Annual TEC Awards Will Miss Les Paul

With the annual AES (Audio Engineering Society) Convention fast approaching, it occurs to me that there will be a big part of the show missing this year: The presence, participation, and indeed, the spiritual leadership of Les Paul himself. For decades LP was a mainstay at the convention, walking the floor, shaking hands, meeting and greeting, and generally blessing the event like The High Pope of Audio. Most AES goers, myself included, consider Les Paul the father of modern recording.

Most notably, Mr. Paul will be missed at the annual Mix Magazine TEC awards ceremony (which accompanies AES every year), where he always presented the annual Les Paul award. The coveted award is given to the artist who, like Les himself, has most creatively blended musical achievement with the art and science of recording. Les presented the winner with, what else? A Les Paul guitar!


"Wow, this thing's heavy!" Les Presents THE AXE to 2007 Winner, Al Kooper

The list of Les Paul award-winners is impressive; artists like Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson, to name a few. Les Paul Winners 1991 to present

Here's a vid produced by Mix about The TEC Awards and The Les Paul Awards: TEC & Les Paul Award Highlights

This year's AES Show is at New York's Javitz Center. Appropriately, the 2009 TEC Awards will feature a special tribute to the beloved Mr. Paul...

Hello folks! Well I have some big news! I have started my own company - a web-boutique called Drew Townson's Analog Planet. Yazoo! The Planet sells high-end analog recording gear, including lots of tube stuff. I call it "The Audio Hardware Store...in space!" Great idea, starting a high-end business in this economy, right?

What am I thinking?

Well, I'm thinking I want to start a a genuine high-end thing, based on my own deication to quality, as well as creating a legacy for my family and son. Plus, I was getting sick of the guys I was working for driving in to work at 11 am in their Beemers and Benzes and coming up to me with, "Sold anything today Drew?" "What have you done for me lately Drew?"

What I had done for them is a lot. Made happy customers. Brought in a lot of money...which was not trickling enough back down to me. So I said, "screw it!" and started my own business.

The site's young and buggy and still in development, but hey, go check out Analog Planet!

Selling my gear

If you're interested in the list of audio gear I have for sale, go here.

Review of the ADAM P22A 2-Way Active Studio Monitor

This review appears in the current issue of Tape-Op, a 'zine I ocassionally write for. It's a great publication geared toward the DIY musician, engineer and producer:

I love great-sounding speakers. I guess you could call me a monitor guy. Ever since I blew up the studio’s last pair of NS-10s in 1990, I’ve been on a quest for the perfect tracking and mixing monitor, one which exhibits the rare balance between musicality and accuracy. It’s not an easy thing to find, as I’m sure all you Tape-Op readers know. I am also a true-believer that an excellent pair of monitors, well-matched to the room, should be at the very top of any gear wish-list when assembling a project studio. Really, how can you get any work done if you aren’t hearing the full spectrum of sound?

My own quest started seventeen years ago, when I experienced Genelec S-30 ribbon monitors for the first time. They were the most realistic speaker I had heard up until then. I couldn’t quite get them rocking loud enough for my tastes, but they sure sounded good. At this point I realized there was no going back to the Yamahas. By ’92 I was using Meyer HD-1; the first popular self-powered console-top monitor. By ’94 it was the first generation KRKs, and then it was on to the Genelec 1031A in ’97. In 1998, I first encountered the Dynaudio BM15A, a discovery which changed my life. Never before had I heard a speaker so dynamic, so three-dimensional and detailed, so punchy, and so versatile. I’ve used it for tracking, overdubbing, mixing, you name it, without getting fatigued. The bass is deep enough even to track drums and bass. I thought I’d found the perfect studio monitor, and to this day, I love that speaker. Since then, not much else has grabbed my attention…until now.

I recently became hip to the ADAM P22A, and wow, I am lovin’ that monitor! And I thought I hated ADAMs! All I had heard before was the ADAM S3A, which some people swear-by but which I have never been able to get a handle on. I guess they are a, “Can you handle the awful truth?” kind of speaker. And at five grand a pair? Fuggedaboudit! I’ll take my Dyns any day, thank you.

Then one day not too long ago ADAM’s Dave Bryce informed me that ADAM makes monitors in every size shape and price-range, so just because I disliked the S3A didn’t mean I should condemn all of the ADAM range. He asked me some questions about the type of speakers I like, and then suggested the P22A. I’m very glad he did. Thanks, Dave. For one thing, I'm a fan of vertically aligned two-way monitors (like a BM15A). So the P22A is a good match for a guy like me. (Even when I used the old NaSty-10s back in the day, I never laid them on their sides. Do people listening at home put their speakers on their sides?). I found the P22A to have tight yet deep bass, high SPL, fast, supple mids, and highs that are sparkly but never harsh. There are many things about the P22A I really like. First, they have a very wide and solid sweet-spot. Sometimes ribbon monitors bother me because the off-axis response gets phasey and weird, and you have to lock your head in to one tiny little mix position to get a clear image. This is not the case with the P22A at all; they have nice dispersion. Second, you CANNOT hear the crossover. It's absolutely transparent -- no odd valleys or peaks, which is a very desirable trait. Smooth from bottom to top. Even my beloved Dynaudio 15As get a little fussy at the crossover-points. Third, the speed of the folded ribbon gives the P22 really nice dynamics, detail, and three-dimensionality. This enables fine sculpting because you can really hear your EQ, compression and effects.

