When Vasco Teodoro relocated his Plateia D’Ilusões recording studio to its present location in Almada, Portugal in mid-2019, he was using a hybrid production setup that included an Solid State Logic Nucleus DAW controller joined by an SSL Sigma δelta remote-controlled summing mixer, and he recently upgraded his control room with a 32-channel ORIGIN analog mixing console, UF8 DAW controller and Fusion analog master processor.
“I liked my first-generation Nucleus, but I was looking for a mixing desk for my studio,” says Teodoro, a producer, engineer and mixer whose facility is located just across the river from the center of Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. “When I saw the ORIGIN come up, I thought, this is it.”
He adds that since installing the ORIGIN, he’s using plugins and outboard gear far less. “The ORIGIN EQ is amazing, and the low end is incredible, rounded but defined. I’ll do a high-pass on the ORIGIN, sometimes some EQ, sometimes not, and it sounds great, so I’ve been using less and less and less other stuff. I’m finishing a mix now and when I look at my Pro Tools window, lots of channels don’t have any plug-ins on them. So the ORIGIN really puts me in the sweet spot of working. That’s something I’m really enjoying — the workflow.
“Some of my clients were here asking if I could hear the difference between the desk and the plug-ins,” he continues. “I said, ‘Let me open up some channels and crank 15 dB at 16 kHz.’ In the plug-in, it will sound harsh. I’m not saying that you can’t have great results with plugins. But you can overdrive a console and that’s priceless, for me. I showed them an example, with the drums. They could hear the difference. To get the same result with Pro Tools I would have to use four or five plug-ins.”
With his old setup, Teodoro would often use the microphone preamps in a sidecar desk when tracking. “Since I got the ORIGIN, I haven’t used it,” he explains. “I wasn’t expecting that. These PureDrive mic preamps have surprised me a lot, especially the Drive button that adds harmonics.”
While Teodoro’s clients work in a variety of music genres, many of them prefer to track together as an ensemble, he reports, which is another advantage of working with ORIGIN. “I’m fortunate to work with some of the best musicians in Portugal and they like the setup that I have here. They track live, which is great, because I have 32 channels on the ORIGIN. The desk allows me to get sounds more easily and way faster, because I can saturate the channel preamps or use some EQ to put more bite on the snare, for example. And if the piano player also plays guitar, I can have both set up and don’t need to keep switching things,” which he had to do with his previous recording setup.
While Teodoro finds himself increasingly relying with ORIGIN for recording and mixing, there’s still something of a hybrid workflow at the studio. His SSL UF8 controller, mounted on a stand to his left, provides tactile control of his DAW automation. “Some things I automate in Pro Tools, the main things I automate on the UF8; at most I automate two channels at a time,” he says. “And on the ORIGIN, I can put everything on the faders and ride them. I love having all these faders.”
He adds that the Fusion processor, which he typically inserts on the master bus, offers possibilities for projects where a client has a very limited budget. For those projects, “I know I can’t always be mixing on the ORIGIN desk. So sometimes, if it’s for a little character on something and it’s a really tight budget and tight timing, I can just use the desk for summing with the Fusion,” he says.
