Year: 2001

ENGINEER DAN RUDIN DAZZLED BY RIGHT TRACK RECORDING’S SOLID STATE LOGIC SL 9000 J SERIES SUPERANALOGUE™ CONSOLE

The Acclaimed Classical Men’s Choir “CenturyMen” and the “Broadway Inspirational Voices” Group Put the SL 9000 Through Its Paces

No sooner was the door open for business at Right Track Recording’s massive new orchestral recording room, A509, than top engineer Dan Rudin entered with the acclaimed classical men’s choir “CenturyMen” and the gospel choir “Broadway Inspirational Voices.” Adding tracks to a continuing project produced by Buryl Red and BR Productions, the Solid State Logic SL 9000 J Series SuperAnalogue Console installed in A509 provided excellent sound quality for the sessions.

“Recording the CenturyMen is a challenge as the choir covers more than a 4 1/2 octave range,” explains Rudin, a veteran of pop, jazz and classical recording, a Grammy winner for “Riders in or the Sky: Woody’s Round-up Adventure,” and who has worked with artists as varied as the Newsboys, Diamond Rio and Wynonna Judd. “Because we went with Decca tree and spaced omnis, we depended on the sound of the room and the great performance of the console’s mic preamplifier to capture the power and subtlety of the group. When recording something as dynamic as a 100-man choir, I usually go to an outboard preamp, something I know has an extended frequency range. But, with the J Series, we opened up the pre amps and they delivered a clean, accurate sound. This was the most exposed application I could imagine for a console mic pre and the SL 9000 came through with flying colors.”

The CenturyMen choir consists of 100 professional singers representing music directors from churches and schools around the country. The initial tracks for this project were completed in a church in Knoxville, TN, with the orchestral sections added in Nashville through another SL 9000 to Pro Tools. The New York connection came about, according to Rudin, because the producers decided to add two more tracks to the collection, this time including performances by the 40-piece Broadway Inspirational Voices.

“We needed a very large room for this, and Right Track has the best room for the job,” says Rudin. “The acoustics are wonderful for this type of recording. The room was simply silent. There was a very low noise floor and the acoustic treatment using wood panels and wood floors is also terrific, with nice fat early reflections and a pleasant reverb tail. When you have singers producing such low notes, the sound can get lost in the tone of the room, however, the sound in the room was great and the SL 9000 captured everything. I didn’t lose a single note.”

Right Track’s SL 9000 J Series offers 96-channels, fully loaded with a customized film monitoring center section tailored for surround sound. For the CenturyMen project, Rudin extensively used the cue mix facilities on the J Series.

“Routing things to different cue mixes is always a snap on these consoles,” says Rudin. “The way that all the bussing and effect send architecture is set up is wonderful. The SL 9000 really performed beautifully for this session. We are all very pleased with the outcome and couldn’t have been more happy with the help from Right Track’s staff.”

May 13, 2001 12:00 PM, By Dan Rudin

Hi, my name is Dan and I’m a Protools addict. I own, or have owned, one of almost everything Digidesign has ever made with one notable exception, a control surface. Why no controller? …Well, having used Protools since its introduction in 1991, by the time dedicated controllers like HUI and ProControl were on the market I was quite used to using a keyboard and mouse to get around. And with the minimal amount of mixing I actually did in Protools versus the cost of these units, I felt I was better off investing elsewhere in my system.

But over the past few years things have slowly begun to change. I’m now mixing in PT more often and felt it would be nice to offer clients a tactile interface, something familiar, so that they could make adjustments or try things out for themselves; I thought this might make the technology even more transparent (and it might also get me out of the chair once in a while). I also found myself in need of a comprehensive control room monitor unit, one that had multi channel monitoring, alternate monitors, would switch between ext sources, had good mono, dimming, talkback and cue sends. There are a couple of very good ones on the market, like the Martinsound MultiMax, but they are a bit pricey.

Enter the Control 24 from Digidesign and Focusrite. This baby’s got it all. A well-thought -out control room monitor section, 24 touch-sensitive motorized faders, dedicated buttons for almost every protools control or operation, 16 input analog line mixer, and 16 Focusrite mic preamps all housed in a high-tech, yet elegant chassis. Needless to say, at $7999 I was first in line to lay my money down.

Roughly the size and of an old Oberheim synth, the Control 24 is portable yet big enough to feel like a real console. In fact, at first sight it looks like a conventional recording console. Sitting in front of it everything is easily in reach but not crowded, this is facilitated in part by the geometry of the board. The back half of the unit is about a 40 degree angle to the front, making it easy to read the “scribble strip” LCD displays and the LED meters at the top of the desk. However, while this design does allow easy access to everything on the board, it also posed a big set-up problem for me, I couldn’t figure out where to put my speakers!! With such a steep angle the back of this sucker is TALL and, sadly, a perfect sound reflector back to the mix position. Even with very versatile speaker stands I couldn’t find a place for my speakers (vertically or horizontally) that was comfortable and that sounded good. Placement of my new Control 24 was further confounded by my wish to still have easy access to my keyboard and mouse. In an effort to make the Control 24 as sonically invisible as possible (and as portable as possible) I set it on a keyboard stand that put it at just the right height for me. Putting my keyboard and mouse below the Control 24 left me so far back that finally I gave up, left my keyboard, mouse and computer monitor in center mix position, and put the Control 24 off to my left. This works out fine for me, but for those Protools users who prefer a traditional control room set-up it may pose a problem.

Once I got set up, however, I was giddy as I turned one of the rotary knobs and watched the input level of my Bomb Factory 1176 plug-in change right with it. The faders are quick and quiet, all the LED’s and scribbles are easy to see, and the edit / function buttons are grouped logically. I must admit, the Control 24 works very smoothly. Ethernet communication rules! Anyone who has only used MIDI controllers will be amazed at the seamless interaction between the C24 and Protools, when you move something on the board it goes right with you on the screen… whoopee!

Here are a few of my favorite things;

All of the dedicated function buttons have an LED on them, so you can quickly check things like quick punch enable (where have you been all my life), or loop play/ rec.

Although I haven’t listened to them yet, who among us wouldn’t be pleased to have 16 more mic pre-amps in their studio. It’s my understanding that these are based on the focusrite platinum series, not fancy,but I mean really…16 pre’s with XLR inputs, phantom power and low pass filters…cool. If that’s not enough the first two have DI inputs and all 16 have selectable line inputs (1/4” balanced).

The C24 sports a very well thought out CR monitor section. There are 6 stereo inputs which, in 5.1 mode, still leaves you 3 stereo ext inputs for CD’s, 2 trk returns, or the stereo output of the analog sub mixer. The addition of the 8 stereo input sub mixer lets you monitor through a couple of MDM’s if you are mixing stems, which I think was a great idea.

My only real beef with this unit is that most of the audio I/O is through D-sub connectors. To make the most of the C24’s I/O features a patchbay seems like a good idea, and although D-subs have become fairly standard, they still add expense and inconvenience to wiring the C24… and the manual doesn’t even include an SAC pinout.

Overall I am impressed with the Control 24. It is professional in every regard (and it really looks killer in that Star-Treky/ Neve Capricorn sort of way) and I believe that even engineers with little or no Protools experience would find it familiar enough to soon be running a basic recording or mix session. For those of us long time users it does take an extra effort initially to use the C24’s controls instead of reaching for the familiarity (and speed) of the mouse, but I for one am excited about the possibility of looking at the screen a little less and getting to listen a little more.