Forced to relocate when the building housing his original studio was sold by its owner, Skip Brown built his new Final Track Studios in Roanoke, Virginia. Centred on a new Audient ASP4816 mixing console, he claims that, ‘the best front end for any music studio is an analogue console’
Brown is now in his fifth decade in the music business and he’s not through yet: ‘I work with people’s dreams every day,’ he says. ‘There is nothing more humbling than being part of the creative flow and watching it happen.’
He is presently proud of a referral from a client who has become a 2016 Grammy-nominated vocalist.
Brown describes the choice of the Audient console as a two-step process – initially buying four ASP008 eight-channel mic preamps (the predecessor to Audient’s ASP880) before purchasing the console.
We never told the clients what we were using, and got consistent comments about how much better the new place sounded, knowing the whole time that it was the ASP008s – not the space,’ he says.
As all Audient products implement the same mic preamplifier technology, Brown could be confident that the compact analogue console would deliver the same quality as the preamps: ‘The ASP4816 in a custom Argosy enclosure was the perfect solution,’ he says.
‘One of the best things about the ASP4816 is the two-bus compressor sitting right there on the console,’ he continues. ‘We bring our in-the-box two-track mix or eight pairs of stems out of Pro Tools to the ASP4816, then glorify them with the bus compressor and record the result to one of our analogue or digital two track recorders… analogue and digital play well together.’
‘One of the four stereo returns brings the finished work back into the console and with the full assignment to the output buses, we record it back to our Pro Tools session for distribution (MP3, DVD) I cannot think of anything missing in the ASP4816 design.’
Despite his experience, Brown is still open to advice from others: ‘I remember a conversation with an old, grizzled engineer from South Carolina,’ he recalls. ‘I asked him what is the best gear I should buy. His answer was, “You can cut a CMA Award-winning record [and he had] with a pocket knife. Just be sure the knife is really sharp”.
‘I guess I looked confused, so he finished by saying, “Most of it is your skill as an engineer, but having the sharpest gear for your workflow is mandatory”. The ASP4816 is really, really sharp.’
The Audient console was purchased from Odyssey Prosound.
