Live Recording for John Legend's Artists Den performance

Last December, Dubway had the pleasure of providing the audio recording for another installment of the Live from Artists Den series. Engineer Sam Palumbo, assisted by intern Bea Go, went to the historic Riverside Church in Harlem, NY to record John Legend's performance and interview. Dubway engineer Chris Camilleri is mixing the music for the episode.

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The Artists Den is a critically acclaimed television and digital music series best known for presenting small, secret concerts by extraordinary artists in non-traditional, often historic settings for the TV broadcast. Live from the Artists Den is broadcasted nationally on public television, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Australia, Canada, Israel, and Latin America. Dubway has recorded audio for the series' previous episodes featuring Imagine Dragons, The Lumineers, The Killers, Marina and the Diamonds, and Sara Bareilles.

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John Legend is a ten-time Grammy Award winning R&B and soul recording artist, Oscar and Golden Globe winner, and critically acclaimed concert performer, philanthropist/social activist, and was named one of Time Magazineʼs 100 Most Influential People. Legend has released four studio albums to date, and has been hailed as one of the industry’s most innovative artists. John Legend’s latest album "Darkness and Light" was released on Columbia Records on Friday, December 2nd.

Stay tuned for the premiere of the episode in 2017.

Vocal tracking for Tituss Burgess

Tituss Burgess with engineer Sam Palumbo at Dubway

Tituss Burgess with engineer Sam Palumbo at Dubway

We're off to a busy start this year! Earlier this month, Broadway singer and actor Tituss Burgess worked on his new album, tracking vocals on original songs composed by James Sampliner, accompanied by producer Daniel Weiner. Singer Cassondra Kellam was also in attendance recording back-up vocals.

Tituss Burgess, a Georgia native, has appeared in four Broadway musicals, incuding Good VibrationsJersey BoysThe Little Mermaid and Guys and Dolls. Most recently, he is starring on the Netflix original series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, for which he received Emmy nominations for in 2015 and 2016.

Soooooooooooooooooooooo I'm doing it! Coming soon! My album! #2017 @samps42 @danweinerdrums

A photo posted by Tituss Burgess (@titusssawthis) on

Steven Santoro records his new album with co-producer Marc Ciprut

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Songwriter and musician Steven Santoro spent two days in the mezz studio to record his new album (working title "Deep In August") with co-producer and guitarist Marc Ciprut. Engineer Sam Palumbo ran the live tracking session, recording some of NYC's most accomplished players: Ciprut on guitar, Jon Cowherd on piano, James Genus on bass, Clarence Penn on drums and Danny Sadownick on percussion.

Steven Santoro is a singer and songwriter whose ability to fuse Jazz and popular music helped his debut album, “Moods and Grooves rise to #1 on Jazz FM Radio in the United Kingdom and #20 on Jazz radio in the US. An associate professor at Berklee College of Music, Santoro continues to create music with artists from all over the world, and is working on his next release "Deep In August."

Click through the gallery to view pictures below!

Berkshire Choral International Recording

Every year, Berkshire Choral International records at Dubway for their annual Berkshire Choral Festival. Last week, engineer Devon Emke and conductor Frank Nemhauser recorded an 8-piece choir for the upcoming festival.

Berkshire Choral International, based in Sheffield, Massachusetts, is a non-for-profit educational institution that provides amateur singers with professional-level choral experiences. In 30 US and 5 countries worldwide, BCI offers week-long choral singing immersion experiences under the direction of world-class conductors with professional symphony orchestras. This year's program included Mahler's Symphony No. 8.

Sofar Sounds New York: Secret Gigs at Dubway Studios

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For the past few months, Dubway has had the pleasure of hosting Sofar Sounds in the mezzanine. In addition to providing the space for these shows, we are also facilitating the live sound and audio recording for the filmed performances.

Sofar Sounds is a global network of artists, hosts, and guests, all with a goal of bringing the magic back to live music. "Secret" intimate shows are curated with carefully selected up-and-coming artists throughout the city in unique spaces. Interested guests apply to attend a secret show and are not informed of the lineup until their arrival. During the music, there is full attention: no talking, texting, or filming. At a Sofar, the music comes first: people sit and listen, bringing back the magic to live music – a great way for artists to reach new, curious audiences and for music lovers to discover their next favorite acts.

Check out some photos from our past shows in the gallery below, and stay tuned for the release of the Sofar Sounds videos recorded at Dubway this winter.

