Grammy-winning Nashville mix engineer/producer Rob Burrell has added a Solid State Logic X-Desk to the set-up in his emotionmix studio facility.
‘I’ve had my own studio since 1999 across four different locations – two in my home, and two in commercial facilities,’ he explains. ‘I’ve always been “in-the-box” with to facilitate budget needs and time constraints when clients cannot put me in a commercial mix facility. The latest incarnation of my studios resides in my basement to accommodate the comfort and needs of my clients – mixing, recording, and recreation are all available to make everyone feel relaxed and at home.’
Of his new purchase, he says: ‘There’s something about SSL’s combination of sonics and workflow that just makes sense to the way I hear things and helps me arrive at the end result. I have owned and/or used many different summing boxes, but kept going back to doing in-the-box mixes to see what I was gaining by analogue summing. I continued to find that whatever tonal changes the summing boxes provided, when I mixed ITB I would compensate to achieve similar results, because I was just trying to hunt down the sound in my head.
‘In the end, there was always something about tone and workflow still not sitting right, so I would sell the summing box in question and return to ITB – a fruitless quest. However, the more I looked into the X-Desk, the more I became aware that not only would it provide the sonic stamp I was after – it’s an SSL, after all, but the deep flexibility would do something positive for my workflow and hybrid mixing creativity.’
His studio reflects his working method and his preferences: ‘Ergonomics is such a key to being creative for me, so I built exactly what I needed in my new set-up. I wired it into a 192-point patchbay with all my outboard and I can pick a signal off the inserts or direct outs to send to effects units or parallel compression, I can insert analogue gear with the push of a button. It just allows me to be more tactile in the mix experience, which is how I love to function.’
The X-Desk has also allowed him to devise his own approach to 5.1 production: ‘I have a template and patching scheme that allows me to mix music stems in 5.1 for film or trailer scores,’ he explains. ‘The dialogue and FX stay in the digital realm where they are best handled, but the added dimension to the music mix is wonderful.’
Nor has its arrival has been lost on visitors to emotionmix: ‘The X-Desk has made great impressions on both me and my clients – I can get to the happy place in a mix so much faster, and that’s good for my clients, my business and my family.
This is especially helpful, because not all projects are well recorded anymore – not just indie projects, but even label projects are often “engineered” by producers that believe engineering is just hitting CMD+spacebar. I understand this is a product of the technological and financial times we’re in, so I won’t fight it, but my set-up allows me to use the X-Desk and my outboard compression and preamps to re-track an entire record after the fact, effectively “healing” a lot of technical errors, to bring the mix to a more professional-sounding end result much more efficiently than ever.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
