With a string of albums to their name, the founding members of multi-platinum band Live returned to their hometown of York, Pennyslvania, to set up a studio. Central to Think Loud Studios is a 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality analogue console/controller
In addition to the band’s own projects, the studio serves the artists on the band’s record label, Think Loud Entertainment. The vaulted ceilings and natural light of the 53,000-sq-ft building’s fourth floor made it a good setting for designer Horacio Malvicino: ‘This is inspirational,’ says bassist Patrick Dahlheimer. ‘This is going to be the studio that we always wanted to build and is driven to be songwriter and musician friendly.’
‘Part of the Live signature sound is the sound of SSL,’ says guitarist Chad Taylor, noting that Tom Lord-Alge, who has mixed the majority of the band’s recordings, works exclusively on an SSL 4000 G Series console. After Taylor and Lord-Alge spent a day evaluating Duality, the decision was easy…
‘There’s a convenience factor and a history of the SSL that exists through Duality. In the studio, I’m predominantly focused on the performance of the musicians and the arrangement of the song, and less on the technical aspect of the engineering. I found that those worlds got married very conveniently through the Duality.’
‘My immediate reaction was that there’s a dimension and a spatial factor to the Duality,’ Dahlheimer adds of SSL’s SuperAnalogue sound. ‘Perceptively, it was really very clear. There’s definitely a punch and a clarity, especially to the drum tracks. One of the other qualities is the bus compressor. Once you are in it, there’s cohesiveness to the songs that jumps out.’
Taylor believes that the console’s hybrid role of analogue path and processing with DAW control encourages the creative process to flourish: ‘One thing we took into consideration was that we still like to work in analogue,’ he says ‘With the convenient flexibility of Duality, we are able to switch very fast back-and-forth between our analogue and the digital workstations. Working with Duality pulls my brain from looking at music on a computer screen to actually interfacing with the console, like we did 20 years ago. The concentration is on listening again, and not seeing the music so much. That’s an important characteristic to the creative flow.’
The choice of Duality has paid immediate dividends as Live went to work recording its forthcoming album. ‘We had a bunch of tracks in a rehearsal state that had been recorded through various preamps,’ Dahlheimer says. ‘We got a very polished sound through the Duality very fast. I was thrilled with that. Duality helps outboard equipment shine, but we found ourselves using a lot of the onboard preamps in tracking. In fact, we recently re-recorded existing drum tracks to take advantage of Duality’s sonic signature. There was definitely clarity, presence and dimension to the new tracks.’
Taylor also recalls having previously owned an SSL G+ console: ‘The format and feel of the Duality remind me of the G,’ he says. ‘While it simultaneously moves into a new-world environment of, essentially, Pro Tools control and interface, but one that still has the markings of a traditional analogue console. I’m glad we stayed in the SSL family.’
