With Dragon Tattoo, His Needs Outgrew the 24-Channel AWS 900

Composer Trent Reznor and his production and engineering collaborator Alan Moulder switched mixing consoles partway through their work on the soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which Reznor wrote with Atticus Ross. For the previous Reznor/Ross film score The Social Network, Reznor and Moulder mixed the score on a Solid State Logic (SSL) AWS 900 console, but Reznor said the channel count was an issue. (The AWS 926 returns up to 48 channels, but only 24 of them are full channels with EQ.)

Partway through the project, Reznor installed a new 48-channel SSL Duality SE console in his home-based studio on Moulder's advice. The Duality has 48 full channels with EQ on each, as well as individual channel dynamics, which are unavailable on the AWS.

"Duality is like an AWS on steroids," Moulder said in a prepared statement. "I really love working with the EQs – the ones we all know and love – and having dynamics available on each channel is great. I really like how easy it is to do recalls. We would work on a track, park it and go on to another one if we felt we were getting bogged down creatively. Because you can use two or three people to do a recall on Duality, the reset process was really quick."

SSL noted that Reznor's original Nothing Studios in New Orleans, where the Nine Inch Nails albums The Downward Spiral and The Fragile were recorded, were based around a SSL 4000 G+ console. He's currently mixing the forthcoming album by his new band with Ross and wife Mariqueen Maandig, How To Destroy Angels, on the Duality, and says he plans to build a dedicated studio around the Duality "in the near future."