Prairie Sun Staff Profile: Matt Wright, Staff Engineer

An East Bay native, Staff Engineer Matt Wright received his B.A. in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Beginning his Prairie Sun internship in 2005, Matt quickly fell into assistant engineering work, learning from such seasoned professionals as Oz Fritz, Allen Sudduth, Tim Green, Tom Size, Matt Kelley, Sean Beresford, and of course Mark "Mooka" Rennick. In the last two years, Matt has served as my assistant and "right-hand man" on numerous studio sessions, live sound jobs, and remote recordings.

For a young first engineer, Matt has already developed a substantial credit list, including work with the Boxcar Saints, Kate Van Horn, The Cannery, Acute, Jay Farrar, and The Abolitionists, among others. While not in the studio, Matt provides Prairie Sun a number of other valuable services, including gear maintenance, intern recruiting, and editing the Prairie Sun Newsletter you are now reading. :-)

Mooka's Notes:

As our subscribers know, I love to use this section of the newsletter to talk gear, and recently I've turned all of my gear-related thoughts towards microphones...

It started all over again with the acquisition of a pair of vintage, sequential serial numbered Neumann U67's. Absolutely lovely mics, but of course the first step with any vintage purchase is get them to an expert and check them over, do the routine maintenance, etc. This time, on the recommendation of engineer Sean Beresford, I decided to try mic guru Toby Foster in southern CA. I must say, working with Toby has been excellent, and most educational. Toby is one of those individuals who has discovered all of the places where Neumann made questionable component selections, had to compromise design based on market demands, or otherwise did not meet the high engineering standards their microphones tend to exhibit. His minimally-intrusive work on the 67's was such a pleasing sonic upgrade that I quickly had him perform similar work on our KM85's, and give my beloved U47 a routine checkup.

We also continue to work with our friend Tracy Korby in Nashville; he currently has one of my Korby KAT system capsules in the shop, which, when returned, will emulate the venerable Sony C800. Meanwhile, as my interest in classical recording continues to grow, I decided to invest in a stereo pair of DPA 4006-TL omni mics, complete with DPA's elegant stereo bar system. DPA, of course, is well-respected by classical recordists as an industry standard for their uncompromisingly accurate microphones, but I quickly found them useful on a pop session, recording our Baldwin piano, where they sounded absolutely huge.

I wish I could say that's all, but I can't. Back in our September 2007 Newsletter, I sang the praises of the Barefoot Sound MicroMain27s. While using them involved a short learning curve, when I began translating mixes done on them there was an immediate payoff. Often, mixes can sound amazing in a big control room and not so hot in the real world, but mixes done on the Barefoots simply work outside of the studio environment, perhaps better than with any speaker I have used in the past 30 years. The separation of lows, mids, and highs also gave me more detail and distinction in my mixes than I've been able to manifest with the rest of our monitor collection, which as our engineers know is quite substantial. I was lucky enough to meet the designer and owner of the company, and I can tell you that there will be more to come from Thomas Barefoot. If you remember, in September I predicted that they would quickly gain favor with our staff and visiting engineers. The speakers have proven so popular that I had no choice but to buy a second set! They are on a long waiting list, so I want to shout out to PK Pandey and Vintage King Audio for their help in procurring these cutting-edge tools of the trade.