Simon Franglen

A 2009 unit is featured in this December 30, 2019 Twitter post.

Moore’s law in action. We added 128GB RAM to this 2009 Mac for £200. If I’d been able to fit that in the #Synclavier in its heyday (at $5000 per MB), it would have cost $640,000,000. Or enough to buy Newcastle United, and get them into the Champions league.

Featured on Franglen's official Seaboard artist page.

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

Simon, you’re in Hollywood. Can you do me a favor? Can you kind of look around the studio you’re in and tell our audience what kind of gear you’re using and a little bit about your process. I know you have a current project you can’t talk about. You can’t talk about the one you’re working on now. But perhaps we can use the example of the 2019 release of The Birth of Skies and Earth because that was a huge project, and perhaps we can talk about how you managed that one?

Well, if I look around from where I am, I’m looking at a 55-inch OLED main monitor, which I moved to use touchscreens, and I’d like backlighting, so they don’t sort of blast your eyes out, especially late at night. And then that’s feeding into a 28-core Mac Pro 2019 with 384GB of RAM and 32TB of OWC RAID internally.

Oh, that’s awesome. So you’re using the OWC SSDs inside the Mac Pro?

Yeah. The NVMe writes,

Aha, you know, they just came out with a new case for those. You can actually carry some of those projects with you and use them on your laptop. If you’re thinking about work, you can actually hook the Envoy Pro to the back of your laptop with the NVMe in it. It’s wonderful.

I have external 4M2. I have the 4M2s externals as well as the 4M2s internals. I have two boxes with 8TB in each, which I used to carry stuff around as well.

So you have a studio in London, and you’re currently in a studio in LA. Is that your second place, or are you just traveling?

Yes, it is.

Okay, you have a full setup. You’re looking at your 55-inch OLED. What manufacturer do you use for your monitor?

I’ve used the Sony, but it’s the same panel as the LG. It’s basically the same thing, but I like the Sony. It was the one that came out that had the sort of angled stand on it and made it look a bit like an artist’s easel, and it works perfectly. I have it set up on my keyboard workstation. I have a Yamaha 88-Note Keyboard in front of it. And then a load of little side panels used to control different things like iPads and androids of various sorts that go with different remote controls. Then to my right is an iMac Pro, which is a, I want to say a 12-core. And that’s got 128GB in RAM in there. And then I’ve got two Mac Pro 2013, they both have 128GB in as well.

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

I’ve got generations and generations of OWC stuff. So I have ThunderBays that go back to neanderthal times were spinning hard drives and stacks of big ones and little ones. When SSDs came out in the two and a half-inch format, then I was using box; they’re taking the little mini ones. And that was transformative because it meant I could carry libraries with. Previously we were running external RAIDS, and they became bigger and heavier and noisier, and everything else, and suddenly these little boxes could outperform them. And why for instance, the Accelsior cards are working so well for me in terms in my new Mac Pro, is that it allows me to have a system now where I don’t have all these boxes hanging off the outside of my Mac Pro as much as I love the trash cans because they were very compact and transportable. The problem was you ended up with this spaghetti of stuff that was running off them. The 4M2s were great because they were the first time I could get the NVMe up to size to like, actually get some NVMe RAIDs that were big enough for me to use them properly. And then, of course, I’ve got all the sort of hubs. The different Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 hubs that I’ve had for years. I mean, I’ve been buying stuff from OWC for 15 years. I’m going to guess since it first appeared, it was the place where I would buy all the bits and pieces. And Larry’s wonderful. But I also know that when we were having some issues, there was a bug in the 10.15.4 Apple release of Catalina that was affecting large data transfers. And the guys at SoftRAID and the guys at OWC worked tirelessly with me to try and solve. We nailed it down with a fix, and the guys could not have been better. I think that’s the thing that I would say about OWC, and the reason I agree to talk to you about it is that they’ve gone the extra mile. And I think that for someone like me, that’s worth in gold.

