With credits ranging from Latin artists Celia Cruz, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez to a string of recent EDM and dance successes with Lady Gaga, Pet Shop Boys, Chris ‘C-Rod’ Rodriguez is part of the vibrant Miami music scene. Ranking among the current top producers and remixers, a recent sequence of events came ‘like destiny’ to help him streamline and modernise his recording/editing/mixing set-up.
A run of chart success that found him working in an increasingly mobile fashion as he travelled collaborate with top artists coincided with a period in which he had left his third studio but hadn’t yet moved into his newly opened space.
‘I realised that I was travelling with my laptop as my workstation, and no matter where I went or what gear I hooked up to it, I was essentially recording in-the-box,’ he observes.
‘This was a shift from my earlier years, working with great large consoles and tons of outboard gear in place. It hit me – what if, when I moved into my fourth studio, I got rid of the console altogether?’
Then he learned about the Focusrite Red 8Pre, and realised that it could be the missing piece – whether at home in his new Miami facility, in other studios around the world, in a hotel room or anywhere else the work took him.
‘When you take a console out of the equation, obviously a key element you need is analogue-to-digital conversion,’ he reasons. ‘I knew I needed great conversion going in and great conversion going into the headphones or speakers, and I heard about the Red 8Pre, with its three types of connectivity. When I got mine, I hooked it up in no more than a few minutes and plugged headphones in, and it blew my mind – it was like I could hear every single detail in every one of the mixes that I had done. It became a key element of my set-up immediately.’
The Red 8Pre has proven valuable for his monitors in the room too: ‘I use Cubase, and it has a great centre section where you can select different monitors in your set-up, and the Red 8Pre is completely compatible with this function. I can isolate my ATC 300s, my Genelec S30s or my Yamaha NS10s – all the way they’re supposed to be heard. Working with Cubase, the Red 8Pre can act as its own mini console in that regard. It’s like the centre of my studio.’
And the Red 8Pre gives C-Rod the inputs he needs: ‘The mic preamps, with the Air function, are phenomenal. It’s like you don’t even need to have any kind of external EQ. I plug a Neumann U87 or U47 in, or even a Shure SM57 – mics I’ve had for years – and they just sing. The top end is all there and the bottom end is solid. It’s all so easy to use and easy to control. And naturally the Red 8Pre can offer real-time headphone monitoring for the artists I’m working with. It’s really a great device that has what I need. It just works.’
More: www.focusrite.com
