“In this household you have a sport and you have an art. Pick your poison!”

Mrs. Florido

Before the interview, Jesús Florido was busy chasing his young son around the house; homework needed doing!  When Jesús was a child, his parents didn’t have the time to chase him around, except when it came to attending school, lessons, and sports practice. He remembers them placing his future in his hands at 6 years old: one sport and one art, what’s it going to be?  He chose piano (and tennis), but after several lessons with a tyrannical teacher he quit.  Of course, his mother asked him what new instrument he was going to replace it with!  

Jesús Florido’s Italian father fed him many styles of music throughout his youth – jazz, classical, latin – and, that day, bought front seat tickets to an orchestra concert.  “Choose an instrument.”  As the orchestra played Beethoven’s Fifth, the cellos struck Jesús with their gruff, intense athleticism.  He had discovered his new instrument. Meanwhile, his father found a local youth orchestra, called El Sistema, that was taking on new players and providing instruments for them.  This was around 1974, when the now famous youth orchestra of Venezuela, El Sistema, was organizing its first large-scale (roughly two-hundred strong!) youth orchestra.  Jesús visited their office to borrow a cello, but the only options for little kids were flute or violin!  And he wasn’t about to switch from his cello dream to a silly little flute, so he joined the orchestra, placed in the very back of the 2nd violins.  

“When you take a break from food, you can take a break from the violin,” Jesús explains matter of factly, with a smile.

After several rehearsals of struggling to see the conductor, playing in slight delay from the center, and generally feeling unimportant, Jesús wanted to quit.  But his Mom said, “Well, I guess if you want to be better, you better practice! Because that’s the only way to get to the front seat.”  Supplied with a plan, Jesús let his competitive nature take over, driving him to practice with more determination.  Well, with as much determination as a young kid gets; so, his Mother found a way to ignite the fire just a little more.  She didn’t force him to practice long hours, but handed him a simple rule: when you don’t practice, you don’t eat. 

“When you take a break from food, you can take a break from the violin,” Jesús explains matter of factly, with a smile.

All the while, he contended with a foreign violin teacher who taught in a mix of broken Italian, Spanish, and the occasional Polish!  If that wasn’t enough, his teacher only provided Jesús Russian manuscripts; lessons in the Cyrillic alphabet accompanied lessons in violin craft.  Luckily, Jesús was a natural linguist, and a year later he progressed to the front seat of the orchestra.

Jesús at the shores of the Danube, Vienna, 2005 (taken from jesusflorido.com/photos).

“This record is going to change your life.”

Mr. Florido

When asked what keeps him focused and buoyant throughout career hardships, Jesús tells me his father is to thank.  Mr. Florido passed on a love of music through tons of shared records and performances.  When Jesús won the local violin competition for 16-18 year olds – as an 11 year old – Mr. Florido gave him a record of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.  The quiet energy and honesty of that music is still cherished by Jesús to this day, as a place of safety and love offering refuge. 

Originally, Mr. Florido believed that music had to be fun, not something to make money with.  Despite harboring reservations about Jesús’ career path, he wasn’t always discouraging. Once, Jesús stopped playing his beloved Mozart pieces after his teacher declared Mozart wrote the hardest music; Mr. Florido countered by encouraging him to continue, that he could play anything he set his mind on.  Carrying that flame, Jesús entered the professional music realm with his love of music intact.  Eventually satisfied, Mr. Florido embraced Jesús’ professional choice and became a proud father, always calling to find out what Jesús was up to next. 

Want to hear Jesús?

Follow this link to explore recent performances of all styles.

Video Performances

“You should do that! ”

Mark O’Connor, 1996

The famously prolific folk violinist, Mark O’Connor, saw Jesús Florido improvising for kicks with a Latin percussion player during a recording session, and said, “You should do that!”  Jesús wasn’t sure, but agreed to teach at O’Connor’s camp, and became convinced it was time to break out of Classical-only playing. O’Connor made him connections, set him up with other players.  He was the incubator for Jesús’ entrepreneurial beginnings, encouraging him to explore electric instruments.

