It’s fair to say Etienne Tremblay is a bit of a pioneer – one of the first YouTubers to regularly cover mixing, mastering, and music production, in-depth, and in French at La Machine à Mixer. Since he began doing so in 2014, Tremblay's channel has become one of the most well known in the "Francophonie" (French-speaking community), worldwide with over 70,000 subscribers.
Undoubtedly, part of the channel’s appeal is Tremblay’s emphasis on authenticity; something he feels is enhanced by his insistence on using products like the RME Fireface UCX and BabyFace Pro that are well known for quality and durability. “I bought my first RME sound card about seven years ago – a UCX. I still have it and it still works. I don't use it right now,” Tremblay explains, “but I will find a use for it again.”
When Tremblay needed a soundcard with more in/outs and updated converters, he continues, “I contacted RME directly, and they referred me to GerrAudio. And, because of my YouTube channel, I wanted to see if Gerr were open to a partnership.”
Since, that’s led him to begin creating a series of videos detailing his use of RME on various projects. “I'm always happy to make videos and content about a product I'm passionate about and really like.” Having that level of trust in a product, he adds, “is extremely important for my relationship with my audience. If you do sponsorships with brands you don't fully endorse, the audience can smell it – then you lose credibility, you lose trust.”
The importance of reliability, quality, and long-term service is something Tremblay believes is reflected in the choices GerrAudio makes about what brands/manufacturers to represent. “Which I think is a sign of people that know what they’re doing."
With his new UFX III card and Baby Face Pro in hand, the first video covered Total Mix. “That got a really good response, but I’ve never seen any negative comments about RME products, so it's very easy for me to do content in that context.” He’s also used the new gear in a song he and his wife, Cherine Amr, wrote and recorded that was placed in the popular Netflix series: AlRawabi, School for Girls in February. “Which was very exciting for us, as you can imagine.”
That's just one of many of Tremblay's creative outlets. “Before I was a sound engineer, I was a guitar player and singer,” he continues. “I also studied literature and theatre but was on the fence between going toward music, or theatre. Since I wasn’t a good actor, I decided on music." His goal, at that time, he adds: “Head to Montreal and try to make it as a songwriter.”
Tremblay’s family, however, had reservations, which led him to augment his studies with an intensive one-year live sound and recording engineering course in Drummondville.
Upon moving to Montreal, he worked at a local music shop, Archambault Music, began producing artists he met there, and grew his network of contacts in the industry. He eventually founded Studio CME (with some colleagues from Archambault) where he deepened his chops as an engineer substantially.
When the studio closed he began working for an in-demand, Montreal-based producer but felt unfulfilled. “On paper, it was the greatest job, but I wasn’t happy. That’s when the idea for my channel came up. So I left the job, took a couple of months to build the channel, and then launched it in May 2014.”
Tremblay built his following relentlessly, and, roughly a year and a half in, turned the channel into a viable and sustainable long-term job. “And I'm still doing it, ten years later. It completely changed my life.”
Although he initially considered creating English language content, “At that time nobody was doing what I was in French. The audience is smaller, but I have a niche in Quebec, France, and other French-speaking places like Belgium, Switzerland, and several Northern African nations. People can also put the English subtitles on and watch if they don't speak French.”
While he’s used numerous sound cards over time, after purchasing his first UCX, Tremblay was sold, long term, on RME. “It was an obvious choice because of the quality of the build, the quality of the sound, and the fact my first sound card still works, and is still relevant, after 10 years.
I also worked with friends who had RME cards for many years. It was always the brand I saw people use. And Total Mix makes things way easier for my YouTube videos. Functionality like the loop-back, for example, makes it easy to do screen recording.”
He’s also an enthusiastic user of another GerrAudio line, DPA, specifically the DPA 4061 “I did a lot of research to try to find a lavalier microphone, and the DPA I use for recording my videos was the one that sounded the best to my ears.” Although he uses a variety of microphones for studio work, “Anytime that I need a lavalier, I go with the DPA because it sounds the most natural and open.”
His RME setup was particularly handy during a recent trip to Egypt: a research project undertaken with his Egyptian-born wife (and former member of a popular, all-female, Egyptian metal band). The project centres on Egyptian funeral rites, and required him to record a double-oboe often (and still broadly) used in those rites to create a nuanced and accurate VST of what he describes as “one of the oldest wind instruments in the world.”
“I brought the Baby Face because I really like the format, and I like the travelling case because I don’t have to worry about it being damaged in transit.” Although he usually records in 24 bits and 44.1 he decided to record in 96 instead for this project. "I wasn't sure if I was going to need to do some pitch shifting or time stretching later and I wanted to have extra resolution. So the Baby Face was a good choice for that, and I really like the pre-amps – the instrument I was recording has very tricky harmonics in the high end, so I needed to have pre-amps that weren’t aggressive and very good conversion.”
“I’ll have to play around with the modulation of the sounds with vibrato and tremolo and stuff like that, but that’s very dependent on the tempo of the song so it’s hard to make a VST out of the samples. What I'm trying to figure out now is how to make it better, closer to the original, to make it usable in a modern context, which takes in the tuning of the instrument, which RME also helped with.”
The fact that the unit is USB-powered also made things easier. “It’s really hard to find recording studios with decent gear and the people to run it in Egypt. So I needed to be autonomous so we could just rent a space and record.” Because of that, he adds: “My system, the drivers, the software, all of that has to be extremely stable. I have enough challenges recording on the road and don’t have time to worry about system stability. Also, the Baby Face has a very good headphone preamp. In Egypt, I only used that to monitor what I was doing, but it was important nonetheless.”
For Tremblay, the main benefit “is the Baby Face’s sound quality and conversion – it’s a very clean sound with no obvious colour, which is what I like personally. And the software is great. I think most RME users - once they work with Total Mix, they don't want to go back.”
Finally, he praises RME’s longevity and long-term reliability – particularly the UCX card he depended on for many years. “I don't want to change cards every three or four years. I want to be able to keep them for five years or more. So, again, RME was an obvious choice.”
How Etienne Tremblay Became A YouTube Pioneer in French Music Production with RME