"Barry
Gibb chooses Solid State Logic AWS 900 Analogue workstation system"
(Film
and Video, August 9, 2006)
Months after a Solid State Logic AWS 900 Analogue Workstation System proved indispensable in the creation of Barbra Streisand’s hit album Guilty Pleasures, legendary musician and producer Barry Gibb has purchased an AWS 900 from GC Pro in Miami for his personal studio.
Last year, Gibb and engineer/producer John Merchant rented an AWS 900 from Los Angeles-based Advanced Audio in order to record Streisand’s vocal overdubs at the artist’s Southern California home. Later, when mix sessions on another console proved problematic, the same AWS 900 was shipped to Miami for the successful mix of Guilty Pleasures.
Now, Merchant explains, Gibb has chosen to own what has quickly become SSL’s most popular console ever. “Barry’s new studio is in Miami,” Merchant explains, “but he is heading to Nashville for the summer. After the experience of working on Barbra’s record, where we took the exact console that we used in Malibu and flew it to Miami to mix, we thought it would be cool to have the capacity to drop the AWS 900+ in a flight case and, within 24 hours, have it anywhere we want it. That was no small consideration.”
“There’s no better console to buy,” Merchant adds. “It’s just the perfect project studio board. It’s perfect: it’s the right size, the right number of channels, and it sounds fantastic. There’s nothing that touches it. In an era of fair to middling analog summing boxes—and there’s a ton of them—none of them can hold a candle to the way the SSL sums in analog. It just sounds great.”
Gibb and Merchant are among the growing list of top producers and engineers who recognize the dual benefits of the console’s SuperAnalogue™ signal path coupled with a comprehensive DAW controller.
“Here’s the ultimate endorsement: we bought one,” Merchant summarizes. “This is what Barry is going to commit his recordings to. We had a two-minute discussion about it, and he said ‘All right, cool.’”
