Alto provides rock-solid nearfield monitoring solution for Freemonk

British producer, recording engineer and mixing engineer, Freemonk, has enhanced his nearfield monitoring setup with the addition of a Chord Electronics Alto.

When it comes to creating music, Freemonk prefers to work with an analogue workflow. While choosing to work in the analogue domain provides its fair share of challenges, the results that he has achieved in everything from jazz to hip hop are testament to a producer at the top of his craft.

He discovered Chord Electronics after talking with fellow producer MsM. “Chord Electronics came into my life with a typical nerd chat with MsM, who is a fantastic mixing engineer based in London,” he recalled. “I'd noticed he was using Chord Electronics and I asked him what it was. He gave a very MsM answer of ‘just go try it’.”

Freemonk followed that advice and the Alto quickly became the latest addition to the workflow at The Friary, put to use driving the NS-10 nearfield monitors. “I rely on NS-10s quite heavily during tracking, production and mixing,” explained Freemonk. “I think they're horrible, but they do what they're supposed to and your ears just get used to hearing certain things on them that are out of place or that need adding. The Alto was so small and being very honest I was quite sceptical about how it could provide enough power for the NS-10s and have headphone amps. But I had a listen and it took me down a rabbit hole of wanting Chord everywhere!”

The Alto offers 50 watts per channel for nearfield monitoring, plus enough drive for its four headphone outputs simultaneously, via one front-panel 3.5 mm, one 4.4 mm Pentaconn and two 6.35 mm outputs. It relies on Chord Electronics’ renowned proprietary ULTIMA amplifier topology. This features advanced dual-feedforward error-correction technology, which monitors then immediately corrects signals before the output stage, for astonishing accuracy and transparency.

“It's opened the sound up of the NS-10s, it's not just about the frequency spectrum it also somehow gave them more depth,” he revealed. “I realised that the amp I was using before was just squashing the sound so that was a real eye-opener. Before I would always switch the NS-10s off when the artists were listening back, but now sometimes I leave them on.”

A further advantage that the producer has found has been with the portable nature of the Alto. “The fact it's portable as well with something like that is just is brilliant,” he stated. “Sometimes I track in London in bigger studios and there was a particular studio with a lovely old trident desk. The band were in the same room, so we had to track on headphones. The way that studio was set up I wasn't happy with the monitoring I was getting on the headphones. I just popped my Alto in the bag, went back to London and I just felt like I knew what I was hearing again. I ended up mixing that EP and when I came back in here, be it on headphones or NS-10s, it was the same feeling again which I wasn't getting with their current system.”

With the Alto now established in his signal chain, Freemonk is very positive about what it is adding to his workflow. “It's just made my life a bit better, which is always good in the world of ‘this channel's crackling, the valves gone on that tape machine’ and all this analogue stuff, it's nice to have something which is just a bit of a rock.”