SAE Magazine 12-2

SSL or Neve? I know what you are going to say: “both, each one has its own character- istics and suits a different situation…”; I am happy to hear about that but afterwards I would like to hear: “If I had to choose…” If I want a Madonna or Lady Gaga style album, I go for a Solid. If I want a more acoustic album with strings, folk style or with a big band I go for a Neve. If I had to choose, I would maybe go with this one (softly taps on a Solid State Logic 9000 J-Series). The Solid is more powerful than the Neve, in terms of processing it also offers more routing possibili- ties and the equalisers on the SSL have a much wider range… With a console like this you can obtain a much softer and warmer sound, as long as you don’t force its compressors, which can be very aggressive. That is why I would go for the Solid, without taking anything away from the Ne- ve, which I also love. “In the box” or “out the box”? On Pro Tools, the summing is perfect.And I am not a fan of perfect summing. In an analogue console you cannot completely cancel a signal, each chan- nel is a different world. Digital summing is per- fect, it sounds really good, but I have already done the test a million times: I mix the same track on a Neve, on an SSL and on Pro Tools. And when I do it on one of these (points at the SSL again) it just sounds so much better. Pro Tools is just a “record and edit” tool. If given the choice I would person- ally do everything on analogue, although I do use the occasional Pro Tools plugin as well. But, as I said, I do almost all the work on analogue if I can; I find it faster and more comfortable. What role does EQ play in your productions? It always depends on the quality of the recording you are given. For me, mixing always starts at re- cording. If something is recorded properly, when you bring the faders up the track already sounds good. If it doesn’t, rather than mixing you are fix- ing. In the case of good recordings the equalisation re- quired is very subtle. EQ is kept to a minimum: highlighting certain things, smoothing rough edg- es, adding a bit of shine and a bit of body, applying a high pass filter so that the bass isn’t “booming”… There is another thing which I explained to the SAE students who were here and it’s that in acous- tic albums where there aren’t many tracks like in Buika’s album, what I sometimes do is triple the vocals in different channels and apply a different compressor to each one. For example, a Urei for the first channel, a Manley for the second and a Neve for the third. Each one of them will give you a sound which you can later combine and it always sounds much more natural than “squeezing” the equaliser. Obviously this can only be done with a project that doesn’t have many tracks; if you are working with, say, 200 tracks, it becomes impos- sible. To sum up, in order to avoid abusing the EQ, there are a few important factors such as the position- ing of microphones during the recording, as well as having several microphone options, being very careful with the phasing and carefully choosing the preamps and the rooms. Each microphone should provide a different sound and you have to make sure that different phases don’t cancel each other out. ➤ For me, mixing always starts at recording. Caco explained the analogue console features and his workflow during the process of recording and mixing. 43 People & Business // Caco Refojo Index

SAE Magazine 12-2

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