One of the most difficult things about being an NYC recording studio is keeping up with all the demands of these sophisticated NYC musicians! These guys and gals know their gear, and they know what they want to record through. We’ve got our digital plugin game down, seriously, there aren’t too many plugins we don’t get as soon as they hit the presses. And one of our engineers is a music coder at The Music Transcriber writing plugins for Avid Sibelius and Pro Tools, so we get lots of awesome music software toys through that. But software is not enough for these well learned and ambitious New York City recording artists, we need to get the analog gear they require! It’s our belief that a great studio is a hybrid studio, mixing the best of digital and analog into a powerful recording rig. We’ve got some awesome analog gear, but recently we added two new pieces that we’d like to take a moment to share with everyone.
Perhaps the most common question we get from audiophile bands (in imparticular, the indie bands who want some vintage sound) is what kind of analog preamps do we have. They are often looking for vintage tube preamps, and boy do we have a great one for you now! We recently acquired an Ampex 601 Preamp from the 1950s with original tubes and all. We’ve been in the process of modifying it and restoring some components for an even better sound (I know, I know, everyone wants that vintage sound, and don’t worry we didn’t lose it, in fact, the new capacitors make that vintage sound even easier to record!). The Ampex preamp is perfect for getting that old school vocal treatment or getting a classic mono drum sound, and I’m sure all those New York City bands have some other uses for it too, can’t wait to find them out!
Our other real nice acquisition lately was an Orban 674a stereo parametric equalizer. It’s from the 1970s and we are very happy to have it. In fact, so happy it’s been used on a lot of our masters lately. Frequently when we are mastering we like to use digital EQs because the precision is perfect, but on a lot of our tracks we find that feeding it through some analog EQ brings it to life a little, especially in tracks with a lot of synthesizers, this gives them a whole new life. The coolest thing about this EQ is not only that it is a stereo master EQ, but it is a parametric eq with a semi-graphic interface. The gain for each band is graphic, while the frequency and bandwidth are totally parametric. The point here is that you can get the volumes matched for each channel of the stereo pair, bullseye! We also really love how it breathes some air into the top end of dull tracks and cleans up the low end of the overly bassy dance or hip-hop tracks. Besides, we needed an Orban piece in the studio to confidently say we got some vintage swag!