On the road

With the refit of the Artisan remote recording truck, South Florida's professional audio is on the move again in more ways than one reports Dan Daley

IF THE RECENT US PRESIDENTIAL election didn't sufficiently imprint South Florida on millions of minds, it's also worth noting that many of those same middle-class, middle-aged voters we saw squinting at the hanging chads on television were also around the area 30 years ago. That was when Miami seemed to be the centre of the rock music universe, with artists like Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees settling for long stints at Criteria Studios. In the case of the Bee Gees, they stayed for good.

Miami is once again in the pop music limelight, though this time the artists, led by Ricky Martin and Christine Aguilera, are less scruffy, polished to the point of squeakiness. Once again, everyone wants to come to South Florida to make records, though mostly during 'the season', which runs from the first hint of frost in Manhattan to the onset of hurricane season in June.

With all the world seemingly coming to Florida, you'd wonder if Florida could ever come to you. Actually, it has been doing just that, since
1977, when Peter Yianilos, a 21-year-old starry-eyed and earnest guitar player living in Orlando decided to combine a love of music and a penchant for travelling into a new venture on wheels. At its inception, Artisan Remote Recording was housed in a GMC motorcoach, but it was one of those Interstate behemoths from the days before they were called RVs, when they were unintentionally cool because, short of an actual 45-foot lorry, they were the biggest civilian things on the road in the pre-SUV era. 'But it wasn't like some Winnebago', Yianilos recalls. 'It was very cool and fun to drive, very sleek and modern for its time. The driver sat almost in the middle and was surrounded by glass and really sat above it all.' Yianilos also remembers how, not having ever seen a professional remote recording truck, he designed his first one on instinct. 'I just built it how I thought it should work,' he says. 'It seemed logical putting the console up against the back wall of the truck and to put the gear racks up along the driver's side. Besides, you could part the curtains and sit at the console and look out a nice big picture window while you worked.'

Yianilos is positively misty about those days, which were particularly rewarding because Artisan managed to become a successful proposition fairly early in the game. With a few high-profile recordings for acts like CSN&Y, Linda Ronstadt and Weather Report in its first year of operations, the truck, with its very-Florida complement of MCI JH-400 console and MCI JH-24 multitrack decks, caught the eye of another MCI aficionado. Mac Emerman, founder and owner of Criteria Studios and running buddy of MCI founder Jeep Harned, got his own start in the audio business with remote jazz recordings he did from the back of a station wagon. He contacted Yianilos and they hammered out a handshake deal that made Artisan Criteria's de facto remote truck, an arrangement that lasted for over three years. (It ended on a sour note, Yianilos recalls sadly, which prompted Criteria to build its own remote truck, which Yianilos says was modeled on his, and which was not a success, partly a victim of Criteria's own sliding fortunes in the 1980s. The Criteria truck was sold a company in Puerto Rico not long after it was commissioned.)

That first truck would last for 16 years, until 1993, when Yianilos made the transition to the biggest leagues, moving over to a 36-foot-long/8.5-foot-wide (the broadest legal width for US highways) Pace trailer attached to a Volvo tractor with a 370hp, Cummins engine and a 10-speed gear box. Oh yes, there was a studio in the trailer, but Yianilos--who does all his own driving as well as recording and mixing--seems as boyishly fascinated by the rig as he is by audio gear. 'People get a real kick out of watching me climb out the trailer after doing a mix and then climb into the cab and drive away,' he says.

Yianilos remembers the date of the changeover from small to large truck precisely, for an interesting reason. 'We had the last date for the old truck on 15th March, 1993, at the Calle Ocho festival in Miami's Little Havana,' he recalls. 'On the 22nd March, the new truck had its first gig, which turned out to be a hit record.'

That record was 'I Will Always Love You', Whitney Houston's monster hit from the film The Bodyguard. The track had already been recorded in Los Angeles, and Artisan had originally been hired just to record audio for a series of exterior shots for the film being shot outside Miami Beach's legendary Fountainbleu Hotel. Inside the hotel, however, Houston was to do a critical scene with co-star Kevin Costner, the one in which their relationship transitions to love, and the one for which the Dolly Parton-penned song had been intended.

'It had been planned all along that Whitney would lip sync to the track they recorded in LA,' says Yianilos. 'But apparently Whitney said something to the effect of, "I never lip-sync anything". They hired a great band, including Steve Gadd on drums, and in my truck Bill Schnee is engineering and David Foster is producing. We did five takes and number four was the keeper. I thought it was great but figured that this was something you do when the star wants to do it; I never thought it would be the actual track in the film. But then I got a call from the music supervisor a few months later telling me exactly that, the vibe they got from recording on the set was so unique and emotional. So the track on the score and the hit record was recorded in the ballroom of the Fountainbleu Hotel by this truck.'

It was an auspicious start for the new truck, which still embodied Yianilos' youthful exuberance in its design. In 2000, as Miami-based artists increasingly began ascending the charts, it was time for another revision of the truck.

'It was a comfort issue and a matter of being able to accommodate new formats,' says Yianilos. 'We couldn't fit a 48-track digital into the old design, and we were getting more and more clients at the level where you couldn't say "No, I can't" to them.'

