Top mixer and VP of A&R at Walt Disney Records Brian Malouf chose RSPE and a Digidesign ICON...
"It's about follow through. Here we are two years later, Chris is still a good friend of mine, you guys are still interested in your client, and you're still here for me if I need help... It's like a partnership, a friendship."
Click here to hear Brian on RSPE...
Producer and Mixer, Brian Malouf (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince) worked with RSPE Audio Solutions to build a 32 fader ICON room in a studio on the side of his house. Brian talks about working with RSPE, Pro Tools, Plug ins and Microphones.
"You have a lot of experience as a mixer working with large format consoles, what led you to Digidesign's D-Control for your own studio?"
"When I saw the D-Control, I fell in love with it and thought it was just a very beautiful desk and thought it gave me a lot of options for mixing that I've never had before. Everything is automated, and it's all with knobs and faders and it felt very comfortable and it was very affordable" Brian explains.
"Here I could have what I consider to be as elegant of a surface as an SSL in many ways, more versatile than an SSL but still as much fun to work on, and it doesn't produce all the heat from the 9k, and I don't have all the maintenance worries of all those caps and moving parts that a large format console has. It's just a better way to work with digital."
You have your studio set up in your house. What made you decide to go that route?
"Economics. The budgets were shrinking, and I could see that in 2005 already. So many cuts have been made, we as producers...had to bring our costs way down and try to have whatever funds were available go to the making of the record. I solely based it on an economic scale." Brian explained that with a low monthly lease payment of only a few thousand dollars he can afford to have a world-class studio in an annex on the side of his house.
"Another benefit for me is that I've got three young children, and the long hours you keep as a producer kind of separates you from your family and being at home and putting in those long hours is a lot more manageable because you can go see who fell and scraped their knee, you can have dinner with them, you can read them a story at night. It helps my lifestyle a lot!"
Brian on Microphones
Brian's favorite microphone of all time for recording vocals is the Telefunken ELA M 251. Even after trying other mics for every different singer that comes in, he seems to find himself almost always picking either the Telefunkin mic or the Neumann U87, which Telefunkin also made for a short time. Brian goes on to say that when Telefunkin manufactured the Neumann U87 for a few years in either the late 40's or 50's, "That microphone is incredible! I don't know what's different about it but I love that mic."
"What's your preferred Microphone for recording Instruments?"
"For guitars I like an SM7 or SM57, a close in. I end up using PZM microphones. I throw a PZM microphone in front of an amplifier, maybe six feet away set on the floor, it seems like air is moving through it and it gives you a nice little ambience for a guitar."
He likes the way Royer ribbon mics sound on guitar amps. For an acoustic guitar, he likes to use an AKG 451 or KM54 or KM84. He has even used a large diaphram mic for an acoustic guitar and it sounded pretty good.
Brian on Plug Ins:
Brian uses the Waves SSL plug in which actually turned the corner for him as far as mixing in the box. Because he used to use SSLs everyday, he knows exactly what they are supposed to sound like. "If I do this, this, and this, what comes out of the speaker, I know what it's supposed to sound like. So I took a snare drum and did my ultra thwacking; a kind of 'smack the snare drum around' kind of compression, which for me plugins like the compression was always the trickiest with plugins. You could get EQs to sound pretty good, but compressors are a different animal."
So Brian thought of trying a really wacky compression that he uses on snare drums with an SSL. He turned the knobs the way he would on an SSL and "the thing sounded like it was supposed to sound, I thought HOLY COW! This is something! This is the real deal!"
Brian is also very fond of the URS Neve plugins and the vintage plugins by Waves. As for reverbs, he likes Eventide's Reverb which is part of the Anthology bundle, the TL Space, and convolution reverbs such as Revibe and the IR1. He is pleased with a lot of the Soundtoys, especially the EchoBoy. His favorite compressor for bass is the Eventide Omnipressor. The McDSP G-Console and Filterbank are used often in his mixes, "Those things sound tremendous," Brian declares.
Recently Brian has been experimenting with the L3 LL Multimaximizer, which he says is a little tricky, but it has 5 bands of compression with very low latency so it can actually be used in the mixing sessions, not just for mastering. "Put those on a drum set and you can get some pretty cool compression out of that because it's dividing up the frequencies."
Current Project
In May, Dave Matthews played at Radio City Music Hall in New York, with Tim Reynolds, a guitarist who every so often plays with Dave - they started even before the band came together. A DVD is being made of the concert, and Brian did the 5.1 mix, Stereo mix, and now he's doing a 96k 24 bit version for Blu-Ray, a 7.1 mix for Dolby, and editing out a lot of the between song banter for an audio CD release.
About Brian Malouf:
Brian Malouf pursued a career in music with unwavering passion from the age of 8 years. A first chair symphonic percussionist by the end of his university days, and later drumming for a noted L.A. based rock and roll band, he became immersed in sound engineering in 1980. He became chief engineer of Can-Am Recorders in 1981.
In 1983 his career as a world class studio talent was jump-started when the legendary Michael Jackson, at the height of the Thriller phenomenon, tapped Brian to begin work on his next album, BAD. By 1989 he had risen to the top of his field as a mix engineer and producer, working independently for virtually every major label and amassing an impressive string of hit albums, singles, and soundtracks for artists such as Madonna, Prince and Roxy Music.
Taken together Brians album credits total 53 Gold, Platinum and multi -platinum albums and represent millions of dollars in sales. In July of 94 he became Vice President of A&R/Staff Producer for RCA records in New York where he continued to mix and produce several hit records and shaped careers of acts such as Everclear, The Verve Pipe, Eve 6, and Damone, to name a few.
Brian became a Sr. Vice President at RCA in 1997 under Bob Jamieson, and served the company in that role until February 2004. In July 2004 he joined Columbia Records and also started his own independent record label, Bandha Records. His experience as a musician, producer, and senior executive provide him with a unique and powerful understanding and perspective in all facets of music entertainment.
