AES, Lazy Ape Staff, Control Room
At today's event students from CRAS were given the opportunity to tour Lazy Ape Studio in Scottsdale Arizona! Lazy Ape is a recording studio/production company built in 2006 having artists such as Alice Cooper and many others record there since they opened their doors a year ago!
Lazy Ape is ran by engineers Daniel Willet and Anthony Pressley (CRAS Graduate & Studio Manager, as well), where they offer services such as tracking/mixing, music production, video production, web development, graphic design & photography. The topic of the tour was mixing. Each mix should have equal shares of balance, excitement, and dimension, according to Lazy Ape Studio, which should each be able to take up 1/3 of a circle.
We then listened to 2 songs to demonstrate these qualities starting off with 7 Nation Army by The White Stripes, in this song students saw how it had 3 equal parts of drum, guitar & vocals. We then listened to Airbag by Radiohead where we found that this song was broken up into 8 equal parts, guitars, drums, cello, synth, delay guitar, bass, strings & vocals. Each song demonstrated all 3 elements but used them in a different way keeping the overall balance and section to fit into the same sized circle.
Daniel described his idea of each of the elements: Balance being equal leveled, excitement is how to make something pop or 3D & Dimension as being able to see into a mix. After understanding each element and what to look for we then broke down a mix done by Daniel and listened to each instrument clean and as he added on more effects and more instruments we were able to see each element come to life and how important they are to a mix. Anthony and Daniel then showed students a few of their own tricks with compressors, reverbs and delays to help make a mix come together.
They then opened the floor up to questions from the students. Students asked things like how to balance kick drum and bass guitar, and how they deal with time management when working on multiple projects with deadlines. Overall the day was very successful, we were able to leave learning a lot of new cool techniques to experiment with as well as see where we could aspire to be in a year, after seeing CRAS GRAD Anthony in a manager position less then a year after graduating!
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