AX32 Does Double Duties at Blackburst Lydteknik

We met Frederik Rosenkjær at his base, which is a combined studio and warehouse facility, where his live sound rigs are stored. And that last part does take up a bit of space, so when the opportunity arose to buy a house with a warehouse in the back, he made the move from Copenhagen to Hillerød, which is some 40 kilometers north of the city.

“I guess for most people, that big building in the backyard would be a drawback and mostly be in the way, but for my needs, it was just perfect,” Frederik Rosenkjær says.

Inside the building, he then built a dedicated studio, as well as a pretty big drum box – it turns out that Frederik is a drummer and that he has an extremely well-equipped drum kit that needs a ‘pretty big box’!

“While my sound engineering education was mostly about studio work, I do see some quite concrete upsides to mainly doing live sound gigs today,” Frederik explains.

“For instance, I do enjoy that a live sound session has a fixed timeframe. You know exactly when you’re done and unless there is also a multitrack recording session from that gig that needs post production, you’re done at the end of the night.

In the studio, artists’ creativity may peak late at night and a session that you had actually finished may appear at your doorstep again for remixing or retakes later down the line. But having said that, I still do love the studio sessions as well!”

I also love that I have total recall on everything and that there is minimal latency to and from any source on the network. The AX32 is indeed my centerpiece in any situation – live or in the studio.”

Also central to his Dante-based systems are Yamaha CL live consoles and a PCIe Dante interface to the computer in the studio, and speakers from Danley Sound Labs are also connected to the network in the studio as well as live. When recording live sessions where latency is no issue, he simply uses Audinate’s Dante Virtual Soundcard along with his AX32.

For headphone monitoring, Frederik uses Klang Technologies’ solutions, which includes several KLANG:vier headphone preamp and KLANG:fabrik units. In fact, he has recently recorded an entire big band where everyone received his or her own individual 3D headphone mix, connected to the Dante network.

The Klang system is also used for live productions, including concerts, theater and musicals, and for this purpose Frederik simply bought a bunch of pre-owned iPads that were fine for running the Klang app so that each musician would be able to create his or her own mix.

In the studio, Frederik decided to use the Reaper DAW: “I actually continued to use hard disc recorders well into the DAW era, but I knew all of the DAWs that were available at the time and eventually made the switch to Steinberg’s Nuendo.

However, when I came across Reaper there was just something that resonated really well with me. I think it was the simplicity. There is only one type of track and you can send audio between all tracks. I quickly realized that’s basically all I needed.

Also, Reaper is a 10 MB download or something like that, so I have often been in a situation away from my computer where I needed to quickly edit some audio files, and then Reaper is literally minutes away from download to installation on any computer and being up and running.”

For instance, I can record with a certain selection of microphones, but if I miss something or want to go in a different direction during the mixing session, I can easily try out the piano part with different – or additional – mics, playing back the MIDI track to the piano. It’s like re-amping a guitar or bass track, but with an acoustic grand piano.

I also had a band in the studio once where the lead singer was also playing piano, and he was used to – and therefore most comfortable with – playing and singing at the same time.