https://www.dpamicrophones.com/25yrs/world-tour

LEARN FROM THE BEST “MASTERS OF AUDIO”

Are you new to the audio world and want to start your career off at a high level? Or perhaps you are an experienced sound engineer and microphone enthusiast who is always eager to learn about the newest technology, trends, tips and tricks. Either way, the DPA GET CLOSER World Tour will allow you to meet, network with and learn from the best audio experts in the business.

DPA Microphones is hosting fully-loaded, all-day audio masterclasses in cities around the world. At each event, well-respected “Masters of Audio” will share their experiences, show their best tricks and give hands-on demos of miking techniques for achieving the best result in various applications.

In addition, microphone experts from DPA’s headquarters in Denmark will be available to demonstrate and provide technical background information on the microphones and miking techniques.

To get an idea of what our Microphone Masterclasses is all about, please check out the World Tour Recap

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Donal Hodgson
UK +44 (0) 7778 743743
www.donalhodgson.com
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Dudley-Jeczalik-Langan reboot Art of Noise’s In Visible Silence

Fri 9 Mar 2018, 19:30 – 22:30
See Art of Noise’s million-selling In Visible Silence performed live in London for the first time in 30 years. Released in 1986, the album spawned hits Peter Gunn with Duane Eddy, Paranoimia with Max Headroom and Legs.

Anne Dudley, J J Jeczalik and Gary Langan formed Art of Noise in 1983 and – alongside producer Trevor Horn and ‘director’ Paul Morley – tore up the pop, electronic and avant-garde rule books with the game-changing records Moments in Love, Close (to the Edit) and Kiss with Tom Jones. Supported by DJ Food.

https://www.bl.uk/events/dudley-jeczalik-langan-reboot-art-of-noises-in-visible-silence

I did my first Dolby Atmos mixes in 2017, what an amazing and creative format and just as I finished my mixes Avid released full Dolby Atmos integration in Pro Tools 12, nice to be ahead of the curve, in a good way.

Working with my great friend and partner, Kipper we created yet more resource tracks for Rock Choir as well as 5 choir recording sessions at Abbey Road. Looking forward to another year working with Caroline and Rock Choir.

 

Are you new to the audio world and want to start your career off at a high level? Or perhaps you are an experienced sound engineer and microphone enthusiast who is always eager to learn about the newest technology, trends, tips and tricks. Either way, the DPA GET CLOSER World Tour will allow you to meet, network with and learn from the best audio experts in the business.

DPA Microphones is hosting fully-loaded, all-day audio masterclasses in cities around the world. At each event, well-respected “Masters of Audio” will share their experiences, show their best tricks and give hands-on demos of miking techniques for achieving the best result in various applications.

In addition, microphone experts from DPA’s headquarters in Denmark will be available to demonstrate and provide technical background information on the microphones and miking techniques.

http://www.dpamicrophones.com/25yrs/world-tour

So proud to be asked to be part of this amazing experience, thank you DPA.

Donal

By Sue Sillitoe, White Noise PR

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After resounding success in the USA, DPA Microphones’ 25th anniversary GET CLOSER World Tour continues on. The first stop is Canada and then it moves on to Europe and Asia. The tour focuses on educating participants; combining theoretical learning, with panel discussions and miking technique demos from the best Masters of Audio in the business.

More than 200 people attended DPA’s GET CLOSER sessions in New York and Los Angeles and feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive:

“Overall one of the best brand events I have attended – very well thought out and presented.”
“The format of the class was wonderful. The “intimate” setting allowed for some great learning and interaction!”
“I cannot imagine having a better opportunity to connect with DPA product experts and key users in the audio engineering community. I’ve only owned one DPA product, to date, and I will now be looking at your products with a fresh perspective.”

DPA’s GET CLOSER World Tour allows audio enthusiasts to learn from recognised experts from the audio industry, as well as network with their peers at full day educational masterclass events. At each event, well-respected Masters of Audio share their experiences, reveal their best tips and give hands-on demos of miking techniques for achieving the best result in various applications.

These masterclass events are tailor-made to appeal to specific target groups in the different countries and the Masters of Audio that are chosen to participate change accordingly. One presenter who has participated in multiple classes, sound engineer and mixer Donal Hodgson, shares his experiences from working with Sting, Tina Turner, Arrested Development, Primal Scream and Duran Duran. Film sound engineer Stéphane Bucher, who has worked on films like Taken II and III, Valerian and Lucy, is also on the speaker list. In addition, microphone experts from DPA’s headquarters in Denmark are on-site to tell about miking theory and demonstrate miking techniques. These include miking expert, Bo Brinck, who has been doing workshops for many years together with DPA distributors all over the world as well as audio expert, Eddy B. Brixen, who has a unique knowledge about acoustics.

