Merging Gets In The Mix At The Grammys®

New York AES Prize winner gets Horus and an extra award

Puidoux, Switzerland. March 2016: Once again at last month’s 58th Grammy Awards ceremony, Merging projects dominated the classical and engineering nominations including 4 out of 5 for the Best Engineered Classical and 4 out of 5 for Best Surround Sound Album. In the end, we were not successful in these categories but Bob Ludwig kept up his amazing presence at these ceremonies with a win for mastering the Best Engineered Album Non-Classical. Tracks from Sound & Color from Alabama Shakes also won Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance and Best Alternative Music Album.

In the classical music categories, Tim Martyn contributed to the win for Best Orchestral Performance, Dimitry Lipay, Best Classical Instrumental Solo and Best Contemporary Classical Recording was from Reference Recordings.

This latter prize was all the more remarkable because the winner of the Merging Prize at the 139th AES convention, Daniel Davidsen, created the mix for this recording. He was a member of the multi-award winning Soundmirror team that produced Joan Tower's Album Stroke.
Daniel recently won the AES Gold Prize in Category 2 (Traditional Studio Recording) for his recording of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. The only problem for Merging was that his Pyramix Native prize was a bit superfluous, as he had already been using Pyramix for over a year, so it was suggested that allowing an equivalent credit against another Merging product would be a better idea. Wisely, Daniel chose to purchase a Horus Networked Audio Interface.

Merging offers all students a generous discount and with the experience of using Pyramix, Horus and Hapi with Soundmirror, it obviously made sense to invest in a 24 input Horus. Daniel explains his reasoning; “This state of the art equipment meets the highest professional standards and I have been very impressed with Horus during my studies and during my work at Soundmirror in Boston. Horus is a particularly future-proof investment and it offers an ideal starting point for my professional equipment and enables me to record in the DXD audio format (Digital eXtreme Definition) or DSD, which is really the highest possible quality for sound. The ultra-high performance and resolution is an important inspiration and serves to facilitate the post production and the quality of the resulting product”.

Not surprisingly, Daniel has a significant background in music. This led inevitably to an interest in audio; “My passion for audio started quite unusually. I did arrangements for my Brass Quintet at the time and used the notation program Finale, but I didn’t like the horrible MIDI sounds coming out of it. That triggered my interest in DAW’s and I ended up purchasing Pro Tools. From there I slowly began recording music. After my high school graduation, I realized that a career as a musician was not for me. I started working with Pro Tools and Logic and studying musicology at the University of Copenhagen. When I got my BA in 2011, my career dream was in the field of audio. Since then, my main platform has changed to Pyramix.”

“I am obsessed with quality and have a passion to provide everybody with the best experience possible. Among my key competencies are pitch processing and music editing, which essentially involves joining takes and patches together. Pyramix has been a particularly useful and effective tool for this purpose. When properly made with the best modern specialized equipment and a musical spirit, it is impossible to detect the editing. Editing alters the original performance and brings the engineer into the creative process. These tasks require considerable amounts of training and my professional skills include score reading, strong aural abilities and attention to cooperation with musicians, producers and composers. It is my dream to combine the roles of producer and engineer.”

One suspects that this passion for quality and this stellar success will mean that we will see Daniel Davidsen collecting more Grammys in future years.



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Daniel Davidsen Grammy