Sound engineer Shorty wants to take club systems
back to the '70s

By Kerri Mason

One day not long ago, Craig “Shorty” Bernabeu surveyed the state of nightclub sound, and did not like what he saw. The producer/DJ/sound engineer who had trained under Steve Dash, worked on the fabled Twilo system for Junior Vasquez, and experienced the legendary Paradise Garage sound system firsthand, couldn’t find a single system in clubland that followed what he saw to be the tenets of good sound. So he founded Systems By Shorty, a New Jersey-based sound company through which he hopes to combat the evils of overpowered systems and excessive digital processing. In fact, Shorty doesn’t use digital processing at all – he believes that good sound lies in basic system components alone. “A sound system should not reproduce one kind of music only, like dance music,” reads his company’s charter statement. “It should be able to reproduce any kind of music in a flawless manner.” Shorty is already bringing this philosophy to three Long Island clubs, CPI’s, Luxe, and Cyberia. And Sayreville, New Jersey’s Abyss recently hired him to tune and maintain a rented EAW sound system (from local company Designatronix) for Danny Tenaglia’s one-off there, temporarily replacing old boss Dash’s celebrated Phazon. Bring on the drama.

We asked Shorty about his reactionary yet revolutionary sonic ideas, and how he thinks they’ll be accepted by today’s nightclub community. And oh yeah, about Twilo too.

Why did you pick now to start your own company?

Over the last ten years in this industry – not the home hi-fi industry, but the big PA dance club industry – it’s gone from being about quality and vision and innovation, with guys like Richard Long or Louis Feldman or Alex Rosner, to commercial, loud, bad, expensive sound systems. I know that because I’ve worked with the best – Junior Vasquez, David Morales, Steve Dash – and we’ve discussed the problems in audio. A lot of companies have gotten away from what really matters. So what I decided to do was open a sound company that would bring quality and value back to the club scene. My concept is: You work with the best equipment, best materials, and offer the best workmanship, and you get the best sound, period.

What will you be carrying?

Well, as far as products, it’s going to be McIntosh, BGW, Bryston. These amplifier companies make hi-fi amplifiers with class AB circuitry. A main problem with what’s going on with this industry is that popular amplifiers are using class H, which is not designed to reproduce hi-fi at all. So everybody’s going around saying, “Oh yeah, you’re going to have a hi-fi sound,” but it’s not going to be possible with those amplifiers. That’s like saying a Corvette ZL6 is going to give you good fuel economy. It’ll go fast, but it’s not that economical. So I believe in using a more hi-fi product. I’ll use Bryston for processing as well as amplification, and BGW on my mid-bass and sub-low bottom end. And all our speakers are custom-built EAW cabinets with the best wood and speaker components. I’m loading my boxes with T.A.D. Horn drivers, and I use JBL just for my tweeters. So basically what this company specializes in is the mid-high to high end sound systems. Just because of the quality build of this stuff it’s expensive, but it does the right thing. I hear too many club owners complain that they just spent six figures on a sound system and they’re not happy with it.

Do you think the market’s ready for that?

I think some of the market is. Some of the sound manufacturers that I’m working with want to do exactly what I want to do.

What characterizes your systems?

I don’t do any digital processing whatsoever; these systems are totally analog. I’m using vacuum tube front-end circuitry. I’m not caught up in the politics of getting involved with a big company. I’m just looking to give the DJs, the people on the dance floor, and these club owners especially a value for the money they’re spending, and finally give them a system that really reproduces; something that’s going to keep the people in the club, wanting to dance and have fun. But it’s mostly just to put the best sound out there, period, without anybody having anything to say about it.

You know, the big corporate companies aren’t really into this; it’s why they don’t make this product. But who cares? I’m not a corporate company, I’m a small company just really looking to give you the best value, which is what this used to be about.

Give me an example of one of your systems.