Once introduced to the 5-string electric violin, Jesús was hooked.  In the late nineties, upon gaining his confidence with the new instrument, he transitioned to a career in music outside the Classical realm. Shortly after, in 1998, he bought his first 7-string electric (and hasn’t looked back).  Since playing the 5-string, the limited range of four strings just doesn’t have the same lure.  As a viola player, I completely understand the need for that C string!  Now Jesús only uses his 4-string acoustic for Classical performances.  In every other style, he uses the extended range of variably tuned 5, 6, and 7 string violins.

For those not familiar with playing violin, switching between different tunings and string-numbers is very difficult and quickly becomes confusing.  How does he manage to interchange them? Apparently, Jesús relies on one simple trick.  He learned from his college teacher, Davis Brooks, to treat every different tuning or number of strings as a separate instrument even though the general techniques overlap. 

Much like a band player who comfortably switches between members of the clarinet and saxophone families (and more), Jesús seamlessly switches between his instruments.  However, adopting a new setup isn’t immediate.  Eager to take advantage of every element the unprecedented range provided, Jesús spent a year getting comfortable with the 7-string electric violin before he played it in public.  Now he is in the same transition with a 6-string Glassar acoustic violin, with debut recordings planned for this June.

Mark O’Connor, Jesús, Enion Pelta, Dr. Manjunath Mysore, Mark Wood @ MOC String Conference in San Diego 2008 (taken from jesusflorido.com/photos).

“The sound that I’m able to get because of this system is everything to me.”

Jesús Florido

Jesús plays in different styles the same way a cook grows their cultural repertoire or a bored linguist takes a new language under their belt.  His obsession with sound may have something to do with it.  He told me no matter how little he knows of a language, he will only speak with an impeccable accent (to his own embarrassment when people assume he knows more!).  Over time, he applied this same determination to the music of India, Latin America, American Folk, and more.  Now, he takes great joy in eclectic navigation through these “languages” of music. 

But does he portray a different facet of himself in each cultural style, or present a united identity? He answers with another language analogy: just as someone’s personality conveys itself effectively in different languages, his unique vocal identity find expression in each musical style.  And his approach is very vocal.  Jesús sings through his instrument, inspired by his youthful hours listening to radio Met broadcasts with his grandfather. And he cherishes the single most important aspect of a unique voice: sound.  That’s where the YourHeaven CloseUp System delivers! 

“What the CloseUp® System has done is, it grabbed a sound that I’ve had in my head for years, and made it real.  And made it real.”

When Jesús Florido first encountered our system at our NAMM festival booth several years ago, he got it immediately.  Setting him up twenty feet from the drum section, it was horribly noisy. Yet even there, Jesús could hear the difference.  He remembers gleefully calling his wife that day to spread the good news: his 20 year search for uncompromising sound had ended!  When he came back asking for a custom wireless setup, we were more than happy to help.  (Due to high costs of wireless systems worth using, we generally don’t sell a wireless version).  He gave us confidence that we were on to something, that we had a product worth investing in.  

Jesús has many examples on tour where the sound he gets out of the CloseUp System created unique musical moments.  Within intimate Indian music concerts, Jesús’ electric violin shines thanks to our system. Afterwards, people come up and rave about the special tone and expressivity Jesús Florido gets out of his instrument.  He’s particularly happy with our EzQ feature. “[The closeup system is great] if you are looking for the ability to mold your sound, because you can really shape it to what you need, or what you want, what you hear.” He’s tried every mic out there and none has this ability.  He has two settings on his CloseUp box for his five-string violin: one setting for a plane acoustic sound, and one for effects.  The software allows him to shape the EQ, the reverb, and more.

Jesús is determined to have the same features and capabilities with his new Glassar 6-string acoustic violin.  So, we are hard at work tinkering with our proprietary software to adjust to the huge range of all 6 strings at once!  Jesús says matter of factly:

“Well, I’m expanding your company.  I’m expanding your horizons and your technical capabilities!  [More Glassar 6-strings are on their way,] so people are going to need this, if they want to sound great.”

