TORONTO, CANADA—Humber College, which has trained professional musicians since the 1972 launch of its Jazz Music Diploma, has installed a 48-channel Duality console from Solid State Logic, the world’s leading manufacturer of analogue and digital audio consoles and provider of creative tools for music, broadcast and post production professionals.
Duality is the centerpiece of the polytechnic’s new, state-of-the-art recording studio, based at Humber’s School of Creative & Performing Arts and serving the recently-introduced Bachelor of Applied Music – Contemporary Music program. The four-year program is unique: it is not offered by any university in Canada. This year, 1,400 students applied for just 110 positions in the prestigious program.
In the latter two years of the program, students are introduced to a series of production-oriented courses which demonstrate the proper use of the studio as well as the role and value of the recording engineer, producer and mastering engineer. With the Duality, students will learn traditional production procedures and the fundamentals of signal paths and gain stages.
“Sitting down at the Duality felt like coming home in an up-to-date environment,� comments Ian Terry, original lead consultant on the project and one of two professors hired to teach Music Production. “Integration with the DAW made the interface intuitive and easy to switch from console to DAW and back again. I was up and recording musicians and mixing in 5.1 in minutes. Sonically, it is signature SSL. Duality should guarantee their success for the next decade.�
“When I sat down at the Duality and started mixing for the first time, I couldn’t believe how quickly the console and the DAW disappeared and I could work on the music,â€? adds Steve Bellamy, professor of Music Production. “Solid State Logic has found the answer to integrating the sonic advantage of their large-format consoles with the editing power of a DAW. Duality is the answer.â€?
While Humber College’s Bachelor of Applied Music – Contemporary Music program is not intended to train professional engineers, it is training future professional musicians and producers in the correct production procedures to obtain the best-sounding and best-produced music possible.
“We are not training engineers,� Terry explains. “Rather, we are training those at the heart of creative music production as to the values of quality production and all that it encompasses. Duality is great; I think it’s brilliant, actually. It was the first choice. We got what fits the program well.�
