Joe Clegg’s Red 8Pre And Dante-Equipped Recording Studio

Joe Clegg

Joe Clegg is a drummer and producer/engineer who forged his career as the musical director for British pop sensation Ellie Goulding. Joe is a textbook example of the modern music producer. His recording setup is a hybrid of classic, characterful outboard equipment and cutting-edge interfacing technology: the production glue that ties everything together. In this video, Joe talks though his system, and shows how he's able to use his analogue hardware like DAW plugins: as real time effects and processors on his audio. Thanks to the minuscule round-trip latency of Red 8Pre and Dante, Joe can reach for a hardware device and add the sonic flavour of his choice, without missing a beat.

Like so many modern creatives, he uses his audio technology not purely for utilitarian benefits — although it serves this purpose in leaps and bounds — but as a creative tool and inspirational element to his creative setup. Just as his drum kits, effects pedals and vintage tape delays give him endless sonic options, his audio interface system provides a professional, near-zero-latency environment where boundless flexibility and extreme audio precision go hand in hand.

The Red 8Pre is at the centre of everything in Joe's studio, as the hub to which many spokes connect. It hooks up to his MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt, and interfaces between his banks of analogue equipment, his ADAT-equipped ISA 828 mic pre, and several Dante-equipped input devices, including a RedNet MP8R and a RedNet 2, distributed throughout his impressive studio. (RedNet 2 is a discontinued product, which has been superseded by the RedNet A16R.)