“I’ve heard clinically transparent recordings that aren’t musical, and mixes with so much color they’re not authentic to the performance. I stand behind the Dangerous System because it’s the perfect balance of warmth and transparency.”

By Brooke Bilyj

With credits that span jazz, classical, opera, and Broadway, Todd Whitelock has a history of producing award-winning hits. Since rising through or up the audio engineering ranks at big studios in New York City, Whitelock has garnered nine GRAMMYs, while his work on feature music for film and TV has rendered multiple Emmy Award-winning and Oscar nominated scores.

Though he’s had access to all sorts of large-format mixing consoles and high-end digital recording equipment throughout his career, Whitelock admits there’s a secret weapon in his engineering toolbox of the last ten years: The Dangerous Music System. When it comes to sonic atmosphere and musical clarity, he relies on Dangerous gear to deliver the nuance his clients have come to expect.

“I’m not a gear snob; I’m just an ear snob—it’s got to sound good, and it’s got to be pure,” says Whitelock, who has been mixing on Dangerous gear since 2010. “The circuit has to be completely transparent, but at the same time, bring something new to the mix. I’ve heard clinically transparent recordings that aren’t musical, and mixes with so much color they’re not authentic to the performance. I stand behind the Dangerous System because it’s the perfect balance of warmth and transparency.”

Whitelock credits Dangerous for his recent success and busy schedule, saying the equipment has become so integral to his sound that he won’t leave home without it.

From Large Consoles to Summing

Although he earned his Bachelor’s in Music Production and Engineering degree from Berklee College of Music, Whitelock jokes he earned his Master’s at New York’s legendary Power Station Studios, where he quickly moved from intern to assistant engineer. Whitelock learned the ropes of jazz recording under his mentor—23-time GRAMMY Award-winning Producer - Engineer, Al Schmitt, who sadly died in April 2021.

“Al could make more sound with less gear than any engineer I ever assisted.”

Besides getting to work with Al and numerous world-class jazz artists that PowerStation catered to, the longest project he ever worked on stands as the highpoint of his assisting career, Pat Metheny’s certified gold album “Secret Story.”

When Power Station closed in 1992, he moved to Sony Classical Productions, which later merged with Sony Music Studios where he went from Editor/ Assistant Engineer to Senior Engineer by recording and mixing projects with legendary Producer Steve Epstein and artist Wynton Marsalis. As a senior engineer at Sony for nearly 15 years, Whitelock had his choice of studios equipped with a variety of large-format consoles.

“At Sony, we were pushing the envelope doing hi-res recording,” says Whitelock, who worked with icons like John Williams, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, and Renee Fleming during his tenure there. “I had both analog and digital consoles at my disposal, whatever the project necessitated.”

When the studio closed in 2007, he suddenly had to learn how to recreate the same big sounds—but without the big-studio gear.

“At that point, I had to retool the way I worked,” he says. “I needed to scale back and still accommodate my clients, many of whom I retained when I left Sony. To do that, I had to learn this new world of summing.”

Summing Changed the World of Mixing for Engineer Todd Whitelock

After Sony closed, Whitelock began booking sessions with clients at Flux Studios, where “the mixing rooms had the Dangerous Music System as the focal point,” he says. By using the Dangerous MIXER and 2-BUS analog summing to blend individual stems, he unlocked a whole new level of sonic clarity in his mixes. Compared to the “miles of wire and signal patchbays that were the default at Sony as well as any other commercial studio,” he says, the Dangerous gear streamlined his workflow without sacrificing the warm analog sound his clients expected.

“Sonically, the Dangerous gear lived up to our expectations,” he says. “The translation was really pure. Cutting the signal flow down to the bone enhanced the sound a lot and opened everything up. It opened my ears to a cleaner signal path than I ever had on large-format desks.”

Big Enough for Broadway

Flux became Whitelock’s go-to studio for more than a decade. Then, around 2019, “the frequency of deadlines dictated that I become self-sufficient,” he says. By then, he was producing at least five albums a year for Blue Engine Records—the in-house label of Jazz at Lincoln Center under the artistic direction of Wynton Marsalis—and he simply couldn’t book enough time at Flux to keep up. Their pre-pandemic goal had leapt to 10 albums a year.

