THE HEAVIEST CAB IN THE WORLD with Jakob Herrmann

At Bogren Digital, we love collaborating with talented musicians and producers on new products. The most recent of those collaborations has been with Jakob Herrmann — producer, engineer, and drum tech, who runs the cool Top Floor Studios in the heart of Gothenburg, Sweden. We caught up with Jakob to get a few words on his background, current work, and how the mighty The Heaviest Cab in the World IR Pack came to be.

Top Floor Studios

As the name indicates, Top Floor Studios’ first location was on the top floor of a brick wall building in an industrial area on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden. However, since 2013 it has been located on the ground level of Stora Teatern, a beautiful theater building from 1859 right in the heart of Gothenburg.

The person behind the very cool studio with the somewhat misleading name is Jakob Herrmann, who has worked with bands such as In Flames, Vola, and Raised Fist. Even the mighty Anthrax has popped in to have Jakob record a song with them while they were on tour.

As the name indicates, Top Floor Studios’ first location was on the top floor of a brick wall building in an industrial area on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden. However, since 2013 it has been located on the ground level of Stora Teatern, a beautiful theater building from 1859 right in the heart of Gothenburg.

The person behind the very cool studio with the somewhat misleading name is Jakob Herrmann, who has worked with bands such as In Flames, Vola, and Raised Fist. Even the mighty Anthrax has popped in to have Jakob record a song with them while they were on tour.
Jakob shares a bit about his background:“In the beginning, I worked a lot as a studio drum tech. As such, I worked a lot with Tobias Lindell [yes, the guy with Lindell Audio] and helped him get the drum sounds he was after for his clients. Those were mostly Swedish rock groups, such as Europe, Hardcore Superstar, HEAT, and others. I also did my own recording and production work on the side and eventually, I started my own studio, which has been located in a few different places around Gothenburg. I began working with Roberto Laghi (In Flames, Entombed AD, Diablo Swing Orchestra), engineering on the records he produced. We’ve done a ton of records since, but today our roles vary a bit more, taking turns on who’s in the “producer chair”.

Sometimes it’s both of us, for example, the last Raised Fist album was a 50-50 collaboration between him and me. I always enjoy working together with other producers, and throughout the years I’ve collaborated a lot with Tobias, Tue Madsen, Jens Bogren, Jacob Hansen, Buster Odeholm and many more.

The Mahler cabinet

Top Floor Studios is filled with top-notch equipment. As a drum aficionado, it is no surprise that Jakob owns a handful of drum kits, over thirty snare drums, and an equal amount of cymbals.
There is also a nice collection of guitar and bass amps from MLC, EVH, Engl, Mesa/Boogie, Vox, Fender, Marshall, Orange, and EBS.

The studio's centerpiece is a 48-channel SSL 6000G console, and the monitoring and microphone collections are all first-rate. Jakob also has several guitar cabinets, of which one, in particular, stands out. We’re talking about the elephant in the room — the 300-pound 2x12 Mahler cabinet made out of pure granite. Jakob says:“When I got the Mahler granite cab, I couldn’t believe the clarity from each speaker.

Having something so unique yet versatile and useful when recording and re-amping guitars is fantastic. I've never seen a piece of gear quite like it. Even though I have a bunch of other guitar cabs, this is by far the one I use the most. Also, I love the ‘What on Earth is that?!’ reaction from guitar players whenever I remove the lid from the cabinet’s flightcase!”The idea behind such a dense and heavy speaker cabinet is that no sound emanates from the enclosure itself. Thinner and lighter cabinets vibrate when sound comes through them, and they act more like the body of an acoustic guitar, with sound radiating in all directions. That sound adds significantly to the overall timbre of the cabinet. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it can indeed be a very pleasing sound.

But what you get with the Mahler cabinet is the pure and focused sound of the speaker drivers currently in the cabinet. We say “currently” because another great feature of the cabinet is that it comes with a clever mounting system for the speaker drivers that makes it quick and easy to switch drivers. So if a speaker’s character doesn’t fit the bill, it just takes seconds to replace it with a different one.
Jakob says: “You can play at ear-splitting levels, but if you put your hand on the cab, you still can’t feel much vibration. All the energy moves the air inside the cab and gets projected through the speaker drivers. So the cab itself doesn’t color the sound much, compared to a regular cab”.

The Heaviest Cab in the World IR Pack

With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Jakob’s first-ever IR pack had to be based around the Mahler cabinet. Jakob walks us through the process of creating the impulse responses.“I decided to work together with my old friend and former studio assistant KJ Melgoza for this. He’s a great guitar player who also works as a guitar tech for many big acts, and he’s extremely knowledgeable when it comes to guitars and amps.

We used five different speaker drivers with five variations of each, plus a Mix folder with various combinations of those, and even a room mic capture that is great for blending in with the close mic IRs. We dampened the room some, and It’s not huge but more a short and slappy-sounding room. But add a teaspoon of room to the main mic, and the sound gets really big. The speakers were Electro-Voice EVM 12L, Celestion Vintage 30, Celestion 12H-75 Creamback, Eminence Swamp Thang, and Jensen C12N. We also used my two Dynamounts, a motorized mic arm that lets you remotely adjust the mic position while you listen back in the control room — such a great tool to have.

As for microphones, we used Milab DC96C and VM44 a lot. In fact, the IR folder called Raw is just DC96C all the way through — you won’t get a more accurate and natural capture of the speaker elements anywhere else. But we also used combinations of mics for other IRs, so there’s a lot of Shure SM57, Golden Age Project R1 active ribbon mic, Sennheiser MD421, Neumann U87, and the first-generation Røde Classic. Some sounds went straight to the computer, others were EQ:ed a bit on the way with the SSL or some of my outboard equalizers.”So there you have it, folks — the making of The Heaviest Cab in the World IR Pack. Get the IRs here.