Dyllan - "All Those Other Windows" EP

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Brooklyn-based independent singer-songwriter Dyllan just released her latest EP, "All Those Other Windows", mixed and mastered by Dubway engineers Adrian Thorstensen and Mike Judeh.

Dyllan (Dylan Nichols) is an alternative pop artist and Los Angeles native that describes herself as "an honest, passionate lyricist with deep and original music." Her EP was released for purchase on iTunes or stream on Spotify.

Vocal recording for Paul Schrader's upcoming film 'First Reformed'

This week, Dubway engineer Zac Suskevich recorded singer Julia Murney for Paul Schrader's newest film First Reformed

Paul Schrader, Zac Suskevich, Julia Murney and Jake Falconer at Dubway Studios.

Paul Schrader, Zac Suskevich, Julia Murney and Jake Falconer at Dubway Studios.

First Reformed is a new indie thriller by writer-director Paul Schrader produced by Arclight Films and Killer Films. It follows a former military chaplain (Ethan Hawke), who struggles with his faith after the loss of his son. He befriends a parishioner of his Church (Amanda Seyfried) whose husband is a radical environmentalist, and discovers "his church's complicity with unscrupulous corporations."

Paul Schrader, an American screenwriter, film director and film critic popularly known for writing and co-writing screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, attended the singing session for First Reformed.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 7: Control Surfaces (and their history)

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A long time ago, Avid (then called Digidesign), allowed 3rd-party MIDI control surfaces to move the faders and the pans in Pro Tools. JL Cooper made a bunch of these surfaces. They were awful. Shortly after, Mackie and Digidesign collaborated on an improved system that used MIDI in a smarter way, called HUI. HUI is still in use today, and is the main way that 3rd-party companies make controllers for Pro Tools (SSL, Tascam, etc.). But MIDI is awful, and Digidesign then built their first serious control surface, ProControl. ProControl looked and felt like a real board, and used a proprietary language over ethernet called DigiNet. DigiNet powered ProControl, Control | 24, C24, and all the ICON boards like D-Command and D-Control. For the small-budget crowd, they made Command|8 , Digi 002 and 003 all of which use MIDI in a smart way like HUI. 

When Avid purchased Euphonix, they got something special, EuCon. EuCon was the only serious competitor to DigiNet at the time. Avid promptly ended development for DigiNet and put all their resources into EuCon. The Artist series (we have an Artist Mix and Artist Control), MC Pro, Pro Tools | Dock, S3 (picture below), S5, and S6 are all built on EuControl. And EuControl is compatible with Logic, Nuendo and Pro Tools (and many more apps, too).

With Pro Tools 12, Avid released a free iPad app, Pro Tools | Control. This uses EuCon over Wi-Fi (or via the Lightning port) and is incredibly useful.

So that’s history. Here’s the lesson: EuControl uses ethernet and/or Wi-Fi and looks on the network for all available EuCon devices. Go to “EuCon Settings” in the menubar and you can see a window where you can grab any available surfaces on the network. When you move the Artist Mix and Control from room to room, remember the following:

Artist Mix and Artist Control plug into the ethernet switch (small black box), and the third cable on the switch goes to the Mac. All of our Mac Pro’s have (2) ethernet ports, and they automatically recognize that our LAN and the internet is on one port, and EuControl is on the other port. Ports are interchangeable. If you have time, fire up the controllers and experiment. It’s easy to get stuck in the habit of using only the mouse with Pro Tools. As soon as you break that habit, you’ll discover all the fast and intuitive ways you can run a session and shape sounds with a surface.

Take a look at Avid’s current line-up. These surfaces range in price from almost free to over $100k (!).

Mario Spinetti produces a 25-piece Choir for "Amen To The People"

Composer and producer Mario Spinetti brought a choir of 25 singers to the mezzanine on an evening in December to record his composition, "Amen To The People" with Dubway engineer Adrian Thorstensen.

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According to Spinetti, "'Amen to the People' is a song written for every man, woman, and child wanting to raise a voice in the name of oneness. And so at our session, the task was to offer a song – a singable song – to express the belief that separateness is an illusion: that we're all one, and that we're all love."

Watch a clip of these beautiful voices coming together below:

PREMIERE: "A Dubway Christmas" - Happy Holidays from Dubway Studios

This past month, our staff came together to write and record a song for this holiday season – our gift to you.

We present Holiday Nostalgia (A Dubway Christmas):

Happy Holidays from our Dubway family to yours! See you in 2017!

