Freemasons use Propellerhead Record for Whitney Houston X-Factor Show

Numero uno dance act the Freemasons are on fine form right now and about to bag probably their biggest ever UK TV audience watching another all conquering and sublime production. On this Sunday’s (18th October) X-Factor Results Show, Whitney Houston will be performing her new single ‘Million Dollar Bill’ with the show’s Musical Director interspersing the Freemasons dance remix intro, middle 8 and chorus sections in with the actual live band backing for the U.S. superstar.

In this, the first of a two part interview, we look at the Freemasons current studio activity and here, focus on their recent adoption of the new, quite awesome Propellerhead Record software. James ‘Freemason’ Wiltshire, gear-head and programmer/producer spills the beans..

DV247: Did RECORD get used just partly for this remix or fully as a trial replacement for your normal Logic workflow?

Because of the time pressures we had bearing in mind that we were asked to do the remix within a week and a half (and we like to normally spend 2/3 weeks on a project) I couldn’t move out of Logic but I did all the initial work inside my (then) beta version of Record.

We believe you made great use of RECORD’s time stretch algorithm on Whitney’s acapella, how does it compare to others you’ve used?

The feature that was incredibly useful and became apparent quickly was the power of its time stretch algorithm. We normally use Serato’s Time ‘n Pitch for high end processing of this type, especially on vocals. However, in the case of Whitney’s vocals, we only had stereo stems of the lead and backing vocals which contained all the high end mix effects, including EQ, delays and reverbs so the whole thing was very, very dense.

As we’d already heard about Record’s time stretch feature, we then set about A/Bing these vocal stems within Logic using Izotope’s Radius plug-in, followed by Serato’s Time ‘n Pitch. Then, we just imported the files straight into Record knowing that we had a locked tempo already and took it from about 120 to 126, which isn’t a massive stretch, but then we looked at the resulting files.

Record’s were phenomenal compared to the other market leaders, having none of the ‘pre-note’ artifacts showed sometimes by, say, Serato when dealing with material that needs all dynamics completely intact. Record’s algorithm managed to maintain a lot of information regarding depth and space which is normally the first thing that goes to pot when time stretching.

Even more amazing is that Record does this in real-time which was great because, as we already use Propellerhead Reason, we were able to work out the perfect tempo for the remix using a quick backing from the integration of REX players and ReDrum patches I’d already worked on. Any tempo adjustment with REX loops changing accordingly was instantly followed, again in real time, by Record - it’s an incredible algorithm!

James, you’ve done track mix-downs on SSL desks previously as a jobbing engineer – How does the 9000K model mix environment feel and sound to your ears?

The EQ’s not exactly difficult to model, it never has been. There’s been loads of SSL copies put out there already - SSL itself has even released to the Duendo system. But it’s the ‘dynamics’ that no one has got right yet on any other channel strips - they just don’t sound like the actual SSL gates and compressors. Record’s ones.. do. In fact they sound slightly better in certain respects. They really are as close as I have seen, especially on the master bus compressor which makes everything sound wonderful.

Coming at it from a self contained aspect, Reason’s  mixing functions have always been almost adequate but still not ‘quite there’ and this just absolutely changes everything. Record also doesn’t seem that processor hungry so added to the above, people should actually be able to make entire records within it.

I should also mention its stability - in typical Propellerhead style you just can’t seem to get the damn thing to crash! I think that they may have to look at the interfaces a little bit but they’ve made a very clever system using the function keys to allow you to flip between the main parts of the program. Also, now finally for audio, the integration with Reason’s brilliant effects, for example the vocoder and scream distortion, is an absolute Godsend.
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So there you have it. A quick peek into the power and potential of the new Propellerhead Record software to take on the might and dominance of ProTools and Logic. Check back here later this week for part 2 of this all new Freemasons studio interview.