Having worked with Judas Priest on the majority of their albums, producer Tom Allom was called back to the chair for Battle Cry Live, bringing in mixer Jack Ruston.
‘Tom has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the band and their material,’ Ruston says. ‘He knows exactly what each and every track should be; where the heart of it is. He’s an exceptional producer. My job was to achieve sonically and technically his vision for the production. It was a lot like engineering or mixing a studio project, but with a slightly different set of challenges, chief among them that we needed a number of different but closely related versions of the mixes for release on different formats.’
To accommodate concurrent mixing for audio CD, stereo DVD and 5.1 DVD, Ruston and Allom turned to Metric Halo’s LIO-8 interface and MIO Console software to enable them to switch between a variety of monitoring systems.
‘A project of this nature has a number of different facets,’ Ruston continues. ‘There’s the emotional, musical side. How do we take all this amazing energy that the band is delivering and, on the one hand, push it as hard as we can, squeeze out every last bit, but on the other hand avoid slipping up and harming it – to be aggressive enough but always respectful and careful with the recording. And then there’s the big logistical challenge. How do I handle mixing this vast swathe of audio, ninety minutes or whatever, and all these tracks, for all three formats, incorporating different, and changing edits to reflect what’s happening on the video side, keeping track of all the files, revisions, back-ups, and so on?’
Ruston did all of the mixes ‘in-the-box’ in order to be able to move freely between different mixes and formats. ‘We had a huge number of tracks,’ he explains. ‘For practical reasons we kept to a single timeline for each complete mix of the show, and sometimes we’d need to separate certain elements for individual songs. It just wouldn’t have worked on a physical desk in the same way. I don’t consider that a sonic compromise in the way that it might have once been. There are some extraordinary tools available like the Acustica Audio sampling processors that allow me to achieve a traditional analogue sound, while taking advantage of a digital working method. We also used the ADL Penteo Surround up-mixer plug-in for Pro Tools to enable us to create surround content from stereo sources. That was an essential processor and performed extremely well. I’m also a big fan of the Metric Halo software. ChannelStrip, for example, finds its way onto all my projects.’
For Battle Cry Live, the main function of Ruston’s Metric Halo LIO-8 was as a D/A converter and monitor controller: ‘The amazing thing about the Metric Halo LIO-8 and the ULN-8 is that you can freely recall different MIO mixer states and monitor control set-ups all the way up to 7.1,’ he says. ‘That made it really easy to keep switching between the different formats. When I was mixing for CD and DVD, stereo and surround, I was considering the broadest spectrum of playback systems for that material: it could be someone’s car, their phone, a terrible TV, a surround system that’s not optimally placed, or maybe incorrectly wired, or a really high-end professional A/V installation. So for me it was important to have a variety of speaker set-ups and reference systems for playback. The project was mainly mixed on Amphion One 18s with an Amp 100, but we also wanted to be able to switch to Tom’s Genelecs, a pair of NS10s, some Avantone Mix Cubes, and various sets of headphones.
‘I love the fact that I have just one box – my LIO-8. One minute it’s a tracking interface, fed from a desk and outputting cue mixes, and the next minute those same outputs are a surround monitor controller. It’s extraordinarily well thought-out. There are very few monitor controllers, let alone interfaces, that offer that sort of flexibility, and none at that price that I can think of.’
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