Grammy Award-winning engineer (Foo Fighters, Muse) Adrian Bushby has expanded his recording facilities with a Solid State Logic MadiXtreme 64 & Alpha-Link I/O system, and an X-Rack loaded with E-Series EQ and Dynamics modules.
Having spent his formative years assisting Alan Moulder at Trident Studios in London (legendary location of a vintage SSL 6000 E Series console), Busby is presently settled in Ecospace modular garden studio – based in his North London back garden. ‘I always felt that once you’d learned your trade on a desk you stuck with it, so I was one of the people that stuck with SSL,’ he explains.
Working with the likes of My Bloody Valentine, New Order, U2, Smashing Pumpkins, Depeche Mode, Maximo Park and The Kooks, Bushby favoured studios such as RAK: ‘That had an SSL desk, and you could book it for a certain fee,’ he recalls. ‘Then it got to the point where record companies started giving you a couple of days in the studio, plus your fee, but then they started saying, ‘sorry, we can only pay for one day’. And then it got down to the bottom line: ‘We won’t pay you unless we use your mix’.’
Changing times prompted Bushby to rent his own smaller space and start ‘…branching into mixing more in the box and working out of subgroups.’
When the call came to work on what would become Muse’s Resurrection album at a studio in Lake Como, Italy (built below vocalist, guitarist, and keyboard player Matthew Bellamy’s house), he was delighted to discover that ‘…they had a G+ there, which was a dream for me, because I had the whole desk to use.’
Resurrection absented the engineer from London for nine months, during which time he was still paying rent on his studio space. Time to think again – and a cost-effective solution was found closer to home in his back garden:
‘A friend of mine put me on to this company, Ecospace, who build these spaces in your garden, and they’re really cheap,’ he says. ‘I wish I’d done it years ago, because it’s been so great. I’m really comfortable with the sound in it; it never changes, because I’ve always got the same gear, set up in the same way.’
When the time came to raise the equipment stakes, some choice Solid State Logic kit stepped in: ‘My space is quite limited in terms of areas where I can position a lot of outboard, so I’m doing a lot of stuff in the box,’ Bushby says. ‘I’ve started to do more hardware inserts, where I send stuff out of the box from an Alpha-Link output through an external EQ and then back into the box.
‘For that, I’ve got myself a nice old school rack of eight channels of SL502 EQs from a vintage 5000 Series console, and they sound incredible. And now I’ve got the X-Rack with a few 4000 E Series Channel EQ modules, I really like using those on my kick and snare drums – and bass as well, because you can really dive into the midrange. I also really like its big bottom end; I just wind it in until it sounds comfortable.’
‘I think the Alpha-Link is an incredible-sounding unit and really changed my room, making a massive difference. I’ve now got 32 inputs and outputs from one box, and I can do so much more, because it’s so versatile.’
Bushby can also take this portable kit into bigger commercial concerns whenever the need arises – which is what he did when working on Muse’s The 2nd Law album in Hampstead’s AIR Studios. Here he got his preferred sound while working in Studio 1 on a non-SSL large-format console: ‘I took my 5000 rack into the studio for the tracking, and SSL very kindly loaned us an X-Rack loaded with the E Series modules, which we extensively used for EQ and compression on the drums. We’ve also been using Studio 2, which has a massive 8000 G+ in it, so on this current record we’ve used quite a lot of SSL stuff.
‘As is always the case with Muse, I think that every time they make a record they take a step forward from where they last left off, and this one’s no different,’ Bushby adds. ‘It’s an amazing record; they’ve really gone to town with the production, and, again, I’m very proud to be involved with it.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
