Lostboy links up studio with Flock Audio’s Patch
Posted on: Tuesday 11th of May 2021
Rising pop producer Pete Rycroft (aka Lostboy) has seen chart-topping success in the UK during lockdown thanks to work undertaken in his private studio, which is built around a Patch software-driven analogue routing system.
Flock Audio’s Patch system, which provides a software interface and functionality for an all-analogue routing system, keeps him happy on both of those fronts.
“I am conscious of downtime in a creative environment, and Patch helps me minimize this,” he says. “Downtime can affect everyone’s energy, and hitting a creative roadblock is not ideal. In my studio, vibe is everything.
“For someone who has used any DAW, it is obvious what you are doing straight away. As long as you’ve got everything plugged in in the right way, you can’t really go wrong,” he says. “Set up was really fast — I just made a spreadsheet and figure out how my gear should be routed. All told, it took about a day, and since then, I’ve been integrating new bits of gear piece by piece.”
With much of his work involving writing and working on the fly, Rycroft says he wants appreciates the system’s ability to finding ‘the right sound’ faster, by integrating his analogue outboard into a software interface, and allowing the recall of preset routing options or the drag-and-drop addition and removal of items from his connected-kit list.
“If an artist comes and plugs in a guitar, it doesn’t take long for me to get the guitar to sound good because I can route it through anything,” he says. “I just don’t have to think about it as much, so it makes the creation process much more fluid.”
Some of Lostboy’s favoured gear includes his Manley and Neumann microphones, his Chandler and Neve preamps and his Tube Tech CL1B compressor before going into a Universal Audio Apollo x8 interface.
“These elements are usually my main chain [but] I’ve always had a lot of ancillary gear, like my Strymon Big Sky reverb pedal. When I’m using Patch, it’s suddenly it’s like, ‘ahh, remember all this gear you bought? Now I can send it from Pro Tools and back again because it is just a preset’. It’s unbelievable.
“When you are writing, which is what I do every day in a high-pressure environment, you don’t have time to try and work out if something is routed to the right patch point, or if a signal is muted — it just has to work. The fact that I know I’ve got a few chains I know will work in certain instances is very reassuring. The first time I saw it, I thought to myself, ‘How come nobody has invented this yet?’ It’s just great, and it helps me find the sounds I am looking for faster.”
Find out more about Lostboy here, and the Patch system here.
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