Studio: Desk

Soundcraft Spirit folio 12:2

I look forward to the day when I can take this mixer with its two band EQ, 12 inputs and wobbly knobs and throw it out of the window. That will also be the day when I find a large sum of money in a sack of peas and buy an old 24:8:2 mixer with it.

I used a Studiomaster 16:8:2 until a couple of years ago. No matter how many fancy plugins and computers you've got you cannot top the immediacy and versatility of a real mixing desk and some outboard stuff when you're making  electronic music. Now that I've taken the trouble to learn lots of plugins and engineering stuff I'm aiming to get the best of both worlds.

Most of the tracks here were done on the S950, the Novation, the PowerMac and the old Studiomaster 16:8:2 desk. I think it was the desk that really opened up musical possibilities to me. However, the computer was slow and the sampler was crap. Not having a disk drive was a real drawback.

I've only recently got the PC and the S3000XL, but I've no room for a proper sized desk, so I've got loads of great sounds but nothing on which to separate them out. The tracks done on the new stuff are 'mobile', 'thehittingkitchen', 'charliegame', 'the race' and 'game_3'. I need a real mixing desk, an Intel PC and a SCSI card for fast and reliable sample transfers. And some proper little monitors. And some more room.

Computers / Samplers / Synths / Outboard / Desk