Marco On Music (Issue 5)

Green Room, Great Ears

Marco On Music

 

Marco Migliari is a highly experienced sound engineer with over 20 years working in a top-level studio environment under his belt. He now runs his own mixing, production and mastering suite within Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio complex, where he agreed to meet with Driving Sounds and talk about making and recording music, amongst other things.

 

Marco and I have not actually met before, but I once had a very modest background career in professional audio and shortly after that ended, Marco became resident sound engineer and technician at Real World near Bath. This is a recording studio I knew well as I was involved in building mixing consoles for them and spoke to his predecessor on an almost daily basis. Therefore, it was with great excitement that I motored along the M4 to meet him.

 

As with many talented pro-audio industry types, Marco is extremely self-effacing considering the mega list of stellar mixing, mastering and production credits he holds to his name. The purpose of the visit was to give an insight into modern-day recording straight from the horse’s mouth.

 

Marco has been involved in every aspect from recording the bare bones of a new song by a fledgling artist to producing and mixing the music tracks for the Xbox Halo IV game alongside Neil Davidge of Massive Attack and with a 50-piece orchestra in tow. Alongside these specific projects however, he has also worked with: The Beautiful South, Black Grape, Trevor Horn, Crowded House, Deep Purple, Genesis, Gomez, James, Massive Attack, New Order, Midge Ure, Stereophonics, Van Morrison and more!

 

Initially, we reminisced about the old days when music was recorded on to tape machines. These machines were not only huge and complicated; they were practically works of art, requiring a great deal of care and attention to ensure that results achieved were consistent. Marco explains; “In those days, sound engineers were responsible for a lot of maintenance and technical aspects of running a studio. In this way, we became quickly familiar with all the workings of the equipment we used to make recordings. Beyond this, a lot of our time was spent sat in front of a mixing console listening to tracks many times and making miniscule adjustments to ensure that what we ended up with was both representative of the artist’s performance as well as meeting the needs of the producer of the day.”

I was keen to find out what has changed in the last 20 years. Marco was only too pleased to enlighten me; “Computer-based recording changed practically everything. Instead of huge rooms full of racks of analogue equipment, we were suddenly able to use a Mac to carry out most of the tasks. In a world where real estate and its maintenance can add enormous costs to a small studio, you could say that the digital recording revolution helped smaller artists to afford to record their work. But it is not only about size and cost. The pro-audio software revolution added a huge amount of flexibility to our working methods. The biggest single difference is that working in the digital domain from the beginning of the process means we have the ability to step backwards. In the days of tape, if you wanted to change the order of a song, shorten a guitar solo, add an extra chorus etc. this could only be achieved by bringing the band back into the studio or literally cutting the tape and splicing it back together again. This was time consuming and highly skilled work and can now be achieved with a few keystrokes.”

 

I asked Marco if he felt that audio quality had been compromised. “On the contrary” explains Marco; ”We are now able to use software modules to accurately replicate a lot of the good stuff that became legendary throughout the industry over 50 years. There will always be those who can hear the difference and who prefer a shiny box with knobs on to a computer keyboard, but the majority of software generated enhancements for equalisation, dynamics, reverb etc. cannot be detected even by the most critical listener. It also means that we can have every imaginable sound from an old valve Pultec equaliser to an Aphex Aural Exciter at our fingertips without having to hunt one down and hire it in!”

 

I wondered what other effects the digital revolution may have had on the process of making and recording music; “There is no doubt that the prevalence of throwaway music had a dramatic effect on the industry, There is now even greater distinction between music as art and music made for money. Being positive, the opportunities for new musicians to record their music are vastly increased with many small studios offering a great service. We also see a very large market for home recording as the entry price for a laptop-based set up is much lower than it used to be for even a small console and multi-track tape machine. However, there is also a huge difference between the results achieved by the enthusiastic amateur when compared to a professional engineer, as we tend to listen for different things. Great sound begins with great playing and a great pair of ears and there has definitely been a decline in the availability of both in recent years! Having said this, there has also been a reduction in quality listening devices in the home, although this seems to be changing rapidly. The cheap kitchen docking station is being found wanting now, particularly by young consumers who are listening as standard, through headphones with enhanced bass so, the future looks good as a result.”

 

As Marco was now saying all the right things regarding home listening, I took the opportunity to ask about in-car listening. Marco admits; “I have a family car which I drive a few miles a day then over to Italy on family holidays. I mostly listen to the radio during short journeys, as this is the time I catch up with news. For longer family journeys, my wife and I and two children all make a playlist. We listen to a lot of folk music but not exclusively. The sound in my car is more or less acceptable as we tend to know the music we play quite well and our memory fills in a lot of the gaps.”

 

This is a fairly normal response to such a question which I asked before sitting Marco in a car with an upgraded system! The car in question is a Porsche 911 that many of you may have seen us demonstrating, particularly at Goodwood Festival of Speed last year. It is installed with a high-end Audison Voce system and is set-up predominantly for rock music. I think Marco enjoyed listening to it and leave him to describe the experience himself.

 

I'm not a man for sports cars - I always convinced myself that stiff, cramped seats wouldn't agree with my back or my habit of driving our family 7-seater with my legs stretched out. I was certainly in for a surprise, as the Porsche’s driving seat was remarkably comfy - a pretty good start, I thought, as we waded our way through my pile of reference recordings. 

I think the first impression was one of surprise - I obviously had high expectations, but at the same time I was quite prepared to settle for anything that would mark an improvement over my below-average in-car auditory experience. Next came the realisation that the detail I was listening to was real, solid and consistent. These mixes were really floating around me, and I could pinpoint the position of each instrument with ease.

On rock tracks, the Audison system was impressive - obviously it wouldn’t match the lows of my Genelec sub-woofer, but it wouldn't try to fake it either, unlike some cheap studio monitors. The vocal range was crystal-clear, the highs perhaps overly present though. I suspect that was down to choice rather than accident, but the tricky lower mids were very detailed. There were no perceptible phase issues and stereo imaging was as wide as the Porsche's internal space could muster. There was a sweet spot wide enough to be able to relax into without the sound ever getting murky. 

Slightly different story with some of my fave acoustic folk music - while the detail here was still excellent, the frequency range was slightly off-balance, especially at 200-400Hz which is critical on tracks that don’t have a strong beat or indeed drums and the 2-3KHz range where so many parts fight with the vocals for a place in the sun. But I’m being picky here, because the system was clearly tuned to overcome driving noise, something that can have an effect when turning the volume down to accommodate for a more dynamic genre.

 

Overall, I was thrilled that Marco was able to get genuinely excited by the sound in the Porsche. If only others could experience this, it may prevent them wasting their money on car manufacturer-contrived “upgrades”.

 

You can find out more about Marco and his work by visiting his website: www.marcomigliari.com

I would like to offer Marco and assistant Alessandro a huge thank-you for allowing us a brief glimpse into their world – We should do more of this don't you think?

 

Top Five Driving Sounds

Audioslave - Cochise

Stereophonics - A Thousand Trees

Sigur Ros - () (whole album)

Sylvain Barou - The Windy Set

The Bookshop Band - The Coral Thief


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