Mike Skinner installs Solid State Logic console

Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, has installed a SSL Duality console/DAW controller in his studio.

With the Duality console, Skinner is making a move back to analogue mixing, citing its ability to allow him to work faster and more intuitively as its main benefits. “Since we got Duality, our way of working has completely changed,” said Skinner. “I was probably one of the first people in the charts to be totally in the box. My first album was completely done in Logic… well, they were all done completely in Logic. Now I find working with a console is just a million times faster and more human than producing in the box. But what’s more liberating for me is that stuff just sounds right. Now I really can mix a track in a day and not want to change it, and that has never happened before… you know, stuff took weeks and weeks to mix in the box because it never quite sounded right, because I was always trying to make it sound like it had been mixed on an SSL.”

“For me the analogue is all about the sound. And I didn’t actually get Duality as an aid to my workflow… but as soon as we got it, it was just like, ‘why did I not consider that sitting in front of a computer with a mouse is just very mentally draining?’ I like being able to flip the faders from the analogue to the digital domain and with a desk you can do more than one thing at one time – and that’s the answer, really. In a computer you can only do one thing at a time, but with Duality what I find is that I’m doing everything at the same time.”