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Obviously DigiDesign (now Avid) is your first choice of console
What would be your second choice? I can answer that pretty easily. I would say my second choice would probably be an analogue console
[right] and here's why:
I mean, for many years I had the opportunity to use all the digital consoles out there. And did, at one point or another or another probably. I haven't used XL8 yet
I haven´t used the very latest Soundcraft yet
I'm sure it's great, don't get me wrong. I'm sure it's fantastic. I'm a big Midas fan, I've used Midas for years, so I'm sure it's really good
But here's why I said that
First and foremost is the amount of processing power that I have here, compared to what I would have on XL8. I mean
I come from an studio background, I've done over 3 000 live shows
and I know what processing I need to do my job. I have an approach, a certain approach that I use, certain sounds of music
and this is the only digital console that offers the processors that I want to use, ok? Compared to what I can have on XL8, ok?
But short of that, I'm going to move back to analogue and use the processors there
And the other piece of the puzzle here is that it has delay compensation in it
That's the other really biggy for me. That's why I did not spec
any of the other digital consoles previous to Venue on my tours because
you know, if you wanna do compression multing, you wanna do upwards compression, you know
all of these studio tricks that we use
this is the only console I can do that
ok? So short of that, I move back to analog
and lastly, it's just the sound quality, I haven't heard any of the other digital consoles, though I have not heard the XL8 yet .. that's right there with ...
I think there's some delay compensation in the XL8 as well, which is pretty proficient, I mean, you know
for a couple hundred thousand dollars, it'd better be in there! You know
Yeah, I mean,
again that's part of the ... I mean I'm at a position in my career where I can spec any console I wanna spec, but with this I just won't bother
I don't want to out and spend two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars on an XL8 and not know what the long term path that console has
And also be limited on the processing, etcetera. It may sound great, don't get me wrong
.. when we talk about the sound quality issue, this is always an argument, I talk about this on the forums
when you're talking about mixing
sound quality, and this is gonna sound weird, is only part of the formula
If I had input to output great sound quality,
but I can't mix the show, what good is it for me? ok?
I mean the ability to, specially in today's music,
as complex as music production has become, I gotta have the tools to be able to mix that kind of music
and it's not just about input to output sound quality. That's important, don't get me wrong
but it's not the only measuring stick, you know.
So when people say one console sound better than that one, well, great, can I mix on it?
So I guess the digital world has really suffered from that, you know
where we've had digital mixers come out with all this functionality
And I couldn't cope with it the first few times I worked on PM1D was just, you know
in the very early days, oh my gosh, you were so handcuffed just trying to operate the console that you did not mix the show
So, I really wanted to, you know, when we were working ot his we spent a great deal of energy and time trying to make sure that the user interface was usable
so it wasn't going to impede your ability to mix the show, actually it would help you to mix the show better
so, to answer the question: DigiDesign or I gotta go analog man ... until I tried this
But you know, with the XL8, for as great a piece of engineering as I think it probably is ... just financially it's gonna make it really hard to fit into, certainly concert sound model
Even the US market. It's gonna be an issue, folks, yes. I mean ... I'll give an example
If I was on Tom Petty again (I was still mixing Tom Petty) and I went back to the management and said: you know what, we're going to switch over to XL8 for front-of-the-house and monitors
It would almost double the cost of their rental for the PA system
Now, if I'm going to do that
it'd better sound twice as good, 'cause the management and the accountant ... are gonna come back and say, wait a minute
Why are we spending twice as much money over the course of the tour? I mean, they're gonna ask those kinds of questions and you'd better have the answers for it
So, it may be a great piece of technology, but in terms of its business model, where it's going to fit in the industry, if they are trying to sell it into concert sound they're going to have a tough road
I mean, the elite acts will have it, I mean if they wanna have it ... I'm sure some of the bigger sound companies will definitely have one, the rental companies will have one to rent
But as far as making some deep penetration where it gets used universally, I just don't see it happening at that price point
I may be political on this, but I don't see it
it's too expensive. If you take the sound company position, if I'm the sound company ... I'm stuck with two choices
I gotta rent it out for a very low price to compete with these answers
and try to get everybody to fall in love with it and then raise the price back up
which is dangerous, because then, you know, you can push away your clients
or I just gotta say, I gotta rent it for this much money and take it as it is
So it's a tough decision. When I saw the prices I thought ... they are gonna have a hard time
and I'll tell you,
right now I think if I was them I'd be
really scared
of the DiGiCO SD-7, as it's gonna have all the functionality of XL-8 and a bit more for half the price
I mean, that's a very sexy, very well designed, product ...
It's going to put some pressure on them ... actually, we can talk about this, I believe there are plans for them to run plugins
on the FPGA on that console
But keep this in mind, you know, and this is always kind of the hidden thing about plugins that you have to remember: the TDM architecture as been in existence now for 10 or 15 years
And all the third-party manufacturers have written plugins to run on Windows XP and Macintosh
And they are going to run on Venue as well
If you know talk about a new CPU platform,
it's not like you are going to be able to take all of these plugins and run it on there
All these companies will have to code their plugins to run on your device. That's going to take an enormous amount of time
So while they may run on there, they're not going to run the same
OK, so, you know, a plugin is not just another plugin, they're specific
In the ProTools world, even though it's the same plugin, it's the same Fairchild or 1176 plugin.
