Five-time Grammy Award-winning mix engineer Chris Lord-Alge’s Mix LA recording facility in Los Angeles has utilized Solid State Logic consoles for decades, including an SL 4064 G Series desk originally installed in 1986 in the A room that’s now joined by an ORIGIN analog board situated at the new Studio D.
“When ORIGIN first arrived at AES ‘19 and was first unveiled to my brother Tom and I, we both knew that this was going to be a big winner for us,” says Lord-Alge, who says the layout of ORIGIN offers the right workflow and ergonomics. “It gives you 32 upper and lower channels with EQs and sends, and in the center section and you can mount a UF8 controller for automation. But the great thing about ORIGIN is that it is a classic analog desk with great sounding mic preamps.”
ORIGIN proved to be the right fit in Studio D, for which Lord-Alge wanted to provide an intimate, artist-driven workflow: “I wanted to offer a place where artists could stay for a longer period of time and make music without compromise. For instance, one of my clients, Dwight Yoakam, likes to camp out and spend weeks making sure his vocals and guitars are perfect. Studio D is designed for that kind of one on one work between artist and engineer.”
After a soft opening of the room last summer, Lord-Alge appointed veteran engineer Marc DeSisto to run the new facility, noting, “So far, Marc is having great results with ORIGIN because the desk is really the ultimate work surface.” DeSisto began his career in Boston in 1979, has worked as an engineer on both coasts of the U.S. at facilities that include Fleetwood Recording, Sound Castle and on staff at A&M Studios before going independent.
“When I got here, the room was all finished and it was like walking into a palace,” DeSisto says. “When I first saw the ORIGIN sitting there, it just made me want to record because all of the pieces are right there in front of you: the mic lines, the faders, EQs, sends, and off you go.”
While the recording space is more intimate in Studio D, Lord-Alge says clients can access the facility’s main recording room with 64 channels of I/O, using a Dante AoIP networked infrastructure. “We have an SSL SB 8.8 Dante mic pre in the main room,” he says.
DeSisto says that acclimating himself to ORIGIN was straightforward. “Getting on the console was really quick and it sounded fantastic,” he says. “The EQ section is exactly in the right place above the small faders, and the sends directly above that.” One of Lord-Alge’s favorite features is the 0 dB switch, which automatically sets the faders to unity gain: “This means you can set every fader to zero, and mix from Pro Tools through the console and use it as a summing mixer, which is what we’re doing in Studio D. It’s a nice way of working because we use the small faders for our microphones, with the returns on the large faders — so we can have drums, vocals and everything set up all the time.
Since using ORIGIN, DeSisto has noticed that his mixes seem be ‘larger’ sounding with more dimension: “ORIGIN takes it to another level and makes other mixes seem small. Also, I am noticing how quiet the console is — there is no noise anywhere, and the switches don’t make any noise,” he adds. For his mix sessions, DeSisto is summing to eight stereo pairs and finds the E-Series ‘Black Knob’ style EQ section quite flexible: “You really can spread the sound out quite a bit with the console’s Black EQ. We used the Black style EQs at A&M, and this design is just so musical.”