Yianilos hired John Arthur, a Miami-based studio designer, to help with the remodeling of the truck, now based in Ft Lauderdale, an hour north of Miami. The refit of the truck was substantial, Arthur recalls. 'We stripped the trailer to its skin,' he says. With the interior walls peeled away, a spring-loaded resilience strip, also known as an RC-1 channel, was run around the perimeters to hold ⁵/8-inch-thick panels of MDS and ¹/8-inch-thick panels of 'loaded vinyl', a sound insulator which Yianilos jokingly refers to as 'politically correct' because it contains no lead. The same combination was applied to the floors beneath a new ³/4-inch layer of tongue-and-groove plywood covering. This sandwich of the two materials resulted in a dramatic reduction of external noise penetration.

Yianilos decided to stay with the Amek Hendrix console he's had in the truck for several years. The desk has 40 mono inputs and eight stereo ones, and is fitted with SuperTrue automation, and is buttressed by a pair of Hill Multimix 16:4 submixers, and two Yamaha 02R digital mixers, which give the truck a maximum of 120 inputs. Yianilos believes that an upgrade to the physical plant didn't necessarily require an upgrade of console. 'It's not a matter of always having the latest, the greatest,' he says. 'Music recording is very well served by analogue consoles, and the Amek is a good fit for both music and for remote recording. It's simple, clean, reliable and robust. And most other engineers can come right in and sit down and be comfortable with it.'

With new walls in place, Arthur refitted the control room area acoustically, designing in soffits for the new Hafler TRM-8 active monitors. Though 5.1 was not implemented in this go-round, soffit provisions were made for that for future upgrades. A broadband trap was fitted to the front wall, with bass traps in the room's corners. Using graduated custom acoustical panels along the walls, Arthur had the truck's acoustics gradually change from front to back. 'We wanted the mix position to be very, very flat and accurate,' he explains. 'But as you progress to the back of the truck towards the producer's position, it becomes slightly brighter. The reason for this is that the sound can open up as it hits that area without having to turn the volume up from the mix position.'

Along with flat-panel display monitors for video and automation, the finishing touches are curvilinear cabinetry and other furniture and trim elements that both create an aesthetic and serve a function. 'They help delineate and separate the spaces on the truck,' says Arthur. 'You want a sense that each area --the mixing position, the machine area, the producer's area--are all complete spaces unto themselves but that they also integrate into the entire truck. We accomplished that with trim and low-voltage lighting.'

The machine area in the rear of the truck can accommodate two racks of Tascam DA-88s, or a pair of Sony 3348 decks, or one rack and one 3348. The trucks HVAC was also boosted and better zonal climate control added.

The truck, which celebrates its silver anniversary next year, had been taken to the next level, and the total investment in the rig and gear was up over three-quarters of a million dollars. Would Miami's market continue to follow an upward course, as well?

'Remote recording is still a good market, especially down here,' says Yianilos. He notes that for most of his time in the business, he had no significant competition in the region, indeed hasn't had any until Transcontinental Studios--the R&D centre for In Synch, Backstreet Boys and a host of other boy bands--in Orlando launched their own truck two years ago. But that hasn't dampened Yianilos' enthusiasm or optimism about the market; Artisan has been ranging farther a field in recent years, logging 45,000 miles just on its work with the syndicated and successful Tom Joiner radio programme, which regularly does a live remote, with live music, from one of the 99 markets its affiliated stations are in.

But like every conventional for-hire studio facility these days, fixed or mobile, Yianilos has to
balance the necessary upgrades and ongoing maintenance with cost-savings measures. 'I drive the truck. I do the engineering. I do the maintenance,' he says. 'I work my [expletive deleted] ass off! If I had to hire a driver and a full-time tech, I wouldn't be able to live and work at the level that I do. The costs of remote recording are about 50% higher than regular studios' costs. We can get between $3,000 and $4,000 a day for the truck, which is higher than most studios get. But you have to offset that with additional costs, like road use fees and taxes, accommodations and security, as well as the amount of [equipment] rentals you have to do in a truck.'

Artisan is unquestionably a major-league remote facility in the US market. But Yianilos is nonetheless sandwiched between two other layers of remote classifications, both of which have grown in the last several years. On one hand, there are the large trucks that cater to the broadcasting business. Audio trucks have gained in importance in that market as television sound has improved. But they still generally operate as support for video trucks, and they generally have high technology costs as a result. It's not a market niche Yianilos aspires to. 'Staying focused on music recording only is something of a restriction,' he acknowledges. 'But it's still a good market. And I'm partial to it because I'm a musician. And I confess to being a bit of a brat who doesn't want to work on stuff that doesn't turn me on. And sports broadcasts are not something I find exciting to work on. I'd much rather do music, from chamber orchestras to rock bands and everything in between.' (Yianilos still actively plays in a band, and co-produced and engineered all of the late Jaco Pastorius Warner Bros releases.)

The other niche is the ADAT-in-a-bread-truck sector, which has grown as pro audio technology has gotten smaller and more affordable. Yianilos says small start-ups of that sort haven't affected his business at this point, and he believes there is a place for them in the market. 'They give bands the opportunity to make a decent live recording in a club for $500,' he says.

In fact, Yianilos adds that he hopes some of them become successful and join the ranks of pro audio's road warriors. It's a community that exists as a tightly knit subset of the larger studio community, and with its high price of entry, considering the miles you have to cover in addition to the investment and the long hours of any studio, Yianilos says its clan members have a special kind of respect for each other. 'We were out on the road a few months ago and we saw the Sheffield truck going the other way on I-95,' he says. 'We honked. I don't know if they saw me. But they know we're out there.'