When we went to Intel McIntosh, all those plugins had to be re-coded, you know, to work on the Intel Macs.
So what would work on the Motorola Macs would not work on the Intel Macs.
So you have to have that development as a manufacturer, you have to have that partnership with all those manufacturers. ..., Focusrite, Eventide, to get them to do them for you, you know
That's why you won't probably see plugins running on PM1D natively anytime soon
So that's why this is such a huge advantage
And you could even take that one step further ... where if you consider the ramifications of plugins being used in the studio
You know, you have an artist now who's using plugins on the mixing and tracking
They can take those presets and run them on Venue. I mean, it's a huge advantage
And let me tell you something: it speaks directly to the artist when they know that they can do that
In all my thirty years of mixing live sound I've never seen the artist
become so
engaged and interested in what we are using in front-of-house and monitors until this console came out
Because all of a sudden they can connect the dots a little bit. "Wait a minute. I can use the plugin that I use in the recording, I can use it here, I can use it in my in-ear mix?"
Yeah, it's a done deal. Now they are stepping up and saying: "we need to use that console", whereas before they would never care. They didn't know. Yamaha, Midas, they had not even heard of them
So, you know, if we talk about consoles, that's part of the love I have for this: it transcends both sides of the industry and I just think it sounds great. OK, alright, that's question 1!
Do you still consider analog outboard processors live valve preamps and compressors?
Not as much, I mean .. because I trust all manipulations that happen here ... I'll back up a little bit
I said this in a recent webinar and it really stirred up the dust, but I'm gonna say it here. One of the things you have to remember about Digidesign live sound products is that this company and only this company, as a live sound company
has been held to a completely different standard compared to their live sound competitors
With ProTools, they have been slugging it out for about 15 years now. SSL, Neve, API, Euphonics, ... Studer, analog
and they've survived all that. You know, the industry has accepted it as as a viable replacement for some of those golden analog circuits and sounds
All of that DNA comes right into Venue
so when I tell somebody
hey, this is studio quality audio
and they get to hear it for the first time, they go:
"ok, I get what you're saying now". So the same thing applies to all the plugins
All them have been developed and used in the biggest studios, biggest mastering houses in the world so I trust these. I know that these work
And I've done my own comparisons in the studio where I've taken an 1176 and a plugin and kinda compared them to see if they do the same
And it's close enough
I really have, in plugin form, a Fairchild
that is 80% of what a real Fairchild is and to be able to use it anywhere I wanna use it
as opposed to trying to lug a 30 000 dollar compressor around with me on the road
And I can do it, if I had the opportunity to do it I absolutely would do it
I mean, I was known for doing it in the United States. I would just bring racks of tube gear and processors out and use them. It's like .. good sound is good sound and this is how you get it, right here
I can't do it with a dbx 160 ... you know, it's gotta be this box ... drove the sound company absolutely crazy!
As they would have to go get me all this gear. And the proof is in the pudding, you know, so the shows sounded great
so while I do consider using it here, I don't right now. And here's the two reasons why
because I love having my snapshots ... outboard gear I can't do that .. and the outboard gear, for the most part, I don't think sounds better enough to eliminate it from the snapshot process
The other reason is, specially if we are talking about using different preamps ahead of the stage rack etcetera at some point, ... you can't get in behind the preamp, so you may have something really great sitting out here, but you're still having to go through this preamp,
unless you're gonna go really high preamp, really high end digital converter and come in digitally here
which to me is OK if I find something that I really really really really really have to have that sound on, then I'll do it
but the downside to that is that I give up part of the virtual soundcheck workflow if I do that ... I loose control of the preamp in the virtual soundcheck workflow
[Right now DiGiCo makes a tube preamp for the front of the stage rack. Do you think you're going to make something like that?]
No. I don't see any need to do it because
we can go down a long path here ...
part of what happens ... you know, just putting a tube on something
doesn't make it warmer sounding;
in fact if it's working at the lower end of its operation scale
it can have a better transient response than a solid state circuit
The way you get warmth out of a tube circuit is by overdriving it. That's what creates the harmonic bloom that we like
Do you really want to have an overdriven ... Is there really any opportunity with DiGiCo to overdrive that preamp to create the warmth?
It just doesn't make any sense to me ...