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

I’ve got generations and generations of OWC stuff. So I have ThunderBays that go back to neanderthal times were spinning hard drives and stacks of big ones and little ones. When SSDs came out in the two and a half-inch format, then I was using box; they’re taking the little mini ones. And that was transformative because it meant I could carry libraries with. Previously we were running external RAIDS, and they became bigger and heavier and noisier, and everything else, and suddenly these little boxes could outperform them. And why for instance, the Accelsior cards are working so well for me in terms in my new Mac Pro, is that it allows me to have a system now where I don’t have all these boxes hanging off the outside of my Mac Pro as much as I love the trash cans because they were very compact and transportable. The problem was you ended up with this spaghetti of stuff that was running off them. The 4M2s were great because they were the first time I could get the NVMe up to size to like, actually get some NVMe RAIDs that were big enough for me to use them properly. And then, of course, I’ve got all the sort of hubs. The different Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 hubs that I’ve had for years. I mean, I’ve been buying stuff from OWC for 15 years. I’m going to guess since it first appeared, it was the place where I would buy all the bits and pieces. And Larry’s wonderful. But I also know that when we were having some issues, there was a bug in the 10.15.4 Apple release of Catalina that was affecting large data transfers. And the guys at SoftRAID and the guys at OWC worked tirelessly with me to try and solve. We nailed it down with a fix, and the guys could not have been better. I think that’s the thing that I would say about OWC, and the reason I agree to talk to you about it is that they’ve gone the extra mile. And I think that for someone like me, that’s worth in gold.

Specified on the official Millennia artist page.

Simon Franglen LA/UK STT-1s

Used to mix the The Magnificent Seven soundtrack, as stated in this October 20, 2016 Audio Media International article.

We looked at the options and decided, having built guerrilla studios in the past, that mixing at home was possible. There we used Neumann KH420 mid-fields, each sitting on top of Neumann KH870 subwoofers for an amazing 7.1 rig combination. We then used KH310s for the sides and surrounds.

Avatar was the last film that we mixed in analogue as a crew but since then everything has been entirely in the box. I used an Avid C24 as a mix controller and was taking sounds that the live players were generating and manipulating them through Pro Tools. I used quite a lot of plug-ins, including [The Cargo Cult] Slapper for multi-channel delay and the VSM plug-ins, which I really like. We needed a bit of a contemporary sound so we also used a whole host of different reverb plug-ins along with delay and compression.

Two 2013 units are mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

Simon, you’re in Hollywood. Can you do me a favor? Can you kind of look around the studio you’re in and tell our audience what kind of gear you’re using and a little bit about your process. I know you have a current project you can’t talk about. You can’t talk about the one you’re working on now. But perhaps we can use the example of the 2019 release of The Birth of Skies and Earth because that was a huge project, and perhaps we can talk about how you managed that one?

Well, if I look around from where I am, I’m looking at a 55-inch OLED main monitor, which I moved to use touchscreens, and I’d like backlighting, so they don’t sort of blast your eyes out, especially late at night. And then that’s feeding into a 28-core Mac Pro 2019 with 384GB of RAM and 32TB of OWC RAID internally.

Oh, that’s awesome. So you’re using the OWC SSDs inside the Mac Pro?

Yeah. The NVMe writes,

Aha, you know, they just came out with a new case for those. You can actually carry some of those projects with you and use them on your laptop. If you’re thinking about work, you can actually hook the Envoy Pro to the back of your laptop with the NVMe in it. It’s wonderful.

I have external 4M2. I have the 4M2s externals as well as the 4M2s internals. I have two boxes with 8TB in each, which I used to carry stuff around as well.

So you have a studio in London, and you’re currently in a studio in LA. Is that your second place, or are you just traveling?

Yes, it is.

Okay, you have a full setup. You’re looking at your 55-inch OLED. What manufacturer do you use for your monitor?