The most interesting system I’m working on right now is the bumper car ride on Coney Island. The sound in here is phenomenal. It’s an old Altec Lansing voice-in-the-theater system from the ’70s that we’re revamping. It’s going to be Bryston and BGW. It’s got Richard Long J-horns in it, GML EQs, White Instrument EQs, a Summit Audio vacuum tube compressor, a Bozac mixer as well. The full range is going to consist of three Bryston 4Bs on the midbass, a Bryston 3B on the horn mid-high, and Bryston 2Bs on the tweeters, and BGW 750Gs on the sub. Also, in Luxe on Long Island, there’s BGW750 G on the mid, the mid-high is BGW350A, and there’s a D75 Crown on the JBL 2405 slot-loaded tweeters. There’s a UREI mixer in there too.

So you’re going back to the idea that basic components are all you need.

I’m really going back to the old theories of doing things. Because what’s happened is everybody got caught up in this whole power-hungry thing, that you need a million watts, which isn’t true. If you have proper speaker coverage and the proper power going to the speakers, you’ll actually get more out of it. Because what happens is, when you overpower a speaker with thousands of watts, most of the power gets wasted in heat right out the back of the speaker. So the speaker’s not really getting all of the power which is being displayed. So you’re better off engineering with the proper power and proper techniques of designing a sound system, which is what I’m doing. And I’m doing it analog, because that’s the best way to do it.

Why is that? What are the advantages of analog over digital?

It’s a realistic sound. What’s happening when you use these digital processors is it’s taking a signal that’s analog off a turntable through your mixer, and going through the digital. It’s converting it into a digital domain, it’s sampling it, changing it, making the corrections where a computer is saying, “This is the way stuff’s supposed to sound,” and it’s converting it back to analog. What is the point? The more stuff there is in the signal chain, I don’t care if it’s digital or whatever, you degrade. It’s just more processing; you’re going through another circuit board and it just degrades your audio. A lot of producers I’ve talked to are dumping their digital consoles and going back to analog, because there’s a warmth with analog that’s like nothing else.

How will that make your systems sound?

They’re going to be very smooth, very transparent. You’re going to hear every inner detail of the music, the way the producer intended it to be. And also, the sound is not going to be appropriate for only one sound of music. With a lot of nightclub systems, if you play anything but dance, it just sounds miserable. With the type of product I’m going to be using in my sound systems, you can play jazz and it’s going to sound wonderful. It’s a hi-fi company that makes studio gear as well as hi-fi home stuff coming from the studio end, so they really care about their audio and what it’s supposed to sound like. It’s not going to be a fatiguing sound where you’re going to leave the club with your ears ringing.

Will the big superclubs that are hooked on power go for something like that?

You know, like I said, if you have the right amount of speaker coverage with the right amplification, that will power the speakers and you will get more volume and better volume out of what’s going on in the system. The reason why a lot of the clubs are loud today is that the DJ is playing the records looking for intelligibility out of the music, and looking for information, and he’s not getting it because the speakers are not reproducing it. So the DJ says, “Oh it must not be loud enough,” so he turns it up louder, and is still not getting it. He’s just getting the same thing but louder. And by the time he’s done, he’s run out of power in the sound system, clipping everything. And that’s not right.

That’s not all DJs.

No. Nobody got out of the Twilo system what Junior [Vasquez] did. You listen to the old school DJs, like a Danny Tenaglia, or a Timmy Regisford, or a Tony Humphries, or a David Morales, or Frankie Knuckles, and they know what they’re doing when it comes to sound. They know what the system’s limits are, they know how to get what they’re getting out of it, they know how to climax the system to push a certain sound if they’re looking to change it, and they know when to bring it back. A lot of these DJs play their monitors so loud that they forget about how loud the dance floor is, and they don’t know when to pull back, because there’s a certain point that the human ear fatigues and it doesn’t sound good anymore, ‘cause your ears are just closing up. I can remember many times with Junior at Twilo, and if it was a new sound he was pushing, the system would come out of nowhere and just kick, and after a while he would pull it back. That’s how you properly work a system.

