Music / Interviews
Roni Size: Studio Tour
With a new Reprazent album on its way, and a special guest headline set at Love Saves the Day, Bristol drum and bass legend Roni Size invited Bristol24/7 into his studio for a look around – just as he was adding the finishing touches to the new record, due out this summer.
“This is my main sequencing programme, and this is called Pro Tools – the posh word is a DAW or digital audio workstation. That’s my main workstation.”
“Then we have my Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S61, which is a brand new system and has some great sounds. Along with Maschine, which I love to use.”
“The speakers that I love to use at the moment are Focal.” (Focal SM9 Studio Monitor Speaker)
“What I have here is a lot of analogue outboard stuff. I have a Manley, and I have a Tube Tech compressor, a Manley EQ, I have a couple of Neve EQs and Neve outboard. I have some SSL compressors. And some more Neve compressors.”
“This is the old way of doing music. This is the warmth you get from a sound. If you want to make it sound like an old Bee Gees record or a Chic record, you would use all this stuff.
“If you don’t, you would use this stuff – Universal Audio plug-ins. They’re called UAD plug-ins and they’re very modern and they sound very crisp and sharp and punchy.”
“I also like to use FabFilter plug-ins and iZotope plug-ins, then we run it all through a system called Dangerous’ 2-Bus.”
“I have 64 outputs of sound cards, which allows me to route all my sounds through individual outputs to give it depth and width, so it sounds not like it’s coming off a laptop. It makes it sound nice, big and wide.
“Then I use a U87 microphone, and I’ve also got a phat keyboard! I’ve got a nice phat Andromeda Alesis A6, which people can’t get any more. It’s just great. People like Joker love this machine.”
Catch Roni Size and Reprazent live at Love Saves the Day in Eastville Park on May 24.
Photos by Lukasz Kaminski
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