Butch Walker: Duet by Apogee
Posted on: April 17, 2009
Posted in: Artists, Duet, Featured, Video
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Artist/Producer Butch Walker talks about recording on the road with Duet and his laptop on hit records like Pink’s “Funhouse”. Walker has produced an eclectic mix of albums from artists including Pink, Weezer, Katy Perry, Pete Yorn, Hot Hot Heat and many others and has enjoyed a successful solo career. With him at all times during travel, Duet has made an appearance on many of his solo and produced recordings.
Related Apogee Gear
Duet
Hello, my name is Butch Walker, I’m a recording artist and producer and songwriter. They came up with this amazing product that finally after all this time, of whining and complaining about not ever being able to do remote recording on my laptop that sounded worth a shit, is they came out with the Duet. The Duet is a little box about this big, with one big rotary encoded knob on the top and a firewire input on the side, and a headphone jack on it, and a breakout cbale multipin, 9 pin breakout cable that goes to 2 instrument IN’s to microphone IN’s and then 2 speaker OUT’s.
You can take that thing and hook it up to your laptop and it works with Logic and Garageband, and it’s incredible because I love writing, and I love recording from my laptop,but I don’t like the limitations of it. The fact that Digidesign and Pro-Tools makes you use dedicated hardware to use their software is limiting as well. I didn’t want to take a big rig on the road and I never liked the sound to this day of the Mbox or the LE hardware at all,
The Duet is fantastic because you can plug a microphone, I use an SM-7 and plug it straight in to the box without a pre-amp, compressor or anything and it will phantom power also whichever mic you have and set it up in Logic and pull up a silver compressor or platinum compressor inside of Logic and an EQ and I can get a sound without a outboard mic-pre or anything that will end up on a record that sounds amazing.
As a matter of fact, on the last Pink record, she came over to my hotel room when we started working and writing for that record, and the songs that ended up on the record, I would say half the tracks were cut in Logic using just my Duet. With my microphone or just the guitar straight in, there were some cool amp simulators I used for some of the guitar parts, but for the most part it was all done with the microphone straight in, no pre-amp on the outside, no outboard compressor or nothing. She sang straight into an SM-7 and that became the lead and background vocals for the record. No one is telling me that it sounded like a demo vocal, it sounded as good as anything else.