Editors:
Mary (ISDN queen) Mazurek
and
Kathy (Splice Girl) Dunaj

Volume 16 Number 2
February, 2001

EARS Meets At Bird's Nest

2500 N. Southport Chicago
Wed., February 21, 2001
7:00pm
773-472-1502

Ears meets at the Bird's Nest 2500 N. Southport on Wednesday, February 21st for the Larry Williams Memorial Gr**my Party. [No meeting the 27th] We have the back room all to ourselves to watch the show on their big screen TV. The show starts at 7:00. Harry B. will be da' M.C.from 6:30 on. Cash bar and restaurant menu available. For info and directions call The Bird's Nest at 773-472-1502.

-Gary Khan-

Upcoming AES Event

Mark your calenders for Monday Feb 26th [approx 7-9 pm] AES will meet at the new Goodman Theatre for a tour and presentation on the room acoustics, acoustic isolation, and sound systems. Stay tuned, and check for updates to the AES website for further details and exact time. [no info available as of this writing] www.aes.org/sections/chicago

EARS Appreciation File/Recaps

Thanks once again to all who made our holiday bash a smash! Extra special thanks to Don Morris of BASF for sponsoring our annual Jeff Hamilton Memorial Holiday party at Reza's. Thanks to Harry Brotman for making the plans and being so entertaining, (even though we did'nt see the seven veil/finger cymbal dance.) -kd-

EARS members descended on Symphony Center for the January meeting. Engineer Chris Willis treated us to a tour of the WFMT recording booth and the stage. Chris explained the unique attributes of the hall and how he used different mic placements to capture the various orchestral set ups. He also spoke in detail of the different renovations the hall has been through over the years (the most current one by Kirkegaard and Associates) while we sat on stage and viewed the hall from the orchestra's perspective.

Then CSO archivist and EARS member Matt Sohn took us on a tour of the archives. The temperature controlled vault contains every commercial recording the CSO has ever made plus radio broadcasts on formats ranging from vinyl, CD, DATs, reels, L-cassette and (everyone's favorite) 8 track cassettes. Over decades, that's many thousands !

For tickets and more information, call the CSO at (312) 294-3000. If you are unable to attend a concert, you can hear them on WFMT 98.7 FM every Sunday afternoon at 1:00 pm for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcast engineered by Chris Willis. -Mary Mazurek-

Keys To A Good Sounding "Looking" Studio
By Mike Castronovo

Studios are always concerned with sound, and rightly so. If you don't sound good your client probably won't come back for that crucial second and third session. But too many studios seldom consider how they look. In the business world (and music is a business too) corporate image means a lot. The same is true with your studio image. I'm not just talking about expensive ad campaigns that brag about your latest bells & whistles piece of gear, I'm talking about some simple goals that every studio can achieve with relative ease. Let's look at a few....

Initial Contact Image. Ever answered the phone "Yea, "xyz" recording it's your dime, whatca want?" Well needless to say the image that puts in the mind of your potential client is one of a bunch of kids just starting out...not seasoned professionals who have the expertise to do the job right. A better phone answer would simply be "xyz recording, Joe speaking, can I help you?" Also answering the phone quickly and returning calls promptly is important as well. You'd be surprised how many sessions I've booked with people who said "The other studio never called me back!"

Look At Your Facility. If a client walks into a cluttered, dirty, disorganized facility, they may quickly assume that the way you treat your building is probably better than the way you will treat their session. It doesn't take much to pick up mic cables, dust off the equipment, and vacuum the paper scraps off the floor. The worst offender for some studios is the room that no one spends much time in but everybody uses... the bathroom. I've had the "opportunity" to visit various [studio] bathrooms. Mostly the rooms are clean and well supplied (paper, towels etc) but once in a while you get one that you're afraid to walk into for fear of catching something. If you think this doesn't matter to clients, think again!! I've had some clients tell me that they would refuse to use the restroom at a particular studio because of how filthy it was. When that session was done, they didn't go back to that studio... they looked for some place more "comfortable".

How you treat your customer is the last part of this guide to business image. It's easy when you've been doing this for years to "talk down" to the new clients who've never (or seldom) done any recordings. We're there to record them, but they often look to the engineer to "guide" them from step to step through the process. If we can make it enjoyable, and still accomplish a quality recording that makes it better for the client and the engineer. This is especially important with young groups that have no producer or manager. A case in point I had a couple call me about doing an album project. They had been at a Wisc. studio and continually got into arguments with the engineer. They were so frustrated they canceled the project and considered never going to a studio again "If that's what they're all like". Fortunately they did try one more time... we got the album done... and had a good time doing it. Someone just needed to be a little more understanding of a new group and walking them through the process.

Well I'm sure each of us has plenty of tips about running a studio business...these are just a few of my observations from my 19 plus years of doing this. Hopefully soon I might get it right!!!

