Live and Recorded Shows Benefit from Innovative Design and Oxford Plug-Ins

As Technical Director/Head Sound Engineer of Le Poisson Rouge the new 21st century cabaret recently completed in New York’s Greenwich Village, Josh Loar always has his hands full. Designed by Walters-Storyk Design group and ensconced in the storied site of the iconic Village Gate, LPR presents everything from avant-garde, classical, hip hop, electronic and indie rock to opera, acoustic guitar and jazz. Whether stereo or full 7.4 surround sound, each night’s setup brings a new challenge to Loar. Fortunately, he’s got some serious equipment and a talented staff capable of handling virtually any task. We recently caught up with him on a crisp fall day as he busily prepared for that evenings show.

What made you go with the Digidesign console for Le Poisson Rouge?

We chose the D-Show Profile because we are a New York City nightclub, and it has exactly the right footprint. It’s amazing how much we can do with it. We have it set up as a 48 mic input board, but you can put in more stage racks and go up to 96 if necessary. We’ve also got eight additional I/O’s which play out as TRS (Tip, Ring, Sleeve). Plus you have AES/EBU, and SPDIF connections. I oversaw the design and installation of the customized system which was designed by Dave Kotch, an audio consultant for both WSDG and Masque Sound, and installed by Masque, one of the best live sound companies in the field. It’s extremely routable, and capable of everything from mono to what we consider 7.4, because we can isolate all the subs on their own mixes and have at least seven channels of ‘top.’

Normally we’re running in kind of a summed left /right setup, where we take the center channel as a slightly reduced version of the sides. However, depending on the needs of the show, we will go into LCR, Quad or 5.1 We can go up to twelve sends on this systeml – it’s very flexible and powerful. Plus there’s all those great plug-ins available to us. You can even crash the board and still have audio playing, which helped ‘sell’ me on it in the first place. We’ve had no live crashes yet!

Tell us about your signal path.

We have an AV panel onstage that’s 48 mic ins and a bunch of CAT6 tie lines for Ethernet, which run directly up to the stage rack. We stipulated copper wiring for the club, and skipped the digital because we wanted to be able to do monitors from front of house on a small show. Normally the D-Show runs via a digital snake, but that makes it more difficult to switch from doing monitors at the console onstage versus the the FOH position (which we do do occasionally). In order to convert the digi-snake signal for both consoles we would have had to put more D/A converters onstage. . Instead, we chose to skip the digi-snake path and run an all analog (copper-wire) signal, which allows us normal routing options for our audio pre-console AND provides the digital flexibility once the signal is converted in-console.

So the signals come up to the mix rack here at the FOH and then into the Profile console. From there we run it straight to Pro Tools HD. We’ve got it routed so that it’s sent to Pro Tools post 48V and pre everything else – so all we get is head amp gain. It’s a clean recording path, nice and straight. We’ll often hang a pair of room mics up off the ceiling mounts so that we can get some great rooms sounds for audience applause and ambient sound. It’s worked out really well and people are happy with our results. We’ve recorded a number of shows as live download performances for artists like Rickie Lee Jones and Mos Def. Everyone has been incredibly pleased with the quality. Artists and fans alike.

So which Sonnox plug-ins do you run on this setup?

We have the Oxford EQ, Dynamics and Limiter both for the Pro Tools rig and in-console. I use the Oxford Dynamics plug-in all the time because it’s has a great compressor section. I especially love it on lead vocals, but also use it to get kicks and snares popping. I like the Oxford EQ quite a bit as well. The Oxford Limiter we use mostly on the HD recording side, just to finish off a stereo mix.

Often what happens is that someone needs a bounce of the show right after it’s done, but they may not have the drive space or the Pro Tools rig to read the files. So we’ll set up a bus and sum everything within HD while we roll on another two track bus. Then I’ll put the Limiter on that so when we bounce it, it’s already got a nice sheen on the premaster. It’s certainly the nicest rough board mix you’ll get in town. The Oxford Limiter has a lot to do with that.

What does the Limiter provide your clients?

Well, It makes the tracks that come out of here sound radio ready. Some days they actually walk out of here with finished mixes, but most of the time artists just bring hard drives. In fact, I’ve got the They Might Be Giants hard drive right here (pointing to the row of drives in front of him) from the last show on Saturday. They might even be doing a monthly with us here. Last Saturday they actually played Flood from start to finish and then did a second set of all different material. It was great. The show was sold out - it was packed.

