Similar Mindset?

[Winston OBoogie]

I have many versions of the 1176's, LA2A's, EQP1A's etc and they are all functional yet different. The question is can I achieve a great mix with them. You better believe I can! 

That's key. 
Abbey Road Studios still have 6 Fairchild 660's from the original batch (16?) that they bought all those decades ago.  I believe they still have pretty much all of their original Neumann tube mics.
These are regularly maintained by Lester Smith and they all sound great.
But there are an awful lot of vintage units out there that don't necessarily sound that great.  And lots that do sound great, but not identical.

 

 

[john12ax7]

I don't think we are that far apart in what we are saying. I agree people can,  and do,  make good mixes ITB.  Guessing the tools used after the fact it's not necessarily easy,  especially with someone highly skilled at the controls.

In terms of pure sonics though,  there is often something lacking in digital when trying to recreate non-linear processes.  I agree that transformers are often a giveaway.  But also hear similar in things like heavy compression and overdriven tube sounds. The steady state response is often rather close,  but not necessarily the transient time domain.

I also agree with the concept of using hardware on the way in,  then mix in software. This seems the best compromise for modern production needs.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Yep, sounds like we're just about on the same page and, in all fairness, I haven't had any recent opportunity to listen to models in isolation where it's being really pushed for super heavy compression or an overdriven sound.  I don't doubt at all that what you tell me of your experience is true. 

 

[analag]

But to what extent is one's exposure to plugins. Personally I buy them every week, everybody is making em and selling it for dirt cheap or just plain giving it away. I have found dogs and I have found jewels and once in a while gold (not always among the big names). You can always jump out of the box for a quick dip in the non linear voodoo pool and get back in the box. I think we have gained more than we have lost. Power has been given to the poor.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

But to what extent is one's exposure to plugins. Personally I buy them every week 

Admittedly I don't buy much of anything these days.  My only recent involvement was with Kush Audio who did a plugin of a hardware box I had a hand in so, I get a wee royalty from them and have their plugs as well as the UAD stuff. 

I think you're right that we gained more than lost, although I'm sad that we've also seen so many of the great studios close up shop ** 
But, remember when you were doing a mix and you had to leave the desk and outboard as was until you'd finished?  Being able  to flip between tracks and mixes is a BIG plus I think.

I'd still rather sit behind a big glorious Neve or API or something for tracking certain things though, especially when a band gets off on hearing the result which then feeds positively into the creative process. 

**  Edit:  it's the loss of those great acoustic spaces that's the kicker for me.  A great space, great talent, and a great engineer and it almost doesn't matter what the gear is.

 

[analag]

I remember the $100+ per hour studios, beautiful and intimidating at the same time. Watching the budget to the point where creativity suffered greatly. Then the project studios started stepping forward with the advent of tape based digital recording, hard disk was around but proprietary and expensive. Then came the Pro Fools and us PC pioneers struggling behind. Today even a lowly $100 USB audio interface plugged into a laptop can do damage. I prefer to run a water cooled Ryzen Thunderbolt machine sporting all the advances that AMD made (been a AMD fanboy from the 486 days) I have yet to discover the limits of this machine. When software isn't busy emulation antiquities they can do some nice tricks like dynamic EQing a must when I work with vocals and bass, smarter compressors that can go before or after the ol emulated comp. A convolution of a world class drum room can make a little basement rig come to life. In my 30 odd yrs of studio involvement, now is a most beautiful time for the art form , yet the music suffers from the wide availability and the sheer power of it. Bullfrogs can we made to sound palatable these days.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

I remember the $100+ per hour studios, beautiful and intimidating at the same time. Watching the budget to the point where creativity suffered greatly. 

I was lucky then.  As a young musician I don't remember a time when I ever, in a direct sense, paid for studio time.

Uni @ 16 where they had an 8 track
Was paid to play piano on sessions at 16 through 17+
At 18 Worked with Mike Rutherford of Genesis, they owned their own studio so...
19: In a band with $1.2 million Atlantic Records deal, produced by Roger Tayor of Queen who liked cool studios.
2nd Album at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, there for 3 months.
Another project at the old Virgin Records' Manor Studios

Etc. until I quit playing at 23.


Since then, I've been lucky to get to sit in on sessions with some absolute legends handling the desk and watch other guys make cool music in some incredible spaces.
Abbey Road, Air, Ocean Way, East-West, Sunset Sound...

