Dave Tozer has produced, performed, and written with artists such as Kanye West, John Legend, Free Sol, Musiq Soulchild, Jazmine Sullivan, Bridget Kelley, and Emile Sande.

Video Transcription:

I track probably I would say about 75% of the work I do here. And, If I have to track strings or live drums, I’ll do it in bigger rooms, but it all ends up coming back here. So when I come out with records that I produce, for the large part, they are recorded here. Absolutely.

My main chain going in is going through this Vintech Stereo Mic Pre into the Tube Tech compressor, a very good compressor, and into the interface, which is now the Symphony. It really struck me, you notice that all of a sudden, to me, that the bass is a little tighter. And there is more depth to the stereo spread. And it just sounds pleasant. It’s really great. And also I’ve noticed the sound going in, that’s just the monitoring side, but the recording side is sounding really good. The conversion itself is top shelf. So it’s a great thing just knowing that you’re getting the best conversion going in, because that’s really the sound you’re getting right there, that’s what you’re getting. You want it to sound really great going in.
 
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One of the things that strikes me about the Symphony I/O is the thought that is put into the engineering of it so that it can be used across the board for people who work in a variety of styles and who also have a variety of needs. It’s set up to be very compatible. The fact that it’s modular in the first place really illustrates that. It’s designed being very intuitive and flexible and I think it’s great.

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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.

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Big Ben

“Hi I am Guy Charbonneau, and you are sitting inside of Le Mobile. I have been sitting in this truck for over 30 years now. It’s unbelievable and we are still doing music. One thing Le Mobile will probably never leave the truck is the good old Neve. There is something about the Neve that you can not describe, it’s musical and has a sound. Over the years, Neve and Studer was my machine of choice, Studer 800 as the analog machine at one point I switched with Dolby -SR which I thought sounded great, It’s very musical. I never tried to have a tape machine changing the sound for me. It was capture what the Neve does, when I play it back I want it to sound the same.”

For many years it was straight analog, from time to time go with a digital machine, 48 track. And kind of fight, I didn’t feel proper with these digital machines, They were not sounding analog, they were not sounding like the Neve sound.

“One day Studer came and loaned me a Studer machine for a Circus De Soilel project, I worked for a week with that machine and at the end of the week I said I need to buy two machines. Now we were switching depending on the project between analog and digital machine and about 4 or 5 years ago tape starts to go away, and ever time we need to make a Pro Tools session, we did have a Pro Tools for mixing and editing, but it was just an 8 channel Pro Tools, and at that time I had an Apogee 8000 converter with my Pro Tools and we liked the way it sounded, it sounded like the Studer machine for me, and was sounding like music to me.”

“ We were editing using this machine, bouncing between the studer machine and the Pro-Tools at that time and tuning or fixing stuff and then going back to tape machine. When it came time to build a full system because now it’s time to get a full 48 track of pro-tools, we installed pro tools by the digidesign system and we did some A/B tests and I said “ something is wrong here , it is like putting glass in front of the sound of what I am used to, so the first thing we did with that system is we said  Let’s at least try a better clock because the clock in the Studer machine was great and made the clock sound very nice, and analog in a sense in their sound. So we put a Big Ben clock to the Pro- Tools and it was already a serious improvement, but we were still not there yet. So, I went to a Namm show and I saw Dave from Apogee showing these converters, I said We like our 8000, could we borrow an AD and DA 16 to do some tests, and I got stuck I ended up buying 192 of these I/O’s and more than that because I built another system after that with 48 more channels and that’s the history on how we ended up with the Apogee converters.”

“ “It gave me back what the Neve console gave me, for me that’s the important thing. What I capture. I record, and play it back, it’s the same. And that is what I want. And I don’t want it to sound different or brighter or darker, and the dimension is probably the hardest thing for converters. A lot of them could sound good frequency wise but you miss that depth and of course not every pre-amp will show you that difference but with the neve, we have some Grace pre amps and Millennia pre amps as well.and apogee,  it’s the combination of what I use and it just works, what I record what I capture what I playback, that’s what it is.

Fairfax Recordings>

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Video Transcript

“ Hi, my name is Kevin Augunas and I’m here in my studio in North Hollywood, California. The way I tend to record here is mostly to tape, I prefer the sound of tape for the records I make. I use a 16 track 2 inch and sometimes I use a 4 track 1 inch also. When I’m using tape and the Mic Pre’s on this console, or some of the outport gear that I enjoy listening to and using, the Apogee’s I find are very transparent and the minimal amount of loss or digital conversion comes through using those… to my ear.”

“I’ve tested a lot of digital converters and I really find these to be the best for my setup. So I can kind of fly back and forth between the tape machines and computer, and really not lose anything in my quality of signal going through those converters. They are very valuable to me in that process.”

“This room is a very large room, it’s an old soundstage so it’s got an awkward sound to it because it’s so big but it may be hard to tell in this recording but it’s very dead sounding, there is not a lot of reverberation. This is the control room, but it’s also the live room, so it’s one big setup so it’s a really specific type of recording. I prefer that, I find that I’m more comfortable in the environment, I find the artist is more comfortable, especially if they are younger musicians or younger artists that haven’t made many or any records before. It has a more of a feeling of being in a front room together, and i think it’s less like being under a microscope and having to record.”

“I do pretty much everything I record in this room with the exception of … drums  I will record at another studio if I want more of a bigger room sound. This last Cold War Kids record that I recorded, we did drums in many different studios just to kind of capture different room sounds for different songs we thought were appropriate. We went everywhere from Ocean Way to Sound City  to Sound City, and did some stuff here too.”

“Needless to say, if they didn’t have Apogee’s I would drag mine with me but most of the time they do have Apogee’s  so it made it very convenient. And in those environments I would record the same way, I’d record the tape and immediately transfer down through the Apogee’s to Pro-Tools and I would bring it back to the studio that way.”

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Video Transcript

“Honestly for me the big thing about Apogee systems was the sound of it. The first time I ever used Apogee converters was when we did “ The Fast and the Furious.” We had some 192’s, and these things and we A/B them, and the difference was bordering on ridiculous. Honestly. I was astonished, the difference between the two interfaces, and these just seemed to, especially with the string section, just breathe.”

“They were so beautiful, the sound of them, and I just thought, when I am able to, I am going to set up my room with all Apogee interfaces. Especially with my analog sets and everything, It’s the sort of thing where you really hear a small difference in fidelity is very large.”

“Something like an analog synthesizer,guitars, I do a lot of re-mic-ing, that sort of stuff, and things like strings. It’s massive, you really hear the clarity and articulation especially in things like over 10k interestingly. So it’s kind of like you get this exceptional, sheeny, kind of indescribable clarity, really above 7 or 8k, where everything just feels open.”

“Some of these interfaces too that are like 800 dollars that are expensive prosumer interfaces, they sound like MP3’s and the inputs on them are so dull sounding and you can’t even believe it. You just plug it in in one of these and it’s like Oh My God, like someone took wool out of your ears. Literally, you know what I mean?”