Tuesday, February 17, 2015

GC Pro Helps Creative Giant Yessian


A control station at one of the locations at multi-facility studio operation Yessian – carefully outfitted and managed to give consistency across all their facilities, with help from GC Pro. Photo by Ric Kallaher.

— With facilities in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Hamburg, Germany, Yessian needs a consistent source of technology products, platforms and advice to enable its many studios to be seamlessly interoperable —

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA, February 12, 2015 — You may not know Yessian, but you know their work. Led by brothers Brian Yessian, Creative Director and Partner, and Michael Yessian, Head of Production and Partner, the company creates audio for commercials, films, videos and theme parks for clients worldwide. A collective of producers, composers, music supervisors, research/creative pros and recording artists, with offices and studios in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and Hamburg, Germany, Yessian’s recent projects include Dos Equis’s “Masquerade” commercial, as well as music and sound design for theme park rides at Movie Park Germany in Dusseldorf and the Wuhan Movie Park in China. It’s no simple task managing the technical infrastructure behind Yessian’s widely distributed collection of studio facilities, but they have a key partner in that endeavor: Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro), the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. GC Pro has worked with Yessian for 10-plus years, assuring that Yessian’s facilities are at the leading edge, as GC Pro helps them maintain critical technological consistency across all of their facilities.

“Technical consistency between the studios is critical,” observes Jeff Dittenber, Sound Designer at Yessian. “Each studio might have its own collections of things like microphones and pre-amps, but when it comes to the core systems like digital audio workstations and work surfaces, such as the Pro Tools HD systems we use, you have to have consistency across all of the studios. And that’s something that GC Pro has been helping us with for years.”


A tracking room at one of the locations at multi-facility studio operation Yessian, outfitted with help from GC Pro. Photo by Ric Kallaher.

Michael Yessian adds, “When you’re making technology decisions at this kind of scale, it’s like an enterprise proposition — you need proposals and a plan. We need to think it out carefully, because we need to be able to transfer sessions back and forth seamlessly over our VPN, and we need the same plug-ins for each studio. GC Pro has been a big help with that, because they have access to anything we need and at competitive prices as we manage a global studio system.”

GC Pro has been of assistance not only in sourcing products and systems but also for keeping Yessian’s studios apprised of new technologies and products as they come along, including the recently introduced Avid S6 control surface installed at the company’s New York studios. “Paul Johnson, the sales person in GC Pro’s Southfield store, has been great at keeping us aware of new things that make our studios more efficient,” says Dittenber, adding that Johnson has also negotiated and managed trade-ins and trade-ups for new equipment. “It would be hard to imagine not having GC Pro to help us with the studios,” says Michael Yessian. “They’re an incredible resource.”

For more information, please visit www.gcpro.com.

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About Guitar Center Professional/Guitar Center
Guitar Center Professional is the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. Its clientele includes recording studios, audio engineers, producers, recording and touring musicians, live sound venues, post production facilities and more. Emphasizing extraordinary individualized service via local account managers, GC Pro offers expert consultation and a comprehensive selection of the world’s finest equipment for music and audio professionals. More information on GC Pro can be found by visiting www.gcpro.com.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

GC Pro Outfits St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church

A worship band performs at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in Newport Beach, California. Visible in background are two new DaLite 10x13-foot screens, sourced through GC Pro, along with four Panasonic PTDZ21KU 3-Chip DLP projectors (not pictured).

— As an authorized Panasonic dealer, GC Pro sourced the high-end projectors and screens necessary to overcome a large amount of natural light in the church’s sanctuary —

— GC Pro’s Affiliates Program, which matches each project with the right AV systems integrator, found the church the right installer partners in FirstFire AV and subcontractor Olsen AV, Inc. —

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA, February 5, 2014 — St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in Newport Beach, California, obviously aims for its members “seeing the light” as a primary goal. However, on account of the space’s terrarium roof, the church’s sanctuary is often filled with bright natural light all day long. That created a problem for viewing the church’s video content that plays during services. Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro), the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users, came to the rescue.

Drawing on the wide array of high-end projector products now available to GC Pro since having been named an authorized Panasonic dealer in 2013, GC Pro Account Managers assessed the situation and determined that a solution could be found in two new DaLite 10x13-foot screens lit by a total of four Panasonic PTDZ21KU 3-Chip DLP projectors, achieving 40,000 lumens per side, more than enough to cut through the bright Southern California sunshine. “We have most of our services in the daytime, and with so much light inside the church from our glass ceiling, it can be a challenge getting the screens to be readable,” says Dustin Laemmlen, the church’s Director of Production. "We wanted to achieve a real cinematic effect for our testimonials and announcements, so we needed to find a way to increase the necessary contrast.”

Church leadership wondered whether projection of LED displays would work best, and GC Pro set up demonstrations on site at the church of both types for comparisons. Once it was determined that dual-stacked projectors were the best solution, GC Pro Affiliate Program member FirstFire AV was assigned the installation phase of the project, with Olsen AV, Inc., of Fontana, California, engaged as the installation subcontractor for the projects.

“There is a huge amount of ambient light inside the church that would not have made for a good viewing experience without the projectors that GC Pro were able to source,” says Arthur Olsen, Operations Manager at Olsen AV. “GC Pro was able to make sure we had everything we needed, including custom projector lenses, the mounting hardware for the screens and the custom enclosures from Panasonic that enabled us to mount two projectors atop each other per side, as well as over 300 feet of cabling for all of the projectors. The images are crisp and clear, even in the bright sunlight inside the church.”


GC Pro also coordinated with Panasonic Sales Engineer Randy Moreau on the installation, to provide exact alignment for all four of the projectors. “Everything was pretty much where we needed it, when we needed it,” says Olsen, “and if there was a question, GC Pro was there to answer it.”

Laemmlen adds, “Our experience with GC Pro was super smooth. What they can do that most other vendors cannot is really search out the absolutely best solutions and be able to negotiate pricing directly with the manufacturers. We even had Panasonic corporate right here at the church.”

Olsen notes that all parties will be back at the church to renovate the sanctuary’s podium area and install even larger projection screens. “We’re looking forward to working with GC Pro again on that,” he says.

For more information, please visit www.gcpro.com.

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About Guitar Center Professional/Guitar Center
Guitar Center Professional is the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. Its clientele includes recording studios, audio engineers, producers, recording and touring musicians, live sound venues, post production facilities and more. Emphasizing extraordinary individualized service via local account managers, GC Pro offers expert consultation and a comprehensive selection of the world’s finest equipment for music and audio professionals. More information on GC Pro can be found by visiting www.gcpro.com.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

GC Pro/Dangerous Music sweeps winner Seth Brand


Seth Brand of Eureka, Missouri is the winner of the most recent GC Pro sweepstakes. He gets an awesome Dangerous Music D-Box. The D-Box is a combination summing and monitoring system that is a powerful tool for anyone's studio. It offers eight channels of analog summing, transparent monitoring, 20 watts/channel of headphone amplification, speaker selection, talkback, D/A conversion, two switchable digital inputs, and (above all) excellent detail, imagining, headroom, and overall fantastic audio quality.

We send our congratulations to Seth, and invite you all to participate in our next GC Pro sweepstakes! Our current prize is Waves' Abbey Road Collection. Visit gcpro.com often for the latest information.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Engineer/Producer Mark Lienhart Outfits Dream Studio

The control room of the new space of One Louder Studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo credit: Rudy Harris Photography.

-- A centerpiece of Lienhart’s One Louder Studio is the state-of-the-art Slate Pro Audio RAVEN MTX console --

Cincinnati’s One Louder Studio represents the fulfilled dreams of owner and engineer/producer Mark Lienhart – truly lifelong dreams, as he points out: “I’ve been in the music industry since I was 18 months old, which is ridiculous sounding, but my grandfather had an 18-piece jazz band and I was raised in it. Then I was in bands from age 13 or 14 onward, and studied A/V production in college. At a pretty young age, I realized that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of the studios we were working in. Building and operating my own studio was always there as a goal and dream. I suppose it was my destiny.”

The studio has grown organically since its origins in its first location in Hamilton, Ohio, with Lienhart upgrading gear along the way, remodeling his space and finally moving to a larger permanent space, where he has achieved sonic nirvana with a workflow that results in the sound he’s always strived for but could never quite attain. “I always wondered how the major-label engineers got that last 10% or so of sound quality. I worked and worked, studying the science and art of recording, but I just couldn’t quite get there. As much as people say that the gear doesn’t matter, they’re wrong – the gear is that last 10%! Nothing I did would make the sound perfect until I found the gear that complemented what I was doing.” And this gear has been assembled in Lienhart’s new space thanks to a close relationship with GC Pro – specifically with GC Pro Sales rep Jim Kinney, who has worked with Lienhart at every step of the way in outfitting the new facility. “Jim doesn’t talk to me like a salesman; he talks to me like an engineer, which I very much appreciate,” Lienhart notes. “That makes a huge difference. He really knows what he’s talking about, and he understands my perspective, so he can recommend the right tools for me.”

