A 2010 Wrap-up From the "B" Room

As we get ready for whatever excitement 2011 will bring us, this feels like as good a time as any for reflecting on my "rookie season" at Tapeworks.

In the eight short months since joining the crew here, I've seen many of the ways in which a pro studio earns the kind of reputation that this place has had for so many years. I've learned that a successful audio engineer needs to be constantly aware of many elements within a recording session. That means learning tendencies of clients and being able to anticipate their next requests. It also means constantly weighing the factors of fatigue, productivity and "finance efficiency" against each other when working with studio talent.

It also means multitasking. I was amazed to discover how much multitasking is required to run a successful session between multiple locations simultaneously. Let's just say that my "involuntary stopwatch reflex" has become finely tuned as a result of these sessions.

2010 also brought some very cool new developments to our "B" room, which made the leap this year from functional control room to a miniature version of our "A" room. The end of the year saw the introduction of our brand new Mackie Onyx 1620i Mixer, which combines the necessity of a 16-channel analog mixer with a Firewire digital output. With functional ISDN and phone patch lines running into Studio B, we can now do all kinds of multi-client (and multi-location) sessions from either room at Tapeworks (yes, the "B" room even has a snazzy stopwatch!).

It was a great 2010, and we're looking forward to an even better 2011!

Happy New Year!

From Control Room A:

Well 2010 ended with a bang for us! We had an exciting year. In November I had the opportunity to head out to San Fran to see what's hot in the new tech gear arena, and was able to bring home some toys for the new year. Ribbons seemed to be the hot item on our list. No, not holiday ribbons, but ribbon microphones (Audio-technica AT4080), and ribbon tweeter speaker systems (Adam A8X). So whats so great about ribbons? They provide a more controlled listening environment, and a new (or old) way to capture sound. We are also enjoying our mid 2010 purchase of the PLAY sample and sound design library, that we have used on all of our large scaled audio design jobs. Also with the help of our friends at Upscale Music we have been working hard refurbishing our main recording console to continue to deliver that sought after analogue sound. Happy New Year! And away we go!