Video Transcript

I’m Val Garay. I’m a producer/engineer. I started many years ago at the Sound Factory in Hollywood, started as an engineer. The early projects that I did when I first started out were Seals and Croft. I did a record with them that had “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl.” Then, I started doing Linda Ronstadt records. Started with her with “Heart Like a Wheel.” I did all the pop stuff with her until she started doing Nelson Riddle albums. I did five records with James Taylor starting with “JT,” I did “The Pretender” with Jackson Browne, and then I built my own studio in Sherman Oaks called Record One and I started working there. I really started doing more production that engineering although I always did all my own engineering. I produced Kim Carnes, Joan Armatrading, Carlos Santana, Neil Diamond, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, The Motels- I did all their big hit records. It’s hard to remember them all.

And then about 6 years ago, I met Henry Marx and we started a record label and a studio here in Topanga, and I started developing artists. So i have a new artist named Bonnie Piesse whose record is about to come out. She’s Australian, wonderful singer/songwriter. I’m working with another girl right now named Katrina who is a great pop voice, kind of along the lines of Celine Dion. Then I have another girl singer named Erica Jane who came out of the Hip-Hop dance world.

The apogee gear that I have in my studio now is I have the AD/DA-16X converters and the Big Ben Clock, and the Rosetta 200 and the Apogee ONE, which I am absolutely in love with.

What I’m using the ONE for is, well, when I first got my hands on it, I didn’t quite understand what it was capable of. But the more I played around with it and watched a couple of how-to videos on the Apogee website, which were very good. It’s great because if you’re working with writers which I do all the time, and I write  myself, it’s such a great tool with GarageBand. It’s unbelievable because you can do things in GarageBand you could never do before, i.e. record guitars right into GarageBand with your own guitar, plug it in. Do vocals, plug it in, and they sound great. Because a lot of people use GarageBand and they use the mic in the Mac computer and it’s okay but it doesn’t sound anything like this one. The mic in the ONE is unbelievable. Being able to play back from iTunes through the ONE with the converters that are in it, also unbelievable. Be able to record with it, and use the mic in it. The mic… we were sitting in a hotel room in Miami about a week ago and everybody was just  unbelievably amazed listening on earphones with the mic open in the room… you could hear everything. But it’s an amazing tool, you can actually record a record with it if you wanted to. I suppose, i mean theoretically, that microphone sounds pretty amazing and you can plug anything into it you want and run it right into a laptop or regular computer. And, it’s not expensive which really amazed me.

The song you just heard in the video is “Soak It Up” by Bonnie Piesse.
Visit 321 Records here.

Related Apogee Gear
Big Ben

Video Transcript

“Hi, I’m Andy Meyer… I’m here to talk about the Apogee Big Ben and what a great product it is.  I’ve been utilizing it on multiple tours, going on now for quite a few years… probably five years, I think.”

“From the rock bands like Sevendust to Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Motley Crue, Rage Against the Machine, on and on and on, I’ve employed this piece of gear and it’s been wonderful.”

“When I, first, got on a PM5D, it was not as sonically pleasing as I had hoped for, so in searching for a solution to correct this, I came across the Apogee Big Ben, which is an awesome, awesome word clock.  I tied it into the console and not only did it increase imaging, it also vastly improved the sonic quality of the console.”

“In applying it to the Digidesign Venue, I find that the low-mids are a little tighter, the high-end smoothes out a bit, and imaging is also improved a bit- not as, nearly as drastic as on the Yamaha product, because the Digidesign Venue is a truly great console with a really good clock in it.  But, still, the Big Ben does improve upon that.”

“Also, in playback and recording, I have a CD player that will accept 48k and I also clock that with the Big Ben and that is an unbelievably radical change in audio.  When you clock the CD player, it is truly impressive in how good it really sounds.”

El Rey Website>

Related Apogee Gear
Big Ben

Video Transcript

“I’m Brian Haught, and Front Of House at the El Rey Theatre here on Wilshire Blvd. Recent artists have included Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams, and LCD Soundsystem. In addition to this lovely place I also do monitors for Love and Rockets. We just got done doing Coachella and we rely on this digital stuff to facilitate the multiple things that we’re doing, but what your device has been doing is basically making it better, smoother, and more present so that it doesn’t sound as digital.”

“We had a few shows before we got the piece and it just seemed that when you started mixing everything a lot of the clarity got smudged and smeary in the middle, and now most of the mixes we can get so detailed you can hear every little thing and every little perspective. When we installed this desk here at the El Rey Theatre we did not have the Big Ben, it was on back order, so we went ahead and put the desk in, ran a few shows, and there was a band called Ossmutatos from Brazil, they were a 17 piece band and we used it without that.”

“I noticed just the other day when we did Babasonics, another South American act,that the clarity was dramatic because as you stack more and more instruments the board can only do so much being that it is digital, there is a realm of clarity that’s awesome but the clock source gives it an extra width. When you start putting everything in perspective you can still hear the clarity and definition and  to me it adds a lot more sparkle. It’s less glassy but still brilliant which is hard to do. This desk has a reputation for being a bit cold but Apogee makes a really wonderful device to warm it up.”