[MUSIC] Take it away. >> Okay, we're in the A room of Blackbird. We have a NEVE 8078, the console's kind of the brain of the whole session. It looks like a lot of knobs, but it's the same thing over and over repeated, at least on the first 40 channels. Basically, each channel is for a microphone that's out on the floor recording. Kick drum, let's say you have an inside the kick mic, an outside the kick mic, a snare top, a snare bottom, a hi-hat. Rack, floor, overhead, overhead, room, room, chamber, chamber, bass, and then you get into acoustic and vocals and piano, and whatever other instrument you're recording. You want to be able to manipulate any of these microphones if you need to, which generally here you don't need to because we have such an incredible inventory of great mics. But not everyone wants a record that just sounds like beautiful everything. They want to manipulate things, so they sound different, and that is where the patchbay, which is over here comes into play. The patchbay is it interconnects every piece of gear in this room to this mixing board. So if you want to insert a compressor on a certain input, you'll patch from that input into the compressor, out of the compressor, back into the return of that channel. So that you can listen to that channel with compression, or you can bypass it and and listen to it without. What you're looking at right now or some Telefunken mic pres, which I'm a big fan of. There's also a few other pieces to gear in there, some stuff we use for the monitor system and some converters. But we love old Telefunken mic pres, we have 140 or so Telefunken pres. In this rack behind which is called the producer's desk, there are compressors, EQs, channel strips with mic pres handy q on them. Well, that's mainly what's in this rack, compressors and EQs. And the rack off to the left which we'll get to in just a second is a rack of some effects like reverbs and delays and more channel strips and more EQs and more compressors. These are tools that are used in the studio and are very, very important. These are NEVE channel strips, if you don't like this version of the NEVE console, these are from a different console. These are digital delays, this is a harmonizer, more reverbs, an old 200, which I love. Yamaha REV5, maybe, yeah, and some old AMS delay and a reverb. There's NEVE compressor 2254 models here. There's Poltech blackface. There's EMI Qs. These EMI Qs are probably my favorite EQ that exists on Earth today, outside of maybe the Curvebender, but it's solid state, but it's absolutely the greatest component. And I could take a frequency I hate like 3K and general 3.2K, and it's got that setting, and I can boost it, and I like it better. It's just beautiful, it's so musical sounding. You have speakers that are on top of the console. Small pairs to help, well just depends on what you're used to listening to. A lot of people use NS10s. They're not the greatest sounding speaker, but once you learn what they sound like, it really works well. The Genelec are a little more hi-fi. And then we have ATCs up in the wall for when the record company comes in, or maybe on a tracking day I like to use ATCs because you get to hear all the low end and all the top end, and they're really accurate. And the little vocal booth off to the right there's a Telefunken 251, the one I talked about earlier, serial number 584. That's my favorite Telefunken 251 on planet Earth, and it sounds god-like. >> Hey, Jeff, when you get that, come back in here, and I'm going to ask him a question about the track and capturing their performance like >> Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know what? Let's walk out on the floor. >> Okay, great. >> Come on right this way. >> I left that right in the way. >> Don't worry. These doors, they're the equivalent to a foot of concrete for sound isolation, which is pretty incredible. But that's why they're so heavy. >> Wow. >> Yeah, they're heavy. But check it out. I'm going to talk in here. I'm just going to count to ten, and I'm going to start with the door closed, and I'll open it. And I won't change my volume, I promise. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you see how well that isolates. I love it. Okay, come on in. Shit. This used to be the backyard, and I wanted a bigger big room so that we could do string sessions, etc. So we basically built to the property line which worked out great, but I didn't want to have a big room that sounded the same all the time. So we had these panels built by a company called PRG. It's Peter Antonio, he's the physicist just behind it. When they're closed, it's absorptive, and when they're open, it's reflective. Now you hear the tone of my voice and the timber, and all that? Now you close this. And then you hear my voice, and now it sounds a little duller. A little less reflective. Because it is less reflective, because now we're absorbing instead of reflecting sound. >> That is so cool. That is so cool. >> We have a live reverb chamber right here. This is a room that's built to sound like reverb, so. Hey! So you hear that decay time. Now what's unique about this room is we made it where the ceiling goes up and down. So you can change the reverb time, yeah. >> Holy cow. >> It's kind of crazy, but you know what? I've gotta figure out why that earlier. It's right now not as high as it goes, but almost, but listen. [SOUND] Looks nice, but you bring it out of here, and it sounds like you're in the shower. There's still two parallel walls. There's not a parallel floor and ceiling. It's all hard plaster. There's no corners, everything's rounded, and it just sounds great in here. When we have the drum kit on the floor, we'll put a stereo mic in here, and it picks up all the reflections of the drum kit. So if you blend that back in with the drum kit, you go from in a room to being in a gymnasium, or a stadium, or by how much of reverb you add back in. >> This is like a playground. >> The beautiful part is if you're reverb's too bright, okay. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. You know what we should do? We should go back real quick because they got a lot of drugs down here. Here's another chamber. This one's bigger, so you get a longer [SOUND] and even longer decay time. So watch yourself walking through here, because there's a lot of cables. This is Foy Vance's recording session, which is kind of crazy, which I love. [SOUND] Up on top is a lot of gear that is kind of just overflow. This room's full of guitar amps. I wish we had time. Hey guys. >> How you doing? >> Hope you don't mind being in a film here. >> It's all right. >> How's it going? >> Good. >> So if you went in your control room, and you didn't find what you wanted, you come into this room where you've got some gear, and then some more gear and some more gear and a little more gear back here. And it's just different colors of the palette basically, different flavors of audio, all these different pieces of gear. One of the great things about having all these tools to do the job, it seems like in the past, we would capture a performance, and today, more often than not, we're creating a performance. By applying the first chorus to the second chorus, and the third verse to the first verse because it was played better. I think that's a step backwards as opposed to a step forwards personally, but it's just a point I feel like needs to be made. In here, we have more gear, I love these RCA mic pres that are BA-11As. We've got a few Motown EQs, one's being used for Martina right now. We have back here more EMI EQs and Decca stereo 2 compressors and Helios and PYEs and just a lot of kind of esoteric gear. Cooper Time Cubes, which I love, which is basically a garden hose with a speaker on one end and a mic on the other. And you run a voice through that thing, and it sounds incredible, and it really does. Here are some of the guitar amps we have. We have three Dumbles, we have old AC30s, we have Ampeg flip-tops, we have Tweed Deluxes, we have Watkins. We have Marshall Plexis and Marshall Super Leads, an old tube Werly there, or Rhodes, I'm sorry, and hopefully every color you need to make your record. That's the key. >> [LAUGH] >> This is a rack for each player that's on the session. They get their own little 24 channel mixer, it's got 16 faders, and in the one or two, usually will be a left right from the consul, and then the left, kick, snare, hat, base, more meece. So they can make their own mix on the headphones, which is really nice. Reverb returns and talkback over here. There's a little built-in table, if you need a work deal, you've got a Crown D75, four pairs of headphones, and if you need a music stand [NOISE] well, there you go. [NOISE] So that's another way the players get to hear themselves, just like they want to hear themselves. >> Just like they want to. >> And what's in here is 138,646 pieces of one by one inch wood. And Jay Rock's set up right now, who's in here working, but not until later. No two pieces are literally the same length. Sound hits the wall, diffuses and does not reflect back into the room, particularly from about 200 to about 5K, in that neighborhood. And we have 50 cycle diffusers in the corners. And listening to music in this room, especially surround, it's beautiful. >> There are legends. [MUSIC] >> [APPLAUSE]
