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Athlete ‘Wired’ to Focusrite
2005 was a great year for Athlete. Their track Wires was a huge international hit and one of the best-selling singles of the year. It was followed by an emotive appearance at Glastonbury plus further chart success with the singles Half Light, Tourist and 24 Hours not to mention their album Tourist going multi platinum.
As the year comes to a close the band have just finished it on a high with a massive sell-out tour. For that show, front of house engineer Suneil Pusari has, not surprisingly, chosen the best in outboard gear to highlight the band’s great and varied sound.
“I am using Focusrite Liquid Channels as my stereo bus mix compression,” he says. “Usually you have to decide what unit you like and hope that it will achieve what you need in terms of holding the mix and letting it breathe. This will always compromise certain tracks if you have a band that plays a set of songs varying in style and dynamics. With the Liquids, having most classic compressors built into the unit allowed me to go through different compressors and settings to see what actually worked best. Instead of guessing, you can make a more informed choice.
“It’s something that could never have been done before without a complicated and inefficient use of several various classic compressors,” Pusari continues. “It also allowed me to store settings in a user bank, which made compression settings for different songs far more accurate as well as in keeping with what the track needed sonically. Having the same buttons and dials to push made also setting compressors and A-Bing different modeled units very fast and straight forward.”
And the sound of the unit was also important to Suneil, a big analogue valve fan. “I like colour and warmth and units that affect sound emotionally and not clinically. I think when people listen to music, clarity and detail are important but this should never compromise what they feel from it. A mix should represent the content of the song and it should move air. Air should always move at a gig otherwise everything would feel flat and uninvolving.
“The Liquid Channels seemed to promise a lot so I thought I should try them out and see how they compare to the real units they were modeling, and I’m happy to say I was very surprised! I’m wish I’d used them sooner. I found that it took so little time to become familiar and comfortable with the unit and they are greatly flexible and not intimidating at all.”
Now that the year is coming to an end, so has the mammoth tour. And the Liquid Channels have been there throughout for Suneil, but there’s one thing that they can’t quite provide for him.
“We’ve just finished a year of touring. I’m gonna stay up all night and drink a lot of beer.”
21st December 2005
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