A little over 15 years ago, The Royal College of Music (Kungl Musikhögskolan or KMH) in Stockholm launched a project to build a new campus to support of its performance, composition, conducting and music and media production programmes. In addition to new concert halls, practice rooms and teaching facilities, Walters-Storyk Design Group designed all three music studios.
The KMH campus includes a suite of three recording and production spaces, one of which houses a 32-channel Solid State Logic Origin analogue mixing console. The studio also offers a live tracking space housing a grand piano, drum kit and back line, and is large enough to accommodate a rhythm section.
The Origin room is the only control room of the three music production spaces with a mixing console – the other two featuring DAW and outboard hardware set-ups. The Origin control room is used exclusively by Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree students for their personal projects.
‘Students book this room whenever there is no teaching going on,’ explains Jan-Olof Gullö, Professor of Music and Media Production. ‘Most students have worked with audio interfaces, but to understand signal flow it is always great to get them on a real mixing console. Origin is great for this because everything is clearly laid out. The students are recording everything on the Origin – classical music, pop music, electronic, rock… it responds well to all.
‘What I like about this mixer is that what you put into it you get out of it. It doesn’t colour the sound. The PureDrive preamps on Origin are very clean when the Drive is not engaged. We did tests and the noise floor is very quiet. Also, it is efficient, power-wise. Older consoles need cooling systems, and they take a lot of energy. We like the sleep mode on Origin, which also conserves energy, so you don’t have to power up and power down all the time.’
Twenty years spent at KMH –as a student then a staff studio engineer – has given Erik Metall the opportunity to work on the SSL 4000G+ and SSL Duality desks previously installed at the school. ‘The preamps are as you would expect – it sounds like an SSL and they work very well,’ reports Metall, who is also a freelance engineer and a working musician. ‘Also, the EQ works exactly as you would like to hear from an SSL desk. I love the architecture, with the small faders. That is a return to the 4000 Series structure that I really love.’
Students are largely self-taught through hands-on operation of the Origin: ‘Students get a basic course on how the Origin desk works and how everything is set up. Then they explore things pretty much on their own,’ Metall adds.
Since it was installed, the desk has proven its viability as a teaching tool: ‘It has been very easy for the students to learn on,’ Gullö confirms. ‘The great thing with this mixer is that it allows students to learn it quite fast.’
Having worked extensively on the previous SSL consoles at the school, Henrik Langemyr now works as a support engineer and on freelance projects: ‘It was simple and easy to understand,’ he says. ‘I came from working on an SSL 4k console before, and we also used a Duality. From my work, I can absolutely tell the SSL sound. It’s a great console for these students to learn on because of its easy-to-understand layout.’
The music production rooms also make use of SSL’s 2+ USB audio interface. ‘The SSL 2+ is the best product ever made,’ Gullö states. ‘You plug it in – you don’t need any extra power – and it works. And it sounds fantastic. I think the preamps are brilliant and have 62dB of gain, so you can use a Shure SM7B microphone without an external preamp or Cloudlifter.’
The Origin was supplied by Arva, an SSL-authorised retailer in Sweden.
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
