Pretty much since the invention of radio, recording artists have always jumped at the chance to perform live on the air. Yet where they actually perform is afterthought — if it’s a thought at all. CBS radio’s Sam Cappas, a regional director of engineers, had an idea about creating a live performance space worthy of the talent that comes to play.
The newly installed live room at CBS Chicago is a beautiful looking — and sounding — 85-seat space that is turning heads. The room hosts a wide variety of genres, because it’s used by a total of four stations: a Top 40, an Oldies, a Country, and of course, rock station WXRT 93.1. “So we had to build the room to be good for [all] kinds of music,” says engineer Dominic Mendicino.
The Chicago studio was so successful the team went and did a similar install in New York and Washington D.C. They are also creating similiar live spaces for radio stations in Baltimore and eyeing sites in Houston and San Francisco. “This is a trend — these studios make a lot of money for CBS, and now they want them everywhere,” says Mendicino. “And now that the standard has been set [with the Chicago station], there’ll be more.”
Acoustic Challenges
Mendicino is the man at the console, saying he’s done over 300 shows now. Even when a band brings their own FOH engineer, he’s there to assist and manage other aspects of the production. He then stands off to the side with his iPad and mixes what he needs underneath what’s happening in the room, because he manages a whole lot of mixes for every live performance that could include FOH live; stream/video feed; on-air; and up to four independent monitor mixes and four independent in-ear mixes. “There’s a lot going on,” he laughs.
Mendicino’s background makes him uniquely suited to handle all of this. In his teens, he started working in Chicago recording studios, including Medicine Man Recording. He got an unusual offer to record audio for documentaries in exotic locales like Kenya, and when he returned to Chicago in 2012, he went back into studio recording, spending time at Chicago Recording Company. “Within three months, I was offered to go on the road mixing monitors for Andy Grammer, which was something I couldn’t pass up.” He returned to the studio, and then moved into installations at the bigger clubs around town.
After Mendicino took a job with CBS Radio, Cappas started cooking up the concept for the studio. “It was Sam’s idea to set up a venue appropriate for the artist that came to play,” Mendicino says. As Cappas shared his vision, Mendicino saw that all his varied past experience was right for the call. “I’ve done audio and video, live and in the studio. I’ve ripped apart recording studios and rebuilt them, and worked on installs for live rooms large and small.” A key component of bringing this to fruition was V3 Studios of St. Louis, an architectural firm that happens to be headed by one Kurt Kerns, who was a founder of the industrial rock band Gravity Kills, which sold over one million records and played more than 1,000 shows in 16 countries.
Kerns has, in fact, been playing music all his life, including a lot of time in studios and on stage, slowed only by a stint in architecture school. Since founding V3 seven years ago, the firm has increasingly gotten the opportunity to put their acoustic expertise into play. They’ve taken on the student media center at prestigious Washington University and a theater at the school as well. Kerns has been doing work for CBS on a variety of projects for 16 years, and he is particularly excited to be working on these studios. “When I was an artist touring, I really appreciated the radio station supporting the music, but it would be awkward to perform in a corporate conference room,” he says. “It was great to brainstorm with Sam about what kind of atmosphere we could create that would be great for playing live and for the radio.”
Acoustically, the challenge of creating both a room that was equal parts live space and recording studio was daunting. The room itself is in a high-rise building with executive offices right above. “There was no margin for error, as we had to literally create a ‘floating’ box within a box,” Kerns continues. “There are five layers of drywall and staggered studs, and the ceiling is spring isolated.” Of course, moving from plans to reality had the natural hiccups as mundane things like electrical conduits and ceiling sprinklers knocked specs off a bit, but adjustments were strategically made on the fly as needed. “There were people on the site every day, and things like making sure kick drum frequencies were going to be as they were needed meant that something even as small as two or three percent off needed to be corrected.” Windy City-based Bulley & Andrews were the contractors.
“Tuning the room right was needed to capture the great performances, and we really made sure the band shell was right,” Kerns adds. “We really spent time with the acoustic panels to get the room sounding the best it could possibly be. I approached this whole thing as if I was the artist going to perform here, and not only did we put thought and care into the performance space, but also the green room, and how the artist would get from one to the other.”
Sound Choices
“I wanted to fly speakers, and went with the JBL VRX932,” Mendicino says. “For the size of the room, the JBLs were a no-brainer, because I didn’t want to overpower the place.” He also picked up the 918S matching subs. Four QSC K10s handle stage monitoring duties, along with a Shure PSM1000 IEM system. The mics are standard: lots of Shures — 57, 81, Beta 91a. The console of choice was the Behringer X32. Another issue was being able to multitrack to Pro Tools, because once a year 93XRT puts out a “Best of” album of live performances (“93XRT Live from the Archives”). “We wanted the versatility to go back and mix it from the ground up in Pro Tools.” Then he has yet another separate stereo mix for video and on air. “You need a separate mix with different EQs and processing for the live video and on-air feeds.”
Now that the word is out, artists are asking to come perform there. When The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach brought his band The Arcs in, it was one of the very first times the band had played live in front of people. Mendicino says he was in the thick of it, cutting in and out for commercials, going live for two songs and then streaming video, when he paused for just a moment, looked up, and thought, “Man, I’m mixing Auerbach right now!” Then it was back to work. “So for two seconds, I thought how cool this was, and that was the most I ever let myself get starstruck!” Others include Nick Jonas, Fifth Harmony, Lady Antebellum, Chris Cornell, Of Monsters and Men and X Ambassadors, among many others.
“What’s really impressive to the artist is how professionally the studio is run,” Mendicino says. “From the studio manager Rich Wyatt to the studio creator Sam, the team makes sure everything is done right, on schedule, and artists are just blown away by it.”
Mendicino does a thorough job advancing so when a band shows up, they just plug in and play. Live concerts: Coming to a radio studio near you.
