Veteran FOH mixers Greg Price (Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Van Halen) and Parnelli Award winner Brad Madix (Rush, Beck, Rage Against The Machine) have formed Diablo Digital (diablodigital.com), a venture that offers ready-to-roll equipment packages for live recordings. It’s also another instance of the kind of entrepreneurism that reflects an increasingly DIY live-sound business.
Madix and Price are colleagues — they’ve worked with several acts in common, including Van Halen — and San Francisco Bay Area neighbors. They’ve also watched as the music industry has come to shift its revenue emphasis to live music. Over time, they each began assembling their own live recording kits, comprised of computers and various iterations of Pro Tools and other software (Price is also a product specialist for plug-in maker Waves). Along the way, they began exchanging ideas, tips and — on an increasingly frequent basis — actual stuff as they headed out on their respective tours. After a couple of years’ worth of what, in retrospect, turned out to be ad hoc product development, the pair began renting out some of their assemblies to other road mixers, who found their choice of gear effective and efficient. Sometime last year, when they zoomed past their 12th or 13th kit, they decided to make a business out if it, and Diablo Digital was born, named for the 3,848-foot mountain peak that looms near their Northern California headquarters.
“There was a need developing out there for a good multi-track recording package that mixers can take out on the road and just plug in and play,” says Madix. “We were each doing our own version of this, and then we began pooling the idea and the equipment. I sent some of Greg’s gear out with Justin Timberlake last year, and then we had some systems out with Clair, and one with Sound Image with Rob Zombie. It showed us there was demand for the idea, so we formalized it as Diablo Digital.”
The Technology
There are a few tiers of packages, with Mac tower computers used for larger systems and Mac Minis for smaller ones, running either Pro Tools native or HDX. The simplest configuration is directly into an Avid VENUE console. Interfaces for DiGiCo (with DigiLink to an HDX card) and Midas (using an AES50 interface) mixing platforms are options, as are analog interfaces. The systems can be packaged as 64-track, 128-track and — at least theoretically — 192-track configurations. There are some other options as well, such as video monitors. Systems are racked in Sonnet Technologies enclosures and in some cases use that company’s Thunderbolt expansion chassis.
These systems are priced at a day rate but effectively go out as weekly rentals, starting at $475 a week for a basic 1-rackspace Mac Mini/native system with hard drive to upwards of $1,700 for a week’s worth of a Mac tower with HDX 2 and 128 tracks. Madix says discounts are available for volume users (in some cases corporate clients will re-rent to their customers), and prices include 24/7/365 technical support.
The idea has gained considerable traction in a short time. Users include the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Rush, One Republic, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Nettles, Fleetwood Mac, the Kanye West/Jay-Z tour, Dierks Bentley and Maxwell, as well as multiple systems in place for the SXSW iTunes Festival broadcast. But like most good ideas, it’s not the components but the sum of their parts that make the difference. “All of this stuff is available off the shelf, nothing’s proprietary,” says Madix. “What we did was put it into a package and make it turnkey and make it inexpensive.”
Why It Matters
The digital cost paradigm may help make it even more affordable in the future. As configured now, these systems make the most economic sense in situations where the tour or event is carrying its own console. Madix says he’d like to see it reach down to the club level, with a wider range of interfaces available for a larger array of consoles, as console makers continue to push digital mixers to new price points. “I’d love to be in that space, because that’s where the business is moving,” he says.
That’s the other concept worth noting here. Madix and Price both came of age during the era of the monster tour. There are any number of people in the music industry who have trouble grasping that the paradigm is shifting, that stadiums and arenas are once again the province of the NFL and NBA, not ELP and AC/DC. Clubs are becoming the primary playing fields of live music, and more than a few manufacturers, like PreSonus, are acknowledging that in their product designs. This makes the same sense to Diablo Digital. Madix says that between the Mac Mini’s capability as a server as well as a computer and Thunderbolt’s high bandwidth, the systems can be taken to new levels of capability but in small and still cost-effective packages. “We’re experimenting now to see how far we can push a native rig,” he says.
Interestingly, Madix never talks about the content that Diablo Digital’s rigs create as something to be productized. That he leaves to their creators to work on. Instead, he’s fascinated by the potential of the live-recording process to improve the talent of mixers and, by extension, that of their artist clients. “[Live recordings are] a great tool for making a better engineer,” he explains. “When you can capture your stuff and play it back over and over, and right after the gig, you learn what works in a mix. It lets a good engineer perfect his craft.
“It also lets them sit down with the artists and listen together to a show right after it’s done,” he continues. “If he or she is frustrated with some aspect of the sound, you can work it out right then and there, and that can erase weeks of frustration. It’s not like handing the artist a CD and then hearing about the guitar sound a week later. It’s immediate, and in that regard, it’s a fantastic tool.”
It’s also part of the larger trend that says all content can be intrinsically valuable in some way or another. Between ever-cheaper memory and more robust touring systems like the ones Diablo Digital offers, the old studio dream of never having to hit “stop” on the tape deck is now attainable. Media is now infinite, and you never have to worry if you captured the best show of the tour, because you’ve captured all of them.
Madix is pragmatic enough to realize that most of what Diablo Digital is doing today will eventually end up on the equivalent of an iPhone app. That’s okay, because as mentioned earlier, it’s not the pieces of an idea that will determine its success but rather the way they are put together. And when everyone finally is recording every note, every night, he and Price expect to be ready.
“We’re starting to think about an archiving business,” he says, and as he speaks, I can imagine an eyebrow arching.