Lienhart’s tenure as a studio owner has humble beginnings – a few mics and an interface, purchased at the grand re-opening of Cincinnati’s Guitar Center in 2007 or so. As he recorded more and more in his band’s rehearsal space, he started to get calls from other acts in the area. Word was spreading, and the records were getting better and better. Before long, Lienhart and his wife made the decision to take the studio to the next level. After moving to a space near the University of Cincinnati, he made a significant upgrade to his setup, working with Kinney to set the facility apart from other mid-sized studios in the area.

Engineer/producer Mark Lienhart, owneer of One Louder Studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo credit: Rudy Harris Photography.

Despite Lienhart’s growing arsenal of amazing gear and his increasingly masterful engineering/production skills, he felt that the studio was not quite meeting its potential: “It’s hard to set yourself apart, because there are so many smaller studios out there now. On one hand, that is great for music and artists, but on the other hand, it sort of de-values the professional studio, set up and run by someone with real expertise. It can be a challenge to convince potential clients that what you’re offering is a step up from the average project studio in terms of gear or level of production. So even though we were making great records at that facility with artists I love, I knew we could do more. My wife and I agreed, it was getting to be time for us to take a leap forward in terms of gear and the facility itself.” So a major shift was on the horizon – moving into and outfitting yet another space, his current one. It’s been an inarguably fast rise, and GC Pro has been his number-one resource for the right gear and service.

The centerpiece of the new facility, in operation since June 2014, is the Slate Pro Audio RAVEN MTX console, an acclaimed, state-of-the-art multi-touch touchscreen interface. “We were considering several great options for consoles, but Jim was wise enough to take the conversation in another direction – ‘Have you ever considered the RAVEN?’ – and he set up a demo for me at GC Pro’s Hollywood showroom with some sessions I had tracked. I got behind that console, and it was absolutely the most intuitive way to mix. I immediately understood how it worked. The tactile response is extraordinary. I was able to edit and mix right there at the demo session. Saying that I was sold on the idea right away is an understatement. It was a revelation.”

Kinney and Lienhart interfaced the RAVEN MTX, running Pro Tools HDX, with a custom analog board that they designed themselves with all of Lienhart’s favorite outboard gear – pre-amps, EQs, compressors and the like. Lienhart adds, “We created a setup that blends analog outboard gear, Pro Tools and the RAVEN MTX interface. I have so many flavors to choose from, and all these elements work together marvelously.” The setup is complemented by Genelec 8050 Active Monitors, also sourced through GC Pro, and the classic Yamaha NS10’s, which Lienhart acquired from a retiring prominent voice actress who had used them for years in her home recording space – but uniquely, never for music.

A final touch was acoustical treatment. Lienhart recalls, “Jim arranged for Jay Porter from Radial and Primacoustic to do a 3D rendering of the room, based on the architect’s drawings and our specs, and he recommended several pieces of Primacoustic treatment, strategically placed in just the right spots. It was the perfect solution for controlling the sound in the control room and the tracking room.”

Lienhart is thrilled with the results: “The undertaking of rebuilding my studio and workflow from the ground up was hard work, but the records we’re making now – the sound is incredible. I listen to them and literally can’t believe we made that happen at our facility. I definitely could not have done it without the help of Jim and GC Pro, because at every turn, if I had a question, Jim had the answer, or knew how to get it. The last high-profile client I had, he got choked up and said that we brought to life the sound in his head, which is the biggest compliment you can get as an engineer or producer.”

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About Guitar Center Professional/Guitar Center
Founded in 2001, Guitar Center Professional is the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. Its clientele includes recording studios, audio engineers, producers, recording and touring musicians, live sound venues, post production facilities and more. Emphasizing extraordinary individualized service via local account managers, GC Pro offers expert consultation and a comprehensive selection of the world’s finest equipment for music and audio professionals. More information on GC Pro can be found by visiting www.gcpro.com.

A chance to win Waves' Abbey Road Collection!


GC Pro and Waves have teamed up to give you a chance to win one of Waves' finest software collections. This lineup of exquisite plugins meticulously models the fabled studios’ legendary microphones, consoles, tape machines and signature effects, as heard on countless historic recordings and pop masterpieces. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Void where prohibited. Open to legal residents, age 18 and older, of the contiguous 48 United States and the District of Columbia, excluding Rhode Island.

