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October 2012

October 2012

ON THE COVER

Wisseloord Studios

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Tom Kenny

Reboot, reinvention, makeover, rejuvenation, 2.0. These are words that get tossed around so much these days that it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of real transformation, the kind that involves a company embracing its heritage and simultaneously reimagining its future, and then really making the change. Two years ago at the San Francisco AES, the principals of Wisseloord Studios, the world-renowned facility in the Netherlands, announced the beginning of their transformation. This month we’re back in San Francisco for AES, and the new Wisseloord Studios is up and running and booking time; that’s Studio 2 on our cover….

FEATURES

Where the Jobs Are

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Barbara Schultz

By the time this issue of Mix reaches subscribers, the election-year rhetoric about unemployment will have reached a fever pitch. But anyone coming out of audio school knows that job scarcity isn’t news. For the scores of new engineers who enter the market every year, it’s a fact of life to be faced and conquered….

Neil Young’s Moonlit Sessions

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Barbara Schultz

Working with Neil Young can be a wild card, for sure, but it’s probably one of the most exciting gigs a studio engineer can have. John Hanlon has been producing, recording and mixing Young for about 17 years, and to say it never gets boring would be a gross understatement. It’s a thrill. It’s musical genius live on the floor. It’s awesome power on the fly, by the light of the full moon……

Sonic Fuel

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Matt Hurwitz

Film and TV composer Christopher Lennertz wraps up a cello overdub for a recent project and then announces the next track, a guitar overdub. But instead of sorting through contact lists and contractor recommendations, he takes a shortcut: upstairs at his studio at Sonic Fuel to knock on the door of a colleague, Aaron Kaplan, also an accomplished studio guitarist, to ask him to play on the track. Much easier….

Tape Emulation

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, The Mix Editors

Remember when “tube” was all the rage? The underlying drive was to get digital to sound more analog by introducing a tube into the signal chain. Not to be outdone, software manufacturers over the years have done their part with versions of tape emulators like the Massey Tapehead, Ferric TDS or Digidesign’s Reel Tape. Avid moved it into the next generation with the Pro Tools HD-specific HEAT feature, which is not really a plug-in but gets to the same point. Console manufacturer Harrison even offers another DAW-specific tape emulator in their Mixbus DAW. …

COLUMNS

Robair Report: Striving to Become “Ready Now”

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Gino Robair

Teaching classes at the city-college level is some of the most satisfying work I’ve ever done. The real payoff is at the end of each semester, when I’m often amazed at the high quality of the final projects. But it’s not just the singer/songwriters, rappers and beat makers that impress me….

TechTalk: Your Career Begins Before School

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Kevin Becka

Anyone with the drive and dollars can get an audio education today, and this is relatively new. There have been a handful of dedicated audio training programs around for 20 years or more, but the majority of them (and there are plenty) have popped up just recently. There are associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees from community colleges and four-year universities and trade and tech schools with or without a degree. …

Ask Eddie: Audio Education

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Eddie Ciletti

October marks my eighth year as an audio educator, an experience that has been more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. It’s not just the flow of information to receptive minds, but how each student’s unique interpretation reflects back that has helped me fine-tune each of my classes. Throw in a dash of eye-opening, a pinch of frustration and lots of repetition, and you have plenty of food for thought, or at least time for reflection….

LIVE

Gotye Live at Red Rocks

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, Text and Photos by Candace Horgan

As late as last fall, Gotye was relatively unknown in the U.S. and Europe. Toiling away in his native Australia since 2001, he had some minor success with the song “Heart’s a Mess” locally and in parts of Europe, but nothing would have indicated that Wally de Backer would explode in 2012, riding the song “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which was released in the summer of 2011 on YouTube. As of September 1, the video had been viewed more than 311 million times. …

Tour Profile: Missy Higgins

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Barbara Schultz

Alt-rock singer/songwriter Missy Higgins and band are touring the U.S., spreading the word about her latest album, The ‘Ol Razzle Dazzle (Eleven). The Australian-born artist is playing her own dates and frequently opening for Gotye….

