The Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine may be small—a full house means there's 200 in attendance—but the venue has hosted everyone from Lyle Lovett, Robert Cray and Marty Stuart to Ani DeFranco, Taj Mahal and Mary Chapin Carpenter. To ensure everyone can hear them properly, the facility recently upgraded its audio system with help from regional provider Klondike Sound, which opted to install a Fulcrum Acoustic PA.
More than 40 years ago, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded some of their breakthrough Born To Run album at 914 Sound Studios in the small town of Blauvelt, NY. They spent a lot of time there—so much that occasionally the band pitched a tent in the studio's backyard rather than drive home to New Jersey. Ultimately, however, they only used one song on the final album, opting to record the rest at The Record Plant in New York City. Still, if only a single song could make it to the finished LP, it was the right one: the propulsive title track. We all know what happened to Springsteen, but whatever became of 914 Sound Studios and its audio team?
"I have some scenes that recall some delay times, but otherwise, the board is pretty live—just a vocal delay and a tiny bit of parallel compression on the kit; that's it. All the dynamics come off the stage. When I first started, I was squashing stuff a bit; Robert [Smith] listened afterwards and said, 'We're playing hard here and it's not opening up.' So it went—no gates." —Paul Corkett, FOH engineer, The Cure
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