STUART ROSENBERG: My name is Stuart Rosenberg, and I'd like to welcome you to The League of Creative Musicians. This is the control room of the studio of The League, and we're happy to have you here.

One of the great challenges of producing recordings is making musicians comfortable in the studio, and the great trick to making musicians comfortable in the studio, in my experience, is making them sound to themselves as they wish to sound. So, the monitoring system that you're using is kind of critical to that.

Everybody has different needs. The rhythm section has different needs than the soloist, and the soloist has different needs, and the instrumentalists, and etc. etc. So, there has evolved in the world of studio recording the concept of personal monitor which allows each musician to have some control over what their hearing, and the system we use is the Hear Back System, which allows eight separate more "mes" as it were, eight separate channels that you can assign.

We do it to the aux sends, and we give each musician the ability to control the level of eight different instruments or sets of signal, and this provides each musician basically with the ability to hear more of themselves, which is what everybody wants to hear, and it makes life so much easier, so much smoother in the studio. It allows -- Really it allows for I think a higher quality of performance because everybody is more comfortable with what they're doing, and that's really a critical thing in the studio.

So, the Hear Back System, which is available via dedicated RG45 jacks throughout the entire facility, allow us to connect eight channels of audio plus a stereo signal, and route it any where in the facility, and each particular box allows for two headphones. You got two people in one box. We have enough boxes so basically everybody who's recording can get their own, which makes everybody really happy.

Configuring this with eight individual mono signals, you can also pair them up and you can have four pairs of signal, and then the other option you have is to add an auxiliary input. So for instance, if you're working on something and you want to play along with the track, you can do that. You can do a line out from the Hear Back System and you can supply a monitor speaker for instance. So, if we wanted, we can put this on stage for the musicians and they can adjust their own monitors, but giving musicians too much control sometimes adds a little time in the [SOUNDS LIKE] procedure so we only walk out with it-- There's also a limiter on here, which is useful if we want to use these for in-ear monitor so we can basically cap off the volume at a certain point.

So this works in conjunction with our routing system, and our routing system in the studio basically brings up every single input that we have everywhere in the facility into one central patch panel, so the stage, each one of the studios, even the restaurant comes up on our jack field over here and allows us to connect anything to anything else, and that's really the key to the functionality of the studio that we've designed. In other words, we can use this control room to control performance going on the stage for broadcast. We can use it to do remote recording obviously, but it also means we can use this control room to control a recording session taking place in either one of the two side studios or all three of the studios at once or allows us to route the signal so that we can use the side studios as control rooms for what's going on on the stage or for each other.

So, we can have a number of different things going on simultaneously. These rooms will also have to be recording rooms or set up to be editing rooms. They're set up to be mastering rooms, and they're a great place just to have a pizza and watch television. You know, you can use them strictly for social purposes as well.