Ezomz Productions

I’ve decided to attempt to start making more regular posts about what’s happening at both Ezomz Productions and The Clubhouse. For those of you who haven’t seen the updates on the Bio page, The Clubhouse is a pro studio in Rhinebeck, NY, at which I work when I’m not at my own studio.

Today is a dreary Friday at the Clubhouse; the last couple days have seen torrential rain plague the region, to the point where the driveway to the studio is partially flooded. Luckily the work schedule for the day is pretty light; we have a vocalist coming in to record vocals for one track. The interesting thing is, he wants to use speakers to monitor his recording with the rest of the tracks instead of the usual headphones. This presents a fundamental recording problem in that the microphone he’s singing into will pick up the audio from the speakers as well as his voice, which kind of makes it impossible to record a clean vocal track…

…or does it? Studio owner Paul Antonell and our tech guy Chip devised a great solution to this problem. We took the Yamaha NS-10 monitor speakers from the control room and set them up for the vocalist to monitor on, but we purposely wired the speakers 180 degrees out of phase. What this accomplishes is that the sound from the speakers will theoretically cancel out with the phase-opposite signal at the point where the microphone lies, and thus although our vocalist will hear the speakers, the microphone won’t.

Did it work? Well, as I type this, our vocalist is in the live room above me recording his umpteenth take, and no problems have been reported thus far. Fellow assistant Patrick is running the Pro Tools session from the control room, and I’m currently hanging out in the lounge below. My services will be called upon shortly though; as the resident master of Melodyne, a computer program that is used to change the pitch of audio to make it more in tune, I’ll be heading up to the control room to tune the comped vocal recording once our vocalist is done for the day. To his credit, the vocalist seems to be pretty well in tune when he’s good from what I’ve heard, so my job for today shouldn’t be too difficult. After that, we’ll just have to break down our crazy reverse-phase speaker setup and return everything to the control room for the next session.

So that’s it for this first studio update. If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to post a reply! Thanks a bunch, and keep rocking out everybody!

-DS