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

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The post Interview with Jesús Florido appeared first on Your Heaven Audio.

The post Common Live Performance Problems–And our Solutions! appeared first on Your Heaven Audio.

A top drummer, an engineer, & a CloseUp® breakthrough walk into a studio . . . 

Impressing someone with PJ’s background was a tall order. His resume is exceptional. Well-seasoned in West African drumming traditions, he has also done stints as a sound engineer, and scoring percussion for live dance.  Beyond his training exists a more inherent, familial instinct for rhythm: PJ is part of a rich line of Filipino-American rhythmic musicians, including a father who played rhythm guitar and a grandfather who was an upright bass player in Hawaii.  The reverence and excitement PJ has for tradition was mirrored throughout his experience using the CloseUp® Drum System:

“What you guys are doing is so exciting. I say that knowing a lot about… the slog of dealing with [live] music.” 

We need to step back to paint a rather grim picture of the current state of mic-ing drums.

Mic’ing Drums: go old school, or go CloseUp®

Mic-ing drum kits has long been known as one of the most time-intensive, gear-laden components of live sound, requiring the coordinated efforts of a well-trained audio engineer and patient drummer as well as an array of heavy, tangle-prone cables, mics, and stands. Either that, or sacrificing real-time sound for a handful of pre-recorded trigger-activated samples (or as some call it digital drum death). 

Even if you look past the physical tedium of the set up, the tech limitations, and acoustic challenges, current technology greatly limits the repeatability and reliability of the amplified sound you’ve just spent eons setting up to capture. Drum amplification is so notoriously finicky and intensive, it’s a wonder better solutions for so common an instrument haven’t appeared, until now.

With The CloseUp® Drum System, what was only possible in a sound-proofed recording studio is now available in a user-friendly platform, in any environment.  As PJ puts it: “If you can get a clean sound right away, any engineer will tell you: that’s the goal.” 

I only have to hit each drum once and stand up and EQ. I could be completely autonomous, no one else would need to be in the studio. That kind of thing is revolutionary…in live settings, a drummer could go talk to fans or grab a drink…it’s incredible how much time could be saved, how much energy…There’s this new possibility for seamless performance. You could have such a short window of time between sets! It’s the drummer’s world to have to get to a venue super early to figure out levels. And then the next drummer has to do the same thing, all over again. It’s exhausting! The ease this gear provides is just not a reality right now; it would be so amazing to have this possibility! 

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Turn Up. Tune In. Get CloseUp®. Don’t Trigger.

Each drum kit is a canvas of different microtones and sounds. Because tuning and amplifying drums is so sensitive, some sound engineers use triggers to play pre-recorded samples when different drums are played. The number of samples available is more limited than what can actually come out of a drum kit. There is so much personal identity and style embedded in a drummer’s playing that gets immediately lost when you switch to samples. PJ on digital ‘solutions’ for live drums: “I’ve tried it and I can’t do it—I’ve had drum pads and drum triggers. I play the acoustic instrument; I want those nuances.”  Because the CloseUp® isn’t sample based, he can get them. He was happily shocked by just how transparent the CloseUp® digital interface is: 

It sounds really good. And it doesn’t kill the feeling . . . I was trying to trick it to see if it could detect something super soft after a huge cymbal crash—and it did! It does! 

Where other technology can sound sterile or robotic, he noted the CloseUp® Drum System had a “rich and warm” tone that reflected his drum kit and his playing. 

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

PJ speaks to using the CloseUp® interface:  Anybody who works in sound engineering or audio editing knows… it can be hard to understand, [even for great musicians.] But a total beginner using Your Heaven[’s CloseUp®] will start to understand EQ-ing experientially; it’s bottom up versus top down.

The post CloseUp®Drum System Premieres with Musician PJ Roduta appeared first on Your Heaven Audio.

Meet David Lombardi

a professional in the field using our CloseUp® System

Your Heaven® Audio is working with Italian born violinist David Lombardi to get his instrument’s ideal sound. Here, we investigate his practice and background.

