UA Universe: What do we really do around here?

• Featured Employee
• Upcoming Events
• Artist • Engineer • Producer Gossip
• Tech Talk
• News & Schmooze
• Word On The Street

Featured Employee: Graphic and Web Designer Joseph Lemmer

Joseph Lemmer (2nd from right) with "Alientar" Jeremy on the far right is also from UA. Derk to Joseph's left is from E-mu.

Hi. My name is Joseph Lemmer. I do most of the print and web design for Universal Audio, including the WebZine. My favorite thing about Universal Audio is being able to ask very smart people questions. There are many such people here but Dr. Dave Berners definitely takes the cake, and he always listens as if you've got a PhD in rocket science too.

My 14 years in the Pro Audio Industry includes four years in music shops in the greater Detroit area while going to music school at the University of Michigan and studying privately. I recorded a wide variety of rock, jazz, and classical groups that you've never heard of during that time. Both of the music shops I worked at are closed now. I was selling Pro Tools for Arnoldt Williams Music (yes, with a 't') when the Digidesign Representative ("Digi Rep") at the time, the mighty Dino Virella, recommended me for a job as a Digi Rep for the Midwest territory. I was able to meet a lot of people and see a lot of places I would not have otherwise. I really appreciated that. This situation was later upgraded to international status when I became Technical Marketing Specialist for Digi and they moved me to San Francisco. It was my main responsibility to keep 40+ Pro Tools systems running at trade shows around the world. If you remember NuBus Macintoshes, you know that task was harder then than it is now.

Maybe it was coincidence, but soon after a three week stint in Amsterdam, I found myself in Santa Cruz working for E-mu as Trade Show Manager. If you remember E-mu's Tent at NAMM in 1998, I can take most of the credit (or blame) for that.

After E-mu, I worked as Brand Manager for a company called Aureal. They made sound cards for computer gamers. These cards were based on Universal Audio co-founder Jonathan Abel's 3D sound technology, though I didn't know Jonathan. UA was not born yet. After Aureal I consulted for many Silicon Valley and San Francisco companies during the dot com boom.

Luckily, just as the dot com wave ended, the mighty Dino Virella recommended me for another job- the one I have here at UA. Dino was the VP of Sales and Marketing here at the time- now he's back at Digidesign. The audio industry is such a small world.

I've been playing keyboards for the same band, Alientar, for almost five years now. We all write and sing, and do so in a wide variety of styles. Alientar has thus been rejected by all genre authorities. We're fine with that. I call it Mix Tape Rock. While we maintain healthy delusions of grandeur, we are just doing it for ourselves.

The recent debut release from Alientar

Alientar helped fulfill two lifelong dreams of mine which anyone reading this will appreciate: We played the Fillmore in San Francisco (there is a Real video on our site), and we recently released a self produced CD paid for entirely with gig money. Of course I had a lot of the necessary recording gear already. We tracked the album with the entire band playing at once (with the exception of vocals) into a stand-alone hard disk recorder and then edited and mixed on a Pentium III 867 MHz with 2 UAD-1 cards. Instruments were recorded direct, and the drums were tracked mostly with home made mics that I first learned about in Tape Op magazine. We recorded many takes of the same song and from the best of them we edited across 24 tracks to make the final versions. This preserved the live feel while still giving us "perfect" takes. It also kept traditional overdubbing to a bare minimum.

Recording it ourselves was a huge luxury afforded only by the offerings of companies like Universal Audio. It's an exciting time to be a recording musician!

Thanks for reading the WebZine!
-Joseph Lemmer

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Upcoming Events


The 117th AES Convention will be on our home turf in the California Bay Area this year held at the San Francsico Moscone Center between October 28th-31st. UA will be announcing multiple new hardware AND software products so if you can make it, start planning to come and see us. We will also have some VIP guests, some interesting booth giveaways and our very own Doctors Abel & Berners will be delivering seminars/papers along with our esteemed UREI consultant, Dennis Fink.

http://www.aes.org/events/117/



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Artist • Engineer • Producer Gossip

Legendary Recording Engineer and Grammy winner Bruce Swedien famous for his classic work on Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991), and for Quincy Jones' Back on the Block (1990) took delivery of his second 2192 Master Audio Interface which he plans to use on his current major project with Jennifer Lopez.

