Focusrite Liquid Engineering
By Paul Lavigne
| Posted in Music Technology
Recently I decided to incorporate an “outside the box” approach to my mixing. I was really interested to enrich my sound and I felt that it was needed. I was working on a hip hop track and so I decided to use the compressors of the Focusrite Liquid Channel that I always used as a pre-amp prior to this day. I really wanted to get punchy and powerful drums and I decided to fire up the impulse of the Empirical Labs Distressor.
I compressed the kick drum fairly hard (at around 4:1) and the result was way beyond my expectations. The kick was extremely punchy and powerful. The sound was there! So I tried on the rest of the drums changing the ratio and threshold accordingly and suddenly the whole drum kit sounded really good, in control, and again, powerful and punchy. On top of that you get an EQ section too that can be extremely useful when you use this unit as a channel strip. Using the EQ will affect the Pre amp section and they all sound extremely musical. As a preamp a feature I used a lot was the harmonic section adding different harmonics to make the sound more or less obvious.
I have used the Convolution process before more experimentally when I was working on electro-acoustic compositions and I knew how powerful this process was, but I believe Sintefex and Focusrite have brought it to the next level with their Dynamic Convolution technology. Is it the same as the original unit? Probably not exactly but it sounds bloomin’ good in its own right plus you get so many different tones in a single unit! Many mixes would definitely benefit from using this unit.
NB: Image used is from Liquid Mix and is a Sintefex plug-in illustrated
About Paul Lavigne
I have been involved in live and studio sound engineering since 2004. During this time I absorbed myself in the recording, production, mixing and mastering of projects from Punk to Hip Hop, from Metal to classical and electronic music. I even ran a record company of experimental music for a few years.
The reason I do all this? It’s because I love sound and the tools to create these sounds whether it is a plug in or a piece of outboard or a microphone, whatever the tools to get the sound I’m after. I love to share this passion for sound and hopefully you will too reading these blogs.
Tags: dynamic convolution, empirical labs distressor, focusrite liquid channel, sintefex
Can I have this plug in thank you
Merheb George