Sam Smith recently embarked on a 75-date tour across four continents in support of the new album “Gloria,” with mixes delivered by veteran front-of-house engineer Jim Ebdon working with a Solid State Logic Live L650 mixing console as well as THE BUS+ compressor and Fusion analogue multi-processor in his outboard rack.
Ebdon, who started his career over 30 years ago as a studio engineer in the U.K. and whose résumé includes tours with Maroon 5, Matchbox Twenty, Aerosmith, The Weeknd and, most recently, Justin Bieber, regularly works with SSL Live consoles. He took an L200 out on Smith’s “The Thrill of It All Tour” in 2018, he’s been using L550 Plus and L650 consoles with Bieber for the past few years, and he has a Live desk at his home studio in Los Angeles.
For “Gloria The Tour,” Ebdon elected to take out an SSL Live L650 console along with three 32-input Net I/O SB 32.24 stage boxes. “The console sounds so good,” he says. “I also use THE BUS+ and a Fusion on my mix bus, and that’s a really great combination. You think you’ve dialled up a great mix and then you go into THE BUS+ and the Fusion and start playing around — and suddenly you have an even better mix. The combination is phenomenal.
“It’s got a much bigger, deeper sound, and I’ve always preferred the mix bus sound of SSL Live compared with other consoles,” he continues. “I am only using SSL Live mic pres, I don’t use any external third party mic pres for anything. The inputs and outputs of the console are one of the reasons I chose it!”
As for vocal processing, Ebdon is as hands-off as possible: “You can over process the human voice. I want the human voice to sound just like you are six feet away. Even though it’s amplified, it’s still going to sound the same.” But using the Violet EQ section of the Fusion processor, he says, “I can get some of that 12k, 18k back in there, some of that air that you can hear from a record. And it doesn’t screw up the actual tonal quality of the voice.”
Ebdon has also been using the Fusion for quite some time. “I love the Vintage Drive feature on it; I dial in the harmonics every day. And the Violet EQ is phenomenal. I tend to add some of that high-end air on a daily basis, once the audience has come in, or if I want to have that little bit of air in the mix.” But the current Smith tour is his first opportunity to use THE BUS+ compressor, which he has wired into the insert points of his Fusion. “I haven’t even gotten a quarter of the way into what THE BUS+ can do; you can really get deep into it,” he concludes.
