Next Depeche decamped to the East Coast to continue working in The Penthouse at the beautiful Jungle City Studios in NYC, with its SSL Duality equipped control room and inspiring live room.
“There’s really good monitoring in the main studio there, but we still rebuilt our own studio in the live room, so we could run both rooms simultaneously.”
The transportable Matrix-based workflow worked a treat, bringing several salient strengths to the tracking table.
“We were comp’ing everything on the master Pro Tools rig and running that through the Matrix, so we could just hit recall and get back to the same musical buzz every time, while the DAW control got us away from looking at the computer screen too much.
“We did all the summing in the Matrix — at least all the rough mixes on all the work-in-progress stuff, which worked well. The mix busses sound really great — there’s a gain pot on the top that’s especially handy when you’re setting up a mix and want to drive it a little bit more to make it glue together nicely.”
The key to mixing Depeche Mode’s successful sound arguably lies in balancing those copious quantities of synthesisers (and occasional guitar) alongside Dave Gahan’s distinctive baritone and Martin Gore’s more melodious backing (and occasional lead) vocals.
Here, too, the Matrix proved proficient when tracking the band’s most emotive elements.
“We had a large rack of outboard compressors and EQs — a few of my favourites and some choice pieces liberated from Martin’s studio — that were all patched into the Matrix’s software patch bay.
“Pretty much everything was put through some of them, and we had preset insert chains for things like Dave and Martin’s vocal sounds.”
Hillier must have been doing something right, for following another month-long stint in Santa Barbara Sound Design then an Autumnal return visit to Jungle City Studios tracking was complete. The Matrix proved to be the perfect production partner for Depeche Mode’s modus operandi.
“What’s most exciting about this record is that it seems like we’ve really managed to communicate what the band wanted,” Hillier concludes.