MUSIC

Classic Tracks: Eddie Money, “Two Tickets to Paradise”

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Blair Jackson

Eddie Money burst onto the scene at an interesting time. The new wave was in full flower, with countless bands drawing on ’50s rock ’n’ roll, the British Invasion and various strains of R&B, mixing them with punk energy. At the same time—late 1977, early ’78—commercial juggernauts such as Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles were sometimes combining bright melodies with slashing guitars more identified with hard rock. A third popular strain was the blue-collar rock of Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellencamp and Bob Seger. Eddie Money drew from all those worlds….

The Wallflowers

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Blair Jackson

It’s been seven years since The Wallflowers put out an album of new material. During the interim, leader Jakob Dylan made acclaimed solo projects with Rick Rubin (Seeing Things) and T Bone Burnett (Women + Country), and there were Wallflowers tours in 2007 and 2009, but Dylan acknowledges, “I was anxious to be back with the guys and make a Wallflowers record. I felt if I was going to make more of a rock ’n’ roll record, there was no purpose for me to do that except with The Wallflowers. …

Autumn Owls Take Flight

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Lori Kennedy

Ireland’s atmospheric indie-rock trio Autumn Owls are set to release their first full-length album, Between Buildings, Toward the Sea October 23 on Epitonic. Gary McFarlane (vocals/guitar), Adam Browne (bass) and Will Purtill (drums) enlisted producer Brian Deck and mixing engineer Ciaran Bradshaw to help create the rich textures and sometimes soothing, sometimes haunting sounds of their debut LP….

TECH REVIEWS

Universal Audio Apollo

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Chris Grainger

Bill Putnam founded Universal Audio with the idea that his designs would be synonymous with technical and sonic quality, and the UA design team has forged Putnam’s ideas into their latest offering, the Apollo High Resolution Interface with UAD-2 processing. Apollo offers many features, including mic/line inputs, a range of outputs, monitoring, a software console and more. …

Focal SM9 Studio Monitors

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Kevin Becka

Focal Professional has been making studio monitors for only a short time, but Focal/JMLab has been around for more than 30 years. Besides making pro audio monitors, the company manufactures home and car audio products, headphones and public address systems. They’ve also been the OEM for other companies such as L-Acoustics and KRK, and recently penned a deal to collaborate with Fender Guitar on some soon-to-be-released products. …

Aphex Channel

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Brandon Hickey

Aphex has made a name for itself with its unique brands of processors, preamps, converters, instrument pedals and accessories. Whether helping a particular element poke through the fog of a dense mix, or adding extra luster to an entire mix, patented processes like the Aural Exciter and Big Bottom are welcome additions to any signal flow. The Aphex Channel reviewed here features a fixed signal flow including up to seven different signal processors. It also has a good number of inputs and outputs, both analog and digital, making it a DAW-friendly front end….

MXL CR30 Microphone

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Matt Bishop

Due to the boom in home and personal recording, a wide range of manufacturers offer value-based options from the beginning to end of the signal chain. Microphones in particular have seen a surge in affordable products that look a lot like their higher-priced cousins. The problem is in figuring out which of these can live up to the billing and deliver the goods. …

EDUCATION SECTION

An Open Letter to Students

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Ryan Terrell

Personal skills vastly outweigh technical skills in the real world, and employers are more impressed by work ethic than gear knowledge—they expect the latter. A client pays a lot of money to see you, and when the talent is alone in the booth, there’s nothing like a quick quip and a can-do attitude to set the tone for the session. Being yourself is paramount to success. If “yourself” isn’t outgoing, friendly, polite, and exuding confidence, then don’t be yourself, be Don Draper. You fake it till you make it….

New Studios for Students

Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix

With the increased pressure to get students in the door, audio programs around the country have been updating their facilities to provide some kind of “differentiator,” something that shows they remain on the cutting-edge of the industry and are educating students for the future. And with students in need of, and desiring, more hands-on education, the access to the latest gear in an accurate control room is of paramount importance. Much like we do each June in our “Class of” feature, Mix now takes a look at some of the high-profile studios to open recently at North American recording programs….

MIX EDUCATION DIRECTORY

Mix Education Directory 2012

Welcome to the Mix Education Directory 2012!…

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