 

[Whoops]

Abbey Road Studios still have 6 Fairchild 660's from the original batch (16?) that they bought all those decades ago. These are regularly maintained by Lester Smith and they all sound great.

Hello John, I completely respect you and have no intention of disagreeing with you.

But I had first person experience with 4 of AbbeyRoad Studios Fairchild units my experience is completely different of what you're saying.

In 2012, I went to record in Abbey Road Studio 3, it was a record I was Producing (plus recording and mixing).
I have worked in one of the Portuguese biggest studios the years prior, where I had access to amazing hardware vintage classics, so I had already hands on experience with most of the classics people talk in articles and magazines. Although we didn't have a Fairchild unit.
As I was going to Abbey Road and they had even more gear, I used during the session all the outboard and microphones that I didn't had the chance to try before.  Including a TG console, Fairchild compressors, RCA 44 and many others.

Abbey Road Studio 3  has two Fairchild 660 in the rack, and I wanted more so I asked 2 more from the Floating Equipment list.
So I had 4 Fairchild units in total. Although I never tried a real Fairchild before, I read all the amazing things about it everywhere  and I have used the Bombfactory plugin emulation and I loved it on drums so I thought the real hardware could only be better.

My experience with using Abbey Roads's Fairchilds was a big deception, scratchy pots, erratic behaviour,  changing the switches position would cut the sound in and out, some positions of the time switch just cut the sound completely. It was really distracting to using them and when they were stable they didnt sound particularly good.

In the end I ended up taking some of the them out of the signal chain, and used in the end the Bombfactory 660 plugin during the mixing stage which worked great.

This was a completely different experience to what you described, the Fairchild compressors maintenance at Abbey Road was pretty poor, I can also understand that a compressor that used 20 tubes might never be perfectly working for a long time.

After that experience I already have tried everything of the vintage classics, so I was in a better place to make a judgment for myself. I couldn't care less for any vintage piece of hardware after that neither do I care nowadays for what other people write on the internet or magazines about the magical properties of any piece of gear.
Having a lot of hardware requires constant maintenance, everyone that worked in a big studio knows that, and I prefer to use something that works and, is consistent, stable and something I can depend on.

Sound differences are marginal between a good emulation and an hardware unit compared to what damage a piece of gear can do to your work when it breaks or starts to work erratically in the middle of mixing a record.

I know the 1176 really well, I had 5x 1176 compressors in the studio I worked, all of them sounded a bit different even units from the same revision.
First time I tried the UAD 1176 emulations, I could get exactly the sound I was looking for when using any of those units, the character I was looking for was provided by the plugin.
If it sounded exactly the same as the 1176s? which one of them? Old units of the same model also don't sound the same.

I attached here some photos of the Abbey Road sessions I did, they're from a magazine article that covered the production of that record. You can see pictures of 3 of the 4 Fairchilds I used.

 

[Whoops]

Another one with the channel list for the Drums.
I didn't use the studio 3 console for the recordings, they had an SSL 9000, I used instead an EMI TG console (16 channels) plus some nice racks of Neve 1081 and Monserrat mic preamps.

 

[gyraf]

..now THAT is a party I'd like to have joined...  ;D

 

[Whoops]

..now THAT is a party I'd like to have joined...  ;D

It was a great experience, I have some pretty good memories from those sessions.
Paul Mccartney was recording in studio 2 with Ethan Jones producing, at the same time we were there .

As a side story...
There were 2 EMI TG vintage consoles in the Floating equipment list.
Both had 16 input channels, but one had 16 bus outs and the other one only had 4 bus outputs.
I booked the one with 16 outputs for our sessions, so I could record the 16 input channels into Protools (otherwise I could only record 4, or maybe 6 using the aux outs).

Ethan tried to book the same console for the Paul Mccartney sessions, but Abbey Road had to tell them the "unknown guy" in Studio 3 had already booked it, so they had to take the console with 4 outputs only.

Big respect to the Abbey Road staff as they had the integrity to respect a previous booking , even if that means saying "No" to Sir Paul Mccartney and Ethan Jones, people that I truly respect by the way.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Hello John, I completely respect you and have no intention of disagreeing with you.

But I had first person experience with 4 of AbbeyRoad Studios Fairchild units my experience is completely different of what you're saying.

