Having grown up following his father on the US-based Le Mobile remote recording studio, Ian Charbonneau lives and breathes music and, from a young age, he himself has been involved in the creation of some exceptional records.
Now, with his Fly-Pack and DirectOut on his side, he feels that there is nothing he cannot achieve.
Charbonneau’s father is Guy Charbonneau, a pioneering sound engineer who has been recording albums and soundtracks for 50 years with his rolling studio, Le Mobile. ‘Since I was five years old, recording live music on location fascinated me and still does today,’ he says. ‘I’ve known for a long time that I don’t want to build an audio truck because of the responsibility and very high costs of owning a large vehicle today.’
With so much advanced technology available, Charbonneau sought a way to bring the focus back on recording and capturing great sound. When he was introduced to DirectOut products, he knew he had found the tool that would unlock an idea that had been developing for some time.
‘When I saw DirectOut announce the Prodigy.MC, I knew that this was something I had to have,’ he says. ‘I could finally build a recording Fly-Pack that was high quality, high channel count, flexible, but that could also actually fly! My design was totally on purpose and not just a bunch of audio gear plugged into each other to achieve one overly complicated system at the end. So, during the pandemic, I decided to take a leap and place an order, this was my solution.’
The Prodigy.MC is a multi-format high-end audio converter designed to suit a range of applications with its modular design. For Charbonneau, this was a fully loaded analogue and Made set-up that gives him 64 channels of mic HD preamps inputs that he can control with globcon and feed into his Pro Tools rigs via a Madi fibre.
His fear was that a compact system would lead to smaller projects, and that would make monetising his investment difficult. A great relationship with the team at DirectOut and his confidence in their products ensured a successful outcome.
‘Having worked with DO [DirectOut] and the previous Andiamo products for many years, I knew I was getting a solid workhorse with high end mic preamps and converters with the Prodigy.MC,’ he says. ‘I was a little bit afraid not to have the large-scale recording projects I had been doing with Le Mobile, but it’s been nothing but the contrary. In the last couple years, I was able to capture some very special projects where the quality of the recording really was put in the forefront. I found my purpose with my Fly-Pack system, bringing all my experience of recording live shows through the past 30 years.’
Charbonneau is the owner of The Recording Project, specialising in high-quality recordings and mixing live musical performances. Since 2023, recording projects for Imagine Dragons, Maná, Melissa Etheridge, Neil Young, Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, Macklemore, and most recently Laufey Live at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic IMAX film, the recently released triple live album of Steve Vai, Eric Johnson and Joe Satriani, and Sheléa with the Pacific Symphony PBS Special.
‘My Fly-Pack allows me the freedom to capture music with confidence and transparency, and that’s my goal. ’ he says. ‘Achieving something like the projects my Prodigy.MC allowed me to do thus far has been my dream since I was a kid. It is just a continuation of that and DirectOut made it possible. Without the Prodigy.MC, I would never have been able to make such an efficient Fly-Pack and have these amazing experiences.’
The first Fly-Pack with Le Mobile was made 20 years ago and weighed 3,500lb (1583kg), requiring a truck to move it. In comparison, his new version weighs 450lb and can be shipped with him on a scheduled flight, anywhere in the world.
‘It is the only high-end recording fly pack, to my knowledge, that can actually fly commercially,’ he explains. ‘It is contained within five cases, the Prodigy.MC & preamps, two Madi Pro Tools for redundancy and two utility cases containing everything I might need – audience mics, hardware, fibre and even offer an Atmos mic package for immersive projects. I adapt the contents per project and advance what I need on site. I’m hoping to grow my current system to 128 channels with the addition of a second Prodigy.MC within the next year.
‘My goal is to capture that and share it with people’ he concludes. ‘This is what DirectOut enables me to do. The past two years have been pretty incredible, and that has been down to DirectOut… it really has.’