Chris Lord-Alge's Mix LA Installs Solid State Logic ORIGIN for its 'Intimate and Artist-Focused' Studio D

DeSisto says that acclimating himself to ORIGIN was seamless and intuitive: "Getting on the console was really quick and it sounded fantastic," he says. "The EQ section is exactly in the right place above the small faders, and the sends directly above that." One of Lord-Alge's favorite features is the 0dB switch, which automatically sets the faders to unity gain: "This means you can set every fader to zero, and mix from Pro Tools through the console and use it as a summing mixer, which is what we’re doing in Studio D. It's a nice way of working because we use the small faders for our microphones, with the returns on the large faders — so we can have drums, vocals and everything set up all the time," he explains.

Meantime, the PureDrive™ preamplifiers on ORIGIN deliver both flexibility and sonic character when it's needed: "I like the drive feature on the preamp section, and I tend to use it on the drums in particular — it just adds a little more grit and oomph to the sound," he says.

Since using ORIGIN, DeSisto has noticed that his mixes seem be larger sounding and have more dimension: "ORIGIN takes it to another level and makes other mixes seem small. Also, I am noticing how quiet the console is — there is no noise anywhere, and the switches don't make any noise," he adds. For his mix sessions, DeSisto is summing to eight stereo pairs and finds the E-Series 'Black Knob' style EQ section quite flexible: "You really can spread the sound out quite a bit with the console’s Black EQ. We used the Black style EQs at A&M, and this design is just so musical."

DeSisto is also a fan of SSL's legendary Listen Mic Compressor (LMC), which he has 'hard-wired' and always at the ready: "I have a talkback mic set up running through the LMC, and this is going to another channel which I am printing that all the time. It is a 'set and forget' tool that I can use anytime and sounds great!"

Chris Lord-Alge is also impressed by the sound of ORIGIN — and in particular, the SSL Bus Compressor: "The sonics are clear, crisp and punchy, and it maintains that SSL sound in a brand new product," he says. "It also has probably the best sounding bus compressor I've ever heard. For SSL to come up with something like this at its price makes it incredibly valuable. I’ll be adding a second one to make another small recording, mixing, overdub room."