Classic recording techniques require some vintage tools. Here we look at why some of these EQs, compressors, reverbs and tape machines have reached legendary status, and how you can use and access them today
Really, it’s the wealth of tools at our disposal that has made 21st century producers perhaps a bit too complacent. Getting back to that synth analogy, why bother recreating a sound when there are literally hundreds of presets done for you? It’s the same with mixing. We have perhaps lost the ‘how’ and ‘why’ in favour of ‘just load another plugin’. This feature is about paring things back, looking at classic production techniques and vintage gear, and going back to basics. But first, why that gear was so vital in the first place…
Musical mishaps
There’s a big argument that some of the classic gear used in the production techniques that we’re going to discuss became