Richard Attree and Alejandro Vinao talk to Sean Rothman about their hi-tech 'home' studio

And now for something completely different. Richard Attree and Alejandro Vinao are two thirds of the AVM company who are, in their own words, 'A group dedicated to the creation of multimedia events'. Attree and Vinao are responsible for the audio side, missing person Horatio Monteverde with his multiscreen computer-controlled slide projectors providing the visual input. Ground breaking though ES&CM is, as the only monthly magazine and cassette in the UK, a video version is some years away, which is a pity — AVM used 48 projectors in their last extravaganza and it's stunning. Oh yeah — and these guys actually make a comfortable living doing it. Sweet dreams are made of this...

Both gentlemen are now in their early thirties and met whilst completing their musical studies at the Royal College of Music, and fighting each other for studio time at the City University, London. Attree's background includes spells with various theatre groups and touring with rock bands (the last gig was with Jean-Jaques Burnel — he's never had any desire to repeat the experience) whilst Argentinian Vinao has worked at ECAM in Paris amongst other things. Most of their work together nowadays is for film, though both work separately on projects outside of AVM.

STUDIO SET UP

Their studio is based in Attree's North London house but it is not a home studio in the usual sense of the word. It has been professionally soundproofed and is totally dedicated — no shared bedrooms here. In fact, they are planning to hire it out commercially in the near future. AVM's set-up is totally unlike any I've seen before. For starters, it's totally digital and there's no multitrack. Some times they even work in quad!

The heart of the system is a Yamaha QX1 Digital Sequence Recorder, MIDI'd up to a KX88 Mother Keyboard and a TX816 FM Tone Generator. Another audio visual favourite, a Soundcraft Series 200 16-4 serves both as a road mixer and studio console and outputs to a Sony PCM F1 and SLF 1 Betamax video. Two Quad 405 derivatives provide amplification for the four custom housed Tannoy 15" Dual-concentric drivers. These are ideally suited to quad because the tweeter and woofer units are combined together in one dual-concentric unit, which gives excellent spacial imagery due to their inherent linear phase characteristics. At the time of the interview there was no outboard (they wanted to hear both the Roland RV2000 and Yamaha REV7 before deciding on a reverb) or drum machine (a friend's RX15 is available when needed), though both of these items and a MIDI DDL are on the shopping list. There is no provision for editing the F1.

"The minute you have everything MIDI, there's no need for any editing at all because you have your piece on the (QX1) disk and if you want to change anything it's easy." explains Attree.

"One thing we want to do with the studio is have modules that you can actually take apart. One thing we're going to get is the CX5M — as an interim thing, it's not the ideal computer.

One thing it would be useful for, is if Alejandro and I are working separately on the same piece of music — sometimes we have deadlines which require us to each take a little piece at the same time, a little section of it or a different cue. With something like the CX5M you can have it hooked into the main MIDI system or you can take it away, to another room or something and actually use it for composing in its own right. Then, if we want to use the TX816 we can shove the CX5M's MIDI info into the QX1 and take it apart again."

Other items being looked at include a sampler and a MIDI-automated desk, though the latter will have to wait until some company takes the plunge. At the moment the rack-mount Akai S612 sampler looks the favourite, though Attree was disappointed to find out that the six-voice mentioned in the spec meant six note polyphonic and not that the S612 was multi-timbral.

Vinao is keen to stress the differences between Attree's and his own method of composition when compared to most 'pop' musicians.

"For most pop orientated composers there is no difference between the production and the composing. It's much less 'literary' in the sense that pop is something you do intuitively whereas we write both intuitively and technically, from the point of view of writing manuscript. Let's say we're doing a commercial film, we say 'Okay, we've got a scene here that is 2.30 minutes and they want music.' We'll have a look at our notes and see what the director says and we'll pick up a manuscript and write the score. At the same time one of us will be working on another cue of the same film that we've discussed already — maybe doing a demo of it or writing it as well. Eventually, when we more or less know what we want well get together for the production of it."

TAPE TAKE

The track on the tape was originally composed for a audio-visual package made for the Italian giant, SIP. "That was our most recent job," Attree relates, "It was for the Milan trade fair.

"It's a mega-production sort-of-thing with 48 projectors and massive screens — our visual person Horatio Monteverde went over there and programmed it whilst we did the music here. We sent it to him on a U-matic cassette in PCM form and actually played it in this conference from the PCM with the slide data recorded on the audio track of the U-matic cassette. Not SMPTE, but the actual data that tells the projector or the dissolver units what to do — when to turn on and off, so it's the actual computer instructions that goes to the 48 projectors. It was programmed with two Apple computers, that's why we needed a U-matic because it's stereo, so on one channel we had the data for one Apple and the other channel controlled the second Apple."

The music was the first thing AVM used their newly-acquired Yamaha Professional System for, Attree controlling the TX816 and QX1, while Vinao programmed the Fairlight CMI using MCL (AVM have access to the City University's CMI). Attree again: "Since we've been programming stuff for years we're pretty fast at it and it comes up quite quickly, so we'll actually be working together on the same piece. The TX and the Fairlight were playing at the same time so Alejandro would do a couple of bars, listening to them through the monitors, then I would hear it and start programming a few things into the TX. Then we'd play them together and so on until the piece was complete."

As the CMI and the TX816/QX1 both have eight channels of sound, no multi-track is necessary and both are mastered straight onto the PCM F1, for which both Attree and Vinao are full of praise: "There has been a lot of debate going on about PCM and compact disc. I read this article (not in Soundmaker) about digital audio where this guy was saying that there are side effects on digital tape that aren't there on analogue tape. You get different things on analogue tape, you get hiss, distortion and wow and flutter or whatever, but on digital, tape you get phase distortion. He supposedly 'proved' that this was causing certain producers problems, and that they were making comments like 'The brass doesn't sound natural...' laughs Attree.

"It's ridiculous. The sound you get from the PCM F1 is... just phenomenal, you cannot tell the tape from what you put on it!"

DIGITAL DRAWBACKS

However, there are drawbacks, with editing in particular, as AVM found while recording the music excerpt on this months' cassette: "We were at the very end of the tape and there's this Italian voiceover, where this guy says the SIP slogan. Anyway, the tape was fine except for this one word at the end of it and SIP wanted to use a different version. The tape was fine except for one word! One word! It happened to overlap with other bits so we went back into the studio hoping to just press 'Pause' and bounce the new voiceover on. And even though we were doing this on U-matic and not Beta we found it didn't work — it would click or the mute would come on. We tried various ways but it just wouldn't work, so eventually we had to re-mix the whole thing just for that one little bit of voiceover. Now, if that had been on analogue tape that would have been a five minute job but it took two-and-a-half hours! We could have bounced everything onto analogue tape and back onto digital but that would have defeated the whole purpose of the PCM F1. And that's the sort of thing we don't like doing..."

That little end note of technical defiance I seems a good one to end on. Besides their work with AVM, Attree and Vinao are both seeking a record deal for their more commercial work. They've already had a rejection slip from Polydor's A&R Dept, that's pinned proudly to the studio door. It reads 'Congratulations! But you're way above our heads...' Whatever happens to AVM their system is a lesson for a lot of us. As someone said, I have seen the future and it works.