And I'll give you a little record on the preamps here because I think our preamps are a hidden secret
Our preamp design was taken from a chip design that was very popular in the 70s and 80s in vintage consoles design, in the Neves and SSLs. It's from a 1061, that's the chip design and as it just happened to happen in history
when we got ready to start designing this, the same company, Audio Devices, released a really low noise version of that exact same chip
And we thought. Man, we hit the golden goose here. So that's the central point of this preamp and then add to that there are no electrolytic caps in this design
it's all film caps and it's a really hi-fi sound preamp
So, it's part of the design. You can have great converters, whatever, you know, but if you have a terribly sounding preamp you are just converting bad preamps. It's all gotta start right there
So I think our secret is great preamp design, way, way above average A-D converters and the 48 bit mixing. Those things in combination make for a great mixer
Yeah, I'd say that, at its core it's a studio design, yeah
well i'd say from the position of having film capacitors, that alone makes it sound much more like a discrete circuit. But at the core of it it's probably close to a Neve or an SSL
When we were developing the console we made tons of listening comparisons. Blind tests comparing these preamps to every preamp I could get my hands on, and I think it comes the closest to the Grace preamps
I mean, it's really, really transparent
and i think that those people that's the first time they hear it, i mean, it's so transparent and really so void of any harmonic colour like we see in an analog circuit ...
a little stale sounding maybe ... this thing is just GUI ... I can do anything I wanna do with it ... there's incredible headroom in it ... so that's my take, OK?
.. Where I might use it with this console and, again, I'd probably convert it to digital to do it is if I'm gonna work on things that are outside the scope of virtual soundcheck like room mikes for my recording,
maybe it's ambient mikes sitting at the FOH, things like that, you know, I might push those out and compress them before I actually convert to digital and bring them hot
because if you remember, our record path here is right after the D conversion. So maybe for room mikes and stuff I would do it,
since it's outside of the virtual soundcheck
Here's a good one. [What do you think about the formula: Bad musicians+good sound engineer = good music]
Here's how it goes
Bad music, regardless of whether is engineered good or bad, is still bad music, ok?
It's just good sounding bad music, ok? But, you know, great music will survive any kind of production. Great music can sound terrible and you still kinda get it, you'll still understand it, ok?
I think that's never been truer for record productions, you know.
I believe I've mixed my share of really really bad demos, and made some really good sounding bad demos
They go nowhere
There still has to be music ...
Point source or line array? Line array, definitely, for me
d&b is probably my favourite and it would be very close to VDosc; either one of those two I think are the best out there ... Meyer would be in there somewhere, certain Meyer products
But, for the most part, I'm all up for the line array. I think is gives the best far-field phase response of any PA system going today
You give me ... although having said that,
you give me a horizontally arrayed PA that can provide that kind of phase response and that kind of ability to cover a geometry properly, specially in the vertical domain and maybe I'd go back to horizontal
But I haven't seen any horizontally arrayed PA that comes close to doing that
Aside from the sound quality and the phase, one of the hidden advantages of a line array is being able to adjust in the vertical aspect
To be able to cover high distances is almost impossible for a horizontally arrayed PA ... So: line array, line array, line array for me
[In order to be a good sound engineer,
would you recommend a good degree of theory or enough practise?]
I think both
But at the core of all of it is experience, ok?
And even students that I see coming into schools a lot of times what I recommend to them is to go out and work in the field ... get some sense of what it is and then go to school
It's dark, it's audio
You can't see it. They have no idea what's really really happening, you know
But get some sense of what the business is like a little bit and then go to school if you need it
And I always try to say ... try to get some set in you mind ... are you going to be a mixer, a system designer, a sound designer, you gotta pick one of those ones and then go after it
From my years of experience
the people I've seen be the most successful as mixers are people that have some sort of musical background. They think music, they don't think electronics and decibels, they think music
And, you know, we were sitting and listening to music today. I don't know if you were reading the captions etcetera
but that to me is at the core, if you're gonna be a mixer, of how you should be thinking, you know
You can't use one approach for mixing all styles of music. You gotta go back and listen and dig into mixes and understand What makes the music tick, what makes it work and then come up with your own approach to do that, whether it's live work or studio
that's what what makes you a great mixer, it has nothing to do with learning how to operate consoles ... it's nothing to do with it
It's about the ability to listen and discern and understand that this is what's trying to be presented musically and this is going to be my tool to do that ... ok? understand that? everybody buy that?
[What would you want to say to the new generations?] Yeah, again,
I would say,
you know, there's so much technology at our disposal, so much ... I mean, I think about what was available when I started in audio
I'm going to date myself a little bit here, but I'm not gonna to tell you how old I am
but on my first studio jobs, my first mixing jobs, there were no computers, there was no digital anything, you know
one tape machine, one console, closet full of microphones
maybe a plate reverb, and that was about it
yeah, maybe not that far back!
but, you know, since then, if you think about
the amount of technology that has been put in play
and then you add to that
that all the technology that was in play a long time back
is still valid, people still wanna use it
if you are a new person coming into this, you are just gonna gotta go: wow
how am I possibly gonna learn all this?
but the answer is to learn your approach
don't worry about learning the gear
Obviously you have to learn what a compressor does, what a microphone does. The difference between condenser and dynamic and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah ... you have to know those things
But at the core of all it has to be your approach. How do I approach mixing or creating or recording
that style of music? If that's not at the core of it, you're absolutely gonna fall down
so I would say to the new generations: the gear's important
the music is way, way more important