The best of Bob Olhsson's writings and tour info

The more experience you have, generally the less you want to own gear and a studio.

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A recording studio by definition is first and foremost a performance space.

According to friends of mine George Martin’s basic approach to production was to start out by recording a convincing self-accompanied vocal and then build an arrangement from there. That IS a live performance.
A friend of mine used to play in one of the other bands at the Cavern. He tells me they could be absolutely stunning on stage.

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Sonic accuracy has actually been well within reach for 50 years.
Unfortunately, it isn’t the same thing as experiential accuracy which requires a more abstract approach.
Still many of us have never heard a recording that has all the magic of a great live performance so reproduction of a musical event remains the elusive goal for many of us.

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Last I heard, a recording studio is a space where music is performed while making it easy to record the performance.
It isn’t a mix room, an editing room, a computer or a pile of recording gear.

Performing music isn’t going away any time soon. Just like real football teams need stadiums, the rise of video games doesn’t mean that stadiums are about to be replaced by office cubicles having small coolers filled with Jolt Cola!

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We held an AES meeting in the former RCA Victor Nashville studio A the other night.

This is a REAL old school room that can accommodate a symphony orchestra. (There’s one like it in Rome, another somewhere in Canada and there used to be one in New York.) There were several REAL New York Steinway pianos among other REAL outboard gear such as a rack of 8-10 different snare drums.

I felt like a kid in a candy shop for the first time in a very long time.

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It’s amazing how many people seem to have their identity tied up in the gear they own.

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The place where I miss a great studio and console the most is overdubbing vocals.
At the very least I’d want a full-on mixer devoted to the headphone mix and eight channels for microphones, compressors and comping.
I do this so rarely these days that it makes no sense to own the gear and I’m not up to speed enough for any of the studios we rent to work the way I used to.
But if I were doing vocals every day again, it would be in a real studio with a real console.
The difference is in how well a session can be paced to improve the performance and this can make a huge difference.

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I don’t think the console is going away any time soon.
And the reason is TRACKING as opposed to mixing because I think the economic future is in PERFORMED music.
Any idiot can put together a track in Acid so music that sounds like that is a generic commodity that nobody is going to be willing to pay for.
We’ve come full circle with virtual reality music.

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on how a studio can make money
Location, location, location combined with an extraordinary staff and services combined with sufficient facilities for everybody involved to operate their various businesses as they record.

It really IS the luxury hotel business!

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In today’s economy where would the ideal location be?
Probably not New York (or LA) for very much longer!
The reasons to record in New York have always been the musicians and convenience to the overall theatrical scene.
Each top of the line studio going away reduces a location’s desirability as a place to record because it’s really about the community of people available.
Real estate prices need to come down or else everybody needs to move.
It’s a very facts-of-life situation.

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When I began in the mid ’60s the bread and butter of all studios and musicians was advertising and not records.
The Record Plant was the first label-work oriented independent studio I ever heard of.
Wally Heider followed on the west coast and many studios emulated both operations during the ’70s and ’80s.
I think a very few “sound hotels” will probably survive but they will more likely have resort locations than urban ones.

We are indeed at a crossroads but the handwriting has been on the wall for 20 years when MIDI sequencing began to replace recorded performances especially in advertising, our former bread and butter.

Myself, I see the future as being in extraordinary musical performance because that will be something new to many younger people who view music as being mostly a bunch of hype. This WILL require studios rather than bedrooms.
The question is “where will this new generation of performers be located?”
The best answer I could see is the Nashville talent pool which is why we moved here 4 years ago.

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It’s colossaly important that every client feel like they OWN the facility while they are working there.
A real problem with producer-owned studios is that clients are rightfully paranoid about “the boss” bouncing them for something more important to the producer. It’s happened to enough people that many won’t even go near booking that kind of a room.

Another issue is how the project running over the designated amount of time (Do ANY ever not?) is handled.
Armin Steiner handled this brilliantly by restricting time before noon to acquaintances and unfinished projects that had run into another booking.

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I think there is too much of a supply for even this style of production (the current Erector-set/video game model of music production)
to remain profitable exactly as there is too much of a supply of studios capable of doing it.
I expect to see an increase in demand for performance ability and for studios that are capable of capturing performances.

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When you’re talking about high profile artists, they are looking for exceptional service and fancy window dressing is pretty small change in that scheme of things.
In fact many care lots more about the window dressing than about the gear.
It’s about having zero hassle.
Now this IS a high-end thing.
I’m not sure about the future of studios a level below this because they are competing with mid-level remote recording.
In fact, thinking about it, live broadcasts and recordings are probably what high-end studios ought to really be exploring.

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The first sign of a near certain rip-off in my experience is when a label is supposed to be paying but there is no purchase order sent in advance of the work.
You need to not give out any copies. The artist and producer are not really your friends if they have any objections.

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The whole point of a console is being able to work really fast so that you can stay ahead of the creative flow of the performers.

The minute they need to wait for anything, the quality of the performance can easily nose-dive.
This is my problem with the whole “playing the studio as an instrument” hype.
Studios are first and foremost all about recording great performances.
They are not just a pile of recording gear.

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The thing that has always fascinated me is that I always do a lot better job when I can see the singer and they can hear me riding the gain in their cans.
There’s some interactive magic about it.

I’d lose the baffles. Better to have clean incident bleed than muffled, muddy bleed.

(on headphones)
This is one area where good in-ears like Shure or Etymotic can’t be beat.

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The only great studios that I’m aware of that didn’t have an immense luck factor going for them are the RCA designed studios from the late ’30s to early ’60s. Most people don’t realize that these include Abbey Road, the original Fine Recording studio in New York, Motown Hitsville in Detroit and Radio Recorders Annex in Hollywood

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The ’70s was when the best of the old production methods and the new technology came together.