FOURTH MOON

Fourth Moon unites four nationalities and four musical backgrounds into one creative force to be reckoned with.

 

“The result feels fresh and often exhilarating. With a nod towards the pioneering spirit of Lau in showing how traditional musicianship and instruments can be used to produce a truly original sound, Fourth Moon take a mixture of tunes, many of them self penned, and put together sets that play around with styles and tempos and deliver the unexpected.” – Edinburgh TradFest

 

YOUTUBE LINK

FACEBOOK

 

MODULƎ

MODULƎ is a new project that brings together violinist David Lombardi (Fourth Moon/ Event Horizon), guitarist Seán Gray (Paul McKenna Band) and drummer Stuart Brown (Herschel 36/ Sugarwork/ Twisted Toons). Through the use of multiple loop pedals and effects they create a unique, multilayered, cinematic sound that defies the group’s size and draws equally on the diverse influences of its members.

YOUTUBE Link
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Dallahan

Slated to tour Germany and the UK in October and November, Dallahan is one of the most thrilling forces in the international folk music scene; heavily rooted in traditional Irish music, but with hugely diverse backgrounds and influences. They call on their mixed Irish, Scottish and Hungarian heritage to create a unique and seamless musical montage, drawing in influences from jazz, funk, pop and classical music. Dallahan will push and pull you along on a musical journey, artistically transcending from tender and delicate songs from Transylvania, to relentlessly punchy Irish dance tunes littered with funk grooves and everything in between.

YOUTUBE LINK

Facebook

Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a concept project devised by Géza Frank & Jean Damei at the centre of which stands a unique brand of music that fuses the group’s eclectic compositional styles with astrophysical and cosmological themes.

The aim is to create a new sort of music, inspired by traditional Irish & Scottish music as well as electronic dance music and film music, which is evocative and descriptive of phenomena discovered during humankind’s eternal quest for a better understanding of the Universe.

 

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The post Featured Artist: Violinist David Lombardi appeared first on Your Heaven Audio.

MAY 16th, 2018

A PROMOTION

FRESHGRASS Ticket giveaway

As lovers of all things acoustic, we at Your Heaven Audio are dedicating the month of May to bluegrass. The genre originated in the south, and since we’re headed to Summer at NAMM this year in Nashville, we wanted to learn more! To prepare, we’re on the lookout for some quality live bluegrass anywhere we can find it – including stellar festivals with amazing national acts. This month, we’re giving away TWO tickets to FreshGrass at Mass MoCA. Here’s how you can win.

We’re giving away two 3-day passes so you can enjoy folk musicians such as Trampled by Turtles, the Indigo Girls, Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder, and Yonder Mountain String Band. Plus, plenty of more traditional bluegrass acts throughout the weekend of September 14th-16th.

All you have to do is:

1. Caption the pinned photo on our Facebook page 

2. Tag a friend you’re bringing with you! Also, you are under no obligation to ‘like’ our page – however, if you appreciate our content and giveaways such as this, we’d like to stay in touch!

Prize DOES include all features of the 3 day festival pass. A little more about FRESHGRASS at Mass MoCA:

FRESH GRASS

at Mass Moca

Sept. 14th-16th

87 Marshall Street in North Adams, Mass

We like to think of it as “great music uprooted.”

– FreshGrass

Lineup:

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FreshGrass is a wonderland of traditional and cutting-edge bluegrass, tucked appropriately into a 19th-century factory turned 21st-century museum in the Berkshire mountains of northwestern Massachusetts.

Prize DOES NOT include any trip expenses, including but not limited to airfare, hotel stay or camping, meals, or transportation. The winner must find their own accommodations. Once the winner is confirmed, the tickets are non-refundable. Winner will be chosen by June 1st 2018, so get to our Facebook Page and throw your name in the ring!  

A little more about Bluegrass Month…

Bill Munroe, often referred to as “The Father of Bluegrass”

Photo by Thomas S. England via Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Bluegrass is an all American form of music, and its creation is credited to Bill Monroe (often known as “The Father of Bluegrass”) and his band The Blue Grass Boys. Traditional bluegrass bands generally involve banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and stand-up bass. Since our CloseUp System is ideal for amplifying, and isolating the natural sounds of acoustic instruments, we’re really interested in the genre.

