For this SPL User Story, we had the opportunity to visit mastering engineer Gentry Studer at his Epicenter Mastering studio in Nashville, Tennessee.
Epicenter Mastering brings over a decade and a half of experience in music production and music industry. Gentry is a sought-after expert across various genres – continually providing exceptional mastering services to artists worldwide like Metallica, Deftones, Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, At The Drive In, Ryan Adams, Bush, Andrew W.K., Incubus, Crazy Town, Heart and many more.
Gentry’s mastering chain is based of SPL Mastering Gear with 120V technology.
Watch the video to meet Gentry Studer!
“Mastering is the last part of the creative process and the first part of distribution. You’re kind of balancing this technical and creative world.”
“When I was choosing my gear, I went through a lot of pieces. I realized that SPL gear allowed me to do things that I can’t do with other gear.”
“Other pieces of gear, they smear things, they distort. They don’t sound as good. SPL is a very easy choice when you want to do something and other gear is holding you back and SPL is like, here’s the keys.”
“The DMC is is my console. It’s where I take my input sources. It controls my speaker outputs.
It has my insert in and outs. It has everything a traditional console will have except it’s just a stereo console in a very nice small form factor.”
“And then it hits my insert point which goes to the Hermes which is a eight stereo channel routing matrix that you can put anything and anywhere. That’s where all my gear is connected to. The problem with a normal patchbay is that you have to unplug it all, plug it back in. The beautiful thing about that is I can build three separate chains and at a press of a button, switch through and hear the differences in real time. There’s not really anything else like that in the analog world that’s fully relaybased and not digital.”
PQ:
“The PQ – I call that my analog plugin because it’s super transparent. You can do quarter dB adjustments. It’s got five bands, all the frequency ranges you want, super clean, super wonderful. And then it also turns from a normal constant Q EQ to a proportional EQ. You kind of get two Eqs in one. You know, the PQ is more of a surgical EQ. That’s where I’m going in to notch things out or maybe it’s just kind of like this overall brightness I need.”
“And that’s where the PASSEQ comes in, because it’s got a little bit more of a vibe, more of a flavor. It allows you to bring up that 18k plus and get that creamy high-end that everybody loves. It allows you to kind of add more weight to the vocals. And it just adds a thickness. Most people don’t hear it, but it has this nice weight and thickness and kind of grounds the entire low end through that.”
IRON:
“The IRON compressor is just it’s a beast. There is so many different options with the rectifiers. You know, you can be LED based, but then it’s got germanium and silicone and all these different rectifiers that change the sound differently with how it reacts. And then you also have two bias. There’s so many different combinations with it that you really can do whatever you want. It’s like six or seven compressors in one.”
“I also have the D/A converter Mercury, introducing all that music into the world. I can bring it in at 120V, keep it there the whole way until the end where I need to put it back into the computer. So I’m living in this super high headroom world which allows me to pipe louder things into it, but it also allows me to find little details and bring those out because there is so much room to adjust and affect things.”
“And then I have the Phonitor as well, the headphone amp. One of my favorite things about the DMC is it has a button for headphone out. It says literally Phonitor headphone. If you press it, it mutes your mains and then feeds your headphone amp. So with the Phonitor, you know, it’s got the Crossfeed Matrix, which is great. So then I could dial it in to how I perceive my speakers are crossfeeding. It’s got so much power that the transients don’t feel suppressed.”
“I also have the s900 in my studio and I’ve come to love it. It’s the same with the Phonitor. Having the s900 feed my speakers and the Phonitor 3 feeding my headphone amps, I can press that one button, mute my mains with the headphones on and it almost feels like nothing changed.”
“It blew my mind the first time how SPL feels, right? Like if it’s meant to have a vibe, it has the vibe, the perfect vibe, too. Not too much, not too little, just like the right amount. And it’s subtle, but it’s still a vibe, but also it stays out of the way when it doesn’t need to be there and allows you to do your work without thinking about what’s going to happen if you try to push it too hard. Just stays out of the way. It’s wonderful.”
“SPL just makes it easy at the end of the day.”
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