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When it was time to build a new control room at Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi’s Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville, Florida, their long-time engineer Bobby Tis set out on a mission – to find the speakers that would become the centerpiece around which the room was built. After an almost year-long journey, he found what he was looking for in the ATC SCM300ASL Pro studio monitors.
Read on to learn about what drew Bobby to the ATC 300s, how they’ve been performing in the new space, what comprises the GRAMMY-winning musicians’ vocal and guitar signal chains, what’s in their mic locker, and more.
What was the vision for Swamp Raga Studio when it was set up?
We originally built Swamp Raga in 2007. Derek had been on tour with Eric Clapton all of that year and he wanted to build a place for his personal band to rehearse and get together – a clubhouse of sorts.
My father is an engineer and had been involved in many studio builds as a chief engineer around the New York area, so when Derek was conceptualising what he wanted to build for his band down here in Florida, we did some drawings for him, showed him what could be done, and went with that first plan for this space that was big enough to do both recordings and rehearsals.
That first plan was very DIY, but we ended up making some really great records here, and then last year, we put our new control room together. It’s a beautiful space and that's what brought the ATC 300s into our world.
Have there been any sessions at Swamp Raga that were particularly memorable?
There have been a couple of really, really great ones. Personally, there was one specific session around 2009 with Herbie Hancock that was really memorable for me. For his record "The Imagine Project", we re-recorded a song called "Space Captain" that was made popular by Mad Dogs & Englishmen. It featured Derek and Susan, along with Oteil & Kofi Burbridge, Herbie Hancock, and Vinnie Colaiuta.
I was young, about 27 or 28 years old at the time, and for me, recording these ridiculous talents was just such an incredible experience! And then to have all of them be such great people that I've kept in touch with all these years and are now considered friends… Looking back, that seems like one of the important sessions that has come through the room that really changed my outlook on the music business.
Besides that, some of my favorite sessions are any time we do stuff with producer/engineer Jim Scott. We have a lot of analog recording going on around here and Jim is a master of analog recording. Working with him on some of the early Tedeschi Trucks Band records really showed me a whole skill set that I knew I was capable of and he knew I was capable of. Those sessions had a profound impact on me as an engineer; it was amazing to learn from somebody who is such a legend in the business.
What drew you to the ATC SCM300ASL Pro studio monitors?
We conceptualized building this new control room right at the beginning of the pandemic and had started talking with some acousticians and my father (who helped us design the first place), and [studio designer] Fran Manzella, who ended up passing away during the pandemic, which was just awful.
After talking to those guys, I realized that I needed to first go and find the speakers that we were going to base this room around. It was not: “We're going to build the room and then make the speakers sound good in it”; it was: “We're going to pick a set of speakers and then we're going to build a room” – and that's what we did.
I ended up going on an almost year-long speaker journey, listening to everything I could and learning everything I could about the major manufacturers.
One of the things that landed me on the ATC 300s was the soundstage – it is unmatched. It’s the top of quality in monitoring, there's no doubt about it, and I was listening to brands that are all in the top quality of what's available on the market.
Also, I felt like everything else I was listening to had a lot of DSP and correction needed to make them work in any space. We’re recording on an old Neve console, we use all analog outboard gear, we have tape machines…I wasn't really interested in having a whole bunch of DSP in front of my monitoring.
Our monitors are fed straight off our console and right to the ATC amplifiers. I know there's a little bit of crossover and processing in the amp but to me, it seemed like the least destructive and most analog path to the transducer. And like I said, I love the soundstage of the ATC, so with those two things in my mind it was an easy choice.
What are your thoughts on the transparency and sound reproduction of the monitors?
We've had them up and running in our control room for about four months now and I don't think these things can be understated. We have ours flush mounted into our plenum wall – I know that ATC recommends this, and everything is installed the way that ATC asked us to.
Once we turned the speakers on, they were everything that I wanted them to be. The detail on the high end is incredible, and they go down – I haven't felt the need for a sub yet. We don't do a lot of electronic music or anything, and our engineering staff is small and on the same page, so we haven't really needed subs with our 300s.
It’s been nice to know that everything I'm listening to is coming from just one or two point sources and I don't have other phase things to worry about. So I feel like all the features that are talked about in the paperwork of the 300s hold up one hundred percent. It’s about as full range of a main speaker as I've ever heard, and there are no holes either – it's smooth. I think ATCs are very special speakers, in general.
Some people have commented that they feel less ear fatigue when working with ATCs. Has that been your experience as well?