Dubway-Holiday

Credits: Written by Erica Rabner, Produced by Russell Castiglione, Engineered by Andrew Gualtieri, Mixed by Bea Go.
Vocals: Erica Rabner, Bea Go | Guitars: Al Houghton, Bailey Aldrich, Ben Lapidus, Hayden O'Leary | Piano: Russell Castiglione | Drums: Ben Lapidus | Bass: Zac Suskevich

Dyllan - Sea Anemones

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This summer, independent singer-songwriter Dyllan stopped by Dubway Studios to mix and master her upcoming EP, "All Those Other Windows." The first single, Sea Anemones (mixed by Adrian Thorstensen and mastered by Mike Judeh) has just been released on SoundCloud here.

Dyllan (Dylan Nichols) is an alternative pop artist and Los Angeles native that describes herself as "an honest, passionate lyricist with deep and original music."

Dave Soldier Collaborates with Elena Mindlina

Composer and musician Dave Soldier is back in our studios working on the new classical album featuring opera singer Elena Mindlina.

Soldier, who leads a double life as a musician and neuroscientist and Columbia University, composes music in a variety of genres from experimental avant-garde to classical to jazz. Most of his work is collaborative, with projects including the Thai Elephant Orchestra consisting of 14 elephants in northern Thailand, the cult Delta-punk band the Kropotkins, the Soldier String Quartet, the Brainwave Music Project, and coaching children to compose their own music in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Guatemala.

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Elena Mindlina is a Russian-born soprano singer whose recent endeavors include touring Russia earlier this Spring in collaboration with pianist and composer Ivan Alexandrov. Aside from opera singing, Mindlina teaches voice and violin at her private studio in New York, as well as giving masterclasses in vocal technique in various Russian observations.

D. D. Jackson producing Hunter College's Pop CD

Renowned composer and jazz pianist D.D. Jackson spent time with Sam Palumbo in the mezzanine recording for the CUNY Hunter College Popular Music Combo CD.

The session consisted of three student jazz bands, all of which are Jackson's students at Hunter, in live band tracking format. Each group had one hour to record their songs (both original compositions and covers of popular tunes) that will be compiled in the 2016-17 Hunter Pop CD. Dubway Studios also recorded last year's compilation CD which can be listened to here!

D.D. Jackson produced, directed and mixed the 2015-16 Hunter Pop Compilation CD.

D.D. Jackson produced, directed and mixed the 2015-16 Hunter Pop Compilation CD.

D.D. Jackson is an Emmy-winning jazz pianist and composer who has recorded and performed with some of the most acclaimed names in jazz music, as well as having frequently collaborated with Questlove and The Roots. Jackson also composes music for film and TV, including music for The Wonder Pets, a children's show by our family at Nickelodeon. As an educator, Jackson has taught part-time at Hunter College for the past 7 years, teaching History of Jazz and was recently awarded the Hunter College 2016 Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (part-time).

Composer Jim Papoulis Recording Strings for "Beyond The Backyard"

Composer Jim Papoulis conducted a 9-piece string section in our mezzanine for the upcoming film Beyond the Backyard with engineer Rick Kwan.

Beyond the Backyard is a new coming-of-age film by director PJ Magerko, a recent graduate from NYU in the Spring of 2016.

Jim Papoulis is a composer, conductor, orchestrator and producer from New York City. His compositions are known for "exploring new modes of musical communication by honoring and connecting classical and traditional forms with non-Western sounds. Jim's distinct and ever-evolving approach unites classical with contemporary sounds, world rhythms, R&B, and voices, while combining live instruments with current composing and recording technology." As an orchestrator, his credits include Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole and more.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 5 - Synchronization

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There are lots of ways and lots of reasons to synchronize audio/video workstations. No matter if you're syncing two Pro Tools systems, Logic to Ableton Live, or an old-fashioned video deck and Nuendo, the concepts are the same. Clock reference determines how fast everything is going. You can get clock from an AES/EBU signal, a video signal, or even an optical audio signal. Clock keeps systems from drifting. Positional reference tells the systems where they are. System A says "I'm at 1 hour, 12 minutes, 3 seconds and 19 frames... NOW!" And in each case you need to have a master and a slave.


Today, I sent old-fashioned LTC (longitudinal timecode) from Pro Tools on my laptop (the master) to the SYNC I/O connected to our desktop Pro Tools system (the slave). As long as the desktop system was online (flashing clock in the transport), it responded as the slave.
But there was an important oversight: I didn't connect the word clock output of the laptop/Ensemble to the word clock input of the SYNC I/O, so my demonstration was lacking a common clock reference. Next time, I promise!


