With a break in Maroon 5’s M5OnTheRoad trip around the US and Europe, tour FOH engineer Jim Ebdon can reflect on his choice of SSL’s L500 Plus mixing desk – a result of hearing a comparison between it and other consoles at a music festival…
‘I’m not choosing a console because it looks pretty or because there is a ton of stuff on it that I’m probably never going to use,’ he says. ‘I’m choosing a console because of how it sounds, which is the most important thing.’
Having been with the band since the early days of their success, Ebdon knows the band well: ‘They are the most consistent band I have ever worked with,’ he says. ‘Especially the drummer; he never misses a beat.’
Because of this, he doesn’t need them for soundchecks. He uses a recording of the previous night’s show and switches the console into rehearsal mode so the inputs are taken from the multitrack rather than the stage. Ebdon has also found himself particularly impressed by the desk’s onboard processing – although for lead singer Adam Levine’s vocal, he uses a tried and trusted external preamp, though once into the console he uses the internal EQ and a multiband compressor from the L500 FX Rack.
‘The console compressors sound great, the gates work really well and the delay is amazing,’ he says. ‘The end result just seems bigger, fatter and more open. I do have one outboard reverb, which is something I’m just used to and something I take with me, but I could easily do a show with the onboard reverbs.
On the current show, has been using the redundant fibre-based SSL Blacklight II connection from stage for the 56 band inputs – a high-bandwidth multiplexed Madi format capable of carrying up to 256 96kHz signals.
Another feature of the L500 that particularly stands out for Ebdon is the All Pass Filter – an adjustable and gradual phase shift around a centre frequency, without gain change at any frequency. Fine tuning the relationship between channels with the All Pass Filter can have a profound effect on the sound: ‘Just getting two guitar channels beautifully lined up – the presence is incredible,’ he says. ‘I’m really impressed with that.’
He also uses it with his three kick drum channels – two mics and a sample: ‘As a standard feature on this console it’s amazing, he says.’
Ebdon uses traditional Aux path types for FX and so on, but does use the Stem path type for things like parallel compression and record splits for broadcast trucks: ‘I can send all my vocals to one pair of stems,’ he explains. ‘Then all the guitars to another pair, and so on. In the record truck they just to put all the faders at zero, and there is my mix.’
A stem is a versatile, fully processed audio group with extensive input and output routing possibilities – including other Stems. Any stem can be derived from any one of six points along another processed path, and of course any processed path can be re-arranged simply by dragging and dropping processing blocks using the multi-touch screen.
Overall, the analogue sound of the L500 paired with its digital advantages are a winning combination for Ebdon: ‘For me, the SSL is an analogue console with a save button. I’d tell anyone to go out and try it. Why wouldn’t you?’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
