Austin, TX (March 25, 2022)—U.K.-born mixer, producer and musician Tim Palmer has had a busy few months, having hit the top spot of Billboard‘s Top Album Sales chart on March 12 with the new Tears For Fears album, The Tipping Point—he mixed the title track at his Studio 62 facility in Austin, TX. That came on the heels of him updating the facility last year with the addition of both SSL’s UF8 advanced DAW controller and UC1 hardware plug-in controller.
Palmer’s career is marked with many production and mixing milestones, from winning his first BPI Gold Disk in his late teens, to his first U.K. No. 1 single at the age of 21, through working on Pearl Jam’s Ten, one of the all-time Billboard 200 top-15 charting albums, and receiving a Grammy nomination for U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Classic Track: ‘Even Flow,’ Pearl Jam
Palmer established Studio 62 in 2009 as an analog/digital hybrid mix and overdub room. The two new SSL controllers replaced an older set of faders on his workstation. “The quality of the build on these SSL faders has been really nice,” he says. “They react really well to the touch, which is important to me.”
Since starting as an assistant at Utopia Studios in London at age 18, Palmer has had decades of experience working on mixing consoles, initially with tape machines. “I was contemplating the other day that for most of the early part of my career, I rarely looked at a screen,” he says. “I never had to look at audio wave-forms or a computer monitor.” With the new UF8 and UC1 installed, “It’s so refreshing to not have to use your eyes and just concentrate on listening, and to be able to physically touch an EQ or a fader is a welcome return.”
Palmer previously had a fader controller in his setup, but the upgrade to the UF1 and especially the UC1, provided him with dedicated hardware control of the SSL Native Channel Strip 2 and Bus Compressor 2 plug-ins via the SSL 360° software. “Getting away from the mouse and being able to manipulate the EQ has been rewarding. It’s nice to be able to close my eyes, turn the EQ and say, ‘OK, that sounds good,” he says. “And having multiple bus compressors available to insert onto my sub-groups is an added bonus.”
