VEVA Sound, a leader in music preservation and archiving relocated its Los Angeles headquarters from Burbank to United Recording in Hollywood. The relocation reflects the company’s commitment to establish a home base at the epicenter of the Los Angeles music scene.

VEVA Sound will occupy a recently renovated second-floor executive suite that once housed Frank Sinatra’s office when his Reprise Records label resided at United Recording.

“We were looking for a label-agnostic studio in Los Angeles and United Recording was the obvious choice,” explained Drew Waters, Vice President, VEVA Sound Los Angeles. “United Recording has been around for 60 years and is one of those rare studios that remains relevant and revered by high profile artists.”

“We’re pleased to welcome VEVA Sound to United Recording,” said Rob Goodchild, United Recording’s studio manager. “The renovation of our second floor comprises of three new executive suites, enabling us to provide a symbiotic environment to talented members of the music community like VEVA Sound and other leading companies seeking to operate under the United banner. We’re excited to work together and advocate for important recording industry initiatives.”

VEVA Sound has worked to define, create and implement industry standards for how sound recordings are verified, validated, preserved and enter the digital supply chain. The company services frontline releases for all three major labels. Through partnerships with The Recording Academy, The Library of Congress, DDEX, NDSA and NDIIP, VEVA Sound creates technologies that allows clients to identify and properly credit their music collections, whether legacy recordings stored on analog or digital tape or current born digital projects. Through the use of their platforms and technology, clients can view, access and report on their information at any time.

“We work with audio assets post-recording so it makes sense for us to center ourselves in a studio that has a steady flow of artists, their teams and associated labels,” added Waters. “This ‘strategic serendipity’ positions us in a mutually beneficial setting to interact with many facets of the industry. Labels are always seeking turnkey solutions and what better place to have that solution than at United Recording.”

VEVA’s future-proof archival migration and the corresponding metadata ensures that all assets will be available now and in the future, effectively countering the rapid software and hardware obsolescence and high probability of media failure that puts all modern audio and video recordings at high risk.

VEVA has recently released a free DAW-agnostic plugin (SCP- Studio Collect Plugin) that tracks detailed session information (metadata) that travels with all session collaborators and exports a valid DDEX RIN file, so your metadata can travel into the industry using the global standard defined by DDEX.Learn more at: www.vevasound.com/

About United RecordingUnited Recording is one of the world’s most recognized music studios, with more awards than any other recording enterprise. Music produced at United has generated more than 1 billion in record sales worldwide. More info: http://www.unitedrecordingstudios.com/

Blackbird Studio is proud to announce the arrival of VEVA Sound, LLC to their studio facility located in the village of Berry Hill, Nashville, TN. VEVA Sound, formerly BMS/Chace, is well known for its many years of media restoration, technical processes, and archival transfer facility services. This co-venture is a great match that allows clients to move easily from the technical transfer facility to the studio environment for playbacks, overdubs, remixes, project-preparations for mastering, and a number of other in-house production opportunities. Blackbird Studio manager, Rolff Zwiep, mentioned, “This plan has been developing for some time and we are glad to make this announcement. We are excited about the future of this venture.”

VEVA Sound’s executive vice president, Deborah Fairchild, says, “VEVA Sound is thrilled to join forces with Blackbird Studio. Together we will continue to preserve the legendary catalogs from artists around the world with the level of detail and expertise they deserve.”

VEVA Sound was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Nashville, TN, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. For 16 years VEVA Sound has worked to define, create, and implement the standards for how sound recordings are preserved and monetized. Through partnerships with The Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing®, The Library of Congress, DDEX, NDSA, and NDIP, they are actively at the forefront of creating technologies that allow their clients to identify and properly credit their music collections, whether they be legacy recordings stored on analog to digital tape or current born digital projects.

Combined, each company has every piece of legacy tape equipment to accommodate the transfer of all recorded formats for any artist. Transfers at this facility will not only have the best equipment and engineers, but they will also be housed within VEVA Sound’s state of the art platform. This platform allows these artists to monetize their content with a click of a button—everything at their fingertips. All metadata will be available to export via DDEX’s RIN message.

