Music and podcast producer Lij Shaw is ordinarily to found in residence as the owner of The Toy Box Studio in East Nashville. But each summer he packs a trailer and heads 60 miles south of Nashville to a 700-acre farm. Here, with the help of a local farmer and an SSL AWS 948 SuperAnalogue console, he creates the now legendary Haybale Studio at the quirky Bonnaroo Festival.
The Bonnaroo Festival is known for its wide variety of music and comedy acts, and for an equally wide variety of music fans – all bound by a love for live music, and the event’s ‘be nice’ code. The humour that courses through this celebration can be spotted even in its venue names: The What Stage, Which Stage, Who Stage, This Tent and The Other Tent.
The Haybale Studio is equally individual, with a particular mission to record original arrangements and performances of music from the bands that are playing the festival. These recordings are a kind of ‘in-session’ document that aims to capture the mood of the fans, the bands, and the moment.
The Haybale name originates from a practical solution to the need for sound isolation – the studio is set up behind the Which Stage, bringing the noise of 85,000 fans and a very large PA. Sean O’Connell of Music Allies, who originally invited Shaw to set up a recording studio at Bonnaroo in 2005, was inspired by some large bales of hay in a nearby field, and asked Shaw if these could be used to soundproof the studio.
‘I said ‘yeah, that’s a perfect sound insulator,’ Shaw recalls. ‘Now we come and we park the trailer here, and then we bring in hundreds of bales of hay. They go all around the trailer, right up above the sides. When you look at the outside you just see a giant bale of hay with a couple of doors. ‘
What started as a small idea, has grown beyond all expectations. Originally a two-man operation recording a few bands on limited equipment, Haybale Studio now reckons to record three-song sessions with 40 bands over the festival’s four days.
‘We’ll have everything from all-night DJs like Deadmau5, Scrillex, Kanye West, rock bands, bluegrass... all sorts of stuff,’ Shaw says. ‘And that is reflected in the studio.’
In any hour, on any of the festival days, Haybale could be hosting anything from a couple of mics on a single guitar/vocal act, to a full-on rock band or a classical ensemble.
At the centre of this is an SSL AWS 948 console – ideally suited to the challenge: ‘This console does some incredible stuff,’ says Shaw. ‘This is like having a rocket ship in the studio. The sound, the tone of it, and the flexibility – and the fact that I can mix on it in real time. I’ve tried this with other mixers and I’ve tried to emulate this by mixing in the computer somehow. It’s just not possible...
‘The sound is awesome – it’s got punch, it’s got attack to it, the detail is incredible, and it’s so quiet. For me a lot of time is spent keeping everything else quiet to match how good the console sounds.’
To give Shaw the flexibility and speed he needs, tracks are routed to eight buses that are then sent for parallel compression and brought back into stereo returns, created by using the Stereo Mix mode available on all the AWS 948’s dual-path channel strips.
The mix gets passed on to Joe Hutchinson (Garage Masters, Nashville) who masters the tracks as the sessions are happening. ‘It’s just analogue live signal through the microphones, through the wires, through the console, through the outboard, straight down,’ Shaw says. ‘There’s a quality and purity to that sound... I’ll be damned if I can ever figure out another way to create that...’
Once mastered, the tracks are uploaded to a server, and are available to radio stations and other outlets all over the country. ‘It’s almost real time,’ says Shaw. ‘Within an hour that stuff is accessible and it’s getting aired on radio stations around the country. It’s a really cool way to bring people into Bonnaroo.’
For many recordings, there’s a video crew as well, creating a series of in-session videos, available via the Haybale website and on the Bonnaroo YouTube channel (Haybale Sessions playlists). However sophisticated the distribution though, Shaw has to make sure he always captures spirit of Bonnaroo – keeping the source true to the performance. The AWS 948 is key to that goal.
‘You can get really intense and fancy within the computer,’ he says. ‘It interfaces with Pro Tools if you want it to... But man, if you just want to run mics through it, and you want a mixer that is just a workhorse, that sounds killer, and works when you need it to... It works great for that too.’
