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FEATURES | COLUMNS | WORKSHOP | DEPARTMENTS
George Massenburg
ACCELERATED STUDIO
George Massenburg Builds a Blackbird RoomBy Mr. Bonzai
Multiple Grammy and TEC Award winner George Massenburg is
aninternationally renowned producer, recording engineer, and
designer ofaudio equipment. He is a man in love with music, the art
of soundreproduction, and the recording process. In a career
spanning more than30 years, he has worked with such artists as
Linda Ronstadt, BonnieRaitt, Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins, Journey,
Phil Collins, Toto, EmmylouHarris, Dolly Parton, James Taylor,
Little Feat, Herbie Hancock, WeatherReport, Carly Simon, Earth,
Wind and Fire, Jon Randall, and the DixieChicks. An ardent
educator, he is also on the teaching staff at BostonsBerklee School
of Music and Montreals McGill University. In addition, hehas taken
leadership roles in both the Producer and Engineers Wing ofThe
Recording Academy and META (Music Engineering and
TechnicalAlliance).
Massenburg recently put the finishing touches on the new Studio
C inNashvilles Blackbird Studio complex. Studio C is a stunning
room that
features a Digidesign ICON system in a remarkably versatile
recordingenvironment. You very quickly forget about the room, and
before you
know it, you are simply immersed in music, says Massenburg. You
have a more intimate handshake with the recorded
musicalperformance. The room disappears quickly, rather than adding
something of its own it is very transparent, which is right up my
alley.
The Blackbird Studio recording center was created by John and
Martina McBride in August 2002 by rebuilding the legendary
CreativeRecording Studios, originally designed and built by George
Augspurger in 1977. Since opening, Blackbird has hosted sessions
with thelikes of John Hiatt, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. The site now houses four studios, including
Massenburgs StudioC.
To create this unique recording, mixing, and listening
space,Massenburg built on his past studio construction
experience,which began way back in 1980 with LAs The Complex.
Thatswhere we first used the wall and ceiling treatment you see
heretoday, says Massenburg. Based on Dr. Manfred
Schroedersapplication ofmath to acoustic concepts, and with help
fromDr. Peter DAntonio of RPG, Massenburg integrated sounddiffusion
technology into architectural acoustics. As a result,incident sound
is almost completely controlled by diffusion. Italso happens to
look like something out of The Matrix.
Construction of the new room utilized 1,532 sheets of
one-inchthick medium-density fiberboard (MDF). Ninety tons of
MDF were cut and milled to a final cut weight of 40
tons.Beginning with a room footprint of 36' x 25' x 27', the
one-inchsquare MDF pegs come out of the walls and ceiling in
lengthsthat vary from 6 to 40 inches and no two of the hundreds
ofthousands of tines are the same length. The room uses
2Ddiffusion, whereby two-dimensional diffusers offer depthvariation
in two perpendicular directions, forming a lattice ofdivided cells
or steps of varying depth. Studio C utilized thelargest prime
number sequence that has ever been actualizedin a room, notes
Massenburg. Our prime number is 138,167.
The basic idea is that you walk in and very quickly you
arelistening to a musical balance. You are able to tell a story
witha mix. The lows and the highs are easier to perceive
becausethey have roughly the same ambience, the same
reverberationtime. We dont have any fiberglass on the walls it
absorbslargely at high frequencies and is less likely to absorb at
lowfrequencies. Any absorption in this room is caused by
severalprocesses, including the air turbulence around all these
edges,and the scattering of reflective sound from all these
surfaces.Dr. DAntonio has referred to our principle in action
asambechoic.
The room is conducive to accurate work because we have taken
away the boundary effect by eliminating the walls. The
boundaryeffect is usually a speaker set away from the wall, which
causes comb filtering because the sound hits the wall and bounces
back at adifferent time than the direct signal from the speaker.
Certain frequencies are canceled and certain frequencies are
enforced, which is
not a good idea in a critical listening environment.
The Modern WorkflowA central focus in this room is the 32-fader
ICON D-Control and the presence of Pro Tools in a modern workflow
context, says
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The Massenburg DesignWorks Parametric EQ
George Massenburg has been responsible for engineering some of
themost respected recordings of the modern era, as well as creating
thatmainstay of the recording process, the parametric equalizer. He
hasmanufactured unique designs for compressors, consoles, moving
faderautomation systems, microphone preamps, and noise
reductionsystems. And hes applied this formidable know-how to his
EQ plug-in.
Nobody took 48-bit seriously until we did our parametric EQ
plug-in,Massenburg modestly states. When we were invited by
Digidesign tolook at the emerging HD system and comment on it and
build anequalizer for Pro Tools, we decided it was a real
opportunity to do it inextended resolution, to do it in 48-bit.
This is because we knew thatinternal to the equalizer, a lot of the
nodes needed extendedresolution.