To learn more about each company, visit vevasound.com and/or blackbirdstudio.com

In the Golden Age of recording studios, second engineers played a crucial role- they kept the entire session organized and took detailed notes about the session participants and specific details of each session. Some of this handwritten information would travel with the recording on the back of the tape box and end up as liner notes on a released album cover.

The digital era transformed this process, democratizing recording. This meant leaner teams in the control room and more diverse, less systemic methods of recording and capturing recording information. The tradition of maintaining detailed notes was largely lost as the apprentice and mentoring routines in place that would train young engineers in this system dissolved.

Today when accurate and complete metadata are the key to distribution, discovery, and payment, the way recording data is gathered has become fragmented at the most basic level. The second engineer’s craft has fallen by the wayside. More importantly, the reasons why this metadata is valuable has for many either been misunderstood or lost entirely.

 VEVA Sound is changing this. Their latest product, SCP, a free plugin, is designed to work with any digital audio workstation and gather data about recording sessions, akin to a virtual second engineer. VEVA created this plugin based on nearly two decades of working with producers, engineers and artists within studios, collecting metadata, preserving large catalogs, and working with major labels. 

“From VEVA’s years of working with major labels, we’ve learned how to organize and gather metadata,” explains Deborah Fairchild, VEVA’s Executive Vice President. “We’ve had engineers send us information in texts, emails, Word documents, spreadsheets. Often the responsibility falls on the mix engineer who wasn’t part of any of the recording process and truly doesn’t know who played on the tracks, so tracking down this data takes time and is sometimes inaccurate. There are lots of legitimate complaints about the lack of credits, but there are also many reasons engineers and other contributors aren’t getting credited (or inaccurately credited) because the credits aren’t being collected while the music is being created.”

“We created an elegant tool that is designed not to interrupt the workflow of engineers and enables them to easily enter information,” says Drew Waters, VEVA’s L.A. Vice President. “It’s instantly accessible, instead of someone trying to create their own system.”

VEVA comes by its insights into the recording process with integrity and insider knowledge. The entire team has significant foundations in audio engineering and remains relevant in the industry. 

The SCP plugin supports recording engineers’ data collection efforts as they work on a session in real time. Based on the international DDEX RIN standard, the plugin encourages engineers to input required fields. The plugin offers the option of generating and sharing a fully compliant RIN (recording information notification) as a PDF or XML file.

The plugin is the first part of the Studio Collect Suite that VEVA will roll out later this year, which will provide a wider, more powerful set of tools for managing data, files, and workflow in the recording studio. “The plugin is a basic but highly functional version of what the platform will provide,” says Fairchild. “The plugin has flexibility, and gives you prompts when you want to create an RIN file. To submit an RIN requires a minimum field set and it flags the basic information and asks you to fill it in. And, it is free.” These files form the basis for all music metadata, this vital information that determines track credits, searchability, and royalty payments.

To be complete and accurate, metadata needs to be collected at the source. Without this data, files and tracks may be lost in the deluge of recorded music files. “If you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist,” notes Waters. “You can’t find what you are looking for without meaningful metadata. Collecting content when it’s created can save time and money in the future. If information is requested of you from a label or producer, and this information isn’t easily accessible, your time, and therefore your money, is wasted. As a content creator or a content manager, knowing as much concrete information (metadata) about your assets and where they reside also creates opportunity to monetize and remonetize your work. For example, there is usually a short window for sync and licensing opportunities. Often the first person to return music to a music supervisor get’s the sync.”

As Fairchild says, “This system future-proofs your hard work.”

Efficiency is proving increasingly important as engineers’ jobs shift considerably in the indie music era. For independent artists and even small labels, engineers often act as repositories for files, tracks, and other assets, making data, searchability, and organization vital. These professionals need a toolkit to suit their new role. “We’re giving engineers the same tools the majors have been using,” Waters remarks. “We’ve been working behind the scenes with them for years, and now we’re ready to share what we’ve learned.”