The Audio Hunt: Running Your Tracks Through Iconic Studio Gear Online?
Recently, I sat down with Stephen Bartlett, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of a relatively new company called The Audio Hunt.
The idea is a simple, but fairly novel one. The Audio Hunt website entices studio owners to list some of the most enviable pieces of gear they have available, and for a pretty low cost, allow would-be clients to upload stems or full mixes to run through those pieces of gear.
I was introduced to the company and concept by my friend Andre Kelman, who works at Oscilloscope Studios in NYC. Oscilloscope, for instance, is home to the exact Fairchild 670 compressor that has been used by artists including Kanye West and The Beastie Boys and—for just $25 per channel—you can use that very same compressor on your next production!
I asked Bartlett to explain more about what went into The Audio Hunt, how it works, his future hopes for the site.
First off, can you explain what The Audio Hunt is?
We are basically a network marketplace that connects anyone who is creating music with professionals and any piece of equipment around the world. You can connect and have someone just run your vocal through their Fairchild, or you can ask someone to entirely mix and master your record.
You can also send MIDI to have processed through real vintage analog synths or send your guitar amp through a cranked Marshall 4×12 amp stack.
We [also] try and help people understand what needs to happen to their music to make it sound the way they want. It’s kind of just helping people get together and create music through the internet.
So what got you into music in general?
I was playing guitar when I was 4. I just couldn’t be stopped, and it’s a bit of an anomaly as my parents aren’t musical or anything, but my grandfather was and even at the age of 7, I’d sit there listening to Miles Davis solos and going backwards and rewinding them and going over and over and over.
I generally gravitated towards music in every asset. I went to college to study jazz and the first record I did for friends was incredibly successful, so I dropped out of college and did the classic thing: I thought I knew everything at 18 and started making records full time.
I ended up starting a music studio and a music college in Australia with some other people and a label, and that’s all still going. Organically, I found the need to get out of Australia and managed to find my way to Europe and accidentally walked into one of the best jobs possible working in one of the biggest studios in Europe as the second head engineer working with geniuses like Pat Leonard.
What studio was this?
The Audio Hunt’s founder Stephen Bartlett, pictured here, says that the service they offer is as much about the engineers you’ll collaborate with as it is about the gear they operate.
Wisseloord in Amsterdam. I moved into Amsterdam and about a month in, I was at a street party and I happened to bump into someone who turned out to know the owner of a studio that had just been rebuilt that did The Police, Def Leppard Hysteria for 3 years, like three Elton John records—the owner was the engineer behind the Rammstein sound.
A week later, I ended up having an interview with him and then he put me on as the second engineer. My first job there was recording for Pat Leonard who produced 5 Madonna records and Fleetwood Mac and you name it. I was very lucky and it was an amazing ride.
How did you you start thinking about launching a company like The Audio Hunt?
During that time in Europe, the first record we did went four times platinum, so I started getting these amazing gigs one after the other and I started getting attention in Europe. I ended up getting management in the UK and then I started getting gigs in the U.S. in LA and New York. I spent over a year traveling between London, New York, LA, Amsterdam, just working constantly and I started to see the industry from a different perspective when I was moving around so much. [And] I started to see these huge differentiations in access.
There were people who had amazing skills in these small towns who would never be able to touch a Fairchild or that would never get to hear things. I also started to see these amazing engineers around that had this excellent gear, this incredible experience, and they weren’t finding how to get new and interesting work. So the idea was fairly organic. I mean gear is excellent, I love gear, but it’s only gear. But when you pair that with the exceptional users and the experienced engineers and put them together, then you can find a way that you can get those guys some work and get other people that would never have access to that to be able to achieve it.
There were also times when I’d be mixing in Philadelphia or Austin, or somewhere and one part of my sound is to use original PIE compressors on the kick and snare buses because they just sound how I like. There were points when I’d be in these studios that didn’t have PIE compressors and I wished I could just email this file to someone and tell them exactly what settings I want and get it back.
[So] the Audio Hunt story came out of an organic need that I had when I was traveling and working. You can’t take every compressor and reverb that you love out with you for every session, but The Audio Hunt allows you to have access to nearly any piece of coveted studio gear that you could want.
I love the idea of access that the site provides.
You can use the Fairchild compressor that Kanye used or the API EQ’s that Taylor Swift used. It’s incredible. Cenzo Townshend, one of our big users in the UK who did the latest Ed Sheeran stuff, has signed up and you can access anything in his studio with his guys working on it, like have your guitars reamped through some of his phenomenal collection of guitar amps, or any signal run through any piece of his gear for [just tens of] dollars. Hopefully, it really helps people make better music and get experience working with great people as well.
So one concern I had is that a studio owner can own an API EQ, but in terms of getting the settings right, do you get to pick the engineer at that studio who runs your mix through whatever piece of gear you desire from them?
