Aftermath Entertainment’s head engineer Quentin ‘Q’ Gilkey

USA - Hip-hop artist, producer and record executive Dr. Dre has upgraded the main room at his Aftermath Entertainment studio facility in Los Angeles to a 96-input Solid State Logic Duality Fuse SuperAnalogue mixing console.

Dr. Dre – whose influential debut solo album, 1992’s The Chronic, introduced G-Funk to the world and defined West Coast hip-hop – has owned or worked on every model of large-format SSL analogue music console since the E series, commenting, "The first love of my life was the SSL board."

Aftermath Entertainment’s head engineer, Quentin ‘Q’ Gilkey, has worked not just with Dr. Dre but also many of the artists on the label’s roster, including Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, The Game and Earl Sweatshirt. He began working with Dr. Dre 15 years ago, becoming Aftermath’s lead engineer in 2014. He reveals that there were two main reasons for the upgrade to the Duality Fuse.

Firstly, Gilkey says, “Because Dre mixes utilising the whole board – in our case, all 96 channels – we require a method that allows us to recall at a fast pace, and Total Recall offers this.” The fact that multiple people can work simultaneously to recall the console’s previous settings was a major influence on Dre’s decision to purchase a Duality Fuse, he says.

Secondly, he continues, older analogue consoles inevitably require maintenance, resulting in downtime while issues are resolved. “With the Duality Fuse, we knew we were not going to have to deal with that issue. In today’s studio, things move much faster than when tape was involved. Now, we’re able to retain that analogue sound without the analogue maintenance that once stood in our way and remain creative.” 


Latest Issue. . .