Heavy Melody Music, a music composition and sound design facility located in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, has installed Argosy’s Dual 15K Keyboard Workstations in the control rooms of each of the company’s three principals.
The partners — Neil Goldberg, Dave Fraser and Ari Winters —produce music and design sound for video game and motion picture trailers, and are also the three principals in Heavyocity Media, a developer of virtual instruments for professional composers and sound designers.
In terms of ergonomics, composing music and creating sound design for trailers and developing sample elements for virtual instruments require identical equipment setups, according to Goldberg. The Argosy Dual 15K workstation accommodates most 88-key keyboards and additionally offers copious rack space in bays to the left and right, together with flat surfaces for video screens and monitor speakers.
“We have had Argosy desks before that housed the Mackie Digital 8-Bus consoles, so we were familiar with them,” explains Goldberg, who founded Heavy Melody Music with Fraser over ten years ago. The pair originally met at Berklee College of Music then worked together at a couple of commercial music houses, and launched Heavyocity, along with third partner Winters, about five years ago. “With the Dual 15, we find it a lot easier to work with a controller keyboard as the center focus, with the speakers, the gear and the patchbays where we need them.”
Whether creating sound design, sound effects, samples or music, the focus on the controller keyboard makes it easier to place and manipulate sound elements. “The Dual 15K ergonomics gives us a good basis to be set up and to work efficiently,” says Goldberg. “Everything is mixed in the box now, so this is a much better setup for us.”
All three Argosy Dual 15K desks have an optional MPX shelf fitted. In Goldberg’s control room, two computer keyboards accessing two separate systems are positioned on the MPX shelf above his controller keyboard, along with a Native Instruments Maschine controller, Euphonix Artist Series controllers and three flat screens. His Genelec monitors, sitting on Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizers, are positioned atop the left and right equipment bays.
A self-confessed “gear nut,” Goldberg has outfitted his Dual 15K workstation’s racks with an assortment of high-end equipment from Apogee, Dangerous Music, Dramastic Audio, Grace Audio, Neve, Tech 21, Universal Audio and Wunder Audio. “As the projects call for it, I like to invest in high-end gear,” explains Goldberg, who has a small iso booth equipped with Bogner, Marshall and Mesa guitar amps and shares a larger iso room with Fraser. “For everything that we’re doing, even on the Heavyocity side, such as capturing sounds and manipulating and mastering them, having better quality equipment clearly brings it up to another level.
In addition to their software development for the Heavyocity side of the business, the three principals are typically kept busy creating music and sound design for game and film trailers. They have also scored long-form projects for Discovery Channel and Syfy Network as well as video games. Recent licensing placements from Heavy Melody Music’s 19-track “Fracture” trailer music collection have included a “Snow White and the Huntsman” movie trailer and two trailers for EA’s “Medal of Honor: Warfighter” video game. “More recently we also did two YouTube trailers for the ‘Neverwinter’ video game,” Goldberg reports.
