Grind Music and Sound, an audio post-production facility in Los Angeles that specializes in sound design and mixing for adventure sports and documentary films and television, recently implemented a Yamaha NUAGE production DAW system.
Co-owners Michelle Garuik and Sangtar Heer had been researching consoles and DAW controllers for some time, not finding anything that really fit all of their needs until NUAGE.
“The tactile surfaces give us so many solutions for our different ways of working,” Garuik says. “After mixing ‘in the box’ for years, it’s great to have instant access to deep features in Nuendo with just a touch of a button.
“It’s also nice to have different ways to perform tasks enabling us to work faster and more intuitively,” she continues. “The mixing integration with Nuendo is fantastic in speeding up our workflow. With project deadlines having faster and faster turnarounds, NUAGE lets us meet the demands of our partners and makes mixing even more fun.”
They evaluated NUAGE at the recent AES show in LA, getting a private demo from Yamaha’s Marcel Mauceri, and then took in a more intensive demo at Hollywood Sounds Systems, presented by audio tech Brett Grossman, and Yamaha district manager David Lees.
“NUAGE’s deep integration with Nuendo was an immediate draw,” says Garuik. “It’s much more than faders, pan-pots and the usual four to five things you find on most controllers. Anything you need to do in Nuendo, you can access on NUAGE. Also, the fact that it is a Yamaha Commercial Audio product was another plus for us. Having mixed on Yamaha consoles in the past, we were already familiar with the build quality and support.”
Garuik adds that the ability to store different setups for their individual project needs is a huge plus. Mixing a 5.1 television documentary has a very different setup than mixing a music album, and the ability to switch quickly and seamlessly between those setups was paramount in their decision. The pair has been using Nuendo daily since its inception, first introduced to it at AES in 2000 where their journey began with version 1.0. They’ve also utilized Cubase since the 1990s.
With Garuik specializing in mixing action/adventure sports projects, some of Grind Music and Sound clients include Red Bull, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, NBC Sports and Specialized Bicycles.
“Our first television mix on NUAGE was for Fox Sports Training Day ‘Team Alpha Male’ episode, and it went amazingly well,” Garuik notes. Grind staff set up the system with assistance from Hollywood Sound’s Grossman on a Friday, spent Saturday programming quick keys and setting up system preferences, and on Monday, mixed the 22-minute episode.
“The mix went very smoothly, and having access to 16 faders at once, really sped up mixing for me,” she says. “The master unit rocker wheel was a dream to edit with; cleaning up edits was faster with less clicking. I was also very impressed with the monitoring integration of NUAGE and the I/O Nio500-A16 unit. The sound was impressively clear.”
