Introducing "Studio HD" new addition of StarMount Studio

Things were moving fast in the studio and it has been a while since our last update. 

With much delight, we're introducing the well equipped "Studio HD". Its a vocal-centric recording facility that we have packed in different colors of mic pres and gathered one of the best AD/DA converters in the industry for the one that matters most - vocals. 

The Studio can do up to 12 tracks simultaneous recording, to cater for drums and other instruments recordings. 

The live room is really "live" as we would want to have a more open sound as compared to the ones we already had. It offers a breath of fresh air and we love it after listening to the tracks recorded in the room. Its natural, and sits in the mix easily without much need of an reverb to live up the vocals. 

Its all about the fun of recording and experiment in this new Studio HD. 

The best part is, our main objective for this studio is to make it very affordable so that you can have more time to track your vocals, which is the most important element in the song. 

Its officially available to all starting November 3rd and please do drop us an email for bookings and enquiries. 

Gears List at the moment:

Pro Tools HD8 with Waves Platinum pack and more.

Lavry Blue AD/DA

RME ADI-8 QS AD/DA

Tree Audio Branch

Chandler Limited TG2

Audient ASP008

Audient Centro

Yamaha MSP 7

Our new favorite place.

New room, new sound. Love it.

Violin Recording for "Black Martini"

We set up the session early in the morning as we were having a session in real time with our "day and night different time zone" counter part from the states- incredibly talented Joe Johnson.

JZ 11 is our go to microphone these days. Apart from its friendly pricing, it is such a utilitarian microphone that offers the right amount of sonic character for vocals and other musical instruments.

The low mids are tight and the highs are well controlled without much bumps, thus we need not to worry about dipping the sibilance. And we turned to the Porticos for the warm and silky string sound. I would say the mic pre is very musical and surprisingly Mr Rupert Neve has done a very good job on the 5043 compressor. It just gives us the tonal character we wanted easily- musical. We do admit that the pres are not as tight on the low end, but the Silk mode made it up for strings instruments and we particularly love it on the piano. 

We're honored and grateful to have talented people coming into the studio. Great music, great vibe. Click here for some clips from "Black Martini".

Listening to Joe on the other side of the globe.

Tools of trade

Dalang Post Production and Sound Mixing @StarMount Studio

WeFilm has brought their new independent film "Dalang" to StarMount Studio for post production and stereo sound mixing.

Music was scored by one of the prominent avant garde composer -Yii Kah Hoe. The artistic value was elevated more when the music was paired to the picture. We couldn't stress more about how important audio instills "life" into the video, so we did what we can to guide the audience through the story telling process. 

Our biggest challenge is always in cleaning up the dialogs from the location recordings. Phase reversal and a few more noise reduction/ restructuring plugins were essential and sometimes "life saving". The whole movie was carried by the music and conversations, so we kept foley and sound design at minimum. 

We used sE 4400 and JZ V11 for the ADR. They both have similar character but the V11 has become our favorite go-to microphone for voice over applications. It has a darker tone while maintaining good amount of body on the mids and low mids. Sibilance were much controlled on the V11 compared to the sE4400 which has more top end, less low mids. 

Audient Zen mixing console. 

Steve Long-Director

Maestro Yii Kah Hoe

HeyMun and Chern Hui @StarMount Studio

The talented singer songwriter is based in Sydney Australia, coming back to KL for a short trip. So it was supposed to be a drop by and say hi trip, but we were all excited to try out some microphones-Telefunken AR-51, JZ V67 and JZ J1 (thanks to Soundbuz for their high standards and relentless support), and a new DAW-Pyramix.

We have heard how Pyramix are known for their superior sonic quality, just that its not as widely used by the commercial studios. Thanks to Stagetec Asia and Merging Technologies, we got the Horus with premium ADDA to try out along with Pyramix Masscore system.

This is an impromptu session and the duo liked the idea. Without much delay, HeyMun had her Taylor acoustic guitar tuned while Chern Hwei was already on the resin for his violin.

We had the duo in the same room, 6 ft away from each other. We used the Telefunken AR51 on the vocals, and V67 for acoustic guitar. The violin was done with our favorite sE RT1 Tube Ribbon (great cinematic strings tone with the mic)

So, that was the first studio session for "Hail", a new original from Heymun about friendship. The performance was magical and we're very happy to be able to capture the moment. Pyramix is amazing, and its true that the sonic quality is of very high fidelity and natural. And we're liking it every second we're on it.(not a good sign)

The whole session was done in a default setting:192khz set at 32 bit. And only going through the Horus micpre and AD. We were amazed by how balanced and natural the mic pres could produce, and the headroom was huge.

Everyone was excited and with much delight to hear what was being recorded. We were using the Lavry Blue all this while and the Horus got the upper hand with a huge margin in terms of clarity, fullness and headroom.

Again, it opens up the discussion about recording/ operating beyond 96kHz. To us, listening is believing and we were impressed by this new system from Merging Technologies. Drop by the studio for your own AB comparison. We would like to have more ears to tell us that we're not "hearing things" in the studio or its the "new gear hype" that we are going through right now.

HeyMun 

Chern Hwei

Beautiful Duet

Jumero @StarMount Studio

You love them on live performances and now Jumero has hit the studio for their first studio release. We like the vibe of the band and decided to work together towards their first EP.
Much thought and effort has been put into this production and we're gonna make sure that it gets the most attention as much as possible. We love to host talented musicians and they're really good in what they are doing, writing songs and having fun.
We like the fact that the band is open to experiment on sounds and approach the songs differently. Exploring different sounds like using coins as triangles, using different unconventional mics for vocals, and we had one track all done with ribbon tube microphones (we like it very much). And the most precious thing is we all learnt from each other and grew as a team. Looking forward to the outcome of this project.

Jared, Ryan and Michael at StarMount Studio

The First Step.

Making the first step is always crucial. We've been extra careful when dealing with audition clips/ tapes session. As this will be their first impression to get into competitions or their favored university. And we are delighted to have feedbacks from clients that they got through the competition or got offered a place to further their studies.

Mainly we were commissioned for piano and vocal recordings. But we did have cello, violin and trombone recordings as well. Regardless of musical instruments, we went full out as if its an album production. Our approach is to capture the most natural, undoctored performance and also making sure that the video looks good too. (very important and yes, we do offer video recording as well).

So, drop us a mail to enquire when you're ready to make the first step :)

Tribute To Yao Min Rehearsal @ StarMount Studio

WVC Trio+ 1 was rehearsing for "Tribute to Yao Min", organized by Han Production and lead by one of Malaysia's top vocal talent/ artise Yang Wei Han. The idea was to rehearse the songs, do the rundown from top til end and most importantly get them recorded. This was good for the other artistes/ singers that couldn't make it for the rehearsal and be able to know whats going on and rehearse by themselves.
Although it was just a rehearsal session, we prep it up like a recording session that the client could use the material for further release.
The band was great to work with and we hook the signals through the Audient Zen, which so far its the best option to get a balance overall band sound when tracking together. After so many matching and pairing, we found that using the same line/ character of pres and A/D converters contributes to the "one-ness" or the coherence in between instruments.

Wei Han coordinating with music director Cher Siang.

Mee Eng and Suan

Music Director.

KJ Wong

Julian Chan

AJ Pop Shuvit