Recording history: An interview with Universal Audio's Product Designer, Will Shanks

I started at UA almost 23 years ago now. I was in the second wave. The first wave joined Bill (Putnam Jr.) in his home business in the basement, which grew into two basements! I joined shortly after we went into our first legit commercial building.

I had a for-hire studio up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I built this Airstream mobile control room that backed into a pretty great studio that my landlord had built. The trailer backed right up to a window, so I had line of sight visuals into the room. The decoupling was pretty great, being an entirely different room!

Around 2000, I would see these Mix Magazine ads when UA reissued the LA-2A and 1176 and thought, "I can't believe they are reissuing this stuff. I want this for my studio." A year later, I finally read the bottom of an ad where it said, "made in Santa Cruz California", which meant they were my neighbors. I said, "holy shit, I really want to get a job at this place." By happenstance, a UA employee came through the studio about this time, so I asked him if he'd help me get a job at the company, and he did. That was in July of 2001. And of course I immediately started spending my paychecks on analog hardware (laughs)

Yes. In a new company you invariably wear a lot of hats. At that particular moment they needed people to solder 2-610s, 1176 and LA-2As together, so I was in manufacturing to begin with. When the company hired a marketing manager, he realized I could write and edit for others. So, they put me in charge of the UA webzine. I also did some QA, customer service and managed the tradeshow booth.

UA was also developing software, but at that time I was pretty much interested in hardware, and I didn't understand that maybe something better than the standard plugins that I had heard could be used for mixing. I had heard stock plugins on my DAW and I had heard a few "emulation" plugins—and by that time I had really understood what an 1176 and LA-2A sounded like; I was like, okay, software can't really come close. But soon our algo engineer asked if I could do some listening—I was the only guy in UA that had a studio and making records at that time. I kept putting it off. Dave Berners, who is now our chief technical engineer, finally said, "Here, just come and listen to the 1176 software in my office." As I said, by then I understood what an 1176 should sound like, and my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe how close it was. That was in 2002, and in terms of accuracy to the hardware, that version of the plugin still beats the hell out of most 1176 plugin clones I've tried.

So that was the gateway that really clicked something in my brain, where before I had no interest in software—it was all hardware for me—and I became, little by little, just out of curiosity, more and more involved in what those guys were doing. We were basically two teams from day one—it was the hardware side and the software side—however there was cross pollination for sure. Again, that was the gateway, hearing what Dave had done with the 1176 emulation. So from there, they started using me more and more for sonic evaluation. It was kind of casual at first, I made presets too.

I got more involved when we did our EMT 140 Plate Reverb emulation, where I went along for the ride to go listen to the real plates up in Sausalito at The Plant Studios. That one is an algorithmic design, and they had me do the sonic evaluation. We made impulse response reference recordings for three plates. My job was to listen side by side to the software versus five captures they did with the plate damper all the way open to all the way closed, a middle position and two intermediate positions.

The big job I had was to voice the software, so that the late field sounded the same across an interpolated range of the five response times, and also help the engineers develop an accurate response of the early component. Plates have a very crisp onset. At first it sounded kind of spitty and splattery like a digital reverb, until eventually it came to a point you had that immediate snap, whip crack sound that a real plate has. Man, that was exciting. It took about a year's time. That was pushing me even further toward software, just being this really exciting kind of frontier.

Once the 140 shipped, I really started mixing in the box in earnest. At that time, I also knew we should have a decent studio environment, so they let me build one. As the company grew, with each office building we moved into, I was the guy that would make a commando studio—I'd pick the best room and I'd sound treat it the best I could, and we'd have some sort of decent listening environment.

Now, we own our own building and we have an incredible purpose-built studio called Studio 610. I'm in it almost every day.

Hitsville Reverb Chambers got a TEC Award this year. I'm very proud of this one. It was probably the most rewarding plugin project I've worked on, and I've worked on a lot. It was also some of the hardest work and most diligent research we've put in, for so many reasons. The records that came from Motown are some of the most fantastic sounding ever made, and are such cultural touchstones and are remarkably ingrained in the fabric of American culture. I felt a huge sense of duty to that history.