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Monday, February 2, 2015

Studio Profile: Vanquish Studios, Davie, Florida

Vanquish Studios’ state-of-the-art control room features an SSL Duality SE 48-input analog console; monitors by ADAM, Genelec and M-Audio; and a host of outboard gear.

-- A small private studio boasts professional-grade gear and world-class atmosphere, attracting top artists across a wide variety of genres --

Vanquish Studios sits comfortably near the top of a short list of south Florida’s most advanced private recording facilities. Known for its warm and inviting atmosphere (certainly not hurt by the sunny climate of the studio’s hometown of Davie, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale) and extensive and state-of-the-art gear setup, Vanquish has become a hotspot for recording local talent, and a destination for acts from elsewhere. “I can give you the numbers,” states the studio’s founder and CEO Joseph Salamida, who also serves as one of the primary producers and engineers at the facility. “Five years in business, well over 300 happy clients, more than 84,000 GB of data and over 12,500 hours recorded. We have been busy!” Shortly after opening in 2009, Vanquish was selected as one of the “Year’s Coolest New Studios” in MIX Magazine’s year-in-review. And in the years since, the studio has been lucky to work on GRAMMY-nominated projects by such artists as William McDowell and Israel Houghton.

After graduating as one of the top students in his class at SAE Miami, Salamida tried to find a studio to intern with in the area, but none felt right to him, as he didn’t feel they were going to offer him a balance with his work at church on Sundays – a lifelong priority. “I had a mentor at the time who saw my potential and that I had something special to offer. Through him, I became friendly with some industry heavy-hitters including Horacio Malvicino at the Malvicino Design Group. All of these people encouraged me to go all the way. For instance, it became clear to me that it makes less sense to invest in a great console and set it up in a cement garage than it does to go the extra mile and develop a world-class facility to house that console. So that became my goal. Somehow we made it work, and here we are today.” Joining Salamida in the studio’s day-to-day operations are several trusty associates: Franklin Rodriguez, Franklin Soccoro, Chris Hardy, Tony Morales, Paul Salveson, Danny Duncan, new addition Kevin “Gomie” Gomez, Mario Caroscio, and others.

Vanquish Studios’ extensive patch bay, along with Apogee AD16X 192K A/D converters, Apogee DA16X 192K D/A converters, Empirical Labs EL8X/S Stereo Pair Distressor, and more.

The studio was designed by the Blank Design Group with systems integration by the Malvicino Design Group and gear sourced through Guitar Center Pro. GC Pro has been a key advocate since day one. As Salamida notes, “I have worked with three different Account Managers at GC Pro, and each of them has been world-class. When I call frantically with an emergency, they help us solve it in a calm and professional way. They’ve got our back.”

The live room sports a mix of wood, stone and acoustical treatments – customizable for each project to the clients’ needs. A luxurious lounge allows much-needed R&R. The control room’s centerpiece is an SSL Duality SE 48-input analog console from Solid State Logic. GC Pro-sourced gear includes Pro Tools and a full software complement; microphones from Audio-Technica, AKG, Neumann, Sennheiser, Sony and several other manufacturers; monitors from ADAM, Genelec, Yamaha and others; and outboard gear from such iconic brands as Focusrite, Lexicon, Universal Audio, Apogee and more.

The acoustically-engineered tracking room features a mix of hard wood, stone and acoustical treatment, customizable to suit the needs of each project.

Vanquish Studios worked closely with GC Pro affiliate Malvicino Design Group to help make Joseph Salamida’s dream a reality.

The studio has produced successful projects with artists on every genre, but Salamida’s heart lies with his Christian ministry: “It might sound old-fashioned to some, but I see this studio as an extension of my ministry, whether or not I’m working on Christian music at the moment. And for Christian artists, we are expanding what we offer – we now are unveiling our production company and record label to get these projects fully produced, all in-house, offering a turnkey solution to save these artists money on their tight budgets.”

Salamida is rightly proud of his crew and what they’ve accomplished: “We're a close team of musicians and engineers,” he notes “We are passionate about what we do, and we take pride in delivering only the best, and hopefully it shows on the faces of our clients when they hear the mixes or hold their album in their hand.”

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About Guitar Center Professional/Guitar Center
Founded in 2001, Guitar Center Professional is the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users. Its clientele includes recording studios, audio engineers, producers, recording and touring musicians, live sound venues, post production facilities and more. Emphasizing extraordinary individualized service via local account managers, GC Pro offers expert consultation and a comprehensive selection of the world’s finest equipment for music and audio professionals. More information on GC Pro can be found by visiting www.gcpro.com.