About the Author: Mike Castronovo is the co-owner of Studio "B" Digital Recording. The studio has been operating since 1981 and is 24 track with Alesis A-dats, mediaform CD publishing, and tries to have very clean bathrooms.

We all know how handy gaff tape can be at holding down cables, but what about itsmany other uses....
-Mary Mazurek-

10. Removes lint from clothing (not particularly humorous but it does work)
9. Allows you to draw that proverbial "line in the sand" (Don't even think of crossing it)
8. Holds your eyes open when the session goes into hour 20+ (well, at least you'll look interested)
7. Keeps headphones from falling off musician's head (ALA Keith Moon)
6. Great hair removal system (bikini wax anyone?)
5. Tape talkative assistant's mouth shut
4. Restrain unruly clients
3. Holds batteries in DAT or TV remotes (you know, after you break the cover trying to replace them)
2. Holds SKB cases together
1. The universal fix all...you break it, gaff tape can fix it!!!

Tech Tips
By Ken Paul

Kathy has been bugging me for an article for a year now so I finally found something to write about. Here are a couple goodies for the workstation junkies out there. Happy New Year!

It happens to everyone sometime...that internal hard drive that's been spinning away for 7 or 8 years now 24 hours a day most of the time ( I know it's ungreen but I leave my stuff on) decides to go south. Of course this happened at 5 pm Friday leaving my Sonic Solutions system with a question mark on screen. I called Shreve Systems and found a 4 gig Apple drive for $299 but couldn't get it shipped until Monday. I had an OS 8.6 boot disk but no drive so I looked around the shop and found an Iomega Zip drive with the original Tools cart. I booted the Mac with the startup disk and the Zip online, installed a minimum system on the Zip and rebooted...success! I then found a recent backup of my drive on a CD, (you have backups too, don't you?) copied the Sonic software to the Zip and started editing. When I install the new drive the Zip cart goes on the shelf until the next meltdown.

I wanted to build a portable Pro Tools System that didn't take a van to move. I already had a Powerbook G3 so I just needed a way to put cards in it. Magma to the rescue! I now have a four space SKB case that contains a Magma 4 Slot Expansion Chassis, A Digi 001 interface and an Emagic Unitor 8 Midi/SMPTE interface.

The chassis holds the Digi 001 card, an ATTO SCSI card which connects to an internal CD Burner and external Glyph Hard Drive. A ProMax Turbomax card connected to an internal 25 Gig EIDE Hard Drive, and a Promax Firemax card that provides 3 Firewire ports for Digital video. The Magma chassis connects to the Powerbook with a 4' cable. Magma makes host cards for other Macs as well, so the expansion chassis can be connected to the Powerbook on the road and a desktop computer back at the studio. For the unfamiliar, Digi001 is an entry level Pro Tools package that sells for under $1,000. The interface has 8 analog inputs and outputs (1&2 have mic pres), ADAT optical I/O, and SPDIF I/O. There are also monitor outputs with a front panel volume control, plus a headphone amp. The LE software will allow up to 24 tracks per session. There is no TDM support. If you load a session created on a mix plus system any tracks above 24 will be ignored and plugs ins will be replaced with RTAS equivalents or ignored if there is no equivalent plug in. It is the perfect solution for anyone who likes to have a Pro Tools available in a traditional studio to fly vocals or edit tracks. In my case it was the perfect solution for a portable system. Instead of loading all the software on the Powerbook hard drive I created a new system folder on the EIDE drive in the Magma chassis. I then used the Startup Drive control panel to tell the Mac to boot off the chassis' drive.

I then installed Pro tools LE, Adobe Premiere, Logic Platinum, and Bias Peak on the chassis' drive. Now when I take out the Powerbook all the audio software stays with the chassis. When I run with the chassis there are only the programs I need. The Mac boots faster and runs more reliably too. You can do this on any Mac. Just partition the internal drive and make each partition a separate boot volume. This trick makes moving the chassis between computers a snap too since the chassis has it's own system software and all the applications.

If you have questions my email is ken@kengineering.com. You can also check out http://www.magma.com, http://www.promax.com, http://www.digi001.com and http://www.attotech.com if you want to build a portable studio of your own. Oh yeah...kudos to Sonic Solutions for the online keyfile activation system. I entered my board serial # and was given a code to copy into the Keyfile Activator application and it put a current keyfile on the zip drive...all this at 11pm on a Friday with no human interaction...life is good! http://www.sonic.com.

Who have you been working with lately? We want to know! If you have any ideas for stories, wish to contribute an article, want to include any upcoming events, or have a tech tip, please contact:

Mary at pegasusrecording@ameritech.net. Or write to:
Peagasus Recording P.O Box 578903, Chicago, IL 60657.

Kathy can be reached at SVI, or
kathy@soundvideoimpressions.com.