One of the three recording and production spaces at The Royal College of Music (Kungl. Musikhögskolan or KMH) in Stockholm, built to support the school’s performance, composition, conducting and music and media production programs, houses a Solid State Logic ORIGIN 32-channel analog mixing console.
The SSL ORIGIN control room is the only one of the three to incorporate a console, with the other two featuring DAW and outboard hardware setups. The room featuring the ORIGIN is used exclusively by students pursuing three-year bachelor’s and two-year master’s degrees in music production for their personal projects.
The studio also offers a live tracking space housing a grand piano, drum kit and instrument amplifiers and is large enough to accommodate a rhythm section. Walters-Storyk Design Group designed all three music studios on the new campus at the college, which traces its roots back to 1771.
“Students can book this room whenever they want as long as there is no teaching going on,” explains Jan-Olof Gullö, professor, Music and Media Production. “Most students have worked with audio interfaces, but to understand signal flow it is always great to get them on a real mixing console. ORIGIN is great for this because everything is clearly laid out. The students are recording everything on the ORIGIN: classical music, pop music, electronic, rock. It responds well to all these genres. It’s a great tool and perfect for recording a lot of tracks — and it sounds great.”
He continues, “What I like about this mixer is that what you put into it you get out of it. It doesn’t color the sound. The PureDrive preamps on ORIGIN are very clean when the Drive is not engaged. We did tests and the noise floor is very quiet. Also, it is efficient, power-wise. Older consoles need cooling systems, and they take a lot of energy. We like the sleep mode on ORIGIN, which also conserves energy, so you don’t have to power up and power down all the time.”
Over the course of two decades at KMH, first as a student then as a staff studio engineer, Erik Metall had the opportunity to work on the SSL 4000G+ and SSL Duality desks previously installed at the school. He appreciates the legacy sound character and functionality that SSL has purposely designed into the new ORIGIN. “The preamps are as you would expect — it sounds like an SSL and they work very well. Also, the EQ works exactly as you would like to hear from an SSL desk,” comments Metall, who is also a freelance engineer and a working musician. “I love the architecture, with the small faders. That is a return to the 4000 Series structure that I really love.”
Students are largely self-taught through hands-on operation of the ORIGIN, Metall adds, “Students get a basic course on how the ORIGIN desk works and how everything is set up. Then they explore things pretty much on their own.”
Since it was installed, ORIGIN has been successful as a teaching tool, Gullö notes. “It has been very easy for the students to learn on. The great thing with this mixer is that it allows students to learn it quite fast.”
The music production rooms also make use of SSL’s 2+ USB audio interface. “The SSL 2+ is the best product ever made,” Gullö states. “You plug it in — you don’t need any extra power — and it just works. And it sounds fantastic. I think the preamps are brilliant and have 62 dB of gain, so you can use a Shure SM7B microphone without an external preamp or Cloudlifter.”
The SSL ORIGIN at the Royal College of Music facility was supplied by console was ARVA, an SSL-authorized retail company in Sweden.