Check out the Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

The post Attend FreshGrass at Mass MoCA – For Free! appeared first on Your Heaven Audio.

Matt: My name is Matt Ricci. I am the Chief Engineer here at TRIAD recording in Warren, RI. I’ve been doing this since 2008, 2009, somewhere in there. My father had been a studio owner and a recording engineer for most of his life and all of mine. Even though, as a teenager, it’s not really necessarily what I wanted to do, I sort of fell into it, and I fell in love with it. I love recording and producing and making music. I’ve been in bands and I’ve done that thing as well but I’ve had some success in the past couple of years. I’ve had some Grammy considerations just this past year. I had a mix of credits on a number one on a billboard chart.

Martin: So that’s kind of ironic because it’s usually against most parents wishes that their children work in the music industry.

Matt: Yes. Yes. Usually it’s “Don’t make the mistake of getting into the music industry. Just do something safe, like… do what your father does.”

Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: “Work for your father’s company instead of those crazy dreams of getting into music.”

Martin: Yeah right. And then when your dad was Bob Dylan it’s a difficult decision.

Just for the record, so everyone knows who you are, second generation audio engineer, and actually what was interesting to me was, before we actually started recording, I had come in and you had a student with you, so you were actively teaching somebody about audio recording.

Matt: Yes. I do teach audio as well so that that works out and I love it.

Martin: So what’s your in-house teaching program like?

Matt: Our in-house program is called TRAC. It’s the TRIAD Recording Arts Certification program. So again it was developed in house and anyone who works here now has gone through some version of it but it’s a full 26 week course. It takes a long time. Usually people take more than 26 weeks just because it’s very flexible, but it’s a full blown college level of course. There’s a lot of science in textbooks and reading and homework and projects and class time, so it’s intense but a lot of people have gotten a lot out of it.

Martin: Is it like college or you forget most of what you learned, or have you actually put any of it in to use.

Matt: Have I? I mean, I use, a great deal of it every day. But, I do this every day. So I mean, there are people that have gone through the program either with me, or from before I was teaching it, who have gone on to open their own project studios, or work in the industry, or do exciting things like that. For the students who have gone through it, it’s been very valuable.

Martin: That’s interesting. I had no idea that you guys did that. So it’s kind of cool to learn. Just for the sake of people knowing who I am, so I’m not just this sensual mystery man, I work for Your Heaven Audio. We make our own microphones which have their own special application. And then I personally have been a folk musician. But one thing that I’m actually really bad at is recording. And so the idea for this whole podcast is because you are really good at that.

Matt: I like to think so, yeah.

Martin: We heard the recording you did the last time when we came in and it was pretty solid, so take that for what it’s worth.

Matt: All right.

Martin: Yes so I figured just talking to you would be really productive from the point of just just having somebody who knows nothing, talk to somebody who knows a lot. And kind of like fill in the gaps.

Matt: Right. Happy to help.

Martin: So one question for me was… room noise is really aggravating. And I think when we were in the studio with you last time, there was a point where I watched you guys trouble shoot specifically where a sound was coming from, and then fix it. It kind of sunk in to me how important isolating sound was for you and so from a beginner’s perspective, when you’re looking at room noise, how do you how do you handle that stuff.

Matt: Well in the studio, it’s great because you’ve got a bunch of different types of rooms and there’s actual sturdy construction meant specifically to combat that. You need to get your super isolated booths and we’ve got our main room, we’ve got like pieces of hallway sectioned off to use for certain things, and so we can get isolation just by closing certain doors and doing things in a certain way. It’s much much harder in a home studio. So actually sound proofing a room at home is big money construction. People often confuse the term acoustic treatment and sound proofing. People somehow think that if you throw up some expensive styrofoam on your walls that now you’ve got like rid yourself of room noise which is not at all the case you’re still going to hear the trucks go by outside. So going to hear stuff through your not very well insulated window, you’re still going to hear the fridge in the other room it. Who knows.