You can specify which engineer you want at the studio if you contact them, though the price may go up if you pick the head engineer. There is some [room for] negotiation, if you want. A lot of people will send through a reference file, so you might send through the rest of the track around your vocal so that the engineer can put it in place. Others will take screenshots or settings and send them over.
More and more, it seems that it’s about collaboration. We offer a money-back guarantee and we’ve literally had no one ask for it. What will happen is people will say they like the song, and all of a sudden they might go “it sounded pretty good, but” and then it leads to free revisions and a real conversation.
We’ve had people start working on The Audio Hunt and then going to shows together and start talking about forming bands. People in the same state but in different cities who would never have met each other without the site.
I can understand there’s some fear about what an engineer at a studio might do to my stems, but if I were to go to Flux Studios and work with an engineer there, it would be the exact same process. You talk and you communicate and no one ever gets everything right the first time 100%. It’s impossible, but that hasn’t caused any problems.
I always love it when companies try to bring back the collaborative element to the music making process.
Yeah. Home recording is great but it has taken out the fact that music is about people. The best projects that I’ve ever done have always been based around a group of people who want to collectively achieve a great song and that’s always worked.
No one ever starts a song with the intention of making a bad song
Exactly! It’s so true. But when you get to work with people in so many other fields of work, collaborating over the internet, I think that music can be positively impacted by The Audio Hunt. And as we add more features and the possibility of being able to hear [changes] in real time, I think this will catch up much faster.
[Laughs]. I’d be very happy if I could send MIDI to people with massive MOOG modular systems and be able to hear it in real time over the internet.
It’s funny, I recently worked on a project where I had a MIDI part that a client had done on some kind of synth and I was sure I wanted a [Roland] Juno [synthesizer].
I went on The Audio Hunt and sent the MIDI with a reference track to a studio owner who owned a Juno. The guy writes me back and said “Yeah, I don’t think it’s a Juno you want, it’s this,” and he told me to try out a Roland SH5 or something. He had [one], so he sent me audio recordings of the MIDI going through both synths and his recommendation was perfect.
In about 25 minutes we got the perfect synth sound and it was just our MIDI performances going through his synth, but that recommendation might have saved me hours of trying to get the right sound out of the wrong piece of gear.
It’s funny, I once heard Hans Zimmer talking about the importance of using great musicians when recording. He talked about how, if a violinist dedicated 35 years of her life to playing one note on her violin to make it sound as great as she possibly can, she will be able to add that extra 10% that makes a record great. As I’m not a great synthesist, it’s reassuring to know that I might be able to consult with a great one on a site like The Audio Hunt to get the right sounds for my next project.
Yeah guitar I feel comfortable with, but with synths—I need another 30 years to get to the level of some of those guys. It’s inspiring to hear what they do.
Is it possible for any studio to sign up on The Audio Hunt?
We vet everyone individually, [particularly with the mix consultation service.] You can’t just say you have a Fairchild and sign up. We often ask for credit history, pictures of some of the gear and things like that just to check it through. And sometimes, we send them a file and we pay them for it to test out if they’ll be a good fit for the site.
We’ve had many happy customers because we make sure that the people who do it are really good and genuinely like working with us. In order to be eligible to provide mix consultations on the site, you basically have to have a GRAMMY or GRAMMY nominations, or at least platinum and gold records before we consider you. There’s a decent standard of entry for that.
That’s great to hear. One of my initial fears with the sight is that there might be someone claiming to own a Fairchild and that I’d send a mix to them only to get back my mix run through his super awesome Waves Puigchild plugin.
[Laughs]. So far that hasn’t happened. Right now we have about 500 studios onboard and we have a community manager who’s really helpful and checks in with everyone and makes sure those 500 studios are happy and doing their best job.
In terms of the next 4-5 years what are your hopes for The Audio Hunt?
We’re hoping to continue the growth that we’ve had and we’re excited for the future of being able to hear things in real time with the potential for things to be controlled in real time too.
Think about it like if you were able to remotely change settings on an EMT 140 so that if it’s not being used during a recording session, someone around the world could still access it and use it on their song, searching for the right setting and monitoring it in real time.
So, there’s things like that, and obviously we’re not going to do that with a Fairchild—it doesn’t make sense to open up a Fairchild and mess with the circuitry for a project like this, but there are other pieces of gear make sense to do that with. We’d like to see the interaction with equipment become possible with the internet.
Great. Any final thoughts?
I think that the bottom line is that it’s ultimately about people, it’s about collaboration. Our return users—80% of users who book with us—might wait a couple of months and then use the site again as they enjoy the experience of using the site. The first time you do anything, there’s a bit of fear of the unknown, but that’s why we offer the money back guarantee and everything else.
The other thing is sometimes you feel some of the magic of the process, knowing your vocal has gone through the same compressor at Abbey Roads that’s been used on countless hits or that your guitars are going through the same EQ’s used on an Aerosmith session can be inspiring.
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