AURAL ALCHEMY

YOU CAN T get much further away from the congested and often incestuous Dublin music scene than the rugged rural beauty of the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry. Six miles out from the town of Dingle, near Ballyferriter, is the tranquil if unlikely setting for Alternative Access, a state-of-the-art recording and post-production facility with a difference.
The studio offers an Amek 44 channel desk with full automation and recall, Pro Tools 4 & ADAT interface, and also a full range of high end outboard and ancillary equipment. The live room is expansive, yet intimate, and includes a raised stage area to help achieve that all-important live sound.
If the facilities are technically impressive, then the location is truly stunning. The studio is housed in a rebuilt cottage on a secluded road perched on the side of a mountain. The building itself utilises natural materials and retains the original stone walls and flagstone floors with the addition of timber roof beams. The ambience is warm and relaxed and eminently conducive to assisting the creative process and encouraging the making of great music.
Some musicians have described the place as having a kind of mystical aura, says the studio s founder and proprietor Robert McNeill. In fact we ve discovered since we ve come here that the original cottage was built on an ancient fairy path . The energy in this place is certainly very conducive to relaxing and letting the music come through. As one of my yoga textbooks puts it, We are but flutes for God s wind to blow through and that s how we feel when we re working here.
McNeill, a Scotsman, came to Dingle eight years ago to recover from an industrial accident, having been involved in various aspects of the music and film business since the late 60s. Prior to arriving in Ireland he built film sets and worked on blockbusters such as Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Pink Floyd s The Wall and Superman.
The money was so good that I used to work for three months at a time and take the rest of the year off, travelling to free festivals and living in a van, he recalls. Before that I worked with various bands, including the legendary Brinsley Schwarz, with whom I lived for a year.
He became interested in the possibility of setting up a recording and post production facility when he came across the disused farmhouse that now houses Alternative Access. It was a complete ruin when I saw it first but I thought it had real potential so I bought it and rebuilt it from scratch. It was a long, slow process but we eventually got it to where it is today.
Although the studio is open for business for recording bands and solo artists, its real strength and speciality is in the whole area of mastering and post-production. Characteristically, McNeill has strong views on how the mastering process should be undertaken.
There s much more to mastering than simply generating a PQ encoded CD-R, he insists. It s an art and a skill, dedicated to bringing out the detail and the best in the mix. As such, it takes time, listening, playing back and adjusting, but at the end of the day it is undoubtedly worth the extra effort to the musician wanting his/her work to shine. Sure, it can be cheaper sending your DAT master to Eastern Europe without any guarantee of what comes back. But here at Alternative Access, I make sure that all the work is done in Ireland on the finest available media.
With a combination of the latest in electronic wizardry and his own meticulous attention to detail, McNeill virtually guarantees to improve the ultimate sound of a master tape, adding what he describes as that final sprinkling of fairy dust and aural alchemy.
It all depends of course on the quality of the original recording, he explains. What I do is to insert a bunch of top-end stereo mastering analogue & digital gear between the DAT master and the finished CD. The result is that extraneous noise is removed and tonally it sounds much warmer. The mix can be opened up , giving each instrument its own space to breathe. The stereo image can then be sharpened, focused and widened.
He demonstrates this by playing a couple of tracks from Dublin band Little Palace firstly in the before and then in the after mode. The difference is striking. The treated master sounds much clearer, with increased dynamics, stereo imaging and presence.
Personally, I don t much like compressors, McNeill avers. I prefer dynamic range in a piece of music. They do, however, have their place in some kinds of music and to this end I use multi-band rather than single band compressors and limiters, which can be a bit crude. It s a bit like comparing a hammer and chisel to surgical instruments.
Despite the technology available to him, McNeill still prefers to aim for as natural and organic a sound as possible.
I don t like over-correcting stuff, he says. Flutes should breathe, fiddles should sing and with guitars, you buzz the strings and your fingers slide all that stuff is real. It s the same with vocals. Imagine if they d sent Dylan for singing lessons or Ian Dury to elocution classes! Getting a fancy producer in because he s going to create a magical sound is a sad reality. But you may lose your own sound in the process and end up with his sound.
Although he operates a full collection and delivery service, McNeill encourages bands and musicians to come down to the studio and add their own input to creating the final master. Even if we stay up all night working on it, it will eventually be worth it and they ll go away happy that the end result is the best they can get.
For me it s an immense privilege to work with music, to make it sound better, he concludes. I don t care what kind of music it is the important thing is that the person making it has their heart in it. I don t like people going through the motions. The worst thing is a narrow mind. I would record somebody acoustically outside in the garden if I thought it would work.
Although McNeill has the Pro Tools mastering system installed in the studio control room as an integral part of his multi-track set-up, he primarily uses the SADIE system when mastering to Exabyte. Having checked out all the mastering workstations available, it surpasses everything on the market, and as value for money, there is nothing to touch it, he explains. It can master at 24-bit and which is almost certainly what the DVD (Digital Video Disc) standard for audio will be when it is finally agreed and ratified.
Another reason McNeill opts for SADIE is the backup service. Even when working late at night he can call their customer service representative, should a problem arise.
McNeill is critical of the industry for choosing what he feels is an inferior sampling rate for conventional CDs when they were first launched. He even confesses to not owning a domestic CD player.
The reality is that the weak point in the audio chain has always been where it crosses over to the consumer. Vinyl still sounds better than digital and it s more pleasant on the ear. Cassettes still hiss and CDs can still be painfully bright. Picking the 44.1 khz 16-bit sampling rate for CD audio was a dumb thing to do. CDs are still 16-bit but they want to make them 20-bit. The technology is there. Apogee have a process that converts the information at 20-bit down to 16-bit and it really does improve the signal, even if it was originally recorded at 16-bit.
Very soon all mastering will be done using 20-bit convertors with storage to match. Prices are already tumbling. Alesis & Tascam have both announced 20-bit versions of their MDMs.
The facilities at Alternative Access also allow mixing and mastering to full surround sound a format which McNeill feels will become standard in the near future.
Running surround-sound with RSP technology s surround sound is backwards compatible with all versions of Dolby and it has to be heard to be believed. It s an irony that home cinema is leading the way into high-quality, high-definition surround multi-channel sound.
But it s brilliant that at last, long after the quadraphonic experiments of the late 60s & 70s that it is becoming a reality. Music will become increasingly an all-enveloping experience with 360 degrees of total sound with fabulous quality. Then it will have truly come of age. n
Contact Robert McNeill (telephone and fax) at (066) 52345 .