So, Whitelock set out to recreate the Dangerous Music System in his own home studio, Amplified Art and Sound, where his equipment collection now spans “everything but the Dangerous MASTER & LIAISON which I have my sights on,” he says. His master bus print chain comprises the BAX EQ before the Dangerous COMPRESSOR. His summing mixers include both the 2-BUS+ and the D-BOX+, and over time, he’s added a full stack of Dangerous converters, including the CONVERT-8, and the CONVERT-AD+ for the master print, listening through the CONVERT-2 with the MONITOR ST.

“The first expansion in my home studio was the CONVERT-8, so I could add an extra eight AES outputs, which I came to learn was a total necessity,” he says. The more tracks he had to juggle—especially with Broadway cast recordings, which often surpass 100 tracks—the more value he saw in the Dangerous approach to summing.

“It had always been the norm to do Broadway cast recordings on big format consoles,” says Whitelock, who won a Grammy for best musical show album for engineering “West Side Story” in 2009. “By the time you have a full orchestra recording, and then you add your chorus and your leads, you’re easily between 96 and 140 tracks for a show. I knew I’d have to branch out beyond just summing it down to 16 channels.”

Whitelock’s first Broadway Cast Album summing experience was Irving Berlin’s “Holiday Inn” Broadway cast recording, which he Produced and Engineered for a 2017 release. After tracking the album at Avatar Studios (formerly PowerStation), he ended up with over 100 tracks to mix at Flux, using a 16-channel NEVE broadcast desk that was elaborately wired into the Dangerous 2-BUS+.

“Having 16 extra faders beyond the 16 in the 2-BUS+ allowed me to work with more channels more efficiently,” he says. “That became a new template for me, because sometimes I need the extra ability of individual faders and panning along with post fader reverb sends in addition to the summing.”

Now, Whitelock has a Sony DMX-R100 multi-format mixing console hooked up to the Expansion inputs in the 2-BUS+ in his home studio to accommodate huge track lists. “Once I saw the flexibility of the Dangerous gear, that became my workflow,” he says. “There’s almost no situation I can’t handle now.”

The last Orchestral album he completed on this setup was “Blues Symphony” from Marsalis with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which had a 60+ track count. “Some things require more precise panning than in ProTools, you just need to spread those elements out on the console,” he says, “but it’s all coming back to the 2-BUS+. It’s giving me the same, and in some cases, better results, than my mixes coming out of Sony studios back in the day.”

Conversion Clarity

Aside from handling high track counts, Whitelock expects his gear to accurately capture the atmosphere of spacious concert halls. Before the pandemic, for example, he recorded a classical project on-location in Baltimore with a soprano vocalist and a violinist.

He took his Dangerous D-BOX+ to use as his main monitor & talkback, “and even used it’s summing to maximize the headroom of the reference mix being recorded. “To keep some wildly dynamic performances from clipping the reference mix,” he says. The clients were so impressed by the initial reference mixes that they asked him not to deviate from them too much. I had glued the sound down with Dangerous conversion and summing and even Mastered it through the CONVERT-2 using it’s gain stages as the last level bump (rather than the DAW.) “I’d been monitoring the mix through the CONVERT-2, but I didn’t print the output,” he says. “So, for the mastering stage, I just ran the whole thing through the CONVERT-2. Mastering the mix through the CONVERT-2 instantly elevated the acoustics. “What the CONVERT-2 brought to the picture was that extra spaciousness, the depth of the sonic image. It warmed up the voice and the violin without applying an EQ, which would have been artificial,” he says. “The tone that comes through Chris Muth’s circuitry allows the extension of higher and lower frequencies to inform the whole harmonic series.” The artists (Duo della Luna) still rave about the warmth and detail as well as the incredible dynamic range and the high resolution 96kHz/ 24bit Master will be commercially distributed by the New Focus label.

This intricate balance of full-bodied sound without artificial coloration is critical to achieving the transparency that his clients demand.

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“I’m getting all the benefits of great conversion, plus the tonal palette of Chris Muth’s circuitry. It lends itself perfectly to the music that I do, which requires total transparency,” says Whitelock, who doesn’t rely on lots of gear or side chain tricks for mixing. “The coloration is very cool if you want it, but my mixes have to be 100% sonically transparent and tonally pure. That’s why I use Dangerous, because the warmth is there without the coloration.”

