LYON, FRANCE : Still remarkably early in his career, Julien Collier wears many hats as a musician and sound engineer. He is a multi-instrumentalist, a composer, and an arranger; he is a sound designer, a producer, and a director; he is a recording engineer, a mix engineer, and a mastering engineer; and he is a live tech, a FOH engineer, and a monitor engineer. On the side, he works as a music coach and artist developer! Collier borrowed his alias, Fux, for the production house he established in Lyon, France. Fux Productions contains a recording studio, a composing studio, and a rehearsal room, along with Collier’s extensive industry connections. Clients have access to professional musicians of all stripes, composers, sound engineers, producers, videographers, and more. Across all those wide and varied activities, Collier relies on his Metric Halo 2882 interface and Metric Halo plug-ins for almost everything. They are his pro audio equivalent of a Swiss Army knife!

Collier’s list of clients includes many French independent labels, as well as majors such as Sony, Universal, and Warner. A few of his most recent studio projects include work with Romain Ughetto, Chasing After Time, 99 Ways to Die, and Green Money. For all of those projects, he served as producer, tracking engineer, mix engineer, and mastering engineer, and on many of them he also helped with composition and performance. “A lot of important decisions are made during the tracking,” he said. “It is critical to get the recording into the computer in the best way possible because once it becomes digital, it stays digital. I use my Metric Halo 2882 for everything. It has excellent preamps and flexible input and output routing. It’s just as useful in the studio as it is on stage, where I often use the 2882 to mix in-ear monitors. The software and hardware is very stable, and I am comfortable using it live without a problem.”

Collier’s appreciation for the 2882 made him curious about Metric Halo’s other products and inspired him to get the company’s Production Bundle, which is a complete collection of Metric Halo plug-ins. “Like the 2882, the Production Bundle is now completely integrated into my workflow,” he said. “I use Metric Halo plug-ins on everything and in every situation. They are very flexible and allow me to handle everything from subtle track correction to creative coloration and effects. I use ChannelStrip 3 to clean up my tracks with equalization, compression, and filtering. I love that the plug-in has a great deal of precision – when I adjust a parameter, I really feel it directly. The Character plug-in models different signal paths and gives me a great sound that I use all the time. I use two variants of HaloVerb on most of my productions, which combine together nicely without using a lot of DSP resources. I use the Precision DeEsser on all my vocals and on other shrill instruments, like keyboards or hi-hat. Finally, I use the Transient Control on all of my percussion and drum tracks which gives me fine-grain control of dynamics, attack, and power. It’s also often useful on acoustic and electric guitars and is a lot more reactive than other plug-ins of its type.”