Section chair Dan Mortensen opened the meeting, and had everyone attending briefly introduce themselves. PNW vice-chair Steve Turnidge, the meeting coordinator and sometime collaborator with Endino, noted that The Recording Academy also presented Jack Endino a month earlier in the same place for a general talk, but promised more tech this evening, then introduced him.

Jack Endino has hundreds of albums to his credit over the last 20 years, including work with Nirvana and Soundgarden. He told of his start in the 80s after earning a BSEE degree from the University of Washington in power engineering and working at Puget Sound Naval Shipyards. At the time, he used an analog 8 track and edited with razor blades, of course. Today, he recounts how historic this seems, as students and writers now try to contact him for advice on term papers and articles about those heady days. He noted that he has put answers to most of these questions on his website, www.jackendino.com.

Fame led to job offers as a free-lance producer/engineer. In 1993 the Brazilian band Tet?s (in English, Titans), contacted him, and he now has done 5 albums with them. The band is huge in Brazil, and he described his summer of 2005 in Rio doing sound recording for an MTV/Brazil live surround DVD and stereo CD. He said that in Brazil, the CD market is shrinking due to piracy, which can account for 70% of CD sales. Popular bands will now release DVDs, as they are harder to pirate. He described the outdoor, made-for-TV event on an old island fortress in Brazil. Shoreline CC provided a 5.1 system and video projector to play the full sound and video from the DVD.

Jack continued with details about the elaborate production, showing his slides and some finished DVD footage. Two shows were performed, allowing edits. As an outdoor show, he counted on no natural reverb. Noisy helicopter shots were planned. He had little experience in surround mixing at that point. He was able to use a microphone pointed at the audience and a mike pointed at a rock wall for some ambience during mixing. He took the multitrack recordings into ProTools, and described some of the problems encountered and his solutions. Jack felt that 20-30 audio samples offset was enough to see lip synch problems. One useful trick was recording direct tracks of the guitars. The original guitar tracks were recorded through guitar amplifiers and wireless mikes, sounded slightly different each performance, and couldn't be intercut. By using a recorded direct track replayed through a guitar amp and wireless mike he could recreate that track with the proper sound for some fixes. Similarly, he had to use the same wireless vocal mike system to redo vocal tracks due to the distinct sound of the wireless system.

Jack went on with a potpourri of anecdotes, including:

• A photo of him working in 1988, on a Ramsa 20 channel board and the Otari 8 track used for Nirvana's "Bleach."
• Some stories of working in Mexico City and dealing with frequent power blackouts during recording.
• A project in Portugal in a studio built near a junkyard - with marble floors as the first acoustical problem.
• Stopping an artist from throwing his session tapes into the creek at Bear Creek studios.
• Recording the band "Elevator" in a New Brunswick basement studio built in a strip club.

Then came some comments on equipment. He said that the big mixing consoles always seem to have many switches that are bad. He feels some EQ plug-ins on ProTools are far better than the large console analog EQ, and that automated large format mixers should become obsolete soon, due to software/hardware such as ProTools. He's now using ProTools for the whole mix and leaving analog board mixing. The software plugins are getting better for effects (compression, reverb, etc) and many are good. He does still use analog 2 inch when he feels it's needed.

Next came some random "rants," or what he calls, "Jack's Enemies of Civilization List.":

• knobs on software plugins?
• studios with the thermostat over tape machine?
• click tracks - the artificially perfect time removes emotion and causes editing problems for him.
• cassette decks - the speed and azimuth is always off.
• DATs
• studios with no ground lifters available, no pencil sharpener, no tools, and only a few working headphones.
• mastering loudness wars. Jack showed waveforms and played examples of the hotter average levels over the years, often leading to visible square waves. Dynamics are going away.

After a short break, door prizes were given out. Donated audio CDs and some audio manufacturer CD-ROMs from the recent AES convention were awarded to 11 lucky recipients.

The second half of the evening began with a question - how loud does he monitor?

He had problems before with bad tinnitis in the 90s, and did research at the American Tinnitis Association (www.ata.org). He made many lifestyle changes, now monitors very moderately, and his tinnitis is under control.

Next, he showed a favorite tool, the real-time analyzer (RTA). His are from Audio Control Industrial. He likes to get a visual aid to check his sounds, as sometimes it can be hard to hear something that the RTA might be showing. This led to a discussion of small room bass monitoring - does the wave die out? PNW Committee member Mark Rogers noted that the low frequencies in a small room works like a cavity - the pressure is even throughout the room, with no standing waves, no reverb. Jack noted that instruments in small isolation booths lacked bass unless the door was opened, or better yet, put in a bigger room. So how do you master or monitor in a tiny room? You have to get used to the room.

Then came the subject of bass amps. Why 10 inch speakers? He thinks most of the bass amps are poor, with high resonant frequencies. He likes 15 inch speaker cabinets.

Jack then described his use of mixing with "stems," or sub mixes. Previously, one might have needed different vocal up (louder) & down (softer) mixes, which were all mixed to tape - a waste of tape. Now he uses ProTools to mix with stems - subdividing the mix into parts. Since one needs to keep all processing, latencies, etc. the same for the mix, for something like a vocal up mix needed after the regular mix has been done, he makes another track of the vocal "stem," phase inverts it, and remixes it in to make altered vocal mixes. He also demonstrated just de-essing the vocal only with this technique.

A discussion of mastering houses asking for stems and doing the final mix as well as the mastering led to comments on mixing vs. mastering. Mastering, he feels, needs more objectivity than someone who did the tracking and mixing. But the line often blurs.

A few Q & A ended the evening:

• Do you use a mouse when mixing in ProTools? Yes. And he never uses the ProTools mix window.
• Tracking; he likes the traditional board for tracking and making the monitor mixes, etc. He doesn't use headphones.
• Audible difference he sees between ProTools and analog? It's huge, he said. Analog is not very flat, digital is more accurate. He showed his collection of frequency response plots on his website of many analog tape recorders. Tape is like an effect for him now.

Finally, Jack showed his pacific northwest studio directory on his website.

Special thanks to Steve Malott and his students at Shoreline CC for co-sponsoring this meeting and providing technical support.