Santa Barbara Sound Design Handles Broadcast Mix for Celebrity Holiday Telethon Founded by Kenny Loggins over 30 years ago, the Christmas Unity Telethon is a broadcast annual fundraiser that raises money to provide food and life essentials, as well as Christmas presents and toys, for the underprivileged and economically challenged in the Santa Barbara area. Over the years, the professional production community and local major network television affiliate has gotten involved to provide the necessary technical and on-air support to present the 12-hour show to the regional tri-county area of California. For the last three years, Santa Barbara Sound Design -- owner/chief audio engineer Dom Camardella and his son Adam -- has handled the broadcast music mix for the numerous acts that perform live during the broadcast. As one of the first and largest high-end recording studios in the area, SBSD has worked with a litany of mainstream acts in its 35+ years, including Depeche Mode, Kenny Loggins, The Jackson Family, Blues Traveler, Rascal Flatts, Yes, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Cocker. Typically, the telethon broadcast culminates annually with Loggins performing and singing a number of Christmas Yuletide favorites. This year, he was featured fronting a live big band, which created a bit of a challenge for the TV studio and production team assembled for this one weekend in a large warehouse in downtown Santa Barbara. A 14' box truck served as a remote music-mixing studio for SBSD -- based around its DiGiCo SD8-24, with the Waves SoundGrid plug-in add-on server -- and was parked adjacent to a large broadcast truck transported in from Portland, Oregon. Inside the warehouse, the video and staging crew assembled the stage and lit the numerous sets throughout the warehouse while the music stage was set up with monitors and a monitor board that was independent from but linked through the DiGiCo SD8's MADI Stage Rack to SBSD's audio truck outside the warehouse. While the video broadcast truck would handle all the interviews and talking-head audio needs, SBSD's truck would provide a stereo mix to the truck whenever the performance stage came alive with the live music acts. Fortunately, there was adequate time to rehearse the larger live music acts the day of and evening prior to going live, and that's where the snapshot feature of the SD8-24 helped to create a simple and dependable workflow for the music mix team. Camardella's familiarity with Pro Tools HD and the Waves plug-in system -- the cornerstone of SBSD's pro recording platform -- made adding the DiGiCo-supported Waves SoundGrid bundle to the SD8 an easy choice. "I purchased the SD8-24 originally as an extension of what we do at SBSD," says Camardella. "My son, Adam, has been working in the live sound front-of-house mixing part of the industry for five years now and it just made sense to add a world-class live sound board to the studio's equipment arsenal. Not to be overlooked is that our core expertise is based on knowing how to extract the most sonically out of digital mixing systems and how, when, and where to integrate just a touch of high-end analog gear to take the overall sonics of recorded or live sound to new levels and to make sure that live sound be totally indistinguishable from studio quality. The DiGiCo desks are renowned for their sonics, and when I added the Waves SoundGrid bundle to an already incredible digital audio mixing environment, I found the combination exceeded my expectations in bringing in studio quality and sonics to the live environment." "As an added surprise," Camardella continues, "the recent release of Pro Tools 9 has brought the services SBSD can offer to another incredible level. With PT9 integrated through MADI with the SD8, we can make studio-quality, live recordings of shows now and they are more than just recording off the first stage of the desk at the back-end of the great sounding DiGiCo mic-pre. The DiGiCo user interface allows me the choice of where I want to tap off to the recorder. That being said, if I want I can have all the desk's processing, EQ, compression, and the Waves plug-in sweetening decisions I've made included on the way to the Pro Tools recording while still being on a direct out, pre-fader of my live mix moves to create tracks that need much less work when we get them back home in the studio for the mix session of the live show's recordings." The 2010 Unity Telethon raised nearly a half-million dollars. In addition, the reviews of the broadcast sound quality of the live performances have been glowing, with numerous calls to the studio offering thanks and compliments. "Supporting our local community is critical is these economic times, and although the Telethon itself was not a revenue opportunity for SBSD," concludes Camardella, "the goodwill created and the number of people who noticed the high standard of excellence and quality work ethic brought to the broadcast by Santa Barbara Sound Design and our team was 'priceless.'" 
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