Long Beach, CA – May 2016… On Stage Music Academy was founded with a vision of making the experience of learning music fun by encouraging students to play together as soon as they are able to. And a pair of Mackie DL32R digital mixers with iPad control forms the core of that premise.
The brainchild of Bill McCrae, a former film and TV composer and music business executive, the school occupies the second floor of a building in Long Beach, California, housing two rehearsal rooms, a digital recording studio with isolation room, two piano/vocal rooms, a drum room, and several instrumental practice spaces, And tying it all together: a pair of DL32R mixers, acting as virtual patch bays to connect the entire facility.
“Bill had a context of creating a community of musicians and teaching from that context, and we wanted to make the space work that same way,” observes Richard Rutherford, Director of Rutherford Designs, the company behind the school’s design. “We worked with the contractor to design a system that could easily connect the entire facility.”
Using a pair of DL32R mixers, Rutherford created a matrix that enables students to connect any player in any room to any other room, as well as record and playback capabilities from anywhere in the space.
“The process of multi-track recording is a brand new experience for a lot of people, and it’s a great tool in learning to play live with others,” explains McCrae.
The challenge, says Rutherford, was “creating the ability to do a reasonably good multi-track recording in any given rehearsal room and feed it to any other room. With one DL32R in the main recording suite, and another in a machine room on the other side of the facility, really, anything can go anywhere with some pretty simple hard-patching.”
“The DL32R provides us with multiple inputs, so we can record performances as opposed to tracking one track at a time,” adds McCrae. “You can spend a whole lot of money and go into a studio to do that, but the DL32R makes it affordable for a school like us.
Rutherford concludes, “when you consider the sheer quantity of ins and outs, the iPad connectivity, the simplicity of the Master Fader app, and the overall quality of sound, the DL32R is a really simple choice.”
To watch the video click this link https://youtu.be/s2pHci8aXZU .
