“Hey Ya!” Mix engineer Neal Pogue (pictured) has usedSolid State Logic consoles throughout his 10-plus year career withGrammy Award-winning duo Outkast. Pogue recently mixed seven tracks onAndre 3000’s “The Love Below,” (one-half ofOutkast’s latest release) including hit single “HeyYa!” Pogue mixed six of Andre’s creations at Larrabee NorthStudios in Universal City, Calif. on an SSL SL 9000 J SeriesSuperAnalogue console, but traveled to New York’s Hit Factory touse an SSL XL 9000 K Series SuperAnalogue console for “HeyYa!”
On “Hey Ya!,” Outkast’s Grammy Award-winning debutsingle off of the double-disc, Pogue needed to make Andre’sacoustic guitar shine on top of the mix in order to polish the upbeat,“party” song. While many engineers tend to add elements toachieve a desired effect on a given track, Pogue took a differentapproach.
“I am a huge fan of cutting frequencies,” he explains.“And EQ’ing Andre’s acoustic was a tedious process. Iused the EQs on the console to take the bass out of his guitar, becausehe has a really big-body type of guitar, so I had to trim the frequencya lot at 300 Hz by about –2 dB. That’s the secret, not toadd anything, because usually when you do that, you are just addingbrittleness.”
In addition to the EQ needs on Andre’s guitar, Pogue was alsofaced with making the two programmed drum tracks on “HeyYa!” sound as if they were recorded live. The task wasaccomplished due to a combination of Andre’s diligent programmingwork and the built-in compression on the SSL XL 9000 K Seriesconsole.
In other SSL news, the company now offers the XLogic Series ofoutboard gear. Developed from SSL’s XL 9000 K Series console,each XLogic unit features the company’s world-classSuperAnalogue™ audio quality. The products can be used with awide variety of applications, such as high-resolution digital recordingfor the latest DAW systems and compression for DVD mastering.
For more info, visit www.solid-state-logic.com.
