Producer Jason Deift selects RME’s Fireface UFX+

Producer Jason Deift has worked on a wide variety of projects out of his Orange County, California-based home studio over the last 25 years. With a focus on mastering, Deift recently got pinged by Adam Gubman of Moonwalk Audio to work with 21-year-old songstress Abigail Barlow on a few songs off her debut EP “Abigail.” Because of the pop nature of the tracks, Deift selected the fully transparent RME Fireface UFX+ audio interface.

“I selected the Fireface UFX+ because it is completely transparent and the converters are top notch,” Deift explained. “It’s pop material and pop is high-fidelity so it make sense to use a modern medium. You don’t want a lot of color on these recordings — what goes in you want to come back out.”

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A Stable Solution

Deift mastered several of Barlow’s hits off her EP “Abigail” which rose on the iTunes charts in August, including “Jet Black Hearts” and “Heartbreak Hotel.”

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“I was excited to start on this project because I could tell from the start that she was the real deal,” said Deift, who also builds his own PCs for his mastering work. “One of the reasons I chose RME is because I knew it was rock-solid, and its stability on PCs is fantastic. I run the interface as a thunderbolt setup, and the reliability with RME is unmatched.”

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In addition to its pristine, transparent sound, the Fireface UFX+ provided Deift with just the right amount of stereo width he was looking for.[nbsp]“The stereo is very wide and ultra clean,” he explained. “The UFX+ provides tons of gain and tons of headroom.”

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Workflow Master

In addition to the Fireface UFX+, Deift also integrates RME’s TotalMix FX routing and mixing software — which comes with every RME interface — into his workflow.[nbsp]“I use TotalMix every day,” Deift said. “It’s like a full blown DAW in and of itself. It’s very detailed, so every day I’m working, I’m also routing things into TotalMix. I absolutely love it.”Deift explained his workflow as “a hybrid of plugins and hardware.”

TotalMix FX - Mixing/Routing with superior features for Studio and Live Work

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“When I do mastering, I get the track — left and right channel, a 2-track — and I come out of the Fireface UFX+[nbsp]and use a summing box. Out of the D box, I go into a bus compressor and then into a stereo limiter compressor,” he explained. “I then go back into ProTools and print. I use various other tools to sculpt and shape the track, but the D box is a great compliment because the UFX+ has 8 outputs, and it’s going into the D box and those 8 outputs are critical because if I didn’t have those, I couldn’t sum.”

An avid user of RME for the last 10 years, Deift said he can’t imagine using any other interface for his mastering work.“RME’s interfaces just work,” he said. “With other interfaces I spend so much time fixing things. RME’s reliability is unsurpassed.