The Track Team: Symphony System
Posted on: February 18, 2009
Posted in: Artists, Featured, Symphony, Video
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Composer’s Jeremy Zuckerman and Ben Wynn, aka The Track Team, talk about their work flow and why Apogee’s Symphony System is the perfect solution for each of their studios. The Track Team has recorded, mixed, and composed using the Symphony System on projects for Sony, Coke, Nike and Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
Related Apogee Gear
AD-16X & DA-16X
Symphony
Video Transcript
“ I am Jeremy Zuckerman and this is Ben Wynn, and we are the Track Team. We do music composition and sound design for TV, Films, and commercials. We met Cal Arts basically studying music technology and composition, and we were both basically freelancing for music houses mostly doing commercials and occasionally we’d get jobs where we would work together. Eventually we got this bigger project where we had to form our own company. We formed this company we called The Track Team and a bigger project called Avatar. We did that for four years and we have done a bunch of commercials and a movie or two thrown in between. “
“ I have been using Logic a long time actually, right after undergraduate, I graduated in 1997, it was sort of an affordable alternative to Pro Tools or something like that. And I found it had a lot of really useful compositional tools that Pro Tools didn’t have. So I’ve been using that ever since and I’ve found the integration with Apogee to be really smooth, and really easy and low maintenance which I liked.
Anyway, I have a really simple set up, we don’t have mixers, just a monitor control and SPL monitor control, and everything is hard wired. I have a Symphony Card, G5 and DA and AD 16x’s, and everything is sort of hard patched right into it. The microphone is patched in, keyboards, some really simple outboard gear, a nice pre-amp, compressor. We just try and keep it really clean and simple.”
“I’ve used Logic for years as well, probably about 8 years or something like that, and I only switched when I really started doing a lot of sound design, primarily because Nuendo offers things like offline processing and processing of plug-in’s and it just handles audio very well, so it’s very good for sound design.”
“And like Jeremy’s studio I have a very similar setup in mine, it’s very clean and we got the Apogee’s we sort of got it on that concept as well. Very few elements, but very clean and very precise and very direct, and so the clarity that that offered was great for the whole system.”
“Apogee was this unattainable sort of amazing holy grail product and I think it’s still considered that way and it occurred to me that we were at the point that we probably were able to swing it. So, we actually did a really cool A-B comparison which I will let Ben talk about a little bit because we did it at his studio.”
“We A-B’d it by basically playing a record live both through both our previous converters and the Apogee’s. We also ran it straight through the monitor control so we weren’t even hearing converters which was really interesting. We just listened to the analog output of the record player. We compared analog to the sound of the converter. And our previous one, as we suspected was indeed coloring it, wasn’t offering the correct bass response, or really high in clarity, the detail. And then we compared that to the Apogee which virtually we couldn’t distinguish any difference. “
“So that pretty much sold it, and once we did switch the difference in the spacial ness and the high-end detail and the low end seperation of the frequency was really apparent. It’s just more fun to listen now, it’s more enjoyable. And it feels like I can sort of just forget about it, forget about the converters and just focus on the work. Not even worry about trusting it, it’s just not even an issue, just pretty free. I mean that’s the best thing that it can be. A sound card should just be there in the background, you shouldn’t have to think about it.”