Even though some folks would say that 16 bits are enough
foranybody in any situation, we know that is not true. Now we know
thatyou need extended resolution on the front end and in processing
toreally comfortably fit a competent audio presentation. Well,
thats justyour main signal. You put it into an equalizer, and all
kinds of pointsinside have vastly different ranges. You can have a
point in theequalizer thats way down in level, and you need wide
resolution tomake that work right. We built a 48-bit EQ and
deployed it in HD, and itreally made Pro Tools reach impressive new
levels in professionalsound. And with our new IsoPeak feature, you
can more quickly targeta specific frequency artifact to surgically
operate on it in one simple
step, rather than searching and sweeping, adjusting a level,
andsharpening a peak.
All in all, we are continually looking for ways in which to work
fasterand more efficiently so that you end up with a great
recording that youcan be proud of.
. , , , ,work, and then move on. Our goal is to keep the room
busy by optimizing the available resources for the immediate
requirements of aproject.
ICONs biggest strength, to me, is the ability for a mix to start
with a standard Pro Tools template and continue through the
naturalprogression of building a multi-track song, Massenburg
explains. Lets take a hypothetical project that might begin in this
room. First,you do a track. Maybe its a live track and you use this
room as a control room.
Then you take the live track and edit it offline. We have a
fiber-based server with access from all the studios. You have taken
your trackinto a small edit or offline room, a small production
room where you have a smaller Pro Tools system and maybe a small
worksurface.You plug into the server and you work on your track and
edit it, spending hours or days getting the editing together.
Next you want to add an instrument, so you wheel in an analog
rack that has the same gear that you used when you cut the track.
Youhave a little booth and you drop in a vocal for a fix. Somewhere
along the way you go back to Studio C, the big room, to see how
youredoing, how your space works out. You are r ight on the
network, so you bring it right up. You dont need three hours to
prep a session. Ittakes five minutes.
Does Massenburg use analog tape anymore? No, but in the box is
now thought of as excluding analog inserts, which I use
wheneverneeded. One of the benefits of having so much great analog
gear here at Blackbird, he continues, is that we can deploy a rack
thatgoes with the session, rather than a fixed bay of gear at the
back of the room, 90 percent of which you never use. You have a
designated rack of gear that plugs into a known slot in your Pro
Tools system and your work proceeds. And you are listening to it
inseconds instead of spending hours trying to get used to the
sound, and sending out for lunch, and playing pinball, and trying
to findsome comfort in the room and wasting a lot of time. This is
a very fast room to get comfortable in. That is the key.
If you decide you need to do more work, you can move intoanother
studio. Maybe its a $200-a-day space instead of a$1,500- or
$2,500-a-day space. You move between studios,optimizing your space
and your gear for the job at hand. Thistype of workflow with Pro
Tools optimizes the various levelsof resources at your
disposal.
Would this way of modern incremental record making beimpossible
in the analog days of yore? Yes, I think it wouldbe impossible in
the old days, or certainly very impractical,says Massenburg. First,
there is the problem of getting usedto a new space, where you put
up a mix and it doesnt soundas good as when you cut it. The reason
that people stayedwith one studio was largely because familiar
technology wasthere: same console, same EQ, same inputs, maybe a
recallboard. They got used to a space and achieved a certaincomfort
level.
A lot of that has to do with the anomalies in a room
andmonitoring. You want to reduce those anomaliesand that is
exactly what happens in this room. As a result, it soundsbetter
when you take it out to another room you walk awaywith something
that is more consistent. Also, you quickly getused to what you have
after walking in to a new room. Itsfunny, when Chuck Ainlay brought
some of his recordingsover, he was worried that my stuff would
sound great and hisstuff would suck. But everybodys work sounds
good. Goodstuff sounds good. Of course, crappy stuff still
soundscrappy, but accurately so.
Working In the BoxMassenburg offers some thoughts on mixing:
People aredismayed because certain mixes sound awful on DAWs.Most
of the problem starts with the home enthusiast usingtoo many
plug-ins to try to make something sound better. It isthe belief
that a plug-in has to improve things because it has
changed them. Thats not a very useful concept in the mixingof
music.
In my opinion, music has gotten worse and worse over thelast
fifteen years, with the collapse of the artistic agenda atalmost
all major labels. But another reason is that manyengineers cannot
quickly hear a mix, cannot construct a mixin their mind and then
figure out how to put it together,whether they are working with
tape or DAW.
Mixing in the box has taken the biggest hit because of the
perception that if you are working in the box, then by its very
nature, you aretechnically limited. The idea is that digital mixing
is flawed. In the box has been thought to mean actual digital
mixing. You will seepeople use Pro Tools as a tape recorder, then
break it out and bring it into an analog console. The defense is
that in-the-box mixing is initself flawed. I dont think thats true.
I think the reason for this misconception is the lack of talent
making informed, intelligent, artisticdecisions when mixing, rather
than the idea of the mix being truncated. Unfortunately,
historically, digital mixing was flawed before wehad
high-resolution 48-bit mixing. But now, digital mixing can be very
high resolution.
Massenburgs progressive workflow, and his legacy of acoustics
and studio design, advances with the completion of his newest
andmost revolutionary design to date, Blackbirds Studio C in
Nashville. In short, the name George Massenburg is synonymous with
thestate of the art in audio recording.
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