Bagging gold status with their sixth studio album, American Beauty/American Psycho, US band Fall Out Boy maintained their long run chart success. The band wrote music while on tour with Paramore mid-2014, and undertook much of the tracking in guitarist Joe Trohman’s The Rat Cave studio in Los Angeles, using an API 1608 mixing console.
As well as Fall Out Boy projects, the studio allows Trohman to work on his heavy metal band The Damned Things and ‘other projects no-one cares about except me’.
The first Fall Out Boy album was released in 2003, which is also when Trohman first became familiar with API. Familiarity with the API sound later led him to consider the analogue 1608 desk after deciding to build a studio at his LA home: ‘Originally, I wanted to have a few EQs, limiters/compressors, and maybe eight mic preamps. However, I felt I was only going halfway and that I could get a little more out of a console. Every time I looked at consoles, it kept coming back to the 1608.’
In the end, Trohman loaded his 1608 with 12 550As and four 560s: ‘Having those at my disposal, in line with 16 killer mic pres, is a dream come true,’ he says. ‘The 500 processors and mic pres are amazing. Everything sounds incredible tracked through the console, and the EQs take everything to the next level. No matter how incredible plug-ins sound, great analogue gear still sounds the most three-dimensional to me.
‘My workflow has also sped up,’ he adds. ‘Everything happens faster and it’s way easier for me to dial what I want when I’m actually turning knobs, versus running it in the box entirely.’ Trohman also notes that he’s ‘pleased with how easy it is to integrate my DAW with the 1608. I like having a hybrid of in and out of the box going on, so it’s nice that it was very easy to achieve that’.
While 90 per cent of his studio time goes towards Fall Out Boy, alongside work with The Damned Things and the Danish band New Politics, Trohman also does some work for television spots: ‘I’m very happy that I own this console. It has completely changed my workflow and the quality of what I make’ he says.
More: www.apiaudio.com
