Los Angeles, CA (July 25, 2014)—Mixer, engineer and producer Ethan Mates has outfitted his newly relocated, purpose-built private studio with an SSL Matrix.
“I’ve always had some kind of studio at home, but I’ve never really mixed there—just tons of editing, production, programming, and writing for film and things like that,” says Mates, who worked with Linkin Park on the group’s new studio album, The Hunting Party, at Larrabee. “I didn’t want to be completely in-the-box anymore. In searching for my console, I knew I wanted to have an SSL stereo bus, so that I would be summing through an SSL. That was imperative to me. Matrix just seemed like the obvious choice.”
“The first couple of projects I mixed on the Matrix were smaller, more organic sounding, and I ended up taking it as a challenge to mix them the way that I used to do—rough mixes and just mixed it all by hand. I’m still learning things like A-FADA mode, but it was a really cool experiment…and a lot of fun. I really like having the routing capabilities of Matrix and the dedicated tactile monitor section. The big green button for flipping between analogue and Pro Tools control is awesome. It makes a huge difference to my hybrid workflow! Plus, I totally love having 40 inputs on mix down, should I need them, and I have the Matrix effects returns all filled up with Pro Tools outputs. So, it’s just a really nice package for what I need.”
Mates recalls the first time hearing Matrix summing in action, saying it took him back to the 9K series. “You know, how SSLs have that familiar kind of mid-range area? Well, I just put up some stuff through the 2-mix, that I knew what it sounds like at the studio and was like, yeah, this sounds like SSL, this sounds totally familiar to me. Nothing exaggerated and nothing new, just familiar.”
Solid State Logic
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