Recording - October 2010 - 2

PUBLISHER:

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER:

Thomas Hawley Brent Heintz

EDITORIAL

EDITOR: Lorenz Rychner ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Mike Metlay WEB EDITOR: Justin Peacock MÚSICO PRO EDITOR: Fernando Curiel
CONTRIBUTORS

Shrinkage No, it’s not the age of the shrink, although some of us are being driven batty by some recent developments in this industry and might be ready for a mental-health professional (can you say overused autotune, or louder-than-loud brick-of-cheese mastering?). And I don’t mean shrinkage as in retail inventory disappearing from the store shelves without ever going past the check-outs... By shrinkage I’m talking about our studios that produce more with less. We’re at the stage where Dick Tracy with his two-way wrist-watch radio (circa 1946) has almost become a reality. The form factor of the Apple iPhone and Blackberry and Google Android and such devices is almost down to the size of a wristwatch, and recording audio is just one of the many things these devices can do, and do well. Drummer and occasional contributor to Recording Ivan Katz recently played me some tracks he recorded while on tour in Europe, on a PDA with a tiny Korg keyboard, and they were close to ready for prime time. If you have tried to incorporate a PDA or an iPod or some such device into your workflow, you may have found that it’s not easy to integrate and connect it properly. Enter the DiDock we’re reviewing on page 32—it even has balanced, transformer-isolated XLR connections and ground lift switches to insure buzz-free hookups, plus it can charge your iPod and provides a headphone output. But we’re not quite at the stage where these PDA-sized devices are a valid main tool in the studio. Some of us still have the big A-frame keyboard stands from yesteryear (hey, some of us even still have the big keyboards from yesteryear...), while others have shrunk it down to a laptop, an interface, a mic or two for vocals and whatever instrument(s) they play, a pair of monitors, some hard drives and not much more. The size of the gear doesn’t dictate the quality of the outcome, it’s the quality of the gear combined with the skills of the operator. But there are two things we all need, no matter the size and type of equipment we use: Peace and quiet to work in, and a combination of speakers and room acoustics that we can trust. We have written many times about the ways we can control the acoustics in our studios, and we will again—meanwhile avail yourself of the wealth of information on the topic on our website, by checking out www.recordingmag.com/resources/72.html. The peace and quiet we all need comes from good noise insulation—and it works both ways: We don’t want to bother the outside world with our noises, and we don’t want the outside world to bother us. This month we’re writing about a new material that helps greatly in controlling noise transmission through walls and floors–it has the curious name of Green Glue, and we asked a studio designer/acoustics specialist and his building contractor to tell us about it. They tell us that it not only works great and is easy to apply, but that it does so at a very reasonable cost. Hey, what’s not to like? Another typical contributor to productive studio shrinkage is the Cakewalk V-Studio 20 that we review on page 10. More features, less bulk. We still like the sound of the old keyboards from yesteryear, but we don’t have room for them in our shrinking studios, so we appreciate it when somebody comes out with a software version, like Waldorf just did with the Largo that we review on page 62. It packs so much sound and modulation and arpeggiation power that you’ll never exhaust its potential, no matter how many sound programs of your own you’ll cobble together. The same goes for the Lexicon PCM Native Reverb plug-in bundle that we review on page 44—it saves us making space for yet another box, while it offers the classic sounds of the box—at half the price. I trust that these articles, and the many others in this issue, help you in your productively shrinking studio environment, thus leading to much— Happy Recording.

Allen Goodman, Mark Hornsby, Angela Bender, Bob Emmet, Nick Casares, Brian Gadson, Todd Gascon, Bruce Kaphan, John Rossi III, Paul Vnuk Jr., Gary Eskow, Michael Nickolas, Darrell Burgan, David Herpich, Marty Peters
TAXI METER

EDITOR: Kenny Kerner
ART

PRODUCTION

ART DIRECTOR: Scott Simmonds PRODUCTION MANAGER: Colin Courtney PHOTOGRAPHY: Brent Heintz
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RECORDING OCTOBER 2010

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Recording - October 2010

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