London, U.K. (September 29, 2015)—Mix engineer Wez Clarke recently refurbished his London studio, with acoustic design by Munro Acoustics, ME Geithain monitoring, and an SSL AWS 948 console with delta-Control.
The breadth of Wez’s work has expanded somewhat in recent times. “For some reason, I got pigeon-holed into dance music—before that, there was a lull in dance music and everything I did was hip-hop and Grime. These days, I do much more than that—ballads, guitar-based; all sorts, really.”
Clarke needed a space and equipment that would work in any genre, and for him one of the primary strengths of the AWS is its sonic versatility: “Because it’s so clean, you don’t have to imprint the analogue desk sound,” he explains. “People don’t necessarily want a sound printed on a project at the mixing stage. They might like their sound—they just want it sharper and punchier, and so on—so I need to be quite careful. I think the desk gives you the best of both worlds; you can get either sound you want.”
Another aspect of the console that suits Wez’s work is its dual-path input channels. “I think the stereo channels on the AWS were a massive selling point for me,” he says Wez. “Everything that comes to me is stereo—literally everything—all the stems. It makes life a lot easier to move one set of knobs rather than two.”
His working method has evolved since using the desk: “I basically have everything in Pro Tools at zero and do it all on the desk in the analogue world. Once you get the bug—once you hear the sound—it’s difficult to go back; and now I’ve got delta-Control and I can automate using that, I hardly do anything in-the-box.”
Solid State Logic
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