The first coming World Tour dates will find place on:
Sept. 19, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with Gerr Audio
Sept. 22, Bologna, Italy, with M. Casale Bauer
Oct. 4, Paris, France with Audio2
Oct. 12, Amsterdam, The Netherlands with Amptec
Oct. 17, Barcelona, Spain with SeeSound
Nov. 14, Sydney, Australia with Amber Technology
Nov. 16, Melbourne, Australia with Amber Technology
Nov. 23, Leuven, Belgium with Amptec

You can find details about these and more Master Classes by going to http://www.dpamicrophones.com/25yrs/world-tour

“We are extremely happy with the overwhelming interest for our DPA GET CLOSER World Tour. Having these focused days with such a dedicated crowd is a fantastic opportunity to get even closer to existing and new users of our microphones. DPA is constantly increasing our level of activities and the interaction with the users is of utmost importance for us. Through the many years of developing high-quality microphone solutions for the pro audio market, DPA has gained a lot of knowledge that we want to share to give others the opportunity to take advantage of our findings.” says Kalle Hvidt Nielsen, CEO for DPA Microphones.

DPA has been doing successful workshops with its distributors for many years and in connection with DPA’s 25-year anniversary the idea of the DPA GET CLOSER World Tour was born. It consists of 25 masterclasses throughout the world focusing on giving the participants a thorough introduction to different theoretical as well as practical miking topics.

There are limited seats for all GET CLOSER World Tour events and tickets, along with full details of finalized events, are available here: www.dpamicrophones.com/25yrs/world-tour

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Just bought and installed Sonarworks Reference 3, amazing, the imaging on my NS10’s is greatly improved and they have never sounded so good in my little studio. Can’t wait to hear how my mixing works with this new plugin. Talking of which I bought the Fab Filter bundle just before Christmas and I am mighty impressed with the quality and ease of use. Looking forward to the MPG awards next week at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Was great fun last year, especially bumping into so many old friends.

Donal.

Hello reader, shabby… that’s the only word for it, my ability to update my blog has been at best shabby. But now I find myself on a long haul flight to Melbourne and time is on my side, yes I would prefer to goto sleep but I have adjust to local time and that means staying awake for another couple of hours, might get a movie or two in as well !! Hopefully by the time we leave Australia, I’m only here for six nights, I will have posted another blog update, time will tell.

So, to start things off, I have an issue that I need to get off my chest. I left Vodafone earlier this year and as I did my subscription to Spotify died with it, my account was linked. I took the opportunity to try out Apple Music (I’m a die hard Apple fan of over thirty years). I like Apple music, I miss a couple of Spotify playlists but not now enough for me to ever go back. The other day I was researching something and it came up that the Billboard chart I wanted to see was listed on Spotify. So I clicked through and thought I can check this out with my now free Spotify account. The Spotify App loaded on my Mac Book Air and although it was offering to upgrade me again to a fully paid member all was good, then the App crashed. So I went through the process again, same thing happened. I tried three or four more times and each time as soon as I was logged in and I dismissed the dialogue to upgrade, the app crashed. I tried one more time and I’m not sure if I clicked on the login with Facebook button or what but I suddenly got redirected from the crashing Spotify app to Safari and Facebook.
Now, I deleted my Facebook account years ago and I mean years ago, about seven if my memory serves me. Why do I know that, because it took so f***** long to do that it’s indelibly stuck in my mind. The button to delete your Facebook account in those days was well hidden, at the bottom of the list at the back of the site, underneath several menus that you wouldn’t normally look at !! So now, I see a site loading on Safari and f*** me if a little popup doesn’t show up with the disgusting words … “welcome back to Facebook Donal” !! And I can see on the right of the screen some of the people I had linked with, it is my old Facebook account that I had deleted. It was still their !! I can only presume that my understanding of the word delete, which I think is the same as the OED hasn’t been adopted by Facecrook !!
Finding the new delete account button in Facebook is a lot easier but then is it really deleted ? We all the know the answer to that, I’ve just become dormant again. I hate Facebook, conveying true meaning in this digital era via the qwerty keyboard is an art few of us achieve with any level of dexterity. Which leads to all the feuds, fall outs and family arguments, not to mention upset friends and accusations of showing off as you post the latest in a series of pics from wherever you have just been that is absolutely fabulous etc etc
So Facecrook and now Spotify are totally barred, upon my return to good old blighty Spotify will be deleted and I mean that in mine and the OED’s meaning of the word. I shall eradicate it from my Sonos system and purge it from every other computer and device I own. I absolutely hate the way these massive internet services automatically connect you with another service with not so much as a by your leave. Wankers.

So, having got that out in the open onto a few more positive things, Red 4 Pre and AT E70 IEM Buds are good places to start. I would include Pro Tools v12, which I think in general is a great step forward but I have a few issues that Avid has yet to resolve, stability is one although I think part of the problem are certain plugins but it’s Avid’s platform and therefore up to them to create the environment to make it work. I’m also not a fan of the Avid Application manager. I turned it off via a terminal command but as soon as I updated it reappeared. I find it slow and unresponsive and it is only for Avid software. If it was truly an Application manager it would look at my plugin folder and list all my files and tell me what version I’m running and what is the latest version and a link to any update. It’s more a British Rail version of management than a truly clever piece of software than genuinely manages. Having said all that Pro Tools 12.6 that I recently upgraded to has proved to be the most stable update I have installed for sometime. Well done Avid, keep it up.

