AudioTechnology Issue 127

I recently had the opportunity to host a panel at the Studios 301 Open Day. The topic was How Can Big Studios Adapt to Making Music in the Modern Market? At first, I thought it was a setup; an easy way for 301 to spruik its relevance in front of a captive audience. To his credit, studio GM, Ron Haryanto, assembled a diverse panel: owner Tom Misner; producer and decade-long Studios 301 stalwart, Simon Cohen; Australian Music Week director and artist manager, Geoff Trio; and independent artist, Milan Ring. While Trio comes from the artist management side, Milan was the real outlier of the bunch. Impressively, she does it all. Not simply writing, recording, mixing and mastering her own music, but doing the same for other artists, and mastering the…

NEWMARKET STUDIOS For the second half of this year, manager and head engineer Callum Barter is heading to LA for a six-month stint branching out into the US market, with some professional development opportunities. Callum is excited to hand the keys to producer/ engineer Anna Laverty 1 who will take the role of head engineer and manager at Newmarket over a six-month residency. Broads were in for a week’s worth of tracking with Callum to lay down parts for their second album. Vocal sounds varied from the U47/1176 winning combo, AGK C12B, the RCA ribbon and some reamping through various guitar amps. Lots of exciting sounds in there! The Hunter Express was also back in for album number two, this time produced by Robert Muinos and engineered by Callum. An…

BEHRINGER CLONES 808 www.musictri.be/brand/behringer/home Probably the most coveted drum machine of all time is the Roland TR-808 — you’ll still pay into the thousands for an original unit. The rumours of Behringer releasing a clone of the classic have proven true with the introduction of the RD-808 Rhythm Designer. Importantly, the RD-808 doesn’t generate digital emulations of those classic drum sounds — it’s a completely analogue machine. Aesthetically Behringer’s clone sports the familiar gradation of red and orange keys alongside orange and white knobs. However, it’s not a straight clone in every respect. Behringer has thrown in a few useful features not found in the original, including an analogue, resonant two-pole filter and a transient designer/bus compressor which you can feed with multiple assignments. The synth has 11 individual direct…

When Bendigo’s new 1000-seat Ulumbarra Theatre opened in 2015, everyone thought it would simply spread the gig load. Up until then, the 480-seat Capital Theatre had been doing it all — music, events, theatre — you name it. By the seat allocations alone, Ulumbarra should have cannibalised at least two-thirds of the Capital’s shows, but head technician Mickey Levis said the Capital is still as busy as ever. There’s just more gigs happening in Bendigo. Two hours north-northwest of Melbourne, Bendigo has carved out a place for itself as the centre of a regional tour catchment. If a tour is hitting Bendigo, punters will often head there — even when they’re on the dividing line between there and Melbourne — because accommodation is cheap and the area is beautiful. With…

ALLEN & HEATH IN ITS PRIME www.allen-heath.com Allen & Heath unveiled the new Prime Input and Output modules for its dLive mixing system that are designed to make the most of dLive’s 96kHz XCVI FPGA core. Two modules will be available; an Input Mic Pre module (with eight mic preamps) and a Line Output module. As the modules are designed to fit into the dLive DX32 expander rack, Prime can be used easily in conjunction with existing I/O, with the ability to tailor or scale the system to your unique requirements, from select channels up to multiple fully-loaded racks. Allen & Heath’s Managing Director, Rob Clark explains: “As our XCVI core is a defacto 96kHz platform, we realised we were able to exploit I/O converter technologies that are optimised for…

ARTURIA ADDS PRES & FILTERS www.arturia.com Arturia is confident its new sextuplet of plug-ins are the type “you’ll actually use.” Three of them are emulations of famous preamps, while the other three are recreations of unique filters taken from classic synthesizers. Here’s the breakdown — 1973-Pre is a modern take on Rupert Neve’s classic solid-state pre, complete with switchable boutique transformers; TridA-Pre is an updated preamp model of Trident’s A Range console pre; and V76-Pre models the classic Telefunken tube tone at the heart of the ‘White Album’ sound while integrating a shelf EQ for extra control. Onto the filters — SEM-Filter is recreated from Oberheim’s self-contained analogue synth, and it’s been updated with a sequencer; Mini-Filter cracks the code of Dr Moog’s renowned ladder filter and lets you control…