Yeah, that has been my experience with them as well. I'm in my space right now where I have the ATC SCM25A Pro Mk2s, that I've been on for a long while. I first discovered them in Nashville and had been wanting to try them out. I used them on a session and was letting roughs leave the room with the artists, and they were like, “Dude, the roughs are incredible!”
Eventually, I got outside of the studio and listened to one of the roughs and thought, “Man, it really does sound good!” [Laughs] All of a sudden, my rough mixes were translating without effort! That was sort of what sent me down the ATC wormhole. I was like, “Okay, wait a second, everything I do through these translates in less time.” For me, that’s important as a working engineer – you've just shortened my work time.
There's another thing related to the ear fatigue point, which is that I can work at a lower volume with the ATCs and still hear the reactiveness of the transducer. There’s something about the ATC speaker that makes it alive at a lower volume, which definitely allows me to work longer and get less fatigue.
I was going to ask about how easy it was to tailor the ATC 300s to your space, but since you mentioned that you’ve tailored the space to the ATC 300s, tell us a bit more about that process.
Absolutely! Once we settled on the 300s, we started looking at their specifications for placement and we actually kept our main monitors sort of low – we didn't soffit mount them up high, we didn't want a double angle. Ours are flat soffit mounted into the wall just above our console height, probably about 49 inches off the ground. We went with a bunch of math done by my father, Bob Tis, to figure out exactly the percentage of trapping we were going to need within the room with these speakers at a certain amplitude. We picked an amplitude in the middle, probably considered a little high for long-term listening, but right in the 90s, and we started basing things off of the information we had in front of us.
Once we had the speakers, we put them in the room before we finished the final surfaces, before fabrics went up, before all of that… So we were playing around with the speakers in an open room with access to our acoustic treatments and we had also left some places in our soffits for porting if it was needed.
Then we spent a few days with some measurement microphones, moving them around the room to understand what certain acoustic treatments were doing to our space. Piece by piece, we started dialing it together.
We had some smart people giving us good advice and it really wasn't too hard to get the speakers to sound great. They sounded great from the second we turned them on and it was really all about: “How can you get the room to handle that better?” That was sort of the game we played.
Listening to your process, it feels like this is how you should do it.
I believe that’s how you should do it! [Laughs] My father, and initial talks with Fran Manzella, led us down that path; they said: “The best thing we can do is start with what you're going to be listening to – the speakers!” It was a learning moment and it seems to have paid off. I love it!
How do recordings/mixes on the 300s translate to other systems?
In all honesty, I haven't gotten many mixes out the door on the 300s yet, but I did print some roughs last week and brought them home and they sound exactly like I expected.
Consistently, everything that leaves my space from the 25s sounds as I intend it and that's great. I haven't found many other monitors where I can take things out to my car and they sound better than I thought they were going to.
With speakers like the NS10s, people always talk about being able to place midrange and all these types of things, and I find those attributes to be very true within the ATC 25s as well but I still have a hi-fi stage, so I feel like I have the detail of the midrange and I get to listen to something that sounds a little cooler.
Specifically in terms of the music that the Tedeschi Trucks Band makes – how do the ATCs fit in that world?
Their music is really just American music. They're playing rock and roll, jazz, blues, gospel… they’re an American band. It's a very organic thing, we like things to sound real for the most part, and I feel like ATC embodies that as a brand. It feels real from the second you put signal into it.
This is only four or five months in for us, but I feel like I can hear all the way around my sounds, and a lot of that has to do with moving into a different space too, but the ATCs are a hundred percent a part of that.
I now have a soundstage and a room that go together in a way that I feel like I can see around sounds. It's a great feeling to be like, “I can really inspect this”. [Laughs] It’s so pleasing and fun to listen to and it’s fun to play for other people!
What was it like working with Vintage King to purchase the ATC 300s?
It was just post-COVID that we started working with VK on this. We’re working with Cody Angel and the folks at TransAudio.
I happened to be in Nashville on another project, and I took a day off and went around to a bunch of studios with the representative from TransAudio. We listened to everything, and that's when I knew it was the ATC 300s for us. I think I listened to them at Blackbird Studio A – they were angled soffit mounted there, which I didn't love, but everything about the tone of the speaker stood out.
When you're buying main monitors, demo pairs aren't really a thing; you do have to have a rep who's willing to do the legwork and find you speakers to listen to, and it was Vintage King and Cody who made all that happen. For me, it was just a phone call – it didn't take me much effort at all – and I just happened to get myself to Nashville because I was doing something else there. Vintage King really made it a joy to buy, no question.
