Atlantic Records

Atlantic Records has been a home of choice to legendary artists such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, The Rolling Stones, Genesis, Cher, Cream, Rush, Stevie Nicks, Phil Collins, and countless others.

The label’s legendary former studios in NYC once served to showcase Atlantic’s commitment to artist development and innovation. Back then, with industry icons Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler at the helm, Atlantic Studios played host to the production of numerous hit recordings and pioneered the science of stereo and multi-track recording, forever changing the way we experience music. And today, that same tradition of artist development and recording excellence lives on at the new Atlantic Studios NYC.

We chatted with Ron Robinson – Director of Studio Operations for Atlantic Studios NYC – about his job, legends he’s worked with, and LEWITT microphones.

[LEWITT] Ron, tell us a little bit about your job and what you do for Atlantic Records…

[Ron Robinson] I’m the Director of Studio Operations for Atlantic Records, and I run our in-house studio here in New York. We’ve got a nice studio that’s set up for live tracking, mixing, and kind of whatever. I also help to administrate our other studio locations: we’ve got rooms on the East Coast, the West Coast, and everywhere in between.

[LEWITT] In that capacity, do you deal only with Atlantic artists or with other artists, as well?

[Ron Robinson] It’s primarily dealing with Atlantic Records artists, but we are part of Warner Music Group, so you do get the opportunity to work with artists, writers, and producers from Warner Music now and again.

[LEWITT] Atlantic Records has this great, long history of superstars and game-changing, genre-changing musicians. So do you get the opportunity to work with some legends?

[Ron Robinson] Yeah, we certainly do have this incredible “recorded music history,” and from time to time we have a unique opportunity to get some facetime with some of these folks. One of the cool, unique things we do, since we have the label, is that we work very closely with the A&R folks, so we’ll have special projects like movie sound tracks and other things where you might even work with artists who aren’t signed to the Warner Music Group but appear on a soundtrack. So we get to meet everybody: we’ve had Phil Collins in the room, we’ve had Lauryn Hill … and it runs all the way to artists who are popular today like Ed Sheeran, or Chris Martin from Coldplay, and we recently even had a week-long block with Wiz Khalifa.

[LEWITT] Do a lot of these artists use the LEWITT microphones?

[Ron Robinson] Yeah, they do! In any given session, the mic choice and everything depends on the application. But we’ve quite often done little shootouts, where we give the artists a little opportunity to hear the microphones side by side. Many of these artists are discovering LEWITT mics for the first time, and especially in the case of the LCT 840, they’re blown away. Not only by the design, with that tube that glows and looks just amazing, but also by the warm and full sound of the microphone itself. It’s just incredibly warm, natural, and smooth. We’re constantly surprising people with that microphone … we used it most recently on upright bass, even – and it just sounded incredible. The LCT 840 is very versatile: we use it on a lot of vocals, a lot of guitars, a lot of bass, and we’ve used it quite often as a room mic or when tracking drums as mono overhead.

But we also had a lot of success with our matched pair of LCT 550’s. The LCT 550 is just such an incredibly quiet mic with a flat response that sounds very natural. It’s a quick no-brainer when you’re doing strings or piano, or when you’d like something to sound natural but detailed overall.