In this video interview Bob Strakele, who is the FOH live audio engineer for Slipknot and Avenged Sevenfold takes us through his outboard gear set up for the 2022 Slipknot tour.
Video Text:
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[Applause] [Music] hi my name is Bob Strakele i mix bands like avenged sevenfold and for the last four years i’ve been mixing fun of house for slipknot and uh today we’re in bratislava on a slipknot show with our friends in gain lab audio i’m using a dictator for my mixbus compression it’s nice and nice and gentle you don’t hear it working too hard but it adds a nice thickness adds a lot of body adds a lot of harmonics depending on how you uh like to drive it for me i’m sitting at about 4 db of reduction on the mix bus we’re in slow mode on the attack and fast mode on the release i’m using the high pass filter function on the detector so that the low end is not or is not affecting the compressor too much
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and it’s really just one of those devices that you can dig in hard and you don’t really hear it working too hard until you turn it off and then everything kind of gets smaller and more boring so yeah it’s it’s a great device to add excitement to your mix um for bus compression that’s that’s my main use for it going down the rack the gain lab dictator is in series with the cream liner the cream liner is a pentode line level preamp uh made by a guy in um vancouver called sonic farm a guy named boris makes them this is based after a telefunken v72 preamp that he uh makes a line level version of and uh similar to the to the dictator it’s one of those devices where when you turn it off everything just kind of
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it just adds a little more meat to your mix you know going down the rack uh i have a rupert neve master bus processor and that is on um my band group so it’s everything in the console minus the vocals and i’m using this mostly for um a little bit of width in the mid-range and the red silk which just adds a little bit of high frequency um harmonic distortion moving down we got the gain lab empress which is gain lab’s pull tech style eq with a lot of additional features most notably the mid-range which eqp1 would never normally have so this is on my guitar bus and it really makes the guitars come alive have we found out this afternoon so i’m adding a little
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little 1k to it and then i’m putting some it’s like a sheet of glass over it so some some 8k for some air um and then using some of the high pass filtering to just clean up the low end api 2500s on my drum crush bus so that’s working pretty hard just to add some excitement as a parallel drum group then we got the retro double wide on kick this is a back baxendal eq style eq so it’s a linear um tilting eq and i believe it’s the low band is at 60 and the high band is at 12k so that’s my snare group um snare top and bottom goes through that and then also goes through the distressor i use my expressor on the percussion group so it’s a lot of crazy sounding drums some kegs um a lot of things that
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tonally are very very different and uh the expressor just keeps them all together for me the serpent 4001 is um on another drum group that i use uh very lightly 1.5 to 1 slow attack fast release um and that’s in parallel with my with my group that’s on the 2500. the knee 542’s are tape emulators so it’s it’s actually got two tape heads in it creates like just a nice gentle saturation and some red silk as well adds some high frequency content and that’s on my guitars as well and then you’re just your standard effects i always love the spx 990 number 19. big snare it’s like a gated snare drum that’s all it does it sounds pretty
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bad but in a good way i like it the stressors on snare bricasti’s on drum verbs for big hits and then the rest is vocals record computer smart computer i send um my solo bus to smart to this so if i’m ever having any problems with feedback or anything like that i can just uh solo the channel and it it goes right to there so this is my the system smart this is for uh troubleshooting purposes and uh keep an eye on how loud i am so we will we’ll have an average screen up here that shows me a 10 minute average and i try and stay pretty consistent depending on uh how loud the audience is tends to start off pretty loud and then i’ll i’ll take it down a little bit everybody’s pretty excited at the start of the show yeah so if you haven’t heard of game lab audio make sure you check them out
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it’s very road worthy i’ve been using it all year never had one problem with it i’ve fallen in love with the the brand and what the the people and the people at game lab are doing it’s uh the most important it all sounds amazing so check out gamelab and maybe see at a slipknot show
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