Martin: So the first step is maybe like get a new fridge.

Matt: At home you can you can take some small steps Maybe record at times when you know that people are going to be moving their lawns outside and put the dog away somewhere far away and ask your family to shut up for a while and unplug the fridge and anything that’s going to be actually making room and making noise in your room. Just either get it out of there or deal it as best you can and get that one electronic thing that you can actually unplugged so you just throw like a bunch of blankets over it and hope for the best. I mean it’s you do it you can.

Martin: Unplugging the fridge is a lot cheaper than getting a new one. So yeah, I appreciate that.

Matt: And so I’m always a fan of going to somewhere else that has that sort of figured out where it is actually for soundproofing and for you not getting the outside world into your recordings.

Martin: The door in the back is pretty heavy it’s like it reminds me of locking myself in the ice closet when I used to work in a restaurant.

Matt: You mean the big iso booth?

Martin: Yeah, the big iso booth. It’s like you shut it and you’re like you’re in there.

Matt: It’s a little uncomfortable. You can if you’re sitting there and it’s silent. You can like hear your heart be loud. Well and it’s just a creepy

Martin: Interesting. Ok so like maybe some like myths about room noise right. Like within your own house. What do you think about egg cartons

Matt: Egg cartons. You know… I can’t say. I haven’t tried it. There are some companies that I’ll not name that sell what amounts to very expensive styrofoam. Some people have found suitable DIY [methods,] you know, buy cheap bulk styrofoam and do their own cuts even though there are some things that you need to be sort of measured.

Martin: And what about the traditional mattress in the closet and mattress in the closet method?

Matt: It’s not the worst thing in the world. So again that’s essentially creating an iso booth. So I mean anything that’s going to absorb a lot of sound is better than being in you’re being kind of empty square bedroom where everything’s just all rings and flutter echoes every time you open your mouth. So, it doesn’t solve all of your problems but honestly going into a closet full of clothes and blankets and mattresses is much better than nothing.

Martin: That’s interesting. Yes I was thinking about this the other day and I realized that when I started recording in my bedroom I was actually completely incapable of hearing the room. It’s like it was something that it didn’t pay attention to. And so I couldn’t figure out why my recording sounded so bad. And then after spending time listening to other people’s recordings and singing in different rooms as a as a performer I was able to start to hear the sound of the room noise the difference between the noise that my voice was making and then the really rapid reflection of that sound coming back at me from the walls inside of my own room.

Matt: So by room noise you’re talking about like the acoustics and the reflections of the room as much as anything that’s actually making noise in the room.

Martin: As a layman they’re equivalent to me.

Matt: Right. Even though they’re completely separate they are problems sort of separate because there’s there’s like acoustic treatment and then there’s like I’ve got a really loud computer fan that’s sitting there humming away in the background. And then every time I make a sound it’s reflecting off the walls and a really unpleasant way. Yeah. So there’s a sort of separate. Yeah but it gets tricky in the home studio to solve really both of those problems.

Martin: So there’s that old story about like how Led Zeppelin recorded like the drums for Berani Harrar or something like that. And they went to this like giant like mansion probably out in California or like England somewhere and they just put the drums at the base of this like enormous staircase that like went up some turret or something and they played it and they hung the microphone down from the top of the top of the spiral staircase

Matt: So you get that enormous reverby sound. Which they created just with the actual space they were in.

Martin: Right. And so it seems like to me the easiest way for a layman to circumvent going to a studio is to like seek out places within their community that have these like natural acoustic properties which is like fun but also like can become somewhat impractical over a longer period of time because every every time you want to record you have to go back to that place and hope no ones like using it currently.

Matt: Yeah, and if you don’t have control over those places, who knows who’s going to be walking in and out and ruining your recordings and you have to obviously haul your set up over there, and who knows if things are going to work right, or like “Oh, this is the perfect place to record, but I can’t find a power outlet!” Certainly, if you can, pull it off by all means. Go across the world far and wide to find interesting places to record sound. But I’m a fan of studio or it’s we’ve got a super dead booth and a really great natural sounding live room and a really really reflective sort of reverby chamber all right next to each other, so it’s just, “Well, which one do you want to set up in and use in the next five seconds?”

