‘We spend a lot of time “in-the-box”, just staring at a screen, so when I saw SSL’s X-Desk I thought, ‘that’s it!’ says McEwan. ‘Straight away it looked like the answer to all the problems we’d been having. Sure, we have a great tracking desk but I really needed something in front of me, right there in the centre position – a solution that wasn’t enormous, that I could bring up multiple outputs, do talkback, effect sends, stereo cue sends. And that’s where X-Desk fits in to The Sanctuary Recording Studio. It’s now installed right there in front of me.’
Although only in partnership since 2006, David McEwan and Eric Appapoulay have already racked up a string of successes, most notably co-producing many of the tracks on Plan B’s award-winning album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, and are soon set to start work on its follow up. The duo are also regular collaborators with Nitin Sawhney and helped mix the soundtrack to the BBC’s Human Planet series.
‘What I like about X-Desk is the really clean sound,’ McEwan continues. ‘Now I can bring all my outboard straight into the mix insert path, which is really what I need to have. For tracking, I can bring the mic pres that I already own in to play. So X-Desk offers me a very clean signal path and a way of getting my external pres on a fader and into monitors or headphones. It’s also a great way of summing and it does the job really, really well. And, of course, the fact that it’s an SSL made me think that I can really trust what I’m going to get here.
‘On the production front, having X-Desk has really sped things up,’ he adds. ‘It’s cleaned up the headphone mixes and the cue side of things. Also the footprint of it – it’s really ergonomic and it has slotted nicely into the centre position of our workspace. X-Desk has really helped our workflow in that we just assign our most-used channels, be it kick, snare, vocals and so on, and insert our output comps and EQs from there. It’s really nice just to have it right there in front of you.’
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