The Streets’ Mike Skinner has reinvented his working methods around the Solid State Logic Duality console/DAW controller that is at the heart of his studio.
‘Since we got Duality, our way of working has completely changed,’ he says. ‘I was probably one of the first people in the charts to be totally in the box. My first album was completely done in Logic… well, they were all done completely in Logic. Now I find working with a console is just a million times faster and more human than producing in the box.’
It was 2002 that saw Original Pirate Material, The Streets’ debut album, launch Skinner’s minimalist orchestrations and street-savvy lyrics into the mainstream, garnering awards from all quarters along the way. Almost a decade later, early 2011 saw Computers and Blues released, the last of five albums put out under The Streets name.
Perhaps signposting Skinner’s change of direction as a producer, Computers and Blues also mars a change of style – to date he’s mixed almost exclusively ‘in the box’, but with Duality he’s getting back to analogue. Duality is all about facilitating and accelerating the creative process in a number of ways. Like so many users, Skinner chose Duality because he was looking for a specific sound but quickly found that it also let him work faster and more intuitively.
‘What’s more liberating for me is that stuff just sounds right,’ he says. ‘Now I really can mix a track in a day and not want to change it, and that has never happened before… you know, stuff took weeks and weeks to mix in the box because it never quite sounded right, because I was always trying to make it sound like it had been mixed on an SSL.
‘For me, the analogue is all about the sound. And I didn’t actually get Duality as an aid to my workflow – but as soon as we got it, it was just like, “why did I not consider that sitting in front of a computer with a mouse is just very mentally draining?” I like being able to flip the faders from the analogue to the digital domain and with a desk you can do more than one thing at one time – and that’s the answer, really. In a computer you can only do one thing at a time, but with Duality what I find is that I’m doing everything at the same time.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
