34 l June 2013
www.psneurope.com
studiofeature TOP FOUR BOXES
Mirek Stiles, Abbey Road: “The one that Wade, myself and many of the engineers at Abbey Road would pick out is the one we’ve called the Curve Bender, a TG EQ unit. It’s a beautiful sounding EQ, very creative and very musical with a huge amount of options. It crops up on tracking notes everywhere.”
Keith Andrews, Expat Audio: “A guy called Larry Janus in Southern Florida founded the Tube Equipment Corporation, and he makes the Blackbird – not a straight replica of the Fairchild 670 but a development of it. For him, it’s not just about cloning. I like this saying: there’s two types of fool in the world: one that says something is good because it’s old; and one that says something is better because it’s new. Age itself is not the criterion.”
Kevin Walker, Unity Audio: “Toni Fishman in Connecticut started by simply making replacement polar-pattern selector switches for the old Telefunken ELA
Kevin Walker of Unity
M 251 microphones – and ended up buying the rights to the name from Germany and manufacturing the whole mics all over again. They are superb: at one comparison with the originals at British Grove they were indistinguishable. Geoff Foster at Air Lyndhurst – one of the greatest collections of mics in the world – recently bought three of them from us.”
Guy Davie, Electric Mastering: “I started using the EAR 822Q EQ, a Pultec copy, then managed to get a couple of originals – and went back to the EAR! I actually prefer the replicas: they have a sweeter top end. Old Pultecs, old Fairchilds, old anything else… they vary quite a lot, and recapping the valves can go either way.”
visit the EMI archives in Hayes, Middlesex and relay any notes and schematics he can find that represent each chosen piece of equipment. “Over in Hayes is what used to be EMI’s factory where the records were all pressed – along with television sets, radios and gramophones,” he continues. “You name it, they did it! It has slowly dwindled and there’s no original manufacturing any more, but the archives are still there. All the tapes are there, all of our paperwork and the EMI Archive Trust is based there, with a small museum showing TVs, microphones, tape machines and so on. It’s an amazing building, very well preserved and curated by the Trust, which is a registered charity. Luckily, I can go down there and I’m allowed to dig my nose in and see what I can find! Notes, scribbles, bits of paperwork… blow the dust of a box, and it might be something related to any one of those classic recordings.”
Tube Equipment Corporation Blackbird: “Not a straight replica of the Fairchild 6570 but a development of it”
The association between Abbey
Road and Chandler Ltd has, so far, resulted in the TG Channel MkII, a re-creation of several vintage circuits; the TG1 Abbey Road Special Edition Compressor, hewn from the legendary EMI TG12345 mixing console; the very popular TG12345 Curve Bender (see boxout TOP FOUR); and the TG12413 Zener Limiter.
DEMOGRAPHIC EQ A generation or two raised on laptops may raise a painted eyebrow at all this, but Mirek Stiles detects a natural evolution. “There’s a market for people of
any age wanting something that’s a bit unusual,” he points out. “Obviously a young producer or engineer gets his first laptop or DAW with a basic set of plug- ins, but as you get to learn those you get curious about what else is out there. There’s plenty of information in the media about classic gear and the producers who love them, word gets around and you get inspired to experiment and explore. It’s like an adventure. Once you start chipping away here and digging there, before you know it you’ve opened yourself up to this entire world of possibilities. I think
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