Sweetwater Gearfest, 2009
This past weekend, Dan and I headed down to Fort Wayne, IN to Sweetwater Gearfest, a big ol’ trade show/convention/workshop for audio nerds. And both of us being audio nerds, this was a good place for us.
Never having been to one before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be just a lot of glorified sales pitches by Sweetwater staff? Would it be a big meet-n-greet? Would it be like NAMM or MusikMesse where vendors trot out their big upcoming products and try to impress you with their marginally-functional experimental stuff? Would it be a big tradeshow? Would it be a lot of beardy guys standing around arguing about tube manufacturers?
It turned out to be a none of those things. Oh, sure, there was a tradeshow aspect of it, and that was alright. Vendors were there in spades, but they were pretty much only showing off what they had, not their upcoming stuff. The sales staff was not pushy at all, and was more than accomodating to questions. The only really esoteric flamewar I saw was a brief bit of the Manley reps casting aspersions on solid-state gear by tossing off some facts about linear harmonic distortion.
Since we have day jobs, Dan and I left for FW on friday night, missing the entirety of Day 1. In retrospect, that was probably alright for us, since it meant one less night in the hotel, no need for vacation time, and so forth. Also, while I would’ve loved to see a few more of the workshops, I don’t think there was a enough in the vendors tents to occupy me for two full days. There was a lot of gear, but since my budget is limited, I could really only salivate on the Neve stuff instead of actually buying it.
We got into our fabulously jet-age hotel at around 1am, crashed out, got up at 7 local time, had a ridiculously cheap but tasty hotel breakfast, and sallied forth.
The Sweetwater complex is ridiculously big. I had NO idea just how big it was. The main building is gorgeous – all LEED certified, open and spacious, with lots of amenities for visiting clients (it has its own arcade. Seriously). I don’t know where they put the salespeople, though, because this place was very much geared towards clients and customers. We wandered a bit thoguth the gear tents, I talked briefly to a rep from Rode and Dan got giddy over the “TUBES RULE” schwag from Manley. The Manley dude liked my Front242 tshirt.
We then filed into the main auditorium for the first session, “Microphone Techniques for Acoustic and Electric Guitar.” Everyone got a handout – an XY graph showing where most major mic brands fall on a transparent/colored bright/dark multi-axis. That was rather helpful. The two salesguys giving the presentation were fillins, since the original presenter had taken ill, but these guys knew their stuff. Even being unfamiliar with the slides and filling in at the last moment, they did a pretty complete job. Of particular interest to me was the fact that yeah, I was pretty much on the right track with my own techniques for a lot of this stuff, so hearing a professional say “this is how to do it” was reassuring. They also hammered home the points that hours of mic fidding isn’t going to fix a bad room or a bad performance.
We skipped out of the end of that workshop to hit the “Mastering like a pro” session. That was run by the dude who writes most of SW’s magazine articles. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, since his video settings were mucked-up, making it painful to watch his protools session on the big screen. He also was stumbling a bit in protools itself. Someone in the audience was kind enough to debug his video troubles. Dan and I had our Nerd Moments when he mentioned setting a baseline volume of 85db and we both whipped out SPL meter apps on our respective iPhones.
A mastering demo in a big room without fancy speakers and such is always going to be a little dodgy, since you can’t hear the subtleties. I got the impression that in the process of trying to condense a lot of information down into an hourlong session, a lot of meat got cut out and a number of things I found less useful got highlit. As an example, he spent a lot of time showing how to pinpoint frequencies in an EQ plugin, using the Anderton-sweep method. While that’s all very well and good, if you’re in a room full of people who want to learn how to master, I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that they’re familiar with EQ practices – and if they’re not, they need a separate class before they try to tackle mastering EQ. Also, he was a big proponent of “Reference Mastering” – using other recordings as a reference for comparison. I understand the popularity of that, since you can easily say “make that sound like a Linkin Park record” or whatever and work from there. But that doesn’t really help you much if you have a starting mix that has problems that need to be fixed. It also requires a pretty large corpus of existing tracks for comparison, since no two artists are going to be the same and you’ll need a lot of familiarity across a lot of genres to even get started. Yeah, it has a lower learning curve than “absolute” mastering, but I think it also has a lower ceiling too. I was quite surprised that in his discussion of lo-cutting, he never brought up spectrum analyzers. I live by those, since even with a good set of speakers and sub and all, you just can’t hear a lot of the rumble going on at super-low frequency, so sometimes you need to work visually. Dan said almost the exact same thing to me as we left the presentation.
