|
|
Juan-Pablo Quezada - Santuario Sonico
|
|
Located in Santiago, Chile, Santuario Sonico is one of the leading music studios in the country. With his fingers on the pulse of the local music scene, engineer and producer Juan-Pablo Quezada is going from strength to strength, enjoying success with local artists in a market that has to compete with international pop. Over 100 albums have been recorded at Santuario Sonico, many of which have won prestigious awards including several Altazor prizes (Chilean award for the film and music industry). More recently, the album "Cambio De Estacion" by Muza has been the winner of the 2006 Independent Music Award for Dance/Electronica Album of the Year. We caught up with Juan-Pablo shortly after the recording of Cambio De Estacion.
 Juan-Pablo, please tell us a little bit about yourself to start with. How did you get into engineering and owning a studio. Are you an engineer by training? A musician?
Music has been dear to me since I was a kid. I guess I was particularly impressed by my father's new stereo when I was seven, not just by the music but also by the power of sound. I was irresistibly attracted to knobs and instruments. I used to think that recording studios were the coolest place to be (after the star trek command deck, of course). So I finally overcame my fear of maths and went to sound engineering school.
How big an operation is Santuario Sonico? And who is on your team?
It’s not big or fancy, but a quiet and nice place to be. It’s located in a neighbourhood where you just listen to the birds, no traffic, no hurry. The same building is also shared by Madreselva Studios, mainly focused on folk music. The team is quite a family (actually) as my brother and my cousin (the only female Soundscape user I know) collaborate as assistant engineers. We all have musical backgrounds but focus on engineering.
I see that you have recorded and mixed over 100 albums. Have you ever wanted to diversify? Or was it always your ambition to only work in music?
My career started in post, music for TV and radio commercials (well I actually started making coffee and gathering cables, but that sounds less glamorous). Those were years of frantic activity, which was a good “ninja editing and mixing” training. But music has always been my passion, so at some point I ran away from the world of advertising and never looked back.
There are no more than 10 studios in this whole country that are exclusively dedicated to music recording, so I consider this craft a blessing and enjoy every working day.
I must say, I've been playing Muza's "Cambio De Estación" in a continuous loop. I find it totally absorbing an beautiful, even though it's not the kind of music I normally listen to, and even though my Spanish is rusty… it's amazing to know how quickly you recorded this album. Please tell us how you went about the recording process.
 100 hours is quite standard here, budgets are always too short….. but you learn to live with that and try to do your best!
Anyway in this case it was no trouble at all. Sol Aravena (Muza’s composer and singer) had already composed and sequenced every song. She is not only a very talented composer but also a great singer, most of the vocal tracks were done in no more than three takes.
The drums (although it fits the electronic genre, the whole album has real drums in it) were played by Felipe Candia in just one day, which is quite an accomplishment because he had never listened to the songs before.
And Juan Caballero, the bass player, broke the records doing all of his parts in one morning.
So after this amazing display of talent from the musicians, I had plenty of time for some additional synth programming, some guitar playing with my stiff fingers and finally mixing.
You say there was not actually a producer, just the artist and yourself helping… how, then, do you define the role of a producer?
I would say that 80% of the albums recorded in Chile don’t have a “producer” as defined by the international industry, but most of the time here the engineers are in that position where you are just “outside” of the composing/performing role, so you can actually see things with a bit more perspective. This can easily turn into an actual co-production between the artists and you, even when it’s not officially stated.
How do you feel about the album receiving the 2006 Dance/Electronica Album of the Year Independent Music Award?
It’s a real honour. Making a living from music here, in South America, is like swimming against the current, as the market is very small and we are somehow isolated, so getting and award from people that are thousands of kilometers away is really something encouraging for us.
You are clearly very busy. How do you choose the projects you work on? Do you have artists calling you all the time? Is it about artistic affinities… or just availability?
Luckily the studio is booked all the time, and this has given me a lot of experience. We learn from our mistakes and I’ve made plenty of them, so now I finally know what NOT to do!
I’m not so famous that I can choose the projects I work on (but even the most famous recording engineers here couldn’t do that), and it’s rarely about artistic affinities.
On the other hand, I love music in general and think it’s a great challenge to learn the sound of a music genre. Reggae, rock, pop, flamenco and classical musicians have all become my friends, and like to come and play here.
I have the “Taxi theory”, in this theory, musicians and producers tell the engineer where they want to go, and the engineer carries them in the softest, fastest and nicest way he can… and hopes they had a nice ride.
Have you always used Soundscape at Santuario Sonico?
Yes, when starting the studio I had the chance to test ride an SSHDR-1 for a week, it was so solid compared to the DAW owned by the studios I worked in, that it was actually love at first listen.
What kind of benefits does Soundscape bring to your sessions?
Speed (I’ve had clients laughing because edits were done before they had time to actually ask for them), reliability (the studio charges by the our and we don’t want to apologize for losing time with crashes) and sound (it’s not only a very transparent sounding system, but it’s always been complemented by very good sounding converters).
And there are some unique things I could never live without:
- A Mixer that allows anything, with no restriction to your most insane mixing ideas.
- This latency free environment where you can actually use a multiband compressor in the drummer’s headphone mix (for his complete happiness!)
What is your current Soundscape setup and how is it integrated to your studio? And do you also mix in Soundscape?
I have a Soundscape 32 fitted with a Mixpander 9 and I/O 896 converters. This is enough for me for recording and mixing. Even if the studio had a nice mixer, I believe it would only be used for tracking. The “analog summing obsession” hasn’t got me yet.
What are your projects for the future? And will you work with Muza again?
I would really like to work with Muza again, we complement each other very well and people seem to like the combination (we had a four times platinum album for another project we worked on together). In the near future I’ll be completing an album with Francesca Ancarola, a tribute to Victor Jara (a legendary composer who was killed during the long lasting dictatorship we had). It’s an album that can easily bring you to tears, even if you don’t understand the lyrics. I'll also be recording vocals for the next Pedro Foncea’s album and in the meantime Carlos Perez (one of the best classical guitar players in Chile) is recording two parallel guitar albums, and then 3xLuka Big Band, and then….. well music never stops, engineers are so lucky!
|
More inFocus articles
| Back to the homepage
|