Martin: Yeah. Roll out of bed and hung over and walk into the room and then walk into the next room and bam it’s a hit.

Matt: Not a mobile setup you know, everything works. Yes, but yeah, definitely, like the the environment that you record in makes an enormous difference.

Martin: How did you develop an ear for sound?

Matt: I’m still developing an ear for sound. It’s an ongoing process. I started when I was 18. I was oblivious to a lot of things. It’s just a lot of practice and learning from mistakes. You do the best work you can at the time, and in the early days my career I’ve done work with clients who were very happy to pay me for my abilities and I gave them a final product that I was reasonably proud of and then a few months later I listened back and go “Oh my god how could I have let that go. That sounds terrible.” Not that I think I’ve ever released anything that’s truly awful. But yeah you know, definitely your your client base grows along with you, you know. So you find people whose whose expectations and musical skill level sort of matches your ability to handle that so you graduate to pickier and pickier artists and clients as you yourself become more able to deal with picky people because you can hear things yourself. It’s an acquired skill like anything else.

Martin: Sure. It’s like drinking coffee

Matt: Just like drinking coffee.

Martin: So another, softball question for you is “What is a good first mic?”

Matt: If you’ve never owned a microphone before, I would say in most cases if you’re going to be recording acoustic instruments whether that’s vocals or whether that’s like acoustic guitar acoustic anything then probably some budget condenser what the budget condensers are are constantly changing there’s always new ones being released there’s a million microphones on the market now but it’s a very broad question just because the genre and what you plan to record matters. If you’re going to be recording an electric guitar in your bedroom and then you’re going to be doing screaming metal vocals and probably you want to like, an SM-57 or maybe some better dynamic mic but if you’re going to be just doing rap vocals then maybe you just need some fairly cheap condenser microphone. Or, if you’re going to be trying to do like clean and beautiful acoustic guitar pieces, maybe you need something a little higher quality.

It’s a broad question with a lot of answers but really, if I had no idea what the person did, and they asked me… “I’m going to go buy one microphone” and I felt cocky enough to give them an answer that I thought might suit their needs I’d say, you know, look into a few-hundred-dollar condenser microphone. I don’t know what you need I don’t know what your budget is I don’t know where or what you’re going to be recording so I can tell you.

Martin: Yeah. I find I ask a lot of people simple questions like that on purpose because I’m usually pretty sure that the answer is going to be like “Oh my god, I don’t know what you’re doing. This is a really complicated simple question that you’ve asked me.”

Matt: You’ll find that in audio especially, even though there are a lot of technical specifics, the end result that people are trying to achieve is so subjective and all over the place that I mean, I’ll pretend to give you answers, but really the answer to every single question is probably “I don’t know because nobody knows for sure because there is no one answer for anything when it comes to music.” It’s just, there just isn’t.

Martin: Yeah, that’s that’s good to know. So I guess on a certain level it’s like, no matter how much you know or learn, there’s a specific point in the day where you just have to make a judgment call. What you’re hearing.

Matt: If I know what you’re trying to do what your expectations are what your talent level is, what your budget is, then I can be much more specific with a recommendation for something like what piece of gear should I use.

Martin: It’s so many different things, a bit of a loaded question. So there was another question that I had written down here which is “As a studio owner or a technician within a studio, why would you have 100 microphones?” and I’m assuming the answer is because you don’t know what anyone is going to be doing who walks into your studio.

Matt: Exactly. So there’s a couple of answers to that question as well. You can think of microphones sort of like the metaphor that gets thrown around a lot. It’s a lot like like an artist having a whole bunch of different kinds of paint brushes. So just different tools for different jobs. If you are recording something like quiet and delicate and detailed you need a different mic for that then a blazing loud guitar amp where you don’t want all the all the volume in detail. There’s different situations call for different things. And really every microphone sounds different even if you’ve got two microphones of the exact same model within quality control of the manufacturer and they’re going to sound different and so it might be that if you’re recording a vocal you try ten different microphones. None of them are going to sound the same and it’s going to be kind of a pure taste which flavor you like so.

