AKARSH SHEKHAR
The Importance of an SSL-
XL Desk in Your Studio
Today we thrive in an incredible time with very affordable
hardware and software tools. With all of the software-based
tools and technological advances that we are experiencing,
why would anyone bring an analog desk back? Consoles (and
hardware in general) are limited, because you have what you
have and no more. Most of us with DAW already start out
with dozens of plug-ins or beyond that, and with computers
becoming absolute rocket ships of processing, there’s almost
nothing stopping us from throwing endless tools and options at
our projects. Some find this confusing, others find it helpful but
sometimes, it can be an absolute waste of time. For example if
you only had 16 EQs to use, do you change the way you record
or do you decide that a track doesn’t even need EQ in order to
preserve that EQ for another track that definitely does need it?
Analog Consoles
Most of us make music because we love it, not because someone
is paying us to. Since it’s a labor of love, we come back to
projects again and again, remixing, reediting, retracking,
adding new plug-ins or gear, etc., rather than just calling it
finished and moving on.
When a console like the XL-Desk doesn’t have recall or
automation, there is no saving your project and coming back
later. Sure, you can photograph the knob and fader positions or
try to recall it from memory, but it’s not practical to think that
you will do either as you switch from one song to the next. If
you want to move on from this project, you need to be done!
The Importance of an SSL- XL Desk:
• The XL-Desk as we’ve already mentioned houses an inbuilt
500 Series chassis, but it isn’t hardwired. It’s got its own patch
points that can either be jumped right to the board or routed out
to a patchbay.
• A button on each channel brings it into the signal path or
you could just as easily patch a different piece of gear into that
point, giving you two inserts on each channel lending a lot of
versatility.
• With the 500 Series chassis, you can tailor the sound of the
console to be what you want.
• SuperAnalogue, the technology behind SSL’s flagship
products, is meant to be transparent and clean, so it makes
sense to drop in whatever modules you want for color.
• Great if you love vintage Neve-style EQs on guitars and vocals.
• Great for an API tone on your drum bus
• Great for SSL compression on your mix bus
• At the press of a button, it becomes a box of crayons, and you
get to choose the colors which are imposed onto individual
channels or mix buses.
• The workflow of this board is unbelievably flexible with both
cue mixing and talkback built in so it could just as easily be
used for tracking.
• This board is so fun, as we often just want tools to help take
the music out of our head and simply get it into the real world
and if there’s a tool that can help us do that more fluidly, more
efficiently, more creatively, and in a more fun and inspiring
way, then this is the tool for that.
Last but not at all least, we generally play and create music
because we like the sound coming from our system and
feeling more creative while operating that system is definitely
something worth pursuing. The XL-Desk delivers so much as
it is clearly meant to be part of a DAW-based workflow, built
to leverage the power of computer-based music production
without sacrificing any of the benefits of an analog workflow.
The
Score Magazine
highonscore.com
37