If you were googling Undertone Audio and found my blog here, well...welcome! You should visit the official website, undertoneaudio.com, but here you can follow my adventures as the crew and I build these mixing consoles, EQs and other oddities. Some, most or all of my work wouldn't be very interesting to a lot of people, but for recording junkies who get excited about vintage German tube mics, cool, eccentric compressors, studio history and some of the fun ins and outs of studio life, this could be for you. Hey, make it your home page and impress chicks! I can be reached at mw@undertoneaudio.com
After we wrapped up Greg Wells' console last month, we got the final word and the deposit to build another one, so console number five has already started coming together. Eric is designing one for another client in Europe and we have very serious quotes that may turn into more console building right away. One of the interested parties came to Barefoot Recording to experiment with the console in Studio B last week and ended up doing a full on tracking session. We'll see what happens and I'll keep you posted.
To keep the rackmount EQs, the compressors and now a bunch of other stuff on track in addition to all of this, Eric is taking the rest of the year off from recording to focus all of his attention on UTA. Tim O'Sullivan, who has been working with us part time since last year, is leaving his job at Capitol to join Undertone Audio full time (the humiliating hazing process is due to begin soon). Ken Miller is getting more involved and he is able to do much of his UTA work at home in Mammoth and Roger is preparing for the workload ahead. As I've done a lot of work on the side (The work I've done with Bock Audio, Capitol, Jon Brion and others has been independent of UTA and Barefoot), I have to scale it back. I haven't worked with Bock Audio since November or December -those guys are great, but I've had to juggle so much, so Anthony Houser has taken over my post with David. I want to keep Jon and Greg happy and Anthony is helping me out with that as well. I hope to work with those guys for a long time, but outside of that I'm too booked to take on much more and that's a good thing.
We had an Undertone Audio BBQ at Roger's house last weekend. Eric, Larry, Roger, Ken, Tim and I sat down and discussed what we have ahead of us for the rest of this year, including the AES show in San Francisco this October, and how we are going to handle it all.
Eric triumphant after grilling burgers
Roger and I spent about a week with Art Kelm installing a studio for My Chemical Romance. Art, by the way, is now the Chief Technical Engineer at Capitol Studios in addition to everything else he does... talk about having your hands full!
I was just making myself at home in someone else's studio
I went straight into putting Greg Koller's mix room together (Art is onboard with that one, too). The new studio is in the Capitol tower and there is interesting history behind it -it used to be Glen Ballard's room, he moved out long ago and the room sat dormant until last week. Greg bought a Euphonix CS3000 (he is mixing a movie for which Jon has been composing the score and he really needed the recall) and a small crew of us had one week to get it up and running. Meanwhile, Jon, Greg and Eric Caudieux (AKA French Eric) were in London. As soon as I finished the bulk of my work on that, it was back to Jon's live rig downstairs in Studio B and back to Barefoot to continue on this new console. I had to take a couple of days off, I returned to Capitol on Friday evening and promptly came down with a cold.. so I've been home sick since.
Greg's new room is only temporary -we are going to tear it all down when the movie is finished and reinstall everything in a more permanent manner later... with or without the Euphonix, it depends on if he likes it or not. Here are a few shots:
Euphonix in place before the temporary floor
Anthony Houser prepping Elcos
Racks of Greg's gear and engineer who didn't want to be named
Secret undercover engineer who's face must not be revealed
I visited Alan Yoshida at his mastering room at Oceanway. Alan, Robin Lynn and I went out to eat dinner at Cafe Gratitude http://cafegratitude.com/, it's a raw, organic, vegan restaurant. Excellent food.
We spent time discussing wiring for mastering... always interesting with Alan.
They didn't just break the mold after they made Yoshida... they sold the pieces to tourists just to make a quick buck
As for the newest console we're building -it has 24 channels, 16 of them on channel strips with EQ and filters, in interesting feature that will make it behave as though it's inline (meaning the monitor path is on the same channel strip as the send to tape or digital domain), it will have four separate stereo busses, the faceplates are black, like the first one we built, final tube output stages and the patchbays will be onboard. This one is going to Birmingham, Alabama and I'll post pictures as we go.