In fact, Whitelock relies so heavily on Dangerous conversion and clocking that he takes the gear with him wherever he works. His road kit typically includes the CONVERT-AD+, COMPRESSOR, and BAX EQ, whether he’s supplementing a basic digital recording setup in a symphony hall or complementing high-end outboard gear in a professional studio.

“I rely on Dangerous clocking and conversion. It will beat any other clock out there, hands down,” says Whitelock, who often runs blind tests to compare Dangerous gear to the equipment in other studios. “If I go somewhere and they don’t have it, I need to bring it because it’s synonymous with my sound. I’m confident I can stand behind my work because it passed through Dangerous gear.”

Mixing Jazz with COMPRESSOR & BAX EQ | Todd WhitelocK

Remote Recording Innovation

Even though Whitelock moved into his home studio in New Jersey about a year before the COVID pandemic hit America, he had to adjust quickly to a new era of remote recording as performing halls and recording studios suddenly closed.

Just days before the country entered lockdown in March of 2020, Whitelock booked the final studio session with Marsalis to finish his album, “The Ever Fonky Lowdown.” He planned to finish mixing the album in his home studio during quarantine while Jazz at Lincoln Center remained closed.

But within a week or two as the enormity and permanence of the lockdown was evident, Marsalis was eager to create a Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra recording from the band member’s homes. He called Whitelock asking what it would take to create a remote recording, like he’d seen from other musicians who were posting Zoom-style video collaborations.

Whitelock questioned an orchestral engineer in Minneapolis who had created one of the first viral “At-Home” pieces by having musicians individually capture their parts while playing to a pre-recorded track—making it possible to edit the pieces back together with a single time reference. But Marsalis balked at the idea of playing along to a pre-recorded jazz piece, so Whitelock had to improvise. He suggested that the drummer start the track and “be the click,” playing time to a pre-decided tempo following the form of a pre-agreed chart or in most cases a new chart by one of the JLCO’s members.

After typing up some basic instructions to help the musicians set baseline format and recording levels on their phones, which he decided was the one piece of common technology everybody shared, Whitelock collaborated with Marsalis’ entire ensemble to track each part individually, starting with the drummer who would record a 4 bar count off before playing the chart and then send his track back. Next, Whitelock would create a ProTools session, put that track on a grid and send the session to the bassist Carlos Henriquez to overdub his part and send back. Whitelock would make a ref mix and send the session to the pianist Dan Nimmer who sent back, Whitelock mixed the rhythm section and sent that reference file to the leads of each horn section, who sent back their tracks to be layered together. The recording / mix successively snowballed until every instrument was incorporated. The other critical component to all that was having a synchronous video file so that they could all be “joined together” onscreen.

“Even with the challenge of clarifying bad phone audio, I can still blow it up through the Dangerous circuitry and make it sound almost studio-quality,” he says. In fact, Marsalis was so impressed with the first At Home Recording project that he made it a weekly event. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) connected via Zoom every Thursday to plan each virtual recording, and then Whitelock worked behind the scenes to weave it all together.

Throughout the pandemic, Whitelock, along with the video team at Jazz At Lincoln Center, created/ mixed almost 500 pieces of multimedia content for JaLC—including the center’s Spring Gala fundraiser in April. “Being able to create content remotely became essential to staying connected during the pandemic, and to meeting some financial goals along the way,” he says which allowed the organization to keep it’s personnel on payroll as opposed to furloughing which other arts organizations were forced to do.

The Secret to Engineering Success

If anything, Whitelock’s workload picked up pace during the pandemic, as clients sought his remote mixing wizardry and track record of success.

For example, when jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant asked him to mix her new Nonesuch debut album during lockdown, Whitelock knew his home studio was equipped for the challenge. He’d mixed albums for Salvant previously at Flux—nabbing three GRAMMYs in the process—and he largely credits the Dangerous sound for delivering her pure vocal prowess to the listeners. “I just get out of the way, I don’t want the listener to hear anything but the artist performing their magic.”

“I’ve done more GRAMMY Award-winning work on Dangerous equipment than I had done at Sony or other great studios,” he says. “Some of that is timing and the good fortune to work with elite artists of course, but the lion’s share of my nine GRAMMYs are from albums mixed through Dangerous gear—and that’s no small coincidence. I’m totally bought into the Dangerous aesthetic.”