My eyes were vibrating. 👀
Throwback to the @referencesessions legendary party in Denver.
Hands down best indoor sound I’ve ever heard.
#140 #dubstep #soundsystem #soundsystemculture #bass #rave
Last weekend with the @subculture.audio boys was peak. They brought out their beautiful full rig of 12 HSD Battlehawks, 2 Hammers, and 2 Haymakers (plus another 2 for DJ monitors). My flight got super delayed so I went straight from the airport in Austin to the venue and got a quick and dirty alignment going by ear before show time. After a little more emphasis into the core and upper midrange (to push against the 500hz high tilt in the stock voicing of the sound system) and a little transient de-emphasis in the same ranges I really enjoyed the sound of their rig. It was as lush and detailed as I like, with headroom for weeks.
@heylowdub and Brandon Harris made me feel right at home and kept me loaded up on coffee and Austin's finest culinary offerings through the whole weekend. They even took me over to check out ConcertDome which is a negative pressure projection dome venue managed by some of the (Sub)culture sound system owners. Very very cool space, though the acoustics are challenging, as one would expect from venue boundaries which are solely comprised of concave, reflective surfaces. I feel like there must be a clever and not too deeply involved way to treat a projection dome venue for excellent sound, I just haven't quite figured it out yet.
My FOH system got another in situ test across the two nights of afters at Propaganda. It impressed a few people and held up very nicely for the most part.
I definitely found part of the Reference Sessions 003 sound system out in Austin, we just need a good location and I need to figure out what I want to hybridize it with. My heart is telling me that their subs with 6(?) more kick bins and Danley J7-95 Jericho tops might be the ticket. I also want some rumble bins, whether they wind up coming from Ascendo or more V-plated Battle Axes like last time (ideally 16 of them in two 8 pack V-plate stacks since I managed to hit the voltage limiter with 8 of them last time). But a plan is forming now and I think I know the guys I want to make that plan happen with.
Photo Credit: @degenexposures
Not gonna lie, I have legit been struggling with the ergonomics and lack of functionality in most of the FOH dynamic EQs I've messed with on the market so I've decided to just kinda do my own thing for it.
What you see here is a controller for Pro-Q4 with Gain/Freq/Q/Threshold/Range controls per band over four bands, plus a static low and high shelf. All on one bank of one control surface at the same time.
I've tried a few different midi controllers for FOH lately and this MPMidi controller is far and away the nicest option I've found so far. The build quality is diesel, the encoders are weighty and rugged, there is an integrated peripheral that displays the plugin so I'm not looking away from the control surface to my screen as I dial in, plus contextual descriptors for each knob function. The encoder resolution is also scalable even up to degrees of minutia that keep a mastering engineer happy.
Extremely nice control surface, I see my FOH moves getting much quicker and more musical in the near future now that I'm not being held up by lousy UIs that weren't built for speed. It's probably too soon to stress test it before I run A1 for Detox Unit at Resonate this Friday, but you'll be catching me out with this guy in the field very soon.
We wound up with two misprints on the original pre-order shirt run, so I'm going to front some cash to hit the minimum order and get another round of shirts made to fulfill those and the new orders that have come in since. We've got quite a few new orders in right now so we don't need many more to get it paid for, but if you've been waiting on copping one of our shirts now would be a great time to jump in since the wait time should be short. Thanks so much to everyone buying these lately, it greatly helped me finance my backup Lavry mk3 to get the studio going again by Saturday and keep my clients happy. Link is in my linktree!
❤️🧡💛🤍
I'm very particularly proud of the outcome of this new EP's mastering. I developed a new trick while working on these tunes that I've carried forwards into all of my other mastering work for bass music, and the tunes are absolutely peak. This is some of my current favorite demo material for studio guests. Big thanks to @theaudiogoblin for letting me mess with his stuff, all of your recent successes are well earned brother and I hope you get a ton of traction with this EP.
Born To Clip shirts have shipped, thanks so much to the surprising number of you that took part in the pre-order! Reference Sessions 002 shirts will ship next weekend, thanks so much for your patience. The process of finding garments and a printer that we liked took a while, but we are proud of the results.
New designs for shirts/sweatshirts/hats dropping v v soon.
Unconscionable new face melter from @sixpath_music today at @haciendamastering , this dude was one of the rookie MVPs at @referencesessions 002. Unreal tune, and an unreal first set on our hallowed rig. The first of many to come!