Reading the manual on the train tonight, I was happy to discover that our old SYNC does support the HD video frame rate of 23.976: "The 24 fps LED flashes to indicate 23.976 fps." Which is exactly what we saw went I sent 23.976 LTC.


Homework: I've been reading up on RTS (Remote Transport Sync), which is a proprietary method of synchronizing two Source Connect systems over the internet. To make it work, you must instanciate the "Se ReWire" plug-in in Pro Tools so SC and PT can speak positional reference.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 3 - Calibrated Listening Levels

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Adrian and I are marking down the listening level for mix sessions. This can be really helpful to you and to clients when you're working on the same project over multiple sessions. Everyone gets accustomed to what "loud" sounds like in the room, and as you get used to it, you can take your eyes off the meters and your ears will tell you if you're in spec.


To do it, download the calibration files from the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee). Put "MidRngPinkNoise_-20dB.wav" on a new track in your session, and set the fader for unity gain (make sure the master fader is also at unity gain). Then pan it hard to one speaker and play it in loop mode. Get an SPL meter, set it to C weighting, slow mode, and hold it at the listening position, but pointed to the loudspeaker. Turn the gain knob on your monitor up and down. You might find that working on a mix for the web, or on a music mix that you're in the 65db range. I discovered that our television clients like to mix at 73db, some of our film clients like it at 77db. Crazy-dynamic film mixes in bigger rooms than ours can be set to 85db.


Keep in mind that calibrated levels are not terribly important for tracking. But they're great for mixing. And if you're disciplined, you can set the level at the start of a project and never change it. This will result in more consistent mixes without any guesswork.

Geek Out with Nathaniel - Episode 4 - Mastered for iTunes

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Mastered for iTunes (MFiT) is less complex than it seems. Click here for Apple's documents and droplets for diving deep. I recommend reading them all. But here's the short version:

Apple figured out a way to make AAC encoding sound better in some ways than CD. To do it, Apple has to feed the encoder mixes that are at least 44.1Khz/24-bit. 96Khz is preferred, but 44.1 is tolerated. Must be at least 24-bits. When you're close to done mastering, you run your mix through afclip in the Terminal app, which will tell you if your mix will clip on AAC decode (the decode happens when users are listening to iTunes or their iPhones).

After some experimentation, I found that I needed to leave at least -0.7dbfs headroom on my mixes, and sometimes even more (I did -1.5dbfs recently which is a lot). This is contrary to the old CD-mixing advice which was to push the mix way up to the ceiling, like -0.3dbfs. Those mixes will fail MFiT.

You can also "round-trip" your mix by using the AAC>WAV droplet and sending the file back into Pro Tools. This will let you A/B the process. There you can cancel the two mixes and then really hear what AAC is (AAC always sounds like a swishy fish tank to me when I do this, but a good swishy fish tank).

Full Choir Tracking for David Rowan

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This past week engineer Sam Palumbo tracked a thirty person choir in our Mezzanine studio for David Rowen. The music features David's original arrangement of the hymn, "Joyful, Joyful" and his talented performance. 

David is a Helen Hayes Award-nominated actor and musician based in New York City. Hailing from Washington, DC, he has performed at the Tony Award-winning regional theaters, Signature Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company, among others.

As a musician, David is a classically trained singer and pianist, and a self-taught guitarist. He has worked as a music director, accompanist, and private piano instructor, and he specializes in a cappella arrangements and piano/vocal transcriptions. His arrangements have been featured on the Best of College A Cappella, and Voices Only compilation albums.

Geek Out With Nathaniel - Episode 2 - Plug In Automation

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I've often wished that every time an engineer created a new Pro Tools session that a big window popped-up and asked "Plug-In Controls Default to Auto-Enabled?" This preference box is unchecked by default, but is absolutely essential for modern mixing workflows.


Let's imagine Al is mixing dialog, with maybe an EQ, de-esser and compressor in the chain, and then he gives me the session. I keep mixing, but then I notice that the de-esser threshold is too high for one line, but everything before it sounds fine. If I pull the threshold down, it will affect everything before it, so it must be automated. But just looking at the plug-in, I have no way of knowing whether or not the threshold parameter has been auto-enabled!


To keep from going insane, I auto-enable absolutely everything in a session, but start a mix in auto-suspend mode. In auto-suspend, you can tweak, fiddle and play for hours, and then when it starts to sound good, use write-to-all-enabled for all tracks and turn off auto-suspend. This will lock your mix in, and give you the freedom to make moment-to-moment tweaks.