Fourth, they’re LOUD, rating 109db in the SPL column. You rock and hip-hop guys can get them cranking, which again is a trait not typical of classic ribbons.

Fifth, the P22A has deep bass, going down to 38hz, so you can feel the bottom octave, but it’s a tight, defined low-end, never boomy or rumbly. For many applications, this avoids the need for a subwoofer. But what I like the best is that the P22A is a very musical monitor. The silky highs, supple mids and punchy lows make it a pleasure to work on all day long. Most importantly, they translate AMAZINGLY! I usually have to mix and remix a song a couple of times to get the frequency balance right. My very first mix on the P22A was perfect. One and Done! (One song on a ten-song CD was mixed on the P22A, and I liked it so much I told the mastering engineer to use that track as the model to match all the others to). It's a rare speaker that is both musical AND accurate. Usually real "happy" speakers don't reference well, and super-accurate speakers are boring and no fun to work on. I can count the monitors that do both on one hand. The P22A is in that rare group. At half the price of the S3A, it lands at the same $2500.00/pair price-point as the Dynaudio BM15A.

Yep. I think the ADAM P22A just knocked my Dyns off the console.

Drewcifer’s Recording 101 Primer

Spring Mixing Tip: Pre-delaying the Reverb

You don’t hear a lot of heavy or obvious reverb on modern pop recordings. The vocals tend to be very up-front and dry. But are they really dry? Is it possible to add depth and dimensionality to vocals using reverb that is extremely subtle? Absolutely! It’s done all the time. One way to accomplish this is to pre-delay the ‘verb. That’s why that “pre-delay” parameter is a feature on most modern reverbs, be they plug-ins or outboard. It wasn’t always so easy: Back in the days of the analog pioneers, the mixing guy would send the vocal-signal through a delay unit, usually a tape delay, which was daisy-chained in-front of a plate reverb. This delayed the onset of the reverb by 50ms to 100ms or more. The gap between the dry vocal and the reverb makes the vocal stand forward more, sound “drier”, and not be “swamped” by the ‘verb. In the end result, the reverb may not be obvious at all, but if it was removed you’d definitely notice something was missing.

Ghost Harmonics

Well, I have to start with something, right? I have so much I want to post, that deciding where to begin is hard. So I went to some recent posts of mine on Gearslutz and pretty much randomly grabbed one.

It's choice was not quite random, truth-be-told. I have been listening to a couple CDs I engineered and produced back in '90 and '91 by a band called Anastasia Screamed. This was a very unusual, adventurous band. You could almost call them Avant Garde, and definitely ahead of their time (Pre Nirvana "Never Mind"). The sound-scape we created was that of noisy but flowery guitars, sometimes harmonically beautiful, sometimes clashing and dis-cordant.

http://www.anastasiascreamed.com/index_flash.html
http://www.myspace.com/anastasiascreamed23

We layered electrics (primarily Fenders) and acoustics over multiple tracks. Like, the two guitar-players would both play on the basic track along with the drums and bass, and then I'd have the two of them both do an overdub pass at the same time, often playing different parts and guitars than they had played on the basic. So in two passes we had created four electric tracks. Then we'd do leads and acoustic guitars, feedback tracks, the occasional slide guitar part, and even a dulcimer or mandolin track on a song or two.

The guitar mics we used were SM57, Senn 421, Beyer M500 ribbon (my secret weapon back then, before the whole ribbon revival), and even some very nice vintage condensers, like Neumann U67, M49 and AKG C12. Pres were usually API 512B, along with the desk pres from a Trident 80B and a Neve V. Compression, when used, was usually my standard choice, the Teletronix Urei LA-3A. Nice gear huh? Recording guitar is my love and my specialty anyway, so I was in hog-heaven. And these guys were good players, albiet unorthodox. Funny thing was, they could play everything from country to blues to jazz to Led Zepplin if they felt like it. But their original songs sounded like all of those influneces spun together in some psychedelic Osterizer. The result was challenging alternative rock music, which some might even consider an acquired taste.

So I'm driving around in my car the last couple days, listening to these CDs for the first time in 1o years, and really enjoying what I was hearing, especially the guitars. And knowing full-well there were many guitar tracks, I was hearing sounds-- voices, bells, organs, etc --that I know were NOT part of the recording. And this time I was sober as a judge, unlike when we were creating the recordings. Let's just say there was a lot of "magic" happening in the studio then.

Which brings me to the Gearslutz post:
http://gearslutz.com/board/
Replying to a guy who was hearing a "phone ring" in a mix he was working on.

Phones, choir voices, horns, acoustic guitars, harps, angels...If you DON'T hear those things in your mixes you are unusual. I noticed it much more in the all-analog days, but when all those instruments combine they create overtones and bell-like sounds that become a sounds in-and-of themselves. We called 'em "Ghost Harmonics". I remember one time we were mixing this tune and suddenly this keyboard string kinda synth part just appeared out of nowhere. There were no keys on the tracks. All guitars and vocals. When we played the finished mix for the artist, they actually thought we had added a keyboard part. Nope. Overtones.