MusicMixMobile Parked on Park for Rock Hall Inductions
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: A few weeks back, we stopped by Music Mix Mobile’s flagship M3 truck, which was parked outside the Waldorf Astoria for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions. Owners/engineers Joel Singer, Jay Vicari, John Harris and crew were running through rehearsals for the performances they’d be mixing for broadcast on Fuse that evening.
Pictured in M3 (l-r): Joel Singer and Jay Vicari
Paul Shaffer led the all-star Hall of Fame house band, backing performers like Phish covering Genesis, The Hollies with Maroon 5, The Stooges with Billie Joe Armstrong and more.
With Vicari at the Digidesign D-Control during rehearsals, Singer stepped into the truck’s machine room with us for a few minutes and brought us up to speed on the rapid growth of the Music Mix Mobile fleet!
“We have a West Coast truck now, multiple flight-packs and a few other tricks coming up shortly,” he explained. “After the show tonight, we drive M3 down to Baltimore and do two nights with Daughtry at the 1st Mariner Arena for a web broadcast. John (Harris) is going down to New Orleans with a flight-pack shortly, while we do Daughtry at the NCAA semi-finals half-time show in Indianapolis.
“Next week, we’re doing Black Eyed Peas out in LA — “The E.N.D. World Tour Live” for Regal Cinemas with the M3 West truck. Then, back in New York, we’re doing a 30 Rock taping at Silvercup.”
M3 West lives in LA and is almost identical to the flagship M3 truck. “It’s the same mixing image, it just does less tracking,” Singer describes. “M3 East will track 160+ where that truck will only track 104. But it’s an identical mixing core — D-Control, Genelec surround speakers, Waves packages, etc. And when we do the larger awards shows — the Grammys, the CMAs — which require a live mixing truck and an off-line mixing room, we use M3 East and M3 West.”
“These trucks were built very specifically for teleproduction — from the huge front end, pre-amps on the stage, fiber optics and MADI delivery. But, we get a lot of calls from people wanting to hire our talent-set on their project that can’t afford all the hardware that goes along with it. So, we have the flight pack systems — 96-channel and 48-channel D-Command systems.”
The flight-packs free up the trucks for the big productions, of which Singer and partners — Jay Vicari, John Harris and Mitch Maketansky — seem to be handling more and more.
M3’S ADVANCED WORKFLOW
Getting ready for the Rock Hall inductions on Monday afternoon, M3 was humming. Matthew Cohen and Chris Payne were on board from NYC’s Tekserve, Music Mix Mobile’s technology partner, helping to configure a new dimension of M3’s repertoire.
“We’re now capturing multi-streams of hard-disk video,” Singer describes. “We’ve added Aja Kona interfaces and Telestream Pipeline HD systems. We’ve been capturing video for our audio purposes all along, but tonight, for the first time, we’ll be able to have multiple streams of SDJ-HD video captured as DNX-HD, with the Pro Tools files and video that’s Avid compatible. We’re taking HD-SDI streams and record directly onto a firewire hard drive and there you go!
“It’s a new methodology we’re establishing,” he points out. “At the Grammys this year, we captured SDI-HD video and those files — embedded with 8 channels of AES, 5.1 and LT-RT mixes — were available immediately. We’re able to remix very efficiently and keep projects on time and on budget. Tomorrow morning, we’ll start remixing these Rock Hall sessions at our studio in Wayne, NJ, with the hard-disk video and audio files we’ve captured here tonight. We lose no time.”
Also integrated in time for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions were some new Audio Technica AT 4081 mics. “We’ve just started working with these AT ribbon mics and they’ve been phenomenal,” Singer notes. “We’re using them on this show for the first time, and they sound amazing. We also depend on our Waves Mercury bundles immensely, the processing is fantastic.”
Technologically, Music Mix Mobile’s New Jersey studio mirrors the M3 truck. “It’s a private studio with Digidesign D-Command, M&K 5.1 system, a high-speed line so that we can send files back and forth to clients,” Singer describes. And when M3 needs a Manhattan facility for editing and mixing, they head to Beat Street Productions in the Flat Iron district.
“We’ve forged an alliance with Joe Franco’s Beat Street Productions, which has worked out really well for us,” says Singer. “He’s got a great D-Control / Pro Tools room with Genelec 5.1 speakers, and he’s updated his Pro Tools system with more cards and more DSP, since we run Pro Tools HD6s everywhere, so that we can walk in there, boot up and get going immediately. We’ve mixed a Kanye West Storytellers and John Mayer at the Beacon Theater in there, among other things.”
Incorporating the right blend of talent, technology and hard-earned workflow expertise, Music Mix Mobile is poised to cover much of the major remote recording and tele-production business in 2010. In our conversation, Singer even alluded to another announcement yet-to-come this summer. “We far-exceeded our expectations and look forward to a very productive 2010.”