Part of the recent relocation of his Graphic Nature Audio recording studio to a larger, rural property in Kinnelon, New Jersey, metal and hardcore producer, engineer, mixer and musician Will Putney has installed a new 32-channel Solid State Logic Origin analogue in-line mixing console, acquired from Vintage King.
Putney is known for his work with Every Time I Die, Body Count, Knocked Loose, The Amity Affliction, Stray From The Path, Counterparts, Terror and Northlane among others, and has long mixed using a hybrid set-up.
‘I would mix out into pieces of gear that I’ve collected over the years and sum everything together back into the computer,’ he explains. ‘The set-up ended up getting more and more complicated. Over time I was basically building a console piecemeal, with different summing mixers, and creating ways to do parallel sends and analogue-style routing to get to my compressors and EQs.
‘I decided that, if I could find something streamlined enough that would give me the routing functions that I want and without too many components, and that had a small enough footprint, I would probably be better suited to working on something like that,’ he continues. ‘Then the Origin came out and it’s worked itself right into my workflow.’
The transition from his former multi-component workflow to incorporating the Origin has been seamless, he says. ‘It all just feels super musical and it’s fast and easy for me to get mixes going on. What I do in the computer doesn’t really change at all, so it’s business as usual; I still work how I always did.’
The Belleville location, where Putney has been working for the past ten years, is a multiroom complex in a converted warehouse originally set up as The Machine Shop by his mentor, Gene ‘Machine’ Freeman. About eight years ago, when Machine moved to Texas, Putney and his Graphic Nature Audio staff finished off the drum room and built out some additional workspaces.
‘Every room was set up to be functional for a specific task. The control room was pretty small and just had the gear that we used to track drums. Then I would move around and do work in other rooms,’ Putney says.
The Origin desk has been installed in a room at the new location in Kinnelon, where the next stage of construction will begin in coming months. ‘I’ve got two control rooms here. The goal for the future – we’ll start construction in the spring – is to do an updated version of my old drum tracking room but with a more traditional control room. That will be my A room where I can do everything – recording drums and mixing. I will be able to do an entire record there, start to finish, as opposed to working in the modular rooms in the other facility.’
The complement of gear installed with the Origin mimics Putney’s previous set-up and includes a pair of Amphion Two18 close-field monitors, which he switched to several years ago, along with Universal Audio Apollo interfaces for tracking and overdubbing into his Logic Pro DAW. ‘We still use Pro Tools for editing if I travel to another studio,’ he says.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, or perhaps because of it, the Graphic Nature Audio team has seen plenty of projects continue to come through both facilities, he says. ‘When bands don’t go on tour everybody is trying to cram into a studio, so we’ve been surprisingly busy.’
Late last year, Putney also immortalised the Belleville studio’s celebrated drum room, along with his extensive collection of drums and microphones, when he recorded and produced Toontrack’s Modern Metal EZX expansion library.
Origin is the perfect console for the modern-day hybrid set-up,’ Putney continues. ‘All that lovely headroom, width, and functionality that SSL is known for in a smaller, easier to navigate footprint. It has super musical sounding EQs, and it makes tracking and mixing on this feel like cheating. The redesign of the bus section and improved routing architecture is so streamlined it has erased all doubt in my mind that moving to a larger format console would slow me down. I’ll be happily working on this console for years to come.’
Putney may still be in a transitional phase until his new studios are fully built out, but he’s already enjoying working on the Origin in its present location. ‘I’ve done five or six mixes on it,’ he confirms. ‘The room that it’s sitting in is where I do the bulk of my work. My new drum studio set-up is still using my racks of mic pres and things like that, but I’m also doing Apollo-based tracking and mixing in this room with the SSL. I like the idea of being able to patch in different pieces of gear into different parts of the process, instead of having dedicated rooms for things. It was just time to put everything all in one place.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
