Bill Carmen discusses the ins and outs of SRT Facilities across all the studios.
Bill Carman, Associate Director of the Sound Recording Technology facilities, introduced the underclassmen to the vast technical infrastructure of the rooms they'll be using during their time at the school. Mr. Carman knows these rooms inside and out - literally - and no one is better suited to talk about them as the facilities are his design.
He started by introducing the other people who make the room work: the senior undergraduate studio supervisors, the graduate assistants, and maintenance chief Jeremy Houle, a former student of the SRT program who now helps keep everything up and running.
Among the details that particularly appealed to the audio nerd in everyone present were: ?
- A review of the API Vision console and Studer A827 2" 24-track tape machine, both part of the fundamental SRT philosophy that learning analog signal flow is still every bit as important as learning digital.
- The school's extensive microphone collection that ranges from the humble SM57 to some of the world's best mics from AKG, Neumann, Royer, DPA, and others.
- An in-depth look at the school's senior and graduate studio, room 114, a major point of pride for the school. The room is unique in that it works equally well as a studio, as a mixing/mastering room, and as a critical listening space. Its variable acoustics and multiple interconnects make a broad array of recording sessions and research projects possible.
- The setup of the talkback/cue system allows tracking to take place in any combination of the school's 4 studios simultaneously, all controlled from a single production room.
A secondary focus of the meeting was getting underclassmen to know their upperclassmen better. Seniors were asked to seek out assistants from among the freshman and sophomore students, and everyone was urged to help out with the school's larger projects, like the installation of the recently arrived SSL 8000 GB console.