What are some of your favorite pieces of outboard gear at Swamp Raga?
We have some really, really beautiful vintage Universal Audio 175Bs. One of them is usually involved in my vocal chain, and also in Derek's guitar chain. Besides that, we have a really great assortment of 1176s of all different types and shades.
I also have this one piece that's made by Mercury Audio – it's an original Mercury 66 Studio Limiting Amplifier, which is a Fairchild 660-type device. They're built beautifully! I call it ‘the overdub killer’. If you need an overdub to cut through it all, at the end of your tracking day, this will do it; it puts things together unbelievably.
It is very, very 660-like but one of the best things is that they moved the bias knob that's on the back of a Fairchild to the front on this, so you can control the amount of saturation at any compression level, which is nice. It changes the knee a little bit, but it really is useful and I find it to be one of the most tailorable pieces of gear to get something to be important in a mix, without parallels and all sorts of other things.
We have some great Neve compressors in our console that I always take for granted – the 2254s and the 32264s – but they are incredible. I end up using them on drums, so I feel like they just end up sitting on busses and I forget that they're doing such a magical thing.
Take us into your mic locker.
We have a couple of really special things, one being this late ‘50s/early ‘60s Telefunken U47. It came out of Battery Studios in New York and it's got a cool plaque on it related to who donated it to the studio; it's got all this cool history behind it.
When we first got the U47, we weren't a hundred percent sure; we had been tracking Susan on a Telefunken ELA M 251, which has a very big low end to it, so we always kind of thought that that would be the realm. Then we got this microphone and, for some reason, it has a connection to Susan’s voice or something; when she sings into it, it just sounds like a picture of her standing in front of you. So that has become her vocal mic and it's become very special to us. We do everything we can to protect and maintain it.
We also have a lot of vintage RCA ribbons. I think we're sitting on two 44s, and three 77-Ds at the moment, along with a BK-5, which is the original shotgun microphone RCA made – I think it was made for old Western movies for capturing gunshots! [Laughs]
I use them a lot as character microphones. I feel like you can put up the normal mic that you would plus one of these, and as long as you can get the phase alignment to be happy, you're always going to have this little fader with a bunch of character on it.
We have three Altec 639Bs – they have a dynamic and a ribbon in the same microphone and it's blendable. As you tilt the microphone, it determines how much ambient room I'm getting, while the dynamic part of it is still getting direct signal. So it feels like I've got two mics in one with these 639s and I've found some interesting things to do with them.
We also have all the normal stuff, like the Neumann KM 184s, Shure SM57s and 58s. I'm a big fan of the AKG D12 so we have four of those around. I'm not a complicated person but once I find something I really like, I always have a couple of them. That’s another Jim Scott-ism that has come to me: anything that's worth having one of is worth having two of. [Laughs]
Do you have a go-to signal chain for recording, or do you use something different every time?
For Susan’s vocals, the first thing is usually the Neve 1081 preamp on our console, but a significant amount of the time I will use an API 512 line input into that 1081 instead, just for the EQ, and then I'm usually, post fader, feeding her through the 175B, whose output is then usually hitting the cleanest of my 1176s and then hitting tape, so there's a double compression going on. I will say that both of those compressors are doing just a tiny little bit, and the main compression will come in later when we're mixing, or sometimes if I want to hear it right away, I'll put it on my monitoring path. For the most part, I try to not over squish things while we're recording.
I find the 175 being a soft tube thing first, and also, it's also got an incredible amount of clean gain within it, so that allows me to keep the mic pre maybe one click lower than I normally would, which stops it from distorting. As vocalists get going, they might get louder and louder, so they might just hit one line really hard, so to prevent those things from being distorted to tape or to the recorder, I like to keep that a click lower and use the gain on the compressor to get me a little hotter to the recorder on the first 175, and then I'm usually looking for that to just tickle the gain reduction and then I boost it the rest of the way with the 1176.
During normal moments, I'm looking for no compression on that last 1176 and on hard notes, I want to see it. It's just a little bit of a balancing act, but that's generally my tracking chain for Susan. We sprinkle little bits of plate reverb into the cans and into our return, but Susan’s not a vocalist that’s like, “I need to be drenched in reverb”; we use just a little bit.