Hey my friend,
never any need to feel you might be disrespectful in relating your experience having a different outcome than mine, I have as much, if not more, respect for anyone else's experience over mine.
I am surprised, and disappointed though that the 660's you used @ AR were not up to par.  I've known Lester, who looks after that stuff, for many years and he's a solid guy. 
The one session I was involved with that utilized the Fairchilds was in no. 2 and the pair of units in the rack worked and sounded great.  I can't say I paid attention to if the input and output attenuators were scratchy as you say, but, running signal through them was everything I expected.
Anyway, each to each. 
It sure does look like a fun party was had by all regardless  

 

[Winston OBoogie]

P.S.  Cool gear shots in the pics from the magazine article.  That TG desk isn't the usual one that folks get to use, it's usually a small sidecar type setup that's available.  If you got to use the one pictured that's very cool indeed.     
The pics also show a couple of RS.124 comps. and I can attest that the few they have left out of the original 30+ original units do indeed sound and behave quite differently from unit to unit.    Still cool though. 


Edit:  Irrespective of gear, what did you think of studio 3 itself?  It's a relatively small room to work in, but does have history of some great records being recorded in there.  I've only ever walked around and watched other stuff being done in there so, no real experience myself.

 

[Whoops]

The one session I was involved with that utilized the Fairchilds was in no. 2 and the pair of units in the rack worked and sounded great.  I can't say I paid attention to if the input and output attenuators were scratchy as you say, but, running signal through them was everything I expected.

I'm happy you had a different experience, unfortunately the ones we had were unusable.
But it was good also because it was a big eye opener for me, that I don't need any magical/Voodoo/Mojo vintage piece of equipment to do any record, if I have it fine, it not there's a lot of different ways nowadays to make great sounds.
UAD plugin emulations are some of them.

 

[Whoops]

P.S.  Cool gear shots in the pics from the magazine article.  That TG desk isn't the usual one that folks get to use, it's usually a small sidecar type setup that's available.  If you got to use the one pictured that's very cool indeed.

At the time the only external EMI TG consoles they had were the the 2 16channels I described, one was MKII (4 group outs) and the other the MKIII (16 group outs) both consoles were in the Floating Equipment list, which meant they could be used in any studio with no extra charge.
I was recording a rock band and the guys were into the 70s vintage sounds, the SSL9000 is a great console but it's pretty Clean and modern sounding. So the TG console was a nice addition, I love those Limiters on the channels, to this day they're still some of my favourite compressors.
The "EMI TG12413 1969" plugin does it quite nicely.


The pics also show a couple of RS.124 comps. and I can attest that the few they have left out of the original 30+ original units do indeed sound and behave quite differently from unit to unit.    Still cool though. 

Edit:  Irrespective of gear, what did you think of studio 3 itself?  It's a relatively small room to work in, but does have history of some great records being recorded in there.  I've only ever walked around and watched other stuff being done in there so, no real experience myself.

I loved to work in Studio 3. It's small if you compare to the big Live Room in Studio 2 and the huge live room in Studio 1. But it's not small by average standards.
It was the perfect size for our rock band. The main room has a really high ceilling and sounds great, quite Live, loved the sound. Then there were 2 other rooms, the Piano/Mirror room and a smaller one.
Leslie Speaker went to the Mirror room, and Bass and Keyboards amps went on the smaller room.
Everyone was playing Live in the Main Room, Guitar amps and Drums were in the same room for spillage/leakage.

There was nice accommodations upstairs with a balcony view for the Live room, you have a kitchen and a shower and a social room with couch.

The control Room was nice, big enough, although it's a dead sounding control room and I was used to Live End/Dead End control rooms, also they didn't have my preferred speakers so Monitoring wise it was a bit hard. But I had my trusty headphones.
I take a long time to adapt to different monitoring conditions and being able to learn them and then trust them. But I guess it's a bit like all of us.

Assistant was Gordon Davidson, really nice guy to work with, very professional and organised. Was always fast to help when needed and never got in the way when not needed.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Hey thanks Whoops, nice story.  Good to know you had fun in no. 3

And you're correct in that you don't need a piece of voodoo equipment.  Like I said, the right talent, engineer, and room is all ya need. 
That and love, love is all ya need...

 

[Whoops]

That and love, love is all ya need...