Dave Gahan из Depeche Mode: Взгляд изнутри на его очень личную студию.
Personal Studio, Personal Choice
Gahan has acquired a beautiful vehicle for getting there via his innovative private studio here in New York City. Built into a residential apartment separate from his own home, Studio Blanco has been constructed with a clear mission: capture one of modern music’s most iconic voices.
Kurt Uenala engineers all at Blanco Studio. (all studio photos in article by David Weiss)
The pilot flying this plane is Kurt Uenala. A Swiss-born engineer/producer with sharp engineering skills, deep production experience, programming and songwriting abilities, and an amiable personality, Uenala is a versatile presence at Studio Blanco, helping Gahan to get where he wants to go – as quickly and easily as possible.
Even though Gahan can – and does – make ample use of NYC’s world-class suite of commercial recording studios, Uenala points out that a personal facility is essential for an artist on this level to write, demo new tracks, and also record final vocals – as was done here for many of the Soulsavers and upcoming Depeche Mode songs.
“Money is not necessarily a big issue with successful bands, but still at $2500 a day in a commercial studio, you can’t be as experimental as you can be at home,” he says. “You can work at a personal studio any day and any time, and that can be a big part of the creative process. The mindset becomes, ‘We arranged and finished a song a certain way, but can redo it from scratch if we feel like exploring further.’
“The end result is better than a big room with all of the drama gear. We can book a studio like that for a month, but when that time is up, Beyonce is coming in – so you have to go. At that point money doesn’t help: It’s booked. Not having a deadline is wonderful, and so is knowing the room in and out.”
“The room”, in this case, is a personal studio operating on a high very level. The obvious centerpiece of the sun-kissed residential space is a space-age white hut which occupies a large portion of the main living room, without engulfing it – plenty of space remains in the room and the rest of the apartment to provide headroom for writing and relaxing.
The acoustically isolated structure is made by the Barcelona-based company Studio Bricks. A “self-assembly cabin system” that can be constructed by one person in a short amount of time with minimal tools, Studio Bricks are acoustic solutions made specifically with artists, engineers and producers in mind.
According to Uenala, Studio Blanco’s big white box represents the first Studio Bricks deployment in the US. “They’re modules that are really Legos – they snap into each other, but they’re made of sandwich wood and rubber,” he notes. “It’s been here since September, and it really works sonically and in terms of providing acoustic isolation. It reigns in the sound not just of the vocals being recorded, but also of productions and mixes – we have to be able to turn it up.
“I’ve got to admit that first and foremost I fell for the look – it’s beautiful. This is a very beautiful apartment, and whatever we do has to look good. That was maybe more my prerequisite, because I thought it would be really sad to put a carpeted wooden room in here.”
Inside the Studio Bricks structure — which also stands as one of the largest ever designed — are Vicoustics foam and wood treatments that can be easily mounted and moved around. “The wooden panels are like variable acoustics,” Uenala explains. “Using foam only is a little too dead for vocals, but its cool for disco drums. When you add wood, there’s a little bit of reflection that sounds natural.
“We didn’t think this solution would work for final vocal tracking, but it turned out that it is. In this day and age, with the gear you don’t need a huge room to do vocals, guitars or synths. There’s even an isolation box – a speaker cabinet in a flight case – so if we ever send something through amps we can mic it, but its not going to bother the neighbors. We have everything we need right here.”
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