No other reverb is able to do so much, yet be transparent when you need it to be.
With a Grammy Award on his shelf and a solid client index listing top artists such as Santigold, Alicia Keys and Taylor Swift, recording engineer Brendan Morawski is at the top of his game.
Brendan Morawski ending up in the music business is no coincidence. His father is a professional musician, and therefore young Brendan grew up surrounded by music. However, Morawski didn't discover that recording music was even a profession until he was around 10 years old.
'I had an old CD, and a new CD of the same album, and I remember the new CD sounding incredibly better,' Morawski explains.
In 2010, Morawski graduated from Full Sail's Recording Arts bachelor's degree program and, in 2013, he landed a job as Assistant Engineer at Jungle City Studios, in New York.
At Jungle City Studios, he one day met Jack Antonoff. One afternoon in the studio, working on some new music for one of Antonoff's friends, Taylor Swift, the two recorded 'Out of the Woods' and 'I Wish You Would'. Both tracks ended up on Swift's album, 1989, which brought home a Grammy Award for Album Of The year.
Though earning his own Grammy for his work for Taylor Swift, the most rewarding mix Morawski has done is 'Before the Fire' for Santigold. Although he has worked with some of the best mastering engineers in the world, he thinks that Santigold is one of the most sonically demanding artists he has worked for - also, she has the best hearing out of anyone he has ever met. So, 'To be able to do a mix that not only satisfies her needs, but makes me feel proud of the sounds that I got are very refreshing,' he explains.
Working in the music business, Morawski needs to be willing to adapt. Therefore, he's been a huge 'in the box' guy for a long time, 'cause working in only one software program - for him Pro Tools - makes it easier to transition from one engineer, or one studio, to the next.
'It's very common for me to track a studio in one state, mix it in another state, do some overdubs in another state, so depending highly on analog gear has proven to be very challenging in the past', he says. Recently, he has started to get himself 'out of the box', though. Now he is beginning to work in his hybrid setup with a little bit of analog summing, analog compression and analog effects.
In his daily work, Morawski, first and foremost depends on Pro Tools, to make his life simpler and to be able to attend to his artists' needs. But, also the TELEFUNKEN microphones is something that he depends on every day in order to get an incredible sounding recording, and to realize what the artist's intentions were.
However, one of his favorite pieces of gear is the System 6000: 'It's one of the only pieces of gear I've used that I found to be capable of making changes without compromise. The algorithms on it are just so incredible, and there are so much detail with the settings that you have, that you can really dial in exactly what you're looking for without having to deal with any side effects,' he explains.