200-HD monitors, a Tree Audio Roots Gen II Console, a custom-designed desk by Sound Construction & Supply and Carl Tatz Signature Series acoustic modules by Auralex.

Leveraging the placement of the existing rooflines and structural beams, Carl Tatz was able to configure a tracking room with a neutral sonic footprint and visual appeal. Three stereo pairs of Crown PZM microphones are strategically mounted on the tracking room’s multi-gabled 18-foot-high ceilings, taking full advantage of the unique acoustics.

The owners of The Upper Deck insisted on maximum sound isolation between the studio and the rest of the home as well as outside. This was achieved with enhanced room-within-room construction with layers of 3/4" laminated glass used in the window assemblies.

A custom privacy staircase entrance, built to access the second-story studio directly from outside, leads to an inside stairway funneling into the entrance vestibule between the MixRoom and tracking room, which doubles as a quiet machine room and iso booth. Great care was taken to accommodate sight lines, ergonomics and traffic flow. "Every once in a while a project will present itself as a Rubik’s Cube, and when we view it as an opportunity, we can design something spectacular," said Tatz. "This was one of those times, and the owners were terrific to work with. We are again humbly grateful for receiving this prestigious professional recognition.”

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The Recording Industry faculty at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) has chosen to implement TEC Award-winning PhantomFocus (PFS) MixRoom technology from Carl Tatz Design into its renovated Studio C.

“We now have nine PhantomFocus systems in six studios,” said Bill Crabtree, professor and M.F.A. director. “Studio A is Dual 5.1 PFS, Studio B and now Studio C are Dual two-channel PFS. Studios D and E and our Mix Lab are two-channel PFS. This provides our students with very high quality and consistent monitoring throughout all of our music production rooms.”

The original idea for the studio renovation was to make Studio C primarily for mixing, with the other studios designed as classrooms and recording spaces. ”Bill was committed to turning the thirty-year-old Studio C into the best room on campus, and based on feedback from students and professors, I think that was achieved,” Tatz remarked.

The MixRoom includes a pair of large vintage in-wall Boxer monitors that were refurbished and implemented into a Dual PFS along with Event Opal near-field monitors. The room features a new PhantomFocus eChair, along with an SSL AWS Delta 948 console with custom rack enclosures by Sound Construction & Supply. The rear wall was enhanced acoustically with Carl Tatz Design Signature Series modules by Auralex, augmenting a custom bass trap design.

"The PFS renders the frequency response, and low end in particular, to be remarkably consistent between mains and near fields and from room to room. In today’s environment, where so much work goes on inside the box, professional studio monitoring is one of the most important technologies that we can provide for our students,” explained Crabtree. “Our goal is that they will develop astute listening skills. Our students’ expectations for their own work and the systems on which they monitor in the field after graduation will both be greatly elevated."

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