SSL Fusion complements Halsey's vocals
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Thomas started out in the industry as a lighting operator in the world of amateur dramatics, and because 'no-one wanted to do sound' he volunteered, soon moving into professional theatre and hospital radio, and eventually joining Britannia Row in the '90s as one of the then 'new school' engineers. He worked as a monitor engineer initially – and for a number of A-list artists including Lighthouse Family, Moby, and Machine Head. Further down the road, he moved onto FOH, and has been working at the very top level ever since. After completing Ariana Grande's recent Dangerous Woman tour, he got the call to do Halsey.
“I was only going to do it for three months, but I've been here two years,” he reports. “We've been through trials and tribulations, and Halsey has consistently evolved, and she does steady business. She has a lot of cred, too, and her catalogue of music is really fascinating. I wonder how she comes up with half of it to be honest, as the versatility of her music is insane.”
For the last tour, which wrapped up on 12 March at Manchester Arena, Thomas started off on an SSL L200 console, as he liked how compact it was – but with growing production needs, he switched to an L550, provided by US rental house, Eighth Day.
“The L550 has been very extensively used, and I have some tasty outboard too, including the SSL Fusion, which is across the vocal stems,” Thomas explains, adding that he also has a Bracasti, a C2 compressor, an old TC finaliser for his tracked BVs, a couple of Distressors, a Lake EQ, and a Primary Source Enhancer in his rack.
“The thing is, all of this analogue kit just complements the console - there is still nothing that touches it, sonically. There are a lot of blogs out there which discuss analogue versus digital, but the results I get from my L550 are equally as good as what I got out of any analogue board. That is how good this console actually is. Also, if you imagine the amount of kit I'd have to carry around with an analogue console to get the same results as this L550, it would be ridiculous. It's such a great analogue sounding console in digital format, with recall. It can't get much better.”
(Jim Evans)
