STUDIO A CONTROL ROOM
STUDIO A TRACKING ROOM
ham’s custom-designed digital patch bay,
control the entire studio system (interface,
patch bay, audio and video monitoring,
headphone system, and MIDI controllers)
from their own laptop.
“When I built Soleil, I designed a custom
patch bay with 500 points on it. Here, I ba-
sically have nicely-chosen house paths set
up, so if you want to plug in drums and use
my signal chain, you can. At Soleil, I had the
drum kit set up and miked; I’m not doing
that here because it just takes up too much
space, but you can set them up, mic them,
and there’s a signal path to use. My whole
workflow and what I try to do with studio
design is about being able to move fast.”
Having everything pre-patched – drum
lines, piano, synths, amps – is a significant
time saver. “I’m using a Phoenix Audio N8,
which is a wicked ‘bang for your buck’ box
with eight channels of Neve-flavoured DI/
line drivers. They just go right into inputs in
Pro Tools, so all that is set up and ready to
32 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
go on dedicated channels, all the time.”
As house signal paths are already set up
through the patch bay, it’s possible to record
an entire band without re-patching, although
paths can be altered as needed. “It feels al-
most like a home studio,” he adds. “You don’t
need an engineering crew to run it; if you can
run a DAW, you can run Secret Door.”
The studio’s DAW is also controllable from
the recording floor via USB MIDI over Ether-
net, with lines and adapters for a controller,
keyboard, video hookup, etc., “for producers
or artists who need to record themselves
playing piano or drums for instance,” he
says. “I did that a lot at Soleil. Being able to
control Pro Tools remotely is super helpful if
you want to sit out on the [recording] floor
with an artist for a writing session.”
Abraham got his start in music as a
player, and making records is a departure
from the path he originally intended to
take professionally, back when he was a
PhD theology student at the University of
Toronto, eyeing a career as a professor. “As
much as anything, that experience helped
me learn how to learn. I’m completely self-
taught on instruments and production and
studio building, so there was a big value in
that,” he muses.
After being invited to move into The Hive
by owner Oliver Johnson and swiftly building
a client base, Abraham was soon making a
better living than he would as a prof and had
to make a decision about his future. “I took a
year off from U of T, and then another year,
and then they were like, ‘You need to come
back or get out,’” Abraham says, laughing. “It
wasn’t really a hard decision.”
Now, having spent almost two decades
as a producer, mixer, engineer, and compos-
er, Abraham has become adept at blending
old-school and cutting-edge technologies
to maximize productivity.
“I might be doing pop one day, mixing
a country artist or a singer/songwriter like
Royal Wood or a band like Grand Analog
the next, and every genre has a different
kind of production workflow,” he shares.
As a result, Secret Door is designed so that
anyone working there can switch between
workflows – from in-the-box to an analog
approach, for example – seamlessly and
with minimal downtime.
As for his main mixing surface: “There is
a console, but you wouldn’t recognize it
as such,” Abraham says. “I mix hybrid, but
based around the SSL Sigma. It’s basically a
32-channel SSL console in a 2U rack space
and has the same channel electronics as the
SSL AWS series, but it’s all digitally controlled
with plug-ins in Pro Tools. You can use it
with an external Euphonics fader controller
and have the feel of a console if you want,
but I’ve always mixed with a mouse.”
Ultimately, the set-up serves as an auto-
mated, two-buss analog console. “It lets me
use a lot of gear that would be tough to use
with a passive summing mixer, and to push
the gear harder and do full recalls when I
open Pro Tools. On my drum buss, I often
use an API 2500 and drive that into the
red on the output, out of the DAW, out of
the converters, as hard as I want to get the
sound I’m going for. Then I can automate
everything after that hardware. If you were
using just a passive summing mixer, you’d
be changing the level hitting that gear all the
time and that changes the compression.”
Those capabilities are critical to Abra-
ham’s mixing approach. “I move really
quickly at the start; 90 per cent of my mix
happens in two hours,” he reveals. He starts
in the box, with his analog rig mirrored us-