Bruce indicated that he "Sure loves the 2192!" and we trust this is one romance that is really set to last. UA could neither confirm nor deny a rumor that Ben Affleck is considering a marriage with Apogee for his next major project. We will be interviewing Bruce in future - Checkout Bruce's bio.

Also, look out for an interview with UA fan and another Grammy winner - Producer /Mixer /Engineeer, Trina Shoemaker, known for her distinguished work with Sheryl Crow in our next webzine.

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Tech Talk
We have recently spent a significant amount of effort optimizing our UAD-1 drivers for Mac & PC and wanted to internally measure our results. Since it appears that the overall majority of our UAD-1 customers are still working at 44.1k (though 96k & 192k are gaining in popularity), we decided we should internally re-test the best-case scenario at 44.1k using some typical mid-range Mac/PC platforms representative of many of our customers.

So for those still contemplating building a DAW system around one or multiple UAD-1's, the great news is that in some cases, there has been significant improvement over our earlier published (2003) plug counts with legacy drivers and older operating systems.

Because of the differences in performance with different audio I/O hardware and its ASIO or Core Audio drivers/buffer sizes and different system configurations, the figures presented below, should be treated as a general guideline and not a rule, but it shows what's possible with some very typical Mac/PC setups.

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News & Schmooze
On July 16th, at the W Hotel, in Westwood, (Los Angeles) CA, the final round of judging and awards ceremony for the 5th annual Young Film Composers' Competition was held. Turner broadcasting thanked both Larry Thomas and Marty Albertson for their continuing sponsorship of the past 5 years and all the key manufacturer's that were involved which included UA thanks to the efforts of Terry Hardin (UA Channel Marketing Manager) & Susan Wheeler from Guitar Center.

Matt Ward (UA President) and Mike Barnes (Director Of Marketing) headed to LA to attend the awards dinner, which was recorded by Film crews from both CBS and Turner. By the end of this year, both networks will air a 30-minute piece on the Whole YFCC event. Each finalist's short score along with the 90 sec film clip of "The Temptress" was aired before the assembled group of judges and industry representatives.

YFCC Results

• The 4th runner up was Matt Heider of Holladay, UT who will receive from
  Tascam the New 3.0 Gigastudio 96k Sampling software with a complete
  collection of sounds.
  
  
• The 3rd runner up was Cody Westheimer of LA, CA who will receive from
  Digidesign the 002 firewire based LE 32 track system w/ 8 fader digital
  mixer and integrated control surface.
  
  
• The 2nd runner up was Jamie Hall of Bellevue, WA who will receive from JBL
  a 5.1 THX approved surround system including (5) LSR25p's and LSR 12P
  subwoofer.
  
  
• The 1st runner up was Matthew Kajcienski from NY, NY who will receive from
  Universal Audio the 2003 TEC winner UA 6176 Channel Strip and
  UA 2192 Master Audio Interface. 561 10th Avenue 4G NY, NY 10036
  917 586 4546 juilliardcomposer@yahoo.com
  
  
• The Grand prize winner was Michael Picton from Brooklyn, NY. He will be
  scoring "The Temptress" a 1926 film starting Greta Garbo. Elmer Bernstein
  will mentor Michael thru the creative and recording process. He will have
  3 months to write 105 minutes of score and then he will be recording at
  Todd A/O in LA, sometime in November. He also received $10,000 in cash
  and a Neumann U87Ai set Z mic.
  
  

The screening for the movie will be sometime in January 2005.

http://turnerclassicmovies.com/YFCC

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Word On The Street

By now, most existing and potential UAD-1 customers are aware of, and regularly checking out the independently operated Chris Milne UAD-1 forum for help with system setups, recommendations and feature requests. For those of you that haven't visited, we recommend you take a look and communicate with the very active and helpful UAD community.

http://www.chrismilne.com/uadforums/

Here's great vote of confidence from one of the UAD-1 constituency:

"I am also a fairly new customer and purchased the "Studio Pak" first, and a couple of months later the "Project Pak". Doing this has given me every single plug-in on offer! I am one happy vegemite! (Aussie term, sorry!)

I have not had one single issue regarding installation or performance. They both purr like a baby and have given me back the analog days of old. Thank you very much Universal Audio! These products are fundamental gear in my production studio. I really don't know how I ever lived without them before I purchased them.

Take the plunge and purchase the "Studio & Project Pak" and receive every single delicious tasty plug-in they have to offer you! It will be the best studio buy you have ever made!" -Marc777

-Mike Barnes

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