So that was a little bit of a bummer.
We hit the gear tents again and I nearly dropped money on NI Komplete, since it (like much of their other stuff) was being sold for insanely slashed sale prices. Also of note was the awesome fact that many vendors had their gear out on display for test. I gave a listen to the new Event Opals, their higher-end monitors. They’re big, kinda ugly, but man do they have nice tight bass response. I thought the highs were a little harsh, but given that we were listening in an open-air tent with a TON of ambient noise, I really couldn’t judge accurately. I also got to try out a big ol’ AEA R44 ribbon mic (oh drooooool..and only $3600!) . I tried a little bit of vocal through them, and while it was tough with the ambient noise being picked up, I still could tell it was a nice, creamy sound. Just across from AEA was the Lauten Audio booth, so I tried out a much cheaper Horizon cardiod tube mic. That also sounded really nice (not as nice as the AEA, but it’s also 1/4th the cost). The Lauten booth also was showing off Summit amps and the Bricasti reverb – the Bricasti was a dreamy, dreamy dedicated reverb unit. Just gorgeous. Also very expensive, but really nice.
We bugged from there to go to the “Microphone techniques for Vocals and Drums.” This was, for me, the single most useful part of the day. Again, a lot of it was confirmation that my techniques were on the right track, but it was really nice to see someone doing it, and hear examples of the various differences in techniques from people with mic lockers much larger than mine. Particularly on drums – while the demonstration was mainly for kit drums, most of what they talked about could apply to my crazy collection of ethnic percussion just as easily. Hearing the effect of mic position on phase was really eye-opening, too. I’ve only recently pruchased enough microphones to multi-mic drums, so I hadn’t thought too much about it before. Also, hearing someone with hardcore gear experience say “I think a preamp is in many ways more important than a mix” surprised me – I’d always thought that, but figured I was just missing something important. But he’s right – a good mic pre can make a bad mic sound better (not great, but better). A bad mic pre will make the best mic sound terrible.
I was really impressed by that one.
Dan and I vegged for a bit after that, grabbed some beverages (the guys handing out chilled bottled water all over the fest was a really nice touch) and music-nerded out for a while. We went to the guitar tent then, so Dan could get his guitar-geek on. And guitar-geek he did, on the Herman Li edition Ibanez. Dragonforce ho! The Ibanez rep liked me Front242 shirt.
We wandered through the flea market tent, which was kinda cool, since I got to see a lot of the gear I’d lusted for 15 years ago.
We went back to the main tent gear. The Moog booth was small, and lots of people were trying out the Moog Guitar. I mentioned my onwership of an original Big Briar Etherwave, so the saleswoman/rep/whatever showed off the capabilites of the new Etherwave plus. Aside from looking a bit nicer, it has CV outs, so it can be used to control other moog gear. Watching her manipulate a Moog Little Phatty monosynth from a theremin was so. incredibly. dope.
The final workshop we went to was the Ableton Live 8 clinic. Oh wow. I’d read about a lot of the new features but it was impresive to see the new warping and groove extractor in practice. Houston, the guy giving the demo, was really capable, especially given the previous workshop had run long and he was short on time. It was interesting that Dan and I apprached Live from diferent angles – he saw it as a great tool for sketching out ideas and quickly workflowing new songs, heavily using the sequencer timeline, whereas I see it as a great way to mangle samples and loops in the session window. Either way, I’m ecited about the new version. And the new Akai APC40 is etrememly well-designed. I’m usually quite skeptical of “dedicated” application controllers – they’re usually just fancy MIDI controllers, but there are just a lot of nice integration touches with Live.
Craig Anderton was sitting behind us. OMG OMG OMG.
At this point we were starting to flag, so we got lunch at the Sweetwater cafeteria. I had a “pork tenderloin sandwich” which was comical – the pork was about 3x the size of the bun.
One final pass of the gear tents, where Dan bought some auralex and I had a chat ith the guy from Arturia (and nearly bought a lot of softsynths). I hoped Focusrite would’ve had a presence (I was hoping for a really nice discount on a Liquid Mix) but they didn’t, and Sweetwater was out of the speaker stands I was planning on getting. Nonetheless, there were still some really nice prices on gear.
After the final pass, we headed out and began the long drive back home.
It was really nice to see other professionals doing the kinds of thing I’m attempting to do, and it was particualry important to me to figure out how to prioritize my studio purchases over the next several months. Room tuning, mic locker, production tools…it’s helpful. And the mic placement workshop was particualrly helpful. I think for next year, I’m going to save up in advance.
