A NEW PHASE

When we last talked to Parker, he was revelling in his relative engineering naiveté; recording vocals with a mic wired out of phase, plugging mics into the ‘wrong’ inputs. But this time he stepped up his professional attitude. “That’s not to say it was all the way there,” he laughs. “I still do things that would be laughable to professional recording engineers. To me it justifies the way I do it in a sense. I have a disturbed pride in the fact I don’t do it like everyone else. I don’t do it in Pro Tools. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. But to me it feels good that I’m a bit rogue.

“Julian, the other drummer in Tame, he played me this album the other day. And I thought he’d gone to an extremely professional studio in France. It sounded amazing. But then he told me he did it all in Garageband. I couldn’t believe it. It’s the world we live in these days, there are no rules.”

Taking on the mix was as much about gauging his current ability to pull it off, as it was an excuse to get some new gear. Gear only a professional would use. “It was a good excuse to buy stuff I could never justify getting, unless it was something as important as mixing my own album. It sounds selfish. I’m not a professional studio owner, who lives off mixing people’s albums. So I’ve never really bought gear that is just involved in mixing.”

The main adjustment to his mixing routine has been an analogue summing setup that takes that task out of Ableton Live’s hands and adds a bit of colour to the stereo bus. He bought two 16-channel Lynx Aurora converters that feed a pair of passive 16-channel RMS216 Folcrom passive summing mixers. The sum of the 16 stereo channels hits a pair of Neve 1073DPA preamps first to “crunch the mix up” and make up gain, then an SPL Vitalizer, the one piece he’s had for a while and is “just like a glorified EQ that adds a bit of artificial valve quality.” The last thing strapped across the master bus is a Manley Vari-Mu compressor before it gets fed back into the DAW to print. The gear doesn’t see any use other than for mixing, so it allows Parker to leave it set up and return to any mix at will. “I’ve always loved mixing with Ableton,” said Parker. “But I love the sound of a mix being crunched together in analogue. I love the sound of a desk, but I hate not being able to recall any time I want. I flit between songs, sometimes every few minutes. It goes completely against my workflow to have to set up for one song by going around the room and setting EQ knobs on a desk and adjusting faders to how the mix was last time. It’s against how I’ve grown up working.”

It’s a big step up from “just whatever plug-in in Ableton” he used to place over his master bus. He’s always had outboard channel compressors, but never pressed them into service over his whole mix.

That’s no knock on Ableton though, Parker is still a dedicated Live user. “It’s ultimately just what you’re used to. Everyone barracks for their favourite, like a football team. But for me, I find Live so expressive. The whole point of it is that you can link anything to anything, and the automation is amazing. When I’ve been standing over someone’s shoulder watching them use Pro Tools to automate stuff, it seems so laborious. It doesn’t want you to automate. It doesn’t want you to change things that are so easy to change on Ableton.

“I make our live shows on Ableton as well, which demonstrates how versatile it is. The basis of it is just so flexible, and I can move almost as quick as my brain is moving.”