A Day at Kog Transmisssions.

A Day in the Studio.

 

Pukekohe High School student Allen Crimmins won a day at Kog Transmissions' studios in Auckland, in an actv8 online competition. He tells the story of his day at Kog.

 

 

There I was, ten minutes early for a tour of Kog Recording Studios, and the only immediately visible sign of being anywhere near the right place was a sticker of a Converse shoe. This sticker was on a solid black door right on the edge of the footpath, jammed between two stores on a typical Auckland street. So I gave a knock and waited.
It was a little before 11am so I wondered if perhaps they had the best start time of any workplace I'd ever visited and patiently waited for the arrival of the sound engineers. I did hope they at least started at 11am and not 12pm.

 

At this point a young guy wandered up to the door so I made myself known. He promptly turned the handle of the door and walked in - it wasn't locked - and I followed him up the stairs to fi nd several soundproofed layers separating a full complement of working occupants from the real world. The complete pointlessness of my knocking was plain to see.
While the homeliness inside the building suggested my imagined late start time could be a distinct possibility, the truth was they were all already fully immersed in their work.

 

My contact, Huia, wasn't there at that point and so for a short time there was some general confusion as to what this strange guy was doing invading their building, but they valiantly carried on their work with an extra pair of eyes watching and ears listening.

 

On that day, they were mixing, having already recorded music and vocals. Sound engineers Chris, Andrew and Dave scattered themselves around a surprisingly spacious, but windowless, soundproofed room.

 

Bubbled egg-carton foam covered one wall behind two precisely positioned highfi delity speakers, and a bizarre mesh of foam formed a mural opposite. Under this was an absolutely huge couch. Apparently it was a multipurpose version of the foam mural, working to damp any reverberation produced when listening to the recorded music.

 

It wasn't quite the high-productivity seating I had imagined but the middle of the room did not disappoint: a high-end Apple PC with dual monitors running Logic Pro 7 wired up to a rack of amplifi cation and compression modules. A third monitor, in the form of a 42-inch plasma TV, gave additional workspace for the powerful music development software or, alternatively, live views of the musicians working in the building's recording studios.
Also in the middle of the room were two 'highproductivity', ergonomic, swivel chairs.

 

Each instrument had been recorded on its own digital track that allowed the engineers to tweak the tone and sound of each instrument. Then, with all the instruments sounding their best, they proceeded to mix the overall piece, looping specifi c sections for hours at a time, adjusting the levels of each of the tracks until the desired mix of instruments was found. Finally, the vocals were introduced and again tweaked and their levels adjusted. This complete mix took the majority of the day and left only the mastering to be done.

 

Mastering is the process of taking the complete piece and creating the version that we, as an audience, hear. It is a process that people spend years learning, and many more perfecting.

 

The day at Kog Recording Studios was an eye-opening experience as I discovered the huge technological might behind today's musicians. It appears they do not sound good purely by chance.

 

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