Nashville, TN (May 8, 2015)—After years working with a separate Sound Devices mixer and recorder, veteran sound mixer Christopher Brown has switched to the new 633, a smaller six-channel mixer with integrated 10-track recorder.
With more than 23 years of experience, Brown has traveled to many remote places such as the jungles of Papua New Guinea, the desert of Timbuktu in Mali, Africa and the Galapagos Islands. For years, his gear bag held a separate 442 field mixer and the 744T four-channel audio recorder, both by Sound Devices.
However, a growing need to record more than four channels of audio led him in a new direction when he joined a crew headed to the sandy landscape of Turkmenistan for a National Geographic shoot at the edge of a flaming methane gas crater known by locals as the Gateway to Hell. For that project, he rented the Sound Devices 664 production mixer.
“That was my first experience with the combined mixer recorder,” he says. “With the 664, I had five people on wireless mic, and the boom, and so that worked well.”
After Turkmenistan, when he returned the 664, he learned about Sound Devices 633. “Basically, the 633 had the same menus, the same workings of the 664, which I’d just used, and I really liked the mixer and the multi-track recorder all being in one unit. The 633 had all the tracks I needed and it was in a compact package. That’s key when you go to the remote places I have to work in.”
Brown also has to deal with the elements. At a Niagara Falls shoot, which included spending hours outside with temperatures in the teens, showered with freezing spray and snow flurries, “I was donned in a climbing harness and crampons, and I used the ultra-compact Sound Devices 633 mixer, which worked like a charm. All the inputs helped me deal with four climbers on wireless mics, plus recording walkie radio chatter.”
Sound Devices
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