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MACKIE CONTROL SPOTTED IN SPOT'S GRAMMY WINNING
STUDIO
You may not know his name, but unless you've been under a soundproofed
stone for the last ten years you've doubtless heard his work. As
an artist, composer and master of the Native American flute, Douglas
Spotted Eagle has amassed some 14 solo albums and scores of guest
appearances and collaborations. His music runs the genre gamut,
melding classical and jazz, world beat and pop, new age and traditional
and all points between. He has recorded and performed with artists
as diverse as Robbie Robertson, Craig Chaquico, Willie Nelson, Steven
Seagal, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and his co-production of
"Gathering of Nations Powwow" won the first-ever Grammy
in the newly-created Native American music category in 2001.
The rural mountains of Utah may be an unlikely vortex for multimedia
production, yet despite being closed to the public, the two rooms
of Spot's Sundance Media Group know little in the way of downtime.
With projects ranging from major film and TV soundtracks and documentaries
to national advertising spots and Saturday morning cartoons, the
studio has garnered multiple Grammy, Emmy and Telly awards and nominations.
Factor in Spot's non-stop schedule as a touring multimedia presenter
and instructor, his educational and inspirational work with children
and community organizations, and his own performing and production
projects, and one gets the impression of a man who has learned to
do without sleep.
Spot himself is no stranger to digital recording. His studios have
progressed through TASCAM DA-88's and DA-38's, to DA-78 and onto
hard disk recording. But it was during preparations for the recent
Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that he was convinced to migrate
fully to a computer-based system. "I was on tour, booked solid,
miles away from the studio, with music to deliver for the Olympics.
I'd been fooling with a laptop for recording, but hadn't done much
due to latency issues. Then the guys at Echo gave me a PC card with
WDM drivers, I plugged in a keyboard, and was blown away by what
I could do. Finally it was possible to run audio and MIDI together.
"But the one thing still holding me back was the lack of a
control surface. I grew up with analog. I needed to touch knobs.
I'd tried a few early control surfaces but I wasn't really satisfied.
I was doing some support work for Cakewalk and they asked me to
test Logic Control with SONAR, running their beta drivers. I was
so impressed by it, as soon as Mackie
Control was available, I went out and bought two."
Spot and company have recently redone both the studio's rooms,
in a move toward fully DAW-based setups. TASCAM DA-78 and MX-2424
recorders were supplanted by fully-loaded Pentium 4's with M-Audio's
Delta 1010 and MIDISport 8x8 interfaces, and mixing consoles replaced
by Mackie Controls and Control XT's. Studio A centers around Cakewalk's
SONAR 2 XL, driven by a single Mackie Control and three XT's, in
a custom Omnirax desk. The room is equipped with Mackie's new 624
surround system, with AMR far-field monitors, and Genelec near-fields
in 5.1 surround.
Studio B sports a similar setup, running SONAR as well as Sonic
Foundry's Vegas Video and Adobe Premiere; control is provided by
a second Mackie Control and two XT's. The room is set up for 5.1,
with M-Audio 1010's feeding Genelec and M-Audio near-fields.
"Mackie Control has really changed the way we work,"
says Spot. "Mixing with a mouse is neither intuitive nor ergonomic,
and it pulls you away from the creative process. Mackie Control
has all the features of a high-budget mixer, with touch-sensitive
P&G faders, transports and complete control of the software.
The Mackie integrates with SONAR so well, it's easy to forget it's
a control surface and not a mixing console. Plus, the Mackie allows
us to control all our software synths and plugins as well. Just
try doing that with an analog mixer."
Another recent addition to the rooms has been a pair of UAD-1's.
"We were doing some presentations for Mackie at the NAMM show,
so they sent us one to work with, and we loved it." While Spot
opines that, as computers become faster, accellerated hardware may
eventually be a thing of the past, he's quick to point out that
"until we start seeing 1GHz front-side busses and 10GHz processors,
that's not going to happen. The UAD-1's an amazing addition to my
system. I'm hardly using plug-ins at all anymore"
Moving to an all-computer environment has had other technical advantages
as well. Spot, an early proponent of improving audio quality in
video, is happy to see the industry's collective consciousness being
raised, and sound in video productions improving. "Audio and
video can no longer be considered separate worlds. We're in a multimedia
age, and people are growing accustomed to better sound in TV, movies,
games….everywhere. The ability to run video and audio together
in a truly integrated environment is a major plus for the creative
process."
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