Mix engineer, guitarist and producer Mike Butler (Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, many others) recently recorded singer-songwriter The White Buffalo during a two-night stint at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, CA utilizing his Audient Expanded System comprised of an EVO 16 interface and two SP8 eight-channel mic preamps working with his MacBook Pro running Pro Tools.
Butler first discovered EVO Expanded System last year when he was upgrading his home recording setup. EVO 16 offers eight internal mic preamps, a monitor section with two independent headphone outputs and it is expandable via ADAT to 24 channels, and he already had one EVO SP8.
He explains, “I had used a 16-channel version of this setup to record a full album project in my house last year with great results, so expanding the system to 24 channels for this seemed to be a no-brainer.”
When showtime came around, Butler ensured that the rig was set up correctly. “The band did a full sound check, running through various songs and I set all my mic levels from the EVOs. The ability to save all these settings using the EVO software meant that I knew everything would be consistent the following night. All I had to do was open the project and all my levels were exactly the same.
“I can’t tell you what a luxury it was to be able to walk into the venue the next night and have everything set up exactly as we had left it. In the end, the EVO Expanded System worked exactly as I hoped it would. It is an intuitive, easy to use, great sounding and reliable system that is equally at home in the studio and on location, and the fact that the system is so affordable blows me away. I can’t think of any other system at this price point that would even come close to the quality.”
Mike is still in the midst of turning nearly five hours and 50 songs into a cohesive, 20 song live album, concluding, “I’m really looking forward to getting to the mixing stage in the coming weeks because I know I’ll have no issue with the sound quality of the tracks.”
