Ventura, CA (January 23, 2024)—Multi-award-winning film re-recording mixer Paul Massey is such a fan of the Harrison MPC mixing console that when he is unable to work on the hardware, he relies exclusively on the MPC Channel Strip plug-in.
“I depend totally on the MPC Channel Strip plug-in from Harrison,” Massey says. “They’ve done an amazing job at emulating the original hardware.”
London, U.K.-born Massey has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including for Ford v. Ferrari, The Martian and Walk the Line, winning for Best Achievement in Sound Mixing for 2019’s Bohemian Rhapsody, alongside Tim Cavagin and John Casali. The team also won a BAFTA Award for their work on the film. Massey received the Cinema Audio Society’s Career Achievement Award in 2022. A longtime resident of Southern California, he recently completed a new 9.1.6 immersive mix room in Ventura, which features a large MPC5 console that was previously at the center of his home studio in Ojai, a short drive away.
“I first was introduced to Harrison’s MPC5 console around 2009, when I was building my first studio,” Massey says. “I completely fell in love with the way it sounded and its Toys package, the onboard plug-ins that the console provided.” Since then, he says, “I’ve come to completely depend on Harrison equipment for everything I do, whether it’s music or dialogue mixing for film or for streaming.”
But when a project takes Massey away from home and he is not able to use one of the scaled down mobile MPC hardware systems that he keeps in Los Angeles and London, he relies on the MPC Channel Strip plug-in. The plug-in provides six essential components derived from the MPC5 console: a parametric eight-band EQ with RTA, a pair of multi-pole filters, a two-band de-esser, a two-band de-noiser, a compressor and control of routing, trim and polarity. “I depend on it one hundred percent,” he reports.
“I put it on every single strip when I’m mixing within Pro Tools,” Massey elaborates. “It’s on my overall outputs and my individual inputs. Even if I’ve pre-dubbed or I receive tracks that don’t need any EQ or anything, I’ll always put the MPC Channel Strip on as a standard template, just to have the overall compression, de-essing and EQ easily at my fingertips. I find that the sound of the plug-in EQ is almost identical to the MPC5 EQ, which I absolutely adore. And it is so fast, so intuitive and so easy to use.”