What are some specific applications for the EQ in here?

It has been very helpful in carving out problem frequencies, especially for things like strings. It’s more precise than the onboard Digidesign EQ. We do a lot of stuff with cellos and violins, etc. It’s great for cutting, as I rarely boost – say if I have a cello that we’re taking just the pickup from because we ran out of mics. Especially if it’s not a decent pickup, I’ll cut out a bunch of noise and give it a little presence peak. But really, I’m almost never boosting in here.

The one thing I will say for the Oxford EQ in terms of boost though, is that on occasion we’ll get acts that are all two-track mixes. You know, where you’ll have like six mixes from a bunch of samplers and such. Interestingly, in this home studio era, where everyone thinks they’ve made a great record, it often sounds murky when it gets out into the world. Frequently they aren’t sure what it really sounds like, when they’ve only heard it coming out of small speakers and an M Box. That’s especially true when you put it up on the Meyer system. A lot of times what we’ll find is that the high end is really dull. So we’ll turn to the Oxford EQ to add a slight shelf at the top for air, because that sounds a lot nicer than it does using any of the other EQ’s we have here.

Tell us more about your past experience in the field.

I’ve mixed live professionally since I was 16, and that was many years ago! I started in theater, doing sound design for musicals and plays –my first show ever was West Side Story. I’ve also always played musical instruments and was really into studio recording. I went to SAE in New York to punch up that end of my skill set. For a while I was the Technical Director of a club called Galapagos, in Williamsburg Brooklyn. From there I went to Carroll Music, which does a lot of PA and backline setups – that took me to things like the Essence Festival and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Aside from the live mixing, I run a studio in Brooklyn called Electric Lights Music, which is also my label. The company has been around for almost 2 years now, and just got a great mention in Rolling Stone for an album called Surprise Attacks from a band called Ribbons. It’s mostly digital online distribution with small consignment runs and some live shows. It’s just beginning to take off and it’s exciting.

And you also mix the projects that get recorded here at the club?

Yes, we’re the production studio for LPR, since we don’t have a mix room on sight. We’re actually starting to do records here. For example, we just had a group in called The Knights, who recorded a Shostakovich piece for release on Sony Classical. The reputation for the sound has already gotten out, which is wonderful.

Tell us more about the design of LPR.

The great thing about Storyk’s design is that it fuses his recording studio design background with the experience he gained from working on venues like Jazz At Lincoln Center. This place has a great room sound, and the new design takes into consideration the classic Village Gate sound, where countless amazing live records were done. The club owners, two young musician/entrepreneurs were considering doing a wall collage of jackets of albums recorded here… Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, the list is amazing. The overall thought was to bring the Village Gate into the future and make it LPR. It’s a cool place to be.

Another thing to consider is that we change our speaker setups on a daily basis. Not only do we have the main stage in the corner, but we have a center stage as well. There are three sections that come out and form a sixteen-foot circle in the middle of the floor that’s foot and a half high - so we can do shows in the round. We hang four Meyer UPJ’s in a ring for the tops, and attach Meyer MM4 speakers with 4-inch drivers as lip fills around the sides. We also have subs as an undercarriage to the stage. Basically by changing the signal path out of the console via the Digi patchbay, routing through different channels of the Yamaha DME 64 routing matrix, and to hard-wired outs on the second of two Meyer Galileo speaker control systems we can re-route our signal without any physical re-patching,. This means we can send signal to a whole discrete 2nd sound system in the space that is always waiting around the corner. Kurt Loder was here and he described the center stage set up as the rare system that is both “bone-shatteringly loud AND crystal clear”.

Sometimes we have bands on both stages, and they’ll switch back and forth each set. For that, we created sort of a hybrid routing where some things are patched to each stage, and some are patched to both. It’s really a great design.

You’ve also got video projection happening in here.

Oh yea. There are two projectors and three projection screens, all run via Extron network, so we can basically turn any signal into a CAT 5 output. Whether you’ve got a VGA, S-Video or composite signal, you can turn it into an Ethernet cable, send it to the routing matrix, and send it anywhere – even the flat screen in the dressing room or any of the TV’s at the bars. This can be tied into anywhere in the building. LPR is a truly interactive venue. We’re bringing in a really diverse group of artists, and we’re attracting an extremely loyal and enthusiastic audience.

Interview and editorial provided by Rich Tozzoli
Le Poisson Sound Booth Photo by Robert Wolsch courtesy of WSDG