Maybe it’s ironic that I say all that and then wax lyrical about the Red 4 Pre which I use with Pro Tools 12 on my laptop via Thunderbolt and with my HDX rig via the mini Digi link. This is an excellent box, I’m not totally convinced about the build quality of the Encoders but everything else is spot on. Amazing compatibility in one box and it sounds great, two headphone outputs, eight analogue IP’s and Op’s, up to 16 Adat IO and 64 of Dante and I’m just scratching the surface. The other day I took this box along with my Mac Book Air and recorded a choir of 64 people. The box did the following duties. I had 8 mics for the recording session, 4 spots ( one for each part) two ambient and two rooms mics. It then provided the foldback to the choir using the eight analogy outputs. headphone 1 provided the artist her mix so she could hear the balance without her lead and headphone two was split to me and my coproducer for an overall mix. All recorded into Pro Tools via thunderbolt with no latency problem or crashes. Amazing. in fact I am now considering selling my Avid Omni and buying a second Red4Pre, pure indulgence but it would give me total routing compatibility between my two rigs. If your in the market for a new interface or even if your not, check it out. I am also now using the Audio Technica E70’s IEM. And they are great, they’ve proved themselves in the field doing shows with Sting, Gary Barlow and Simple Minds. Much more flexible than closed headphones and they offer a great fit especially if you swap the buds around to find the best for your own ears. They provide a good flat response with enough weight at the bottom end and good clarity in the mids and highs. I actually look forward to wearing them, although I admit I am still bit clumsy when it comes to first putting them on, I haven’t quite mastered the wearing them down your back vibe, although once installed it does leave you happily cable free. So that’s it for now, I am keeping a beady eye out for the new Red8Pre, (I want one !!). Back off to editing Sting live tracks, next time more about the album work I’m doing. thanks dear reader.

Donal

I saw on the MPG website recently that they have opened up a new forum to discuss the business of stems and how they fit in to our current working lives. The issue, as with all things, seems to revolve around money and time. Stems are the current buzz term in the recording industry and I suspect due in many ways to the proliferation of successful bedroom producers and multiple DAW stations used in music production. Stems provide an easy way to navigate round plugin and DAW incompatibility. They also work well as a backup should the track need to be re-addressed at any point, proper multi-track backups for future access is another topic entirely. I have changed my own template in Pro Tools to make living in the world of stems easier and as such when I print a mix, I can print most of the stems at the same time. Admittedly this has become easier with Pro Tools HDX and the extra processing power. It wasn’t really feasible to route the way I do now on my older HD rig, it would have used up too much valuable processing resources.

Some of the posts on MPG forum raise the point of not being paid for creating stems and this seems to be rather more prevalent than I had thought, although I find it hard to believe that when agreeing a mix or album deal the issue of delivery and what that includes isn’t agreed before hand. Asking for money at the end of a project to create stems seems to lack foresight and I keep reading that engineers and producers are running off stem versions as a gesture of good will to the client. This doesn’t seem like a viable business model going forward, although from my experience it would seem very indicative of what we call a business.

I have a bunch of old sample sessions from my Pro Tools 4 / 5 days, how long ago was that !! Anyway, I can’t see these sessions on my current Mac Pro 2013 ( I like the term cylinder but everyone else calls it the ashtray, which is most annoying). They are not recognised by the system and therefore cannot be opened. Luckily I still have my old Mac Pro running Pro Tools 10 and it can see the files. So I did a save session copy to update the sample rate ( i now run everything at 48K) bit rate ( I run everything at 32bit) and file type from SDII to BWAV. The sessions now load in the cylinder and all is good. But for me this is yet another point in favour of Stems.

There have been two big changes in Pro Tools hardware in recent years, the leap from Mix Plus to HD and HD to HDX. Both have involved me loosing access to trusted and favoured plugins which have not made the leap and thus fallen by the way side, anyone remember Lexiverb ? So any thought that you can simply go back to old sessions, open them and hit play are long gone. Your only hope is to find that exact system with all your correct plugins installed, licensed and working. I think you’ve got a better chance of bring back an SSL recall than a Pro Tools 6 or 7 mix.

So from my point of view Stems are the future and here to stay, they provide a steadfast way for labels, artist and remixers to access a song in more detail than the normal master, instrumental and TV mix and yet don’t require the effort and time of bouncing every track with every effect and remain reasonably small in size for storage. And if we setup our mix sessions with the bussing already assigned ,then running off stems should be as easy as printing the master mix. Of course in an ideal world clients, labels and artist managers would build a small increase in their recording / mix budgets for stem creation but then I’ve probably got more chance of seeing a pig fly.

Donal