Studio Monitor: New Media School Ex'pression Offers Top-flight Facilities

School's In: After a public unveiling at the September 1998 Audio Engineering Society Convention in San Francisco, the Ex'Pression Center for New Media‹actually a school‹is open for business.
The management team of Ex'Pression is made up of Full Sail Academy veteran Gary Platt, who serves as president and director; CEO Peter Laanen, a Dutch businessman who was previously the managing director of Arcade Music Co. Germany GmbH and president/CEO of UltiFox Europe BV; and Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen, who is the principal investor in the venture.
The center offers intensive, 14-month programs in sound arts and digital visual media. Its capacity is 36 students in each program‹or a total of 72‹but the first class, which is scheduled to start Monday (11), will have 60 students.
"In a college, you attend classes for 18 hours a week," says Platt. "In this world, it's 40-45 hours a week. The labs are nine hours and the classes are three hours, so you put in a lot of nine-hour days."
The school, which is located in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, Calif., was designed by veteran architect John Storyk, whose credits range from Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York to the $12 million Synchrosound Complex in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Storyk describes Ex'Pression as a "shining example" of a state-of-the-art educational complex for the new millennium. Among its highlights is a studio complex that features a large tracking area that feeds six identical control rooms.
"The students in the six control rooms can all see and hear the same program material, and the instructor can monitor any of the six control rooms," says Storyk. "A lot of people have flirted with this idea, but it's not easy to do from a technical point of view. This is the most exciting bunch of sticks and bricks in the place, although everything else about the school is exciting."
The 66,000-square-foot complex also boasts 5.1-channel monitoring in all classrooms; video and audio tie lines throughout the facility; a digital media group with a dedicated machine room and windowed corridors; three full audio recording studios with 5.1-channel monitoring, 400-square-foot control rooms, projection screens, built-in Foley pits, and variable acoustics; a digital studio centered around a 96-input Studer D950 console that resides in a 600-square-foot control room; and theaters where sound reinforcement is taught.
One of the school's novelties is a "garage studio" that Platt's wife, Debbie, thought up. "It's a miserable place," says Platt, laughing. "It looks like any garage in America." However, the garage studio's educational value in this age of self-made project facilities cannot be underestimated, according to Platt.
Besides its core program, Ex'Pression will offer opportunities for local high school students to record at the school and then sell their CDs at shows, with proceeds going to the respective schools' music departments.
Ex'Pression Center‹whose capital investment is estimated by Platt to be between $16 million and $20 million‹is approved by California's Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education. As such, it must adhere to the Maxine Waters Act, which mandates that at least 85% of vocational school graduates find jobs in the field in which they were trained within six months of graduation.
For now, the school offers a diploma program. However, once it receives accreditation as a college‹a process that can take two years‹it can offer a degree program.
After several years in which such established producers as Babyface and Don Was dominated the Grammy Awards, the voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences have named five candidates for producer of the year, non-classical, who are all new to the category‹including two women, Sheryl Crow and Lauryn Hill, in a male-dominated field.
The other nominees are Michael Beinhorn (Hole's "Celebrity Skin" and Marilyn Manson's "Mechanical Animals," which appeared just weeks apart); Tchad Blake (Mitchell Froom's "Dopamine," Soul Coughing's "El Oso," and Bonnie Raitt's "Fundamental," which he co-produced with Froom); and Rob Cavallo (Goo Goo Dolls' "Dizzy Up The Girl," Green Day's "Nimrod," and the Alanis Morissette track "Uninvited").
Although I feel that the producer of the year category should be reserved for career producers or musicians who produce others' music‹rather than musicians who happen to oversee their own work‹I must admit that Crow's "Globe Sessions" and her self-titled sophomore album, both of which she produced, are two of the finest recordings made this decade, and she clearly deserves the recognition. It would be nice to hear how Crow might do producing someone other than herself.
Hill, who is shaping up to be a multifaceted music maker in the mold of Quincy Jones or Babyface, gets the nod for her critically and commercially lauded solo album, "The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill," as well as for her production on Aretha Franklin's "A Rose Is Still A Rose" (which Hill also wrote).
In Memoriam: Studio Monitor offers its profound condolences to the family and friends of Kendra Webdale and to the staff of New York studio Masterdisk, where she was employed as a receptionist. Webdale, 32, was killed after being pushed onto a subway track Jan. 3.
Described in a Masterdisk statement as "an exemplary employee" with "a bright smile and sweet demeanor," Webdale seemed destined for success. Had she pursued a career at Masterdisk, she would have been poised to follow in the footsteps of owner Doug Levine, who began his career at the studio as a mail-room employee; and of chief engineer Scott Hull, veteran engineer Howie Weinberg, and rising engineer Andy VanDette, who started, respectively, as an intern, a delivery driver, and a receptionist.
In my many visits and phone calls to Masterdisk in the past few years, I found Webdale to be cheerful, sensitive, and graceful under the pressures of a demanding job.