Returning to the studio for the first time since their 2022 album Pop Drunk Snot Bread the punk, pop power trio Bowling For Soup recorded and mixed a new single using Solid State Logic’s new Revival 4000 Signature Channel Strip at engineer/producer Dan Malsch’s Soundmine Recording in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains.
Over a two-day tracking and mixing session, every vocal and instrument track on ‘Holding on to That Hate’ exploited the Jensen transformer-balanced preamps, B Series de-esser, E/G Series EQ, HP/LF filters and E Series dynamics of the eight Revival 4000s in the studio. To mark the launch, the stems will be available as digital download, allowing anyone to experience the sound of the new all-analogue channel strip and mix their own versions of the song.
Malsch has also worked with Ghost, Gojira and Avenged Sevenfold among others, and was a good fit for the project as Soundmine’s Studio A has long featured a vintage SSL 4000 E/G+ console, allowing him to compare the sound and performance of the new channel strip with the originals in the console.
‘Everything that was recorded with Bowling For Soup was all through the Revival 4000, so it was my normal kind of flow, with a lot of EQ and a lot of compression,’ Malsch says.
‘I tend to be fairly heavy handed with my EQ and compression, and I brutalised the new channel strips on drums with lots of everything – lots of bottom end, lots of top, lots of mid; more and more of everything.’
‘I think the real “a-ha” moment was when we started to record the bass,’ says Jaret Reddick, Bowling For Soup’s lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter. ‘Dan ran the bass via DI into the Revival, turned a few knobs and it was the best bass sound we’d ever gotten. That’s our bass sound on the track and it’s glorious. It has the bottom end that you need but it cuts through just right, and it feels good.
‘I’m a voiceover actor, too, and I think running into that strip could give my voice a little bit of luster,’ he adds. ‘We’re talking about getting two for Rob [Felicetti, the band’s bass player and backing vocalist], because he records in stereo.’
‘I was probably most blown away with the Revival 4000 on guitars,’ Malsch continues. ‘In a lot of the music I record, the guitars can get very aggressive around 3kHz, 5k, 7k and I could shave off just enough of that annoying 3k to 4k to smooth it out. I was also filtering out a little low with the high-pass and a little bit of high with the low-pass, but I was pretty blown away by the de-esser. It was a secret weapon on this channel strip.’
Reddick says that he has gone back and forth between distorted and undistorted guitar sounds over the years: ‘I’m not a crazy guitar player, but I do little nuances, and what happened with the guitars on this session was the channel strip had the aggressiveness and the clarity, and I almost didn’t want to muddy it up too much. I was blown away. Dan was manipulating it in these little areas and made it really, really shine.’
Malsch drove the Revival 4000 mic preamps hard, as he typically does on his own desk. ‘I was driving the mic pre, then backing down the trim. Having the trim on the Revival 4000 is a lifesaver for me, because I tend to hit these babies pretty hard. You’d see lots of red lights, and I was waiting for the audio to start clipping and crackling. On my 4000 console you’d hear it, but I didn’t hear anything because there’s more headroom on the Revival 4000. And red means more power, to me.’
Tracking a group of musicians through identical channel strips, such as on Malsch’s SL 4000 console, immediately brought a cohesiveness to a project. ‘I think recording with all the same channel strips, rather than using this or that preamp, gives more of a focus and more of a cohesive sound,’ he says. ‘And when you listen to the Bowling For Soup song that we recorded, it’s very cohesive and sounds just like an SSL console to me – but a newer version.’