Then the mooks figured out they could use technology to make a cheaper acceptable record rather than better great records.

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A real trap is falling in love with what one device does better while completely missing that some other aspect is getting screwed up.

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One of the most enlightening experiences I ever had was doing my first 16 track session after ten years of Pro Tools and 25 years of 24 track.
It was a four piece live blues session and there was a guy in San Francisco renting a 16 track head-stack for a Studer 827.
The room had an older Neve desk.

After ten minutes I was livid. I had forgotten what it was like to be thinking almost entirely about mike placement and NOT thinking about the damned console and recorder. This was a reality check I’ll never forget.

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I heard a great story about KC and the Sunshine Band. The first two blockbuster disco hits out of Miami were recorded as demos in KC’s living room using a Tascam 80-8 and that stupid little mixer that got sold with it. After they got signed, they went right into Criteria to record better versions and quickly discovered they couldn’t come up with nearly as compelling a groove. As a result the demos, warts and all, got released and rapidly became among the most influential records (for good or for bad) of the past 40 years.

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Good mike technique is about a thousand times more important on stage than it is in recording. I’m not sure making a singer comfortable by using a compressor is doing them that much of a favor because it prevents them from learning good mike technique.

Compressors were never intended to be a crutch for singers. Their purpose was to increase the average level for media having a very restricted dynamic range.

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Anybody who can’t make an absolutely great sounding record with a pair of KM-84s, a pair of M-88s and a pair of 57s should probably find another line of work. I’m with William on one good clean mike pre for everything too.

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Our task is recording emotion in the form of music.
The thing people really need to learn is how to adapt Pro Tools to recording the music at hand without inhibiting the performers’ emotion and preferablly in a manner that enhances it.

It’s actually what we used to do with giant patch bays in the 1960s.
Once you understand routing, you can build what you need out of Pro Tools. I haven’t seen any books or videos that just teach basic routing.
Does anybody know of one?

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A good question is how the !@#$ did we ever get on this kick of not recording live?

The original answer was that the musicians often hit their peak of performance before the singer did.

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Below added 17.5.2010

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I think ONLY having NS-10s is kind of silly.

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I highly recommend using lots of stone and plenty of exotic hardwoods too. This allows acoustic treatment to assume a relatively minor financial role which makes one’s loan application far more attractive to a bank. And if your studio goes bust, you can always convert it into a bar!

I’ve honestly never heard reasonably symmetrical scattering in the front mess up imaging.

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The secret to “warm” is often not doing anything that makes things sound “cold” such as over driving cheap A to D and D to A converters or DSP at low sample rates.

I’ve gotten stuff that was recorded and mixed with nothing but a digi 001 by a complete beginner that sounded warmer than stuff from multi-million dollar analog rooms. The difference was that nothing was peaking above -15 in the 001!

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An le system using a current generation computer will run rings around the biggest mix systems in almost every respect other than the number of simultaneous channels you can record. The Intel dual and quad core CPUs have really changed everything.

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If you had to record an album with 1 mic??

KM-84 or 86. They are much less sensitive to funky acoustics than my U67s are.

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One thing that makes a room sound good is a reasonably flat reflected frequency response. When you treat a room, it’s really easy to have a lot less top-end and mids coming back than lower mids. Less is often more in room treatment.

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True. If you aren’t well known, the gear had better be or else it’s gong to be an awful hard sell.

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The producer is the person who can recognize excellence, do whatever it takes to demand or inspire excellence from others and is the one who decides when the recording is finished.

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Comparing music to theater:

Artist = Actor

Producer = Director

Arranger = Set, Lighting, Sound and Costume Designers

Composer = Playwright

When people claim to do all four, it generally means that there is no producer or arranger.

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Neves didn’t become very common in the US until their moving fader automation came out.

Most people I know considered custom consoles such as DeMideo or Bushnell to be the best, then Electrodyne/Quad-8 followed by APIs although lots of us considered the API 550a to be the finest console equalizer ever made. Neve was considered way too expensive and a step down in audio quality from the others mentioned.

The CSNY albums were recorded on DeMideos as were the majority of Heider remotes. The Neil Young green board was earlier and as far as I know was never used as Neil’s main console. I don’t think United/Western ever used the modular tube boards.

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Facing them with pegboard has helped a lot when I’ve done it. To me nothing’s worse than the muffled sound of too much mid and high frequency absorption in a room. It results in performers playing and singing abnormally loud which makes them sound really weird in a recording

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GML8304 Vs Millennia HV3D

FWIW When I’ve asked about how they were recorded, GMLs have turned out to be the common denominator of lots of the best sounding projects I’ve mastered. While they aren’t always the winner of A vs. B comparisons, when you combine a bunch of tracks recorded with them together, the difference becomes pretty noticable.

I can’t afford them but they’d be on top of my list if I could.

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…(I’m reminded of Bob Ohlsson faulting the power supplies of a lot of budget gear- on test tones it’s perfect, but hit it with sudden loads and it craps out. I don’t think he was talking about pres though, I think he meant DACs)

I was speaking of most inexpensive audio gear. In fact mike preamps were my first experience with this.

I was very frustrated by transistor mike pres and steadfastly believed tube preamps were better because they were tubes. A friend of mine brought some prototype mike preamps by the studio that he had just built for Deane Jensen. (Unfortunately Deane died before they were ever manufactured.) I was shocked to find these were solid state preamps that were probably better than any tube preamp I had ever used.

The difference?

The biggest was headroom. You could drive them to +50 before they clipped! I suddenly realized that we were really talking about an acceptable noise to acceptable distortion ratio and not coloration or some kind of a pleasing distortion.

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