Counting all major US television and movie studios among its clients, as well as ad agencies in Hollywood, New York, Chicago and more than 60 countries worldwide, the Chicago Music Library has in excess of 60,000 tracks to licence. Constantly building on this resource, the company’s team of composers and engineers is constantly producing new tracks – adding to one of the world’s largest catalogues of classical music.
Key to the library’s recording session is Metric Halo ChannelStrip: ‘I use ChannelStrip every single day because it has a solid sound and everything I need, set up in exactly the right way,’ confirms Executive Music Producer, Robert J Walsh.
Walsh was the composer and music producer for the original Marvel Animation television series and features for 1982-1988 – including Spiderman, Transformers, GI Joe, Robotix, X-Men, and Defenders of the Earth among many. Previously, he was the Warner Bros Animation composer from 1979-1982 and then helped Stan Lee and Friz Freleng with animation scoring for TV and the internet.
‘Metric Halo ChannelStrip has a “sound”, and it’s the kind of sound that gives a track a well-defined heft,’ he continues. ‘Like a great hardware unit, it enables us to dial in exactly what we need quickly, without a lot of fuss. For example, the equaliser bands are easy to work with and give noticeable results with even a small boost or cut. I also use the compressor and limiter a lot and the controls are similarly responsive. But it goes a bit beyond the standard grab and dial routine somehow.’
The Chicago Music Library team recently acquired the rest of Metric Halo’s plug-ins (via the Production Bundle) and is becoming acquainted with Dirty Delay, HaloVerb, Precision DeEsser, TransientControl and Character signal path modelling. ‘I’ve already had a chance to use Metric Halo Dirty Delay quite a lot,’ Walsh reports. ‘I love the extra layer of edge and distortion that it has – it really puts things in a unique sonic space and gives a track personality. Like ChannelStrip, Dirty Delay’s interface is amazing.’
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