A triple platinum country rock artist, Jason Aldean is on the road with his Burn It Down tour and SSL Live consoles at FOH and monitors.
Chris Stephens is Aldean’s front of house engineer, and has been working with the artist for the past five years. ‘As each tour became progressively more complicated, Evan [Richner, Aldean’s monitor engineer] and I knew we had to make a change,’ he says.
‘And the SSL Live fits all of our needs – it has an extensive feature set and amazing sound quality because it mixes the functionality of a digital console with the sound of an analogue desk, including all of the transparency, clarity and transient response. I’ve never heard a digital console that sounds like this, ever.’
The true test for Stephens was making an A-B comparison between his old console and Live during tour rehearsals. ‘I was impressed with Live when prepping for the tour on my studio monitors, but once we were able to pull audio up on the PA in an arena, we were able to make a true comparison,’ he reports. ‘It is difficult to get an accurate sense of a console’s sound when you’re in a small room. When we were finally on the road with Live, I realised how much processing I had been using to compensate for the sound of the old console. The difference in sound quality was apparent from the first note. Even people who don’t know anything about audio thought Live was noticeably better.’
Evan Richner has been with Aldean since 2005 and is also finding Live to be an asset: ‘At rehearsals, using Live for the first time, the guys came in and our guitar player walked up, put his ears in, hit four notes and was blown away,’ he says. ‘But most important is that console also is extremely flexible, easy to use and powerful.
‘The automation functions and grouping capabilities are spot on. It’s nice to be able to make the SSL Live do whatever I want. Depending on the way I need to use it, it can be a completely different console from one performance to the next. I have never seen another console with the features of Live.’
Stephens echoes Richner’s sentiments regarding the console’s flexibility. For the FOH mix, he uses both SSL plug-ins and a Waves MultiRack Soundgrid outboard processor to accomplish the final sound: ‘As far as routing capabilities, I don’t know of any other console that allows me to have the flexibility of Live,’ explains Stephens. ‘Being able to rearrange the signal path of each channel individually and the capability of routing stem groups to each other are two features you don’t usually find in a console. I haven’t run into a routing scenario with Live that I haven’t been able to work out. No other console works like Live.’
