Engineer Bob Daspit (pictured), based in Northern California, recently mixed a DVD for former Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar. Entitled Livin’ It Up! In St. Louis, the 5.1 mix has aired on the HD Network.
Daspit is also an accomplished guitarist and composer who spent close to a dozen years sampling and playing guitar for film composer Hans Zimmer. Daspit has taken time to focus on his own band, The Goldbrickers, and shift his focus to recording and mixing. To that end, he is setting up a second personal studio at Hans Zimmer’s facility in Santa Monica, Calif.
Daspit relied heavily on Sonnox Oxford Plug-ins for the Hagar project. “I’m a longtime fan of the Oxford Plug-ins, and use them on all my mixes,” Daspit says. “The EQ Plug-in was especially helpful on the Hagar project. It made a major difference on the stereo bus, and provided an incredibly sweet sound. It works wonders in helping to shape guitar sounds, but it manages to avoid that effects-heavy approach that compromises the player’s authenticity.”
Daspit also used the Oxford EQ on the toms and on Hagar’s vocals, which he further enhanced with a dash of Oxford Dynamics. The Dynamics plug-in also plays a role in Daspit’s acoustic guitar mixes as does the Oxford Limiter.
“Generally speaking, I find the entire Oxford Plug-in suite useful one way or another in most of my work,” Daspit says. “I’ll use TransMod on the two-bus and the snare, and Inflator on vocals, particularly backing vocals, which are always a sensitive issue. [Make them] too soft and they get lost almost entirely, too loud and they can overshadow the lead vocal.
“I love the Sonnox Reverb,” Daspit concludes. “I favor that [plug-in] even over convolution reverbs for most applications, because it sounds incredible and I can still make real-time adjustments to all the parameters. It’s great fun to experiment with the Oxford Plug-ins. They really make an amazing difference.”
For more information, visit www.sonnoxplugins.com and Daspit’s MySpace page at www.myspace.com/bobdaspit. To read Mix‘s profile of Daspit from the March 2004 issue, “Music for Games,” go to http://mixonline.com/recording/interviews/audio_music_games/.
