Manhattan Producers Alliance:
The New Manhattan Project
Kevin Joy on the bass.
How are you handling these issues? Obviously, you can’t have your studio down while you’re upgrading.
Carroll: We have the advantage of having several rooms, so we can dip a toe in and try a couple of different things to see what’s successful and what’s not. We’ll always have a Mac OS 9 system handy for old work. New work will go on Mac OS X.
Tonken: The fellowship of talent at the MPA has made the biggest difference in easing the pain of this major undertaking. It has definitely been a team effort. One of us would be cursing the computer and then another composer would come running in saying “I found it!. I found version XYZ on the internet and that’s the one that works with…”
Members here are committed to helping each other and have invested time experimenting and searching for answers. And this is all in the middle of an eclectic list of jobs. And the end the story will be a happy one. It gives two thumbs up in assuring clients that an audio facilities upgrade is all about better connectivity and workflow.
How does Mac facilitate your musical creativity?
Tonken: With a Mac and Mac-native software I can, in an hour, flesh out work that used to take a day with twenty players in a three-hundred-an-hour facility. The computing world and especially the Macs, being so transparent, are a tremendous assist. The Macs are so much more powerful and just so easy to use that they seem indispensable.
If you bring the analogy of word processing, cutting and pasting text, to the type of stuff that we’re doing — where there are hundreds of layers of stuff that we have the ability to manipulate — that alone means an incredible workflow change.
But now you can stream samples from a disk, and they can be huge. It’s still always best and the most fun if you have budget and time for musicians, but when does that happen?
Joy: Music doesn’t always have to be computer based. Even if you’re doing analog recording you can execute so much on the Mac.
In my old setup we had a full 24-track analog studio and five MIDI rooms tied into it. We would record on tape but dump it all to hard disk for editing on the computer. That allowed us to add multitudes of more tracks, number one, but we also could manipulate the original analog recording in ways we couldn’t do in the multitrack world on tape
Carroll: At MPA, we focus on using the technology in a way that can exploit the benefit of musicians. It’s not just about controlling a giant computer that has every note. As Kevin says, we often use digital technology to record a band better, and the original sound source is from live musicians.
“With a Mac and Mac-native software I can, in an hour, flesh out work that used to take a day with twenty players in a three-hundred-an-hour facility.”
Tonken: In the recording world of dealing with live players and vocals, technology just makes you into this super wizard. For instance, I’ve had a sax player come in, under time constraints, and lay down a whole bunch of great stuff. But I couldn’t get him to play exactly what I wanted in the time we had without stepping on his toes. So after the fact, in moments, I’ve made a new sax solo by cutting and pasting in Logic on the Mac. That’s not possible any other way.
Likewise, you can take a vocal recording where a person does a whole bunch of takes. In a second, you can drop in a better word here or there. We have a six-gigabyte piano that sounds fantastic, and when the guy makes a flub, you can fix it later.
And compositionally, I can sit down, flesh something out, print out the score, hand it to a player and say, “Here’s what I mean.” And you know it’s what you mean because you’ve been able to preview it using samples. The advantages are overwhelming.
What changes do you foresee for studios adopting technologies like Mac OS X, Xserve and Xsan?
Carroll: When I started producing music in studios in New York, when it was all recording orchestras, there was this fantastic experience of working with musicians. The composer had the overarching concept. Maybe there was an orchestrator who dealt with some layer of detail. Then, as you recorded, each of the guys in an 80-piece orchestra was making these very fine small decisions that were contributing to making the whole work more powerful.
When computers came into the mix, composers, particularly for film and television, began making the microscopic decisions. When you’re programming and you’re the one-man orchestra, you decide what the drummer is going to do, and you’re not really benefiting from interaction with other artists. What I love about MPA and what Mac OS X server technology is going to let us do even more is that we can come back to that in a way. We can have lots of people contributing to the same work at different levels. We can reclaim some of the creativity that we lost when composing became like the Wizard of Oz, one genius working behind a curtain
