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Motherships and Satellites: The New Generation
To survive in the recording studio industry of today you must be sophisticated and have the talent to manage a business, whether you do it yourself or hire someone. There are motherships and satellites, and those midlevel studios in between. The big guys and the project studios have defined their niches. If you don't recognize their boundaries and understand their niche philosophies, you will probably get in trouble with one of these groups, in one way or another, as you inadvertently try to compete with them.
A “mothership” is a leading one-stop recording/postproduction professional service company in any geographically defined market. These are the big guys, and we all know who they are. A “satellite” is a law-abiding home or project studio whose professional owners perform some or many of the required recording/editing services for sound and/or picture, frequently for themselves more than for others. Often, they then either take or send the resulting product to a mothership recording studio/postproduction/film sound facility to complete what they feel cannot be done as well at their own facility. Also, motherships contract for services that the satellite is not qualified to perform, such as high-speed Internet and satellite transmittal of data, or recording overdubs or voice-overs with an artist in a different geographical location. A classic example of unique services that a mothership provides is access to the large recording area complete with acoustically isolated booths for acoustic instruments and vocals, and sometimes even drums and pianos.
Just to be sure that we use the proper industry jargon, the recording area is normally referred to as the “studio” to differentiate it from the “control room,” where the console and the outboard equipment are located. The control room is usually isolated from the studio by glass in order to maintain visual contact with the artist who is recording in the studio area. To complicate matters, if you refer to studio “A” in a given facility, it means both the recording area and the combination of the “A” control room and recording area. Separately, the control room is always referred to as: studio “A” control room. Got that?
Most of the time, the available project budget determines how much of the project can incorporate mothership services. Sometimes, the party who holds the purse strings for the project (record label, ad agency, multimedia or film company, and so on) determines which sound /visual functions will be created at the mothership and which can be provided by the satellite. In either case, the portions of the project (such as preproduction, composing, arranging, overdubs, and so forth) that get better with repetition but do not require the use of expensive equipment or recording in large acoustically treated spaces are being done much less expensively at the satellites. A classic example of work to be completed in a satellite studio would be voice-overs or vocal overdubs, guitar overdubs, or both, depending on the artist involved. To complete this work, which requires many repetitions to make it the “perfect take,” requires only a small physical space, proper sonic isolation, and very few microphones. The same logic would apply to demos of songs, or composing music that will later be made into a demo for someone who may later pay for the recording costs of the project, after listening to the demo sound presentation.
The motherships have the big consoles such as the SSLs, Sonys, and the AMS/Neves, the acoustical space in which to record real string sections, horns, and even full orchestras, using the vintage tube mikes, the LA-2As, and the 48-track digital machines, which their clients assume they own. The project satellite studios have the Mackie and Yamaha consoles, D-88s, Alesis ADAT tape machines, inexpensive outboard gear, and in some cases, in the upper level of the project studio world, Euphonix or Amek consoles costing $175,000-$300,000. They normally borrow or rent any exotic microphones or outboard equipment necessary for the project that they are working on. There is also the category of “home studio,” where an artist, editor, or producer/ engineer works only on personal musical projects, utilizing his or her own equipment, and so does not need the normal licenses and sales tax permits required to be a legal business.
The motherships also have the major clients, who listen to them and count on them to provide a consistently superior product. Most of the motherships’ clients have project/home studios of their own. One of their major problems is deciding how much of the recording budget they must spend outside of their own facilities (the old “make or buy?” decision) in order to ensure their own clients’ satisfaction with the outcome of the project they have been hired to complete.
A classic example of this is the artist/producer Herbie Hancock. He was one of the first to adopt hard disk rather than tape recording for all of its obvious nonlinear advantages, and also to purchase a relatively large Euphonix console for his home studio. On one particular album, after doing all of his electronic keyboard tracks and overdubs in his home, he went to a mothership to mix the album. He then went back home and remixed the album again himself on his own equipment. He liked his own mix better. The mothership studio had lost a mixing client. It's called progress.
Since the two camps, motherships and satellites, decided several years ago to try to work together, they are now interacting with each other and exchanging services. It's working! Full-service motherships are providing acoustically controlled recording and mixing rooms, high-speed Internet and satellite digital communications capabilities, advanced technical services, and acoustical advice for rent by the hour to the project/home studio. They also provide rental of exotic equipment, recording tape for sale, and the general know-how that the project owner may lack or just simply cannot afford.
In essence, the smart mothership understands that their former assistant audio engineer of yesterday may well be their client of today with his or her own project studio. Today's clients have different needs and wants than they had in the past. They are more sophisticated technically and understand more about the recording process than they did a few years ago. They still need help completing their recording projects—the difference is that now they knows what they need and where to go to find it, since they probably received their practical education in one of the mothership facilities.
The understanding of this dynamic concept by both the client and the mothership studio is crucial to the continued advances of the total audio recording process, and of the industry itself. Both parties should profit by perfecting the art of using each other's strengths to their mutual benefit. Ultimately, it will make the music better. The key is deciding who can provide which services most efficiently to make the finished master as fine as it can be, within the required budget and time restrictions. This applies whether the project is music, talk, jingles, long- or short-form television, or a full-blown film score.
Because some project studio owners still feel like clients, and in a few cases feel a bit sensitive about doing themselves what they used to contract for at the mothership facilities, it is most important that the relationship between the full-service facility and the personally designed project facility be transparently defined. It's called service. The project guys need specific help. They need to believe that the mothership, whose clients they are, is always there for them, anxious to provide any service they may require at any time. They also need to help the mothership by discussing the best way to interface what they are doing with the overall stipulated costs for the particular film, video, or music project they are working on. They may not be familiar with a particular format or interface requirement that—unless they take the time to check it out—could cost them a large amount of time and/or money to reconform, if they have mistakenly adopted the wrong audio format. That is one of the reasons the major facility is called the mothership.
This is also called communication. Let the other facility know what you need, and understand that it has other clients it must please as well. The client and facility must work together to achieve audio perfection. In that manner, both will be happy with the outcome of the project, and the music will be better because of the efforts of both parties. Cooperation—what a concept!