Martin: I feel like the two things we’ve we’ve learned so far is you’ve got to use a judgment call because there’s so much complexity within the situation you get only as much as you can and then make a judgment call and then hopefully five years later you’ll be able to look back at it, you know you’ve gotten so good at what you do that you can go like I can’t believe I ever made that judgment call

Matt: Right and it’s not even to say that you were wrong, just your tastes have changed. You used to like things that were really scratchy and aggressive. It hurt a little bit. And then later in life “actually I like sounds that are a little more mellow and laid back and have a little more body to them.” But you know, back 10 years ago, you’re all excited about things and you just want everything to be super bright and clear crisp and maybe you just changed

Martin: Yeah, the transition from the young punk musician to the married father who loves the domestic life.

Matt: Exactly, yeah.

Martin: These marriage analogies. Sorry, I don’t know what is with me today. So another question is, you know you don’t have to go into exact budget and details but… how expensive is your studio compared to a home studio. I mean how achievable is it for a musician to build a studio that the level and quality of what you have

Matt: To build a studio of this caliber. I… we even moved into this place when it was already built out to be a studio, we inhabited the husk of a former studio. I would say unless you are planning on sinking a significant amount of money to start a business, it would be unachievable and at the very least foolishly impractical to get into this level of stuff or just do your own projects unless you hugely independently wealthy or you know who knows.

Martin: So like there’s a certain amount of of that money that goes into gear and personnel and training which is very necessary. But then there’s a certain amount of it that goes into building the room out and getting sound isolation and is that a significant budget for you guys? I mean I know I feel like your answer is going to be yes.

Matt: Yes. And like I said this this facility was a legendary recording studio back in the day and it’s been a recording studio largely ever since. So I mean a lot of the shapes of the walls and the materials and the booths and the traps and the major construction stuff was largely done. It needed a lot of renovation which even just the renovations were a substantial investment. But yeah, I mean even to build something like this from scratch might have been even totally unachievable for us. It’s it’s really it’s built to be a studio. You see that the walls are all crazy angles and the main room. And that’s because it was very intentionally designed to be a studio from the start.

Martin: So if I know how to put up an angled wall I have a good start to my own home studio.

Matt: I would seek out the help of a very knowledgeable crew, which I’m not. But yeah, when people are serious about really building a room to be a killer environment for recording they’ll seek out the help of a studio designer and an acoustic version because it’s really a whole other art into itself, like how do I build my walls.

Martin: Yeah. My dad got a master’s degree in engineering and then promptly joined the music industry. So there’s this book on his wall about optics. I opened it and it explains the technical specifications of how light refracts through a lens I’m assuming that sound behaves in a similar way that’s really scientifical. It’s the difference between using the camera and building the camera to take the video. A different guy does that.

Matt: Yeah, the science of sound is definitely a deep subject. Even when I teach, I teach the basic stuff that everyone should know, even if they’ve got a place that’s already pretty well set up to record in. So again, a lot of it was was here and just I just used a lot of it was renovation and honestly other people that are better at the studio design and construction and renovation part of things did a lot more work than I did. I definitely was here for a lot of the renovations. I helped with as much as I could but that’s just not my strong suit.

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GADADU visits the Your Heaven® Music Lab and violist and co-songwriter Hannah Selin tries out the Your Heaven® CloseUp® Mic System. This video features her performing a short piece using a loop pedal using the CloseUp® Mic System as the input.

http://gadadu.com | http://gadadu.bandcamp.com

Your Heaven Music Lab Series is a weekly music session featuring local and touring artists. Our guests come down to Your Heaven HQ in Providence, RI to hang with the YH team, tell us about themselves, play, and try out our Close-up Mic Systems. Contact us if you’re interested in visiting the YH Music Lab.

The CloseUp® Mic System captures the natural, authentic sound of an acoustic instrument for amplification or recording – it’s like your personal audio engineer in a box.

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