It was very important to me to make the tool fantastic sounding, but also to make it extremely accurate and historical to how those chambers really sounded. Keep in mind, they hadn't been in operation in 50 years, and the gear was long gone. But the chambers themselves were fully intact. An alumnus named John Windt was key to the historical accuracy. It took a long time to find him.

He set the chambers up back in the day, starting there at the age of 19, clearing out the attic to make way for Pop Gordy to build the first dedicated Motown chamber. He advised us on all the equipment and setups for the plugin. He has a near-photographic memory of everything. Drivers, cabinets, crossover, designs, positioning, everything that was never documented that would have been lost forever without him. It was also important for us to go beyond what was done there, such as allowing the mixing of drivers and mics from different eras of Hitsville's chamber setups.

https://youtu.be/Ot0EckD9atc

Learning about the Hitsville plugin with Will Shanks

The underlying technology is impulse response based. We did impulse response captures for each historical driver and mic setup arrangement. From there, "Dynamic Room Modeling" gives the ability to drag the mics around the room and is the marquee, beyond-reality thing which would have never happened in a real session. But those sonic details are all captured, like an increase in ambience as you drag the mics back, or increased proximity as you drag the mics closer. In the day, it was set and forget. If an amp went out or a speaker got blown, they'd fix that, but generally the setup didn't change.

In the plugin you see the little door open, and it's like your studio assistant was given free time to go up in the attics and experimentally change mics, move the mics around. Our algorithmic techniques faithfully replicate the sound of moving those mics—other than the stands dragging! It is room emulation, but for all intents and purposes, it's a dedicated reverb. You can put it on an insert, you can put it on a bus, you can use it any way you want, like any other reverb. We did a very similar thing with Capitol Chambers. Those chambers are built and sound entirely different, but of course share the expected traits being that they are all physical spaces.

Well, if we're going start into that conversation, then we should probably talk Sound City Studios, which was made available as a plugin in late 2023. It is our second studio emulation plugin. We did Ocean Way Studios about 10 years ago. People don't always have the money to go into a commercial studios like Sound City or Ocean Way, and even if they did, Sound City is on lockout most of the time, and Ocean Way is sadly now permanently closed. So, you're getting access to something that's basically unobtanium. Again, historical preservation is a huge aspect.

I would say Nirvana's Nevermind, where they left an open room for drums and were not using baffling.

One of the things I want to mention is radiation. A speaker radiates out in one direction, and that's super useful. So, what we're trying to do with our emulation is give you the specific radiation pattern of each of the sources. And that's why there are different source options. For example, a drum kit is really a collection of instruments that all radiate in different ways, so we give you the sound of the way a drum set hits the room. It's not just firing towards the mics on the other end of the room like a speaker. It's firing in all directions.

With the mics, what you see is what you get. Similar to Hitsville Chambers, they are a collection of mics that are well-documented as being used and available to the user. With speakers it's different from Hitsville Chambers, because with that, you also see exactly what speakers are used. They are these old, vintage speakers that they used to create their chambers, right? So, you're always using the original equipment in Hitsville or Capitol Chambers. In Sound City or Ocean Way, It is not about any character speaker. There's a Source option, that recreates the energy patterns of many source types.

The origin story is important here. The whole concept of the product is based on the studio technique of "re-micing" a room, to get more ambience out of it in the mix. People would take speakers, blast whatever pre-recorded source through it, and pick it up with mics to create something new. There's actually an option in Sound City that recreates this exact thing, using a pair of vintage UREI speakers used at Sound City for this purpose.

Look for the "PA" options under Source Selection. In this way, it is same concept as the chamber plugins, but with a much shorter decay time. Back in the day, sometimes these new recordings were used instead of the original tracks, and would be effected further with EQ, dynamics, whatever. That really is what this plugin does at the fundamental level, it is an expanded version of this studio trick with moveable mics and all the deeper processing that Sound City would have had at its disposal in the control room. The mixer, the outboard gear and even Sound City's reverb chamber.

Yes there is! The plugin gives you Sound City's chamber. It is fantastic sounding. It was recently rebuilt from Sound City's two smaller and mediocre sounding chambers that spent most of their early years as storage rooms. By recent, I think it was rebuilt back in 2010. The plugin also gives you the famous console electronics as made famous in Dave Grohl's documentary, plus classics like the 1176. But it also has secret weapon Dolby dynamics effects made famous by Sound City engineers such as Keith Olsen. We were able to borrow Keith's units.

But back to the Source options. For Sound City, we are able to recreate the energy patterns of a drum set or a piano, a horn section or vocal ensemble. All the essentials are there. That's another part of our dynamic room modeling technology, so there is indeed a "secret sauce" component, which I can't talk much about. I can tell you that nobody else is trying to replicate energy patterns of sources, and nobody else that I know is able to accurately and faithfully replicate what it would sound like dragging mics around in a chamber or studio room.

And also, there's the curated nature of what we're doing, we're putting those mics in the same spots that were tried and true in historic record making. We brought in Sound City alumni for that project as well. Incredibly, we were also given access to the Sound City multitrack recording archives, where we could actually compare directly to original Sound City recordings.

For example, there is a Tom Petty drum setup. For Petty's sessions, they would put the drums in this wood-walled corner, and they had some baffles around, kind of wide. And they made a room within a room, sort of a smaller more intimate version of the studio. That was their setup for many records, and so we had original Tom Petty multitrack recordings that we could compare to, and go okay, the plugin is exciting the room in the same way these multitrack recordings did. We had sonic validation that we're getting the most accurate thing, which was pretty mind blowing.

There's also lots of broader research done into the acoustic principles of all kinds of instruments. You know, there are textbook answers to the way a violin excites and radiates, or a flute or whatever instrument, so we also had that as a benchmark, but we wanted something that was unique to Sound City. Most people will not even realize or care the depth in which we researched, or the work done to make this as accurate as possible, but there it is.

https://youtu.be/dyBuh37ha7Y

Learning about the Sound City plugin with Will Shanks

Those are sort of the details that go beyond what a basic impulse response snapshot can do. And there's also a whole other backend to what we're doing that gives us just really good sounding impulse responses to start. I have heard some pretty bad recordings in some of the generic and even purpose-built IR tools. Noise, downchirps, abrupt transitions to silence. Or just not very musical sounding setups.

The most important thing to really get the full experience of Sound City is to leave it in Re-Mic mode, whenever it sounds right that way. Re-Mic entirely replaces your recording with the studio's complete room and microphone characteristics. Re-Mic mode retains the source to mic "direct" path component, a crucial part of every microphone's unique sound.

Generally, if you're running an artificial reverb, you're sending it to hardware or a plugin, while still hearing the dry source, and you mix in the wet signal to taste. These reverbs usually don't have a lot of a direct component, although with spring reverbs, the direct signal is somewhat dominant. By direct I mean, let's say you've got a voice going into a mic, there's signal that's going to bounce off the walls, some of it is going to reverberate, and some of it is going to go directly into the microphone. Again, that direct component is a really important sonic fingerprint of that microphone and that interaction between source and microphone.

There are two ways to use the studio emulations, but I think the most interesting and significant way to use it is in Re-Mic mode. But if you want to use it as a straight reverb, what Reverb Mode does is it artificially omits the direct component, the signal that is going from the source to the mic. You can do that digitally—you can kind of go beyond reality—and the upside of that is you'll never have any phase issues. I've learned from this plugin that it's tendency towards phase issues is less than I would have anticipated, even when combining multiple mic pairs. But Reverb Mode is still there as a way to use the room as a straight reverb, and never have any complications of phasing; With Reverb Mode, it is the "halo" of the room's sound without that direct component. And it is still a great sound. That's why it's there.

But the thing that's going to give you the most impact, in my opinion, is the Re-Mic Mode. Basically, what you're doing is you are replacing your recording with something entirely different. You're running it 100% wet. You can't run a dry/wet blend in Re-Mic Mode. Back to the whole idea of putting a speaker in a room and capturing it, you could blend that in, but you could have some phase issues. Or you might favor the newly recorded replaced track that captures the room, using it instead of that dry drum bounce down or whatever it might have been that you were doing. With the technology, we have the ability to omit that direct component under Reverb Mode, so you never have to worry about it. If you look at products like Altiverb, they have always that same feature in them as well. It's a direct defeat feature.

Yes indeed, these are tools to help you suspend disbelief and take your really dry, or even MIDI based recordings and put them in these amazing spaces. That's really it at the end of the day.

You can book a Hitsville tour here.