With Derek's guitar chains for recording, it's actually pretty similar. With Sue, by the way, it's usually her U 47 or 251, but for Derek and his guitar amp, I don't stick with one set of mics. I've been recording him for so long that I feel like that would be vanilla and boring, so I change the mics up on him a lot. I guess if there's one thing that is mostly always in the mix, it would be either an RCA 44, a Royer 121 (if he's playing a very loud amp), or a Coles 4038. There's always a ribbon involved, and then I'll usually pair it up with a dynamic like a 57 or a 421. Sometimes it'll be a Beyerdynamic 160 and then a Neumann U87 or U67 – I find that to be a really cool combo when I'm looking for really pretty and clean things.
The microphones may change around a little bit, but I usually have two mics on the desk going through a bus; post fade, that hits the 175B and sometimes I use the LA-2A on him and sometimes no compression at all.
The deal with Derek is really just a great, clean blend. We are usually close mic’d but I do record a lot of room in addition, so I'll have a stereo room next to his track and we'll keep them grouped together. Sometimes, I’ll set up another completely different room situation and even get nerdy with my tape measure, making sure I'm working with prime numbers and things like that.
I'm always trying to make the picture of his guitar the way he thinks it should be, and a lot of the time he doesn't want to hear the close speaker – he wants to hear what he's hearing standing in the space 12 feet from his cabinet or whatever, so I’ve played around with that too over the years. It’s like, “Put the microphone where he's standing!”
For the most part I usually come up with a good room scheme at the beginning of a record and we'll just stick with it. I hear a lot of people say that leakage is a gift and this is sort of a controlled version of that. [Laughs] I always have the leakage if I want it.
There’s so much greatness coming out of Derek’s amplifier and Susan's vocal, that these things are really easy. That goes back to more advice I was given along the way, which is that every great recording sound starts with a great source and if you have that, it makes everything else easy. So there's a lot of that that I benefit from – they make it so easy by providing amazing sources.
How do you feel about plug-ins?
I don't! [Laughs] That's not true, I use plug-ins just like any other tool. I don't want to sound snobby; I think they are an incredible way to get gear in front of people that can't normally get it.
If I’m at my own mixing space at home and not able to just go down the street and take things out of Swamp Raga, I use some plug-ins to make things happen. I do have a good amount of outboard gear around the most important things, but there are plug-ins that can be so useful, easy, and safe with your session.
There are plug-ins that I like and I'm getting to a point where there are ones I love to have around. As far as my favorite stuff goes, I'm a Brainworx guy; I really like a lot of the Plugin Alliance stuff. I've gotten into the Seventh Heaven reverb as well, which is really great. For reverbs and effects, I'm almost all in the box at home at this point – aside from my plate and spring reverbs – but almost everything else is sends off my console back into Pro Tools through aux inputs.
It’s amazing because my desk has Tangerine on it here, so it stores all of my session data into my Pro Tools session. It couldn't be better, and once I've found things like the Seventh Heaven Reverb, which is the Bricasti M7 model, I don't have to sit here and remember where my M7 was and I've got as many instances of it as I want.
Plug-ins help streamline my workflow and being able to work in a timely manner is important. There are many benefits to the plug-in world and while I am a bit of an analog gear snob, I like to use it all. Being willing to do it all is what it takes – there are no ‘nos’ in this business.
What's a typical day in the studio like for you?
My team and I are at the studio around 11 am, and the band is usually in around noon. We try to base things on ten-hour days, but sometimes we're still here at 11:30 pm or midnight, depending on what's going on. As a producer or engineer, you have to be willing to pull that extra hour if you're in the middle of something, and know which nights you do that and which nights you don't.
Everybody has what we call their ‘little world’ in the studio that they're set up in, so we go in and clean up everybody's little space – tidy up cables and all of that – before anybody walks into the building. We make a pot of coffee, and then I try to meet with the artist or the producer – whoever's got say on what we're going to get into that day – so that I'm prepared when the band walks in, if I haven't had the conversation the night before already, which is usually what happens. Once we get that done, we know what we're working towards, and it's really just about making ourselves ready.
I like to work with speed. I have experience in touring and I feel like that makes me very fast in a recording studio compared to a lot of folks. I hate when an artist has to wait for something or I have to say, “Yeah, give me 20 minutes”. So my day is about making sure that me and my guys are on it – how do we make things happen fast? You never want to kill the momentum of an artist.
Are you working on any exciting projects right now that you're able to talk about?
We're just beginning work on a new Tedeschi Trucks Band record, so we’re all excited about that. The whole band is very excited to be back in this new space. We've done some overdubbing and some little sessions here in the past few weeks, but we thought that it was proper that TTB make the first recordings in the new space.
All photos by Bradley Strickland.
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