Joining Britannia Row in the 1990s as one of the then ‘new school’ engineers, Simon Thomas initially worked as monitor engineer for a number of A-list artists including Lighthouse Family, Moby and Machine Head. Subsequently moving to FOH, he has remained at the top level since, and it was after completing Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour, he got the call to do Halsey.

‘I was only going to do it for three months, but I’ve been here two years,’ he says. ‘We’ve been through trials and tribulations, and Halsey has consistently evolved. She has a lot of cred, too, and her catalogue of music is really fascinating. I wonder how she comes up with half of it to be honest, as the versatility of her music is insane.’

Her last tour finished at Manchester Arena in March, where Thomas – having started off on an SSL L200 console – has switched to an L550, provided by US rental house, Eighth Day Sound.

‘The L550 has been very extensively used, and I have some tasty outboard too, including the SSL Fusion, which is across the vocal stems,’ he explains, adding that he also has a Bricasti, a C2 compressor, an old TC finalizer for his tracked BVs, a couple of Distressors, a Lake EQ and a Primary Source Enhancer in his rack.

‘All of this analogue kit just complements the console – there is still nothing that touches it, sonically. There are a lot of blogs out there which discuss analogue versus digital, but the results I get from my L550 are equally as good as what I got out of any analogue board.

‘Also, if you imagine the amount of kit I’d have to carry around with an analogue console to get the same results as this L550, it would be ridiculous. It’s such a great analogue sounding console in digital format, with recall. It can’t get much better, can it?’

Halsey’s vocal comes into the head amp on the L550, with a Distressor and Primary Source Enhancer inserted. Next, it goes into the console’s EQ and a stereo stem. Enter Fusion: ‘As soon as we first turned the Fusion on and punched a few buttons, we were wondering how can that be possible? How can it make my vocal sound twice as loud without causing any feedback just by turning the thing on?’

Thomas is using Fusion in various ways because Halsey’s production is so vocal-driven, and because of the variety in Halsey’s songs.

‘We are driving into the stem, which is the really great bit,’ he says. ‘So the Vintage Drive setting [on Fusion] varies from what I call my clean vocal, which is Drive and Density both set at five, to pinning it at 11 for songs such as ‘Experiment Me’, which is a metal song with a distorted vocal. I literally have the Drive pinned in the red at 11 and it doesn’t come out. So you get this distorted vocal, but you get the true harmonics of the distortion rather than a guitar-type distortion.

‘Then that leads into the Violet section, with the low end set at 90 and the top end at 16 boosted by anything from 1.5-3dB which, depending on the song, I am reining back in hard on the High Frequency compressor set to about 10k, and at some points it’s down by -3dB just to really push it down. So it opens it up, then slams it down when she is screaming, basically. It’s such a great creative tool. In many ways, it’s the Density which is the key to this unit – you just have to make sure you’re getting that drive into the rest of the sections.’

Thomas admits that he wouldn’t say no to a whole rack of Fusions: ‘I’d really like to try it on playback,’ he reveals. ‘The thing with modern playback stuff is, a lot of it is recorded at 44.1, and we run at 96k; people say there isn’t a real difference, but there is a difference. The one thing about track stuff is that you do need to rein in the top end, but dynamically, so it is working and still breathing. And I think the advantage of using Fusion here is to get some nice Drive and Density going there, some nice EQ, and that top end compression which is useful in track stuff.’

Thomas says Fusion has transformed his vocal production workflow: ‘I think if I could find the right compressor with a parallel function on it, I could use the side chain and punch Fusion in there, too. There are so many possibilities.’

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