ASC’s QuickSoundField provided for Yo-Yo Ma Cinecast live from Boston of his latest CD release–“The Goat Rodeo Sessions”. Joining Yo-Yo Ma are world-class bluegrass musicians Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. For more info, please visit Yo-Yo Ma’s site here.
Control Your Signal from Talent to Mic
The QuickSoundField is the acoustic technique which adds abundant, clean, low level early reflections to the direct signal at the mic. This creates reverberant-free, very lifelike and robust, natural sounding tracks. It is the same “sound fusion” recording technique recommended by F. Alton Everest in his Critical Listening workbook in 1982, who later discovered the QSF in 1991 and endorsed it in his 3rd edition of The Master Handbook of Acoustics in 1993.
Sonic structure inside the QSF is so consistent, you can break the kit down, put it away, and days later you can casually set it back up anywhere and get the same sound you had before.
The QuickSoundField is created by an arrangement of Studio Traps, whose number varies between 8 for vocals and up to 20 for large trap sets. Recording engineer Bruce Swedien uses 14 StudioTraps in his QSF, and he “never leaves home without them.”
The StudioTrap is a dual-zone acoustic cylinder. The front half is live, treble diffusive and the back half is dead, treble absorptive. The silver dot marks the center of the live, the treble diffusive side. The StudioTrap is a free standing, adjustable height, portable studio acoustic, useful in any room to form gobos or to soften walls and corners.
Originally patented in the early ’80s, and ubiquitously also known to engineers, producers and artists as simply,”TubeTraps” (owing to their tall and slender cylindrical shape), many recording engineers as well as numerous custom-designed commercial studios use them to achieve better recording (and mixing) results.
One of the strongest benefits of the QuickSoundField is it’s ability to be moved around into an AttackWall, a legendary producing space. When you’re done recording your talent with the QSF, move it into the control room and place it around the speakers, and watch and hear the mic placement in the mix become more clear then it’s ever been before, while it simultaneously improves the sound from your speakers.
Summarizing his affection for ASC’s products, the famous producer Bruce Swedien wrapped up a recent interview by once again offering his personal endorsement of the Eugene, OR firm’s products, “ASC’s StudioTraps have been one of my ‘secret weapons’ all these years. They are an incredible product—durable, portable, extremely flexible and most important, they give me the ability to achieve precise, repeatable sound results with whatever microphones I choose, wherever I work. I haven’t done a project without them.” These projects include albums by Michael Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, and LL Cool J.
Why do you need a QuickSoundField?
The QSF is a nearfield acoustic environment that improves the quality of the signal at the mic. It uses StudioTraps to surround and separate both mic and talent from the room. The QSF creates a controlled and very stable acoustic workstation and completes the missing link, the acoustic part of the mic environment in todays digital studio. Sonic structure inside the QSF is so consistent, you can break the kit down, put it away, days later you can casually set it back up anywhere and get the same sound you had before.
The QuickSoundField is an amazing resource for producers. Ask your talent to step into the opening at the base of the QSF setup and drop your mic into the middle. The mic becomes decoupled from the room. That means that you can finally free your tracks from that close mic, proximity sound effect. Dig out your good figure 8 or omni, don’t be afraid to back it off the talent, up and away into that dense set of early reflections that live, alive and well, inside the QSF.
And then, ask your talent to project, to play into and fill up the QSF space in front of them. And also, to feel free to move around, because the sound inside that space doesn’t change at the mic, it just stays there, rock solid. Best of all is that what the talent hears is what it sounds like on playback. And, yes it pans, mixes and runs through the effects rack just like ay other dry signal, except better. Remember: “you gotta hear it to believe it.” So, call us now for an audition.
