Digidesign User Feature

Richard Chycki
Capturing Great Sound for Mick Jagger, Aerosmith
By Jim Batcho

Way back in his analog-only days, engineer Richard Chycki used to go to the tape machine to fix up performances captured in the studio, relying on track bouncing, analog offsets, samplers, pitch shifters and a good old-fashioned razor blade to assemble tracks. Then a revelation hit him.
"At one point I just snapped," says the former guitarist turned engineer. "It was taking so much time and so much effort to do it, and although the end results were good, I knew it could be better and I certainly wasn't happy with the inefficient means to the end."

So Chycki moved to Digidesign systems to solve the problem — in particular, the original Audiomedia card. The results impressed him so much even back then that he maintained the working method, eventually moving up to a full Pro Tools system. "According to a listener, what you end up with should sound as if you hadn't done anything, that it was just captured that way. And I was getting that right away in Pro Tools. I knew it would be the recording standard of the future."

These days, Pro Tools is far beyond just an editing system. Together with his friend and regular co-worker, producer Marti Frederiksen, Chycki has put tape to rest for the most part, and replaced it with Pro Tools. Two high-profile projects the team worked on lately are Aerosmith's Just Push Play and Mick Jagger's new solo album, titled Goddess In The Doorway.
Just Push the Space Bar.

Tracking material to Pro Tools for the Aerosmith record came about for two reasons: Joe Perry, Steven Tyler and Marti Frederiksen had used it to create demos, and Chycki and Frederiksen wanted to move more to Pro Tools for tracking, editing and comping material.

"Marti and I got into the whole thing of running a couple Pro Tools systems and blowing out tape altogether. And that's what we've done," Chycki says.
"Marti was a strong Pro Tools advocate and he suggested it to the band," he adds. "They had cut a lot of the demo tracks with Pro Tools. Joe laid down some incredible solos and Steven did the same with vocals in the demo stages. So rather than re-doing a lot of stuff, a lot of the time we just had to clean it up a bit and it was ready to go."

Although Just Push Play was mixed to tape, Chycki recently completed two new mixes for Aerosmith entirely in Pro Tools: a live version of "Walk This Way" recorded for MTV's 20th Anniversary Special, and a club remix of "Jaded." Chycki, an SSL devotee, says he enjoys mixing in Pro Tools.
"I really enjoy mixing in Pro Tools," he says. "It depends on what you're going for to a certain degree; it's not exactly the same as an analog console. Pro Tools and plug-ins do take fractions of milliseconds to calculate and that's a consideration for certain mix configurations common in analog mixing. But there are viable Pro Tools workarounds. Personally, I've had good luck and mixing in Pro Tools definitely sounds good. A good mix is a good mix. Does it really matter whether its origin is digital or analog? I don't think there's any reason to be paranoid of mixing in Pro Tools."

"I'm a very strong SSL advocate, and that's my background," he continues. "But you know, with analog mixing, it's an arduous task to achieve the automation resolution you get with Pro Tools, because with Pro Tools not only do you hear it but you can see it. You can say, ‘Oh there's that piece of that word that I need' and you can turn up just that piece by the precise amount of decibels that you need or automate an EQ plug-in for truly exceptional control. In analog, you say ‘OK, I'm going to rock the reels, find the beginning and end point in SMPTE and then go offline and boost it by a certain amount or wind through the area a few times and try to grab the tiny trouble piece on the fly. That would be the analog equivalent, and that would take so long to do, that I don't want to do that anymore [laughs]."

"I'm a very strong SSL advocate, and that's my background," he continues. "But you know, with analog mixing, it's an arduous task to achieve the automation resolution you get with Pro Tools, because with Pro Tools not only do you hear it but you can see it. You can say, ‘Oh there's that piece of that word that I need' and you can turn up just that piece by the precise amount of decibels that you need or automate an EQ plug-in for truly exceptional control. In analog, you say ‘OK, I'm going to rock the reels, find the beginning and end point in SMPTE and then go offline and boost it by a certain amount or wind through the area a few times and try to grab the tiny trouble piece on the fly. That would be the analog equivalent, and that would take so long to do, that I don't want to do that anymore [laughs]."

Not too long ago, Chycki took two key steps toward improving sound quality when tracking and mixing with Pro Tools: He now uses an external clock/splitter, in his case a Lucid Audio GenX 696, and has incorporated Digidesign's beta version of its new 24-bit mixer plug-in.


"The GenX 696 is a hi-res digital clock with six parallel superclock outputs that I use to feed high quality superclock from a single point source to my audio interfaces and USD, rather than the usual serial wiring configuration. The length of cable from superclock generator to each interface is equal and with the high quality clock, substantially improves the audio ‘depth'," he explains. "That combined with the beta of the improved 24-bit mixer has made a big difference. When you start to get a lot more tracks happening, the new mixer seems to sound a lot more natural."

With these modifications, Chycki has found little reason to resort to third party converters. "The audio interfaces in my Pro Tools rig are all 888|24 and I've been totally happy with their performance," Chycki says. "In fact, I've cut together drum takes in the past that have been recorded with both third party ‘premium' converters and 888|24's. The results were transparent to me, the talent, the producer, and the mix engineer. That's a pretty strong endorsement."

Shuffling Hard Drives for Mick
The same configuration was used for the new Mick Jagger CD. Chycki engineered and Frederiksen produced five tracks for the album; Chycki mixed a sixth track. As with Aerosmith, everything was tracked directly to Pro Tools, with the exception of drums, which were first tracked to tape for effect and then transferred to Pro Tools.

"Generally what we did was to work up the songs in Pro Tools," he says. "Then we made a few stem tracks that we layed down to analog and we got the drummer to play to the stems. Then we transferred the material back into Pro Tools and it stayed there from then on. Tracking drums to tape was strictly for sonic effect. There was a song where we wanted to get that analog slam and distortion. I was running the tape super hot in order to get a particular sound. I know there are plug-in tape emulations out there. But I haven't completely disposed of tape altogether because if someone really wants that saturation, I just use the real deal."

Since Frederiksen and Chycki both have Pro Tools systems, the two set up a workflow method whereby one would track material while the other worked on editing and comping.

"Since Marti and I both have systems, we'll use one to record the artist and one to edit at the same time," Chycki explains. "We both have removable drives and we hand material off between each other. So maybe he'll ask me to do something like record bass and he might take an acoustic guitar in the back and comp it, or vice versa. I might go in and tweak a vocal while he records something else and we'll sort of hand things off. And that's what we did for the entire record. It's fantastically fast that way. We keep up a pretty good pace."

Chycki says Jagger liked working with Pro Tools and sound quality was never an issue. "He thought it was a fantastic way to work," Chycki says. "One of the biggest hurdles that Pro Tools had to overcome was the stigma of intangibility with no tape there. But I think that's all but gone now. When I first started to do computer stuff, when someone would not see tape rolling, they'd really freak out. But that's in the past and there's no question that it's an efficient way to work, and sonically it sounds great. There's no reason for the industry not to go this way. However, it is absolutely critical that we continue to develop a very strong standard to archive Pro Tools masters to ensure that they stand the test of time."

Besides the Jagger record, Chycki and Frederiksen have also recently finished projects by artists Pink, Shawn Colvin, Chantal Kreviazuk, Jonny Lang and Def Leppard, all done with Pro Tools.

original link: http://www.digidesign.com/users/user_story.cfm?story_id=1161