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Mixer Ryan Ulyate (Tom Petty, ELO) chose RSPE and Digidesign Pro Tools HD with D-Command.
“First of all, there’s no issue in terms of me getting a good deal with them, I know I’ll get the best deal from them, so I don’t have to worry about that. And the second thing is that the way they’ve got it setup, it’s very easy, they make it easy for the client."
&t
By Jennifer Kae
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years now... I started out as a runner for a studio in 1978... and from there started engineering a lot of records.” What are you currently working on? “Recently, one of the high profile things I’ve been working on is I’ve been working with Jeff Lynne [leader of the Electric Light Orchestra], - And we did a lot of the George Harrison stuff that’s been coming out recently. We finished the album that he did after he passed away, called Brainwashed, and then I mixed a really important concert called the Concert For George, which was a memorial concert they did in the Royal Albert Hall in London for George a year after he died. It featured Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Tom Petty and a bunch of people. That was a really neat project, I felt very lucky to work on a project like that.” 
Tom Petty’s last studio solo album was "Highway Companion", Jeff Lynne produced it while Ryan mixed and engineered it. Since that album Ryan has been working on more projects with Tom, including an upcoming documentary film about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Ryan has also re-mixed a lot of live performances along with old and new recordings. Ryan says this has been a huge yet very interesting project... “Working with artists, making records, bands, and rock n roll, that’s what I love, and I’m recording and mixing all this stuff!” What led you to choosing the Digidesign D-Command, and how has it improved your workflow? “The last thing I couldn’t do in my home studio was to mix records, and I finally realized a couple years ago that Pro Tools is finally powerful enough to be able to completely mix 72 tracks inside the box. When I realized that I wanted to do stuff inside the box, then the D-Command became the logical controller for that, because it's just so tightly integrated with ProTools. The great thing about that is, I wanted to have a system where I could be mixing something, I could send a CDR or MP3 to someone, they could listen to it at their place and then I can easily make changes to the mix. "Since it’s all in Pro Tools, you open it up, wait for your session to load and then your mix is there. It’s just the more logical way to go rather than have a 3rdparty console to where you have to store that mix data on that console. ... I’m able to jump around to any kind of project and open it up in a minute and make a change, that is the thing that really makes a difference.” The release of Pro Tools 7.2 made all the difference for Ryan. He speculates that it may have something to do with George Massenburg’s influence. Massenburg used to make automation for large recording consoles with moving faders and his were always the best. “There’s a feature in Pro Tools called Trim, and what you can do, is you can write all your automation moves on any given channel, and then put that channel into trim mode. You can do an overall up or down level adjustment and you don’t have to commit to it, so you can just get your individual channels right, and then you can go back and look at your mix and bring the vocals up a little bit, bring this down a little bit and just kind of play with it until you’re happy with it, and then when you’re happy with it,then you can commit that and write that automation. That has really made a big difference, it’s made it a lot easier to do really complex mixes.”
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