NEVE(r) NEVE(r) land
(Burbank Audio Systems, 2017)
The Bounce
Today was the day I have been looking forward to on this current project. Amor and myself had the luxury of getting up close, personal and very handsy with the Neve Custom 75. What a joy this console is, its sound is warm and rich with an easy to follow signal flow. Todays task was to bounce each of the Arturia DrumBrute parts for our piece "Silence" to audio so I can take charge of this project in Logic Pro X.
Our initial plan was to use the individual outputs from the DrumBrute into the patch bay on the Neve. This went out the window when we discovered that the cables were the wrong size to send without creating our own custom cable. As we only had 4 hours we had to come up with a solution. This problem was easily overcome as we decided to simply DI (Direct input) the master from the drum brute to a single channel on the Neve and bounce them one at a time.[White circle on the below picture]
(Arturia, 2017)
This problem was actually a blessing in disguise as we got to spend some quality time with each drum part. Firstly we used the EQ on the Neve to create an amazing sound. Being completely analogue the DrumBrute already has an amazing sound the driving it through the Neve which again is purely analogue we were able to get some amazing sounds using Analogue Warmth. It also meant that we got to manually automate each instrument at the bounce stage live with knobs giving the end result a human real that automation curves can not replicate.
I won't go into each and every sound however here is a brief look at the EQ settings used for the Rim/Claves output on the DrumBrute.
(Doctor Duck, 2017)
As you can see (you may have to pause for a better look). The low end we set to 100Hz and removed all most everything as this instrument doesn't need any bass. The low mids knob is set to 270Hz and we have driven it hard to get some analogue distortion through and allow it to sit in the mix nicely. We also activated the HiQ settings to add presence (AMS Neve Ltd, 2017). Next up was the hi mids again we used the HiQ button to add presence. This one was a little harder to dial in the sound wasn't sitting right until we settled on the 1.8 kHz setting and drove it hard (almost as much as possible we even had to change the gain staging to avoid clipping in Ableton) and then it just popped up in the mix and sounded great. Lastly was the highs we went with a notch cut at 10 kHz to get rid of some upper harmonics created while boosting so hard at 1.8 kHz. As you can hear the drums sound great in the clip recorded on my iPhone and we are only half way through our drum instruments.
Forward
Having now bounced down all our drum parts and each individual track from Amor's arrangement I am free to spend the next week processing, automating and adding the Doctor Duck flare to this piece. Stay tuned for more updates and perhaps a cheeky preview of the piece.
References
AMS Neve Ltd,. (2017). 1084 | AMS Neve. Retrieved from https://ams-neve.com/1084-2/
Arturia. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.arturia.com/drumbrute/overview
Arturia. (2017). Arturia - Overview. Retrieved from https://www.arturia.com/drumbrute/overview
Burbank Audio Systems. (2017). Custom Series 75 | powered by Neve. Retrieved from http://www.customseries75.com/site/
Doctor Duck. (2017, June 30). Clave EQ setting Neve Custom 75 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu2t9hx4bbo&feature=youtu.be