Are you going to give some of these places live capabilities if they need them?

Well, it depends – most clubs don’t really spend the money on live gear. They rent in. But it’s going to be the type of thing where they go from their mixing console right into the mixing board that’s in the club, which is UREI or the Bozac or whatever I’m using. And it’s going to be right, because I don’t EQ my systems with records – I EQ with pink noise, so it isn’t dictated by one particular record sound.

How does tuning that way change the resulting sound?

When you’re EQ-ing with pink noise, it’s giving you equal output per frequency, so what you’re doing is you’re making your systems curve through pink noise, then you’re listening to it, and then you’re fine tuning. But you’re getting your basic curve through pink noise. I learned all this from Steve Dash, who most of my training has come from, plus what I’ve learned on my own, and what I’ve learned from talking with Scott Findland and other people in the business, different engineers. But a majority of what I’ve learned is from working with Steve Dash, who’s a brilliant, brilliant engineer.

Tell me about that time when you worked with him.

I worked with Steve from 1995 to 2001. What the guy’s come up with over the years and how he’s just taken sound and developed it, and how he’s gotten stuff that you would think doesn’t sound right to work. He’s an amazing engineer, and a genius.

But he’s into digital processing…

Yeah, he’s doing digital high-end sound systems, but I’m not. I’m not a fan of digital, but he gets it to sound amazing. From everybody that I’ve seen do anything with digital audio, he’s done it the best. You go hear a lot of these clubs, and you go “Eh, I don’t know.” You go to Steve’s clubs, no matter what, it sounds amazing. I’m biased because I worked with Steve for so long, but I know from what people have told me about liking the way Twilo sounded. It was a very, very good sound system. Obviously, if they had put more money into budget to do different stuff, he would have come up with different things. It could have been better. And it was a six-year-old sound system. Technology had changed a lot since it was built.

What about the sound quality from CD players now?

I can’t sit and enjoy a CD at all. And I’ve heard a lot of different CD players, and not just the DJ ones. I’ve heard hi-fi CD players that cost $5000. They just can’t get it right. They will. But as of right now, it’s still not better than vinyl. Analog recording still outdoes digital recording.

Everyone seems to be using them though. It’s so easy for the DJ.

You just said it right there. The thing about everything going on in America is about convenience. I mean, I still use my reel-to-reel if someone gives me stuff, because as soon as I take a CD and I record it to tape, it fattens it up and warms it up. And that’s a major problem. It’s the recording domain that they’re recording to. If they went to tape in the studio and mastered off of tape, these records not only would sell better, they would sound a hell of a lot better than they do. When I was DJ-ing and CD burners were still available and people would give me their CDs, I was going and getting acetates cut, just so I could play them on the turntable because it sounded better. Junior Vasquez does not like playing CDs. He plays acetates. In fact, he just got an acetate lathe.

Do you think that awareness has to do with his history?

You can hear a lot of these DJs who used to go to the Paradise Garage, you could hear what they learned off of what Larry Levan was doing, because Larry was the one who started this whole sound that everybody’s into. Not the techno/progressive stuff, but there was some stuff that Larry did play that was techno-y. Garage wasn’t just soulful, gospel-y music. Garage was everything from Talking Heads to Barbara Streisand to Michael Jackson. It wasn’t just the soulful gospel vocal all night long. And garage especially was not always up-tempo. There were some nights when Larry would play 110, 115 beats per minute, depending on his mood. And that was a phenomenal sound system that hasn’t been outdone to this day. Richard Long was using class AB amplification, he was using McIntosh amplifiers, he was using BGW 750s, he was using Crown DC300s, he was using UREI amplifiers. This is all why that club sounded like it did. You know, back then they didn’t have digital:they didn’t have class H. They all had big power supplies and they were all made to reproduce audio, because the music was produced properly. It would take two, three months sometimes to mix a record. You can have a phenomenal sound system, but if the source is not a good source, if you put shit in, you’re going to get shit out. It’s all also source-dependent.