Artist Interview: BT Test Drives the UAD Xpander at 40,000 Feet Using the UAD on an Airplane
By Marsha Vdovin
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Pictured: BT using the UAD Xpander on the Road. |
Who better to try the new UAD Xpander than someone who travels constantly and lives on his PowerBook? BT’s name came up as a part of the Intel Artists Project that Universal Audio is involved in. After he had been working with the Xpander for a few weeks, I managed to catch up with a very jetlagged BT in L.A., between a gig in Korea and returning to Asia to play in Shanghai. I’m always apprehensive when someone goes by just initials. What should I call him? B? Mr. T? Sometimes in situations like this I go nutty and say, “Hey you.” I settled for BT.
BT (Brian Transeau) first made his mark in the early '90s in the trance and dance music scene. His classical training and virtuosity enabled him to cross over to film scoring. Now with five solo albums under his belt and half a dozen feature-film scores, BT is in great demand. Trying to find to time to talk to him was challenging, but he couldn’t be a nicer guy. He took a break during a few days in L.A., where he was working on scoring the new film Battle in Seattle, then he flew to Shanghai to perform.
The UAD Xpander breaks ground for Universal Audio, now enabling laptop artists to harness more DSP power and access the award-winning UAD Powered Plug-Ins.
You’ve been working with the UAD Xpander. What do you think?
It's one of the most impressive pieces of hardware I've ever worked with, honestly. It's funny, I'm talking to you on an iPhone right now, and on every level around me, I feel like the promise of the future that everyone has been talking about has arrived. It's real exciting. I've been waiting for years and years for a way to outsource some DSP power and to be able to work on a laptop, which is how I'd say 60 to 70 percent of my music is actually created now. Being a parent, and being very busy in my business, the time I have time to work on music frequently is on airplanes. I do a lot of travel. I fly between 250- and 300,000 miles a year, so my quiet time and time to make music often is on airplanes. So this thing's a dream for me. It's an incredible piece of hardware.
Have you used it on a plane? What about power?
Yeah, I have. Absolutely. It works terrific. I use a power strip and an airplane-to-standard power converter. You don't wanr to sit next to me on the plane!
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| BT performing live. |
What is your main songwriting setup now?
I work frequently in Logic Audio. I use a lot of known plug-ins, and then I've built some standalone things as well. I built a standalone surround-sound drum machine. I use Logic Audio quite a bit. I use Ableton Live, as well.
Does the Xpander work seamlessly with Logic in your PowerBook? Do you get any comments on the plane?
I constantly get comments on the plane about what I'm doing. The integration is flawless. It works like it's a Logic plug-in. It works perfectly. It makes the experience of working so much better, because you've got so much more power. When I'm writing, I really like running plug-ins live. Something that bugs the hell out of me is that in Logic you can't hard process plug-ins. I've been giving them grief about it for years. I stuck with Pro Tools for years just because of the Audio Suite plug-in, and they just won't fix this. It's a real problem, actually. But when I'm writing, I like running plug-ins live, and then I like hard processing when I'm mixing, although I can't do the latter right now. They work great, because I can run so many of them live. It's just very powerful.
Have you had a chance to use all the plug-ins? Do you have any favorites?
You know, all of them are superlative. Honestly, my favorite, favorite, favorites though are some of the EQs and compression.
The Fairchild . . .
The Fairchild for drums is incredible. And the 1176 is the other one that is amazing.
How are you using the 1176?
For vocals, actually. I'm scoring a film right now that I've been using the box on. The movie's called Battle in Seattle, with Charlize Theron and Ray Liotta. I was just working on it on a plane on the way back, and I was using the 1176 on vocals, and it sounds fantastic. Being able to outsource DSP power like that, it's a dream come true. Honest to God, not overstating it, it's something I've waited for, and waited for, and waited for, for years. It’s really exciting.
Have you tried any of the Roland plug-ins, like the Dimension D?
The Dimension D and the Roland Space Echo, they're so incredible. I’m using the Space Echo right now. It’s crazy! I love it.
I thought you would like the Space Echo.
Yeah. It's phenomenal. What's amazing me is how good some of these software emulations are getting, too. Around '98, I remember writing the track called "Dreaming," and I wrote in the liner notes, "This entire track was created using software synthesis and plug-ins." And when I did interviews after that track, nobody believed it. People wanted me to reference every single instrument I used in it. I did it at the time as an experiment. People just weren’t doing that back then. Now, everybody's using soft synth, and plug-ins and stuff.
Over the last couple of years I've been going in the other direction. I've been pulling out all my analog gear. My whole new album is all analog synths. There's no soft synths whatsoever on my record. Not one. And I've sort of made a point out of that. Oberheim Four Voices, and R2600s and EMS DCS3s, the real shit. And what's amazed me about some of these plug-ins is some of them actually sound as good as the original boxes. What makes some of those boxes beautiful sounding are the flaws, the inherent inaccuracies of it. And what I really like about the attention to detail that some of the programmers are putting into some of these pieces, like the Dimension D or the Space Echo, is that the inherent idiosyncratic behavior of these devices is actually being captured now, certainly much more so than even a couple of years ago. I think that's really exciting. The programmers are doing a great job of these algorithms, and they sound very natural. They sound a lot like the original boxes.
Why are you involved with the Intel artist program, and what does that mean?
One of the coolest things about Intel is there's this incredible overlap for me between the PC and the Mac world. I live in both, so I was really excited when they approached me to be one of the music representatives. A very exciting thing for me, and it's a great bunch of people, too. I have people that are friends for years over there that have worked at a variety of different companies, like Rory Kaplan. So it's just a really good bunch of people, and I think that they understand and believe in what I'm doing, and I think what they're doing is great, too. So there's a lot of mutual, synergistic overlap in our interest.
How do you balance your live performance life with your film scoring and studio life? Do you have to be in very different modes to do each thing?
To me it's all just creative problem solving. Anything about music is just creative problem solving. How can I do something cool and effective that's just telling the truth, basically? It's just another way to slice up an age-old problem. How do I make 10,000 bodies move in a room? How do I make 200 people deeply feel this piece of film? Some of the problems are modern, but on a deeper level, we're addressing something that's pretty timeless: how to move people with a visual, how to move people with sound. You put different hats on, for sure, but they're all related problems. Challenges, that’s another way of phrasing it.
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| BT |
Are you familiar with the history of Universal Audio?
To an extent, but not really.
Bill Putnam, Sr., built some of the early recording studios in Chicago and L.A. He built what's now Ocean Way and Cello (Cello is now East West Studios), and was known for studio design and creating--basically inventing the echo chamber, and doing some of the first multitrack recording. He started building compressors and consoles. Our preamps are based on his 610 console. When he died, his sons found all the original schematics, so they brought the company back to life, selling reissues of the vintage hardware, and then started doing modeling, the software emulations of those pieces.
That's awesome. That's amazing.
It's a family-run company in Santa Cruz, California. Everything is made in Santa Cruz, nothing is made in China.
That's wonderful. That's my vibe. I love it. You guys do terrific work, just great work. You guys should be really proud of what you're doing. Thanks so much, and take care.
You can follow BT’s tour schedule on his web site.