Slash's album, "Apocalyptic Love" will be released this Tuesday (May 22nd), so go out and buy it on CD and mark your calendars for AES (October 26-29), we will be there with lot's of special goodies and we may have some tricks up our sleeves.
Here goes... the first blog post in quite some time. I stayed off of it while we were building Greg Wells' console. Although I posted updates and pictures on the Undertone Audio Facebook page, we didn't put very much information about the console or its progress out there until it left the building. I've been working more or less exclusively on this console since I finished my work on the Capitol install and it's so easy to lose sight day in and day out about taking pictures or writing about progress... it's sort of like practicing something; it can be easier for other people to see how much it has changed when the one practicing is fixated on the details.
March was a particularly difficult month. My health fell apart as I wound up in the hospital for awhile with heart issues and Roger's marriage came to an abrupt end. Ken Miller came all the way from Mammoth to help keep the console on track as Roger and I both came unglued. We're both doing a lot better now, but that was a rough period to get through.
It's a long five hour drive between Mammoth and Los Angeles and Ken made the trip regularly. He discovered that the quietest place in the building for sleeping is the "Slash Box," one of Studio A's isolation booths, big enough for the grand piano. He set up a bed under the piano and when he wasn't in, I ended up sleeping in there half the time... it was some of the best sleep I've had.
Ken did an amazing job from the wood and metalwork to everything else and we are very grateful to have him onboard. He is going to take over the building of all future console power supplies, woodwork and a new product that we will announce soon.
Eric was mixing Slash's record until about mid March, then he spent about two weeks with us on the console, soldering iron in hand. He enjoys being involved in the process and as we hand build these things, Eric and Larry are there seeing it through to the end.
So here are some details on Greg's console:
*It has 24 channels; eight of which show up on channel strips with EQ/filters
*The remaining 16 channels come into balanced inputs, stay at unity gain and quickly sum
*There are two solid state stereo busses with insert points (those 16 channels are selectable to the busses via switches on an internal PCB, 14 in L&R pairs, channels 15 and 16 are mono)
*Those two stereo busses feed into the tube stereo buss with transformer outputs and the tube Control room circuit
*The 8 channels with EQ can send to those stereo busses and have panning. There is a +-10dB trim on each channel strip, no aux sends and no multitrack sends
*The middle bucket has rackrails (isolated from the console's chassis) for his favorite stereo gear, which is normalled on the Buss A insert points
*The surface of the console is made from the porous bronze, but the best place for the stereo compressor, etc was right in the center, so the reflections are at least balanced... not just on one side
*There is no metering on the channels, just a custom pair on the master section. There is no meter bridge, this allowed for a lower overall height
Roger getting the frame together
Eric and the faceplate stencil jig
Faceplates ready for silkscreening
Ken soldering resistors on the control room level switch
Eric getting the input bucket together
Eric and Roger on the master section
8 custom input channels
Master section in place
Bolster finally on
Onsite at Greg's studio during commissioning
As we wrapped up this console, we have serious inquiries for more. We may start another one or two within the next two weeks or we're starting in on two smaller, 10 channel consoles that are very portable. Whatever the case, we will be at AES in San Francisco this year and we will have rackmount EQs and mic pres with us.
More behind the scenes videos documenting the making of Slash's record have been coming out, here are some that focus on the studio:
You can find more on Youtube and on Slash's website.
As for me, I have a lot of inventory to look over and we are going to figure out how much parts ordering we have ahead for more consoles. I've been back over at Capitol working on Jon Brion's live rig, I'm rewiring patchbays for Greg Koller and I may work on another studio install with Art Kelm next week. I've slowed down, been getting rest... I need it. I'm going to start moving parts to the loft upstairs as we will be building the next consoles up there and that's where we built the majority of the first two. We built Greg's console in the Studio A live room and we made quite a mess... I still haven't finished cleaning that up.
I'll be posting more frequently... sorry for the delay and we'll keep everyone posted on the progress of products we have coming out later this year.
It's been nearly four weeks since I posted on here and what a wild ride it has been. I finished up my work on the Capitol install on the 4th of this month, not even two weeks ago, and it feels like a year has gone by. The last few days I was there, the wall between Studios A and B was opened up (they are able to do that for larger sessions) and they carpeted the entire area. It was strange to see carpet in a live room that big with two control rooms, but it was all a part of setting up for the first big session with the new console. The artist was Paul McCartney and it was a live broadcast. I stayed far away from all of it... but I heard there were two film crews -nearly a hundred people making it all happen. By Friday they changed over the room again for a Grammy event and this week more wiring and testing was underway.
That's Studio B's window viewed from A's liveroom
Andre Rice and James Goforth
Taking a late night break with Chandler Harrod in Studio C
Art Kelm was deeply involved in the project and I have to say I had a great time working with him. I had known his name for a about twenty years, hadn't met him until the start of the install and I have so much respect for him. Here is a link to an interesting interview with him for Mix magazine http://mixonline.com/studios/design/mix-interview-arthur-kelm/. It was tough work and we were all happy that Andre Rice joined us for a couple of weeks. I'm proud to have been a part of it.
After I finished up at Capitol, I took a couple of days off and last Wednesday, I was lucky enough to go with Slash, Brent and Trevor to a private Van Halen show. It was their dress rehearsal with the big stage... the whole production, at the Forum. The band was amazing -I've never heard Eddie Van Halen play that well, the sound was great and there were musicians everywhere. If the roof at the Forum had caved in... the entire rock guitar player community would have been taken out. It was a very special treat after spending seven straight weeks on the install.
Here at Barefoot, things are quieting down as Slash and the band have left and cartage took away all their gear. I'm going to miss those guys, it was serious fun to spend time with them everyday and watch and listen to the record come together. They are serious, hardworking musicians and the record is going to make a lot of fans very happy. The rehearsals and the recording process were filmed and short episodes will be released online each week until the album comes out (May 22nd). He released the cover art for the record http://slashonline.com/ and had mentioned that he wanted a pin up girl in there somewhere. I am a pin up fanatic, so I brought in some of my books of pin up art for inspiration. Of course, the Bettie Page life size cut out was in the live room with the band the whole time and is in a lot of the documentary footage as well as in the Mativision shoot that happened here last week.
While Dre and I were at Capitol, Roger and Ken Miller were at Dolby, working on an install with Audrey Wiechman. We still had to keep on top of Greg Wells' console at the time and it was a little hard to try to balance my schedule, but now I'm focusing on it and Roger and Dre have been here with me. I have been putting components into PC boards, Dre has been building the power supplies, Roger is building the frame and Ken Miller, although safely away at home in Mammoth, is doing the woodwork.
Larry had finished all the circuit design work on the rackmount EQ/mic pre units, but he was side tracked for several weeks doing custom designs for Wells' console. I'll get into the specifics of that in another post, but long story short... Larry is back on the rackmount units to wrap up the circuit layouts. They will come out soon, I promise. If you look back at older posts, you can add up the amount of times I said that we were getting close... now we have a bunch of parts here. But these have to be right.
I got side tracked for a day... Eric came into the shop at about ten at night on Tuesday and said that in order to do these mixes, we were going to have to figure out a way to be able to send and return to any of his effects (an EMT plate, the chamber, spring reverb, tape echos and a bunch of digital stuff) without taking up so much of the console. The solution was to get another patchbay in there that is fully normalled, tie all the ins and outs of the time based stuff to the ins and outs of a dedicated 16 channel converter. Now all the reverbs can be mixed in the box and brought back to the console on a pair of channels instead of 24 of them and so many of the delays are digital anyways. It is a permanent solution.
David Bock has a new blog about microphones http://macromicrophone.blogspot.com/2012/02/grohl-works-mic.html, so be sure to check that out. I mentioned before that Eric owns the only two Bock Audio Ellfet 7 mics, the original prototype and a second one that David got together for him right before the bulk of recording on Slash's record started. These are fet mics that put fet47s to shame. Eric was so impressed with the prototype, he had to have it and both of them were used extensively on the sessions.
Bock Audio Ellfet 7s in stereo
There are some pretty exciting things brewing here, but I can't talk about them now, but I'll say that 2012 is already pretty amazing and I'll post news when I can.
Roger turned 45 on Wednesday, so we had cake here, then Saturday is Cian's birthday and his whole family is coming over for one serious Irish party.