I’ve used the Sony, but it’s the same panel as the LG. It’s basically the same thing, but I like the Sony. It was the one that came out that had the sort of angled stand on it and made it look a bit like an artist’s easel, and it works perfectly. I have it set up on my keyboard workstation. I have a Yamaha 88-Note Keyboard in front of it. And then a load of little side panels used to control different things like iPads and androids of various sorts that go with different remote controls. Then to my right is an iMac Pro, which is a, I want to say a 12-core. And that’s got 128GB in RAM in there. And then I’ve got two Mac Pro 2013, they both have 128GB in as well.

Mentioned in Franglen's testimonial for the accSone crusher-X.

crusher-X is spectacularly great. I’m finding new ways to use it every day. I’m especially finding the link with my ROLI and LinnStrument extremely creative.

Mentioned in this October 26, 2020 OWC Radio interview.

Simon, you’re in Hollywood. Can you do me a favor? Can you kind of look around the studio you’re in and tell our audience what kind of gear you’re using and a little bit about your process. I know you have a current project you can’t talk about. You can’t talk about the one you’re working on now. But perhaps we can use the example of the 2019 release of The Birth of Skies and Earth because that was a huge project, and perhaps we can talk about how you managed that one?

Well, if I look around from where I am, I’m looking at a 55-inch OLED main monitor, which I moved to use touchscreens, and I’d like backlighting, so they don’t sort of blast your eyes out, especially late at night. And then that’s feeding into a 28-core Mac Pro 2019 with 384GB of RAM and 32TB of OWC RAID internally.

Oh, that’s awesome. So you’re using the OWC SSDs inside the Mac Pro?

Yeah. The NVMe writes,

Aha, you know, they just came out with a new case for those. You can actually carry some of those projects with you and use them on your laptop. If you’re thinking about work, you can actually hook the Envoy Pro to the back of your laptop with the NVMe in it. It’s wonderful.

I have external 4M2. I have the 4M2s externals as well as the 4M2s internals. I have two boxes with 8TB in each, which I used to carry stuff around as well.

So you have a studio in London, and you’re currently in a studio in LA. Is that your second place, or are you just traveling?

Yes, it is.

Okay, you have a full setup. You’re looking at your 55-inch OLED. What manufacturer do you use for your monitor?

I’ve used the Sony, but it’s the same panel as the LG. It’s basically the same thing, but I like the Sony. It was the one that came out that had the sort of angled stand on it and made it look a bit like an artist’s easel, and it works perfectly. I have it set up on my keyboard workstation. I have a Yamaha 88-Note Keyboard in front of it. And then a load of little side panels used to control different things like iPads and androids of various sorts that go with different remote controls. Then to my right is an iMac Pro, which is a, I want to say a 12-core. And that’s got 128GB in RAM in there. And then I’ve got two Mac Pro 2013, they both have 128GB in as well.

Featured on Franglen’s official sE Electronics artist page.

"I usually get to record in the finest of studios, but recently I had to record vocals with a loud male singer in a small, bare, square, spare bedroom, one of the worst of spaces to get a great vocal sound. Having once had to record a famous opera singer singing into his clothes cupboard with a duvet thrown over the doors, I thought there had to be a better way. I went online and after checking out the reviews, I bought the RF Space.

When it arrived, the first thing I noticed was that the thing was built to last; professional, heavy-duty hardware. The second and most important thing was that the vocal sound I got was great - really. I placed the singer about 18 inches from the deeply special microphone I use for vocals and the boxiness and pinging from the room disappeared. Across a whole album the room ceased to be an issue; everything sounded as though it had been recorded in a decent vocal booth."

"My mix engineer never commented on the recording quality once - apart from an initial compliment. The bottom line is that I paid for the RF Space, and it exceeded all my expectations. It made a $0 an hour bedroom into a professional recording space. The RF Space is an answer to one of the biggest problems in getting a great sound; it will help a microphone work the way it should do, even in the worst of rooms."