Focusrite has announced that its RedNet R1 desktop remote controller for the company’s Red audio interfaces is being utilized by Adrian Morales-Demori of Heiga Studios in Miami, GRAMMY-winning producer/engineer Dave Way of Waystation Studio in Los Angeles and Ross Lara of Archipelago Entertainment in Breckenridge, CO.
Heiga Studios in Miami provides audio and post-production services for clients including Paramount Pictures, EA Games, 2K Games, Sony Music, Universal, Disney, Toyota and Burger King, as well as recordings for artists such as Prince Royce, Nicky Jam, Kany Garcia, Abraham Mateo, and Roberto Carlos. The RedNet R1 has played a signficant studio owners Adrian Morales-Demori and Malury Imbernon for the last two years, in particular for the 3,200-square-foot studio’s move into Dolby Atmos mixing where it’s used in conjunction with the facility’s Red 16Line 64-in/64-out Pro Tools | HD and dual Thunderbolt 3 audio interface.
Most recently, Adrian Morales-Demori has applied the R1 to projects including Python Huntress, an award-nominated Argentine documentary about a woman helping rid the South Florida Everglades of an invasive species of snake, and the Dolby Atmos mix of “Flamenco Sketches” from the Premios Gardel Award-nominated LP Unanime by Argentine-American Latin GRAMMY-nominated jazz artist Roxana Amed.
“We were hired to do the stereo and 5.1 surround mixes for the film, and the R1 made it easy for me to jump from stereo to surround to be sure the director was happy with both mixes,” explains Morales-Demori, who adds that he’s able to create specific profiles for clients that lets them connect with and control their own inputs and outputs and monitor configurations from their own laptops, which improves the efficiency of their workflow personalizes the facility to clients and their particular production needs.
“The R1 has become central to the workflow at the studio,” he says. “It’s reduced the amount of time and effort spent patching, and between set-ups for different types of sessions, from tracking dates to voice-overs. It’s become pivotal to how work is done here now, and it’s made a huge difference in that respect.”
Producer/engineer Dave Way’s resume runs across all genres, spanning pop, rock, R&B and more, and his credits include artists such as Fiona Apple, Ringo Starr, Phoebe Bridgers, Sheryl Crow, Pink, “Weird Al” Yankovic and dozens of others, as well as the acclaimed soundtrack to Echo in the Canyon. His most recent GRAMMY nomination, for “Best Immersive Audio Album” for his work as immersive audio co-producer on the 2019 album The Savior by A Bad Think, portended the direction Way’s career would lead, as immersive-music mixing has become an ever-larger part of his oeuvre.
In 2020 he upgraded Waystation Studio to be able to mix in the Dolby Atmos format. Key components of that transition were one Red 16Line 64-In / 64-Out Thunderbolt 3 and Pro Tools | HD compatible audio interface, two RedNet A16R 16-channel analogue I/O interfaces and a RedNet HD32R 32-channel HD Dante network bridge, as well as one ISA 428 MkII 4-channel microphone preamp. A RedNet R1 remote controller helps pull it all together, and has been used by Way on an Atmos-remixed version of Joe Satriani’s LP Surfing With The Alien as well as a stereo mix for Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, and recordings by Fall Out Boy and All Time Low, both done in Atmos. A stereo mix of Iron & Wine’s new album, which Way recorded and mixed, is scheduled to have its own Atmos mix for its release next year.
“The R1 is such a great box and you can do so much with it, because Focusrite has built so many features into it,” he says. “For instance, it has solo and mute capability for every channel — I can cut out a sub or solo a center channel to be able to hear if things are building up in part of the mix. That’s very handy to have. And I recently added the Aux IO feature to my Pro Tools system, which lets me add any Core Audio device as extra inputs and outputs to the current Playback Engine.
“So for instance I can take a stereo reference track and, using the R1 as the controller, have it come up as a separate stereo output next to the binaural or Atmos versions of the track for instant comparisons. I didn’t have to change anything in my system to be able to accommodate that — the R1 was always ready for it! The R1 is great for monitoring multiple sources, so I’ve got my stereo world, my Atmos world, my Tidal playback, and my computer audio playback, all right there at the touch of a button.”
When Archipelago Entertainment co-owner Ross Lara (a multi-platinum and Latin GRAMMY Award-winning engineer) moved his studio to Breckenridge, CO from its previous locations in Atlanta and L.A., he and partner and business manager Brian Shenefelt were also ready to move on to immersive audio in the form of Dolby’s Atmos format. It would become a key element in the company’s strategy as it continued to create and produce audio for music production, film scoring, and game audio as well as audio branding and content development for companies such as Red Bull and Meta.
Critical elements of the infrastructure for that were components from Focusrite’s RedNet and Red series of networked audio converters and interfaces. While all of these devices – such as the Red 8Pre that Lara describes as “the lungs of the studio” – are important to achieving the creative and aesthetic outcome clients want, the R1 has emerged as the key tool of the studio.
“It’s like a hot knife through butter,” he says, describing the R1. “For instance, I may be monitoring an Atmos recording and want to put a piano part on it. I just hit the sum feature on the R1 and I’m instantly connected through an input that I’ve already configured for the headphone preamp, which the R1’s navigation software made very easy to do. I have a handful of those configurations for any number of formats – immersive, surround, stereo – and I hit the output button and I’m there. I don’t have to worry about muting the speakers or turning down the output volume to avoid feedback. I’m ready to work.
“The R1 does that dozens of times in a session. It might seem like a small thing, but if you add up the time that each procedure would take without an R1, you can quickly see the kind of efficiency and time saving that the R1 offers. In a complex studio environment, the R1 is a way to sense of it all and to make the production process flow more smoothly. I don’t know where we’d be without it.”
