www.prosoundnewseurope.com
September 2012 l 27
studioreport PORTUGAL Horsing around
Dave Robinson gets far more than he bargained for when he spent an afternoon at Lisbon’s Golden Pony studios
“IT COULD mean several things. ‘I’m feeling pony today’, for instance. But in a ‘wicked’ sense. Not in a horse droppings sense.” This has to be one of the most enlightening and bizarre conversations your correspondent has had for a very long while. PSNEurope is here to meet the team at Lisbon studio Golden Pony and talk about ADAM Audio speakers. But the conversation with Pedro Magalhães, the sound technician at Golden Pony, has taken so many turns – including a brief discourse on the origins of the studio’s name, above – that focusing on the monitors seems almost tangential. While owner Eduardo
Vinhas works on a session with Portuguese pop multi- instrumentalist B-Fachada in the main studio, Magalhães takes PSNEurope into the ramshackle garden behind the Lisbon townhouse-cum-studio to tell us what was wrong with his native country’s professional audio industry. “What I noticed about
Portugal, having come from London… Well, I don’t know how they sold anything here…” he begins. Magalhães is an ex-SAE London student, and one who doesn’t mind speaking his mind. He’s been working with Vinhas since 2003. “1998 was very important
to Portugal because of the World Expo,” he continues, “because of the concerts that were happening every day. There was this boom in live sound, and with everything that goes with that. Lots of people got information, got equipment… for a year there was almost a practical sound school in the city.”
Main room featuring vintage synths and curious outboard, and ADAM S4X monitors
The international Expo ’98
may have ramped up the skills of the musicians and engineers of Lisbon, says Magalhães, but it didn’t go far enough. He relates how, while he was studying in London, he met André Toscano, and how they discussed starting a distribution outfit in Lisbon. They agreed the city needed it, because “companies selling equipment were still in the ‘old system’ of thinking”. Outlets in Lisbon didn’t care about promoting themselves, he says; worse, they didn’t know enough about the equipment they were selling. “The guy who was selling to me, he knew less about the machine than I did!” he reveals. Strong words. Magalhães’ time in London certainly rubbed off on him. And Toscano did indeed return to Lisbon to start Audio:log, which now distributes and sells a number of lines, including ADAM Audio, RØDE, UA and Ultrasone. “You notice it was different in London – you went to Digital Village, you were well treated. In Portugal, you couldn’t test out the equipment. In Portugal, no one wanted to sell! But I am talking about this because Audio:log, and André, have been a dream to work with.”
“For recording guitars, this space is very beautiful,” says Magalhães. The main recording media is
Pro Tools HD with Lynx converters and a Command 8 controller (“getting a little bit old”).
The monitors, of course, are
ADAM: new S4Xs have replaced the older P33A speakers. “We want the band to say, ‘I never heard the music like I heard it here!’ We want to make magic here.” It was Toscano’s idea to have
the Pony posse try the S4Xs, launched by ADAM two years ago in Frankfurt – and both Vinhas and Magalhães approved. “I’ve been working with
Live space, with tiled cellar-style roof
But back to the amusingly named Golden Pony. This former townhouse in Lisbon was once the studio of Vinhas’ band Jaguar. They enjoyed some moderate success in the early Noughties and so set up a studio here, but – wouldn’t you just credit it – as soon as the the premises was acquired, the band split up. Vinhas took over the running of the studio, turning it from Jaguar’s rehearsal space into a fully fledged commercial facility. The control room is bursting with vintage synths and quirky outboard, while the live room looks like a former wine cellar, with its arched low ceiling. A closer look reveals hidden cupboards full of vintage and rare microphones.
ADAM speakers for several years. I like them. I would call them a technical speaker. The clarity you get from the ribbon transducer – it’s very fast and very precise. Even if you listen to them for a long time, you don’t get tired. “During my years in TV, I used Genelec. They are good speakers, but they are tiring to me. The ADAMs have the same detail but are not so tiring.” Magalhães is impressed by the power of the monitors, calling the low frequency register “incredible” and the general response “very open”. “Sometimes, when you are doing more ‘heavy’ music, it’s hard to get them to rock. When you are doing detailed stuff on the ADAMs, it sounds like you are overdoing it. When you go home you hear that you are not. It’s just the way that you can distinguish between frequencies, it’s really wicked.” Which brings us back to the name of the studio. I explain, if something is a bit ‘pony’, in English rhyming slang, it means ‘crap’ – from ‘pony and trap’. “It could mean several things in our group of friends from the Jaguar days,” Magalhães disputes. “So golden pony, it’s the height of wickedness. A bit like the studio: in terms of production, it’s one of the most productive around here, and for the size it is, it’s the most pony. People come to the Pony and expect to see a shack, then you come in, and discover it’s orange and acoustic and there is lots of great kit... it’s pony! “And,” he adds, “it’s golden.”n
Eduardo Vinhas (left) and Pedro Magalhães
www.adam-audio.com www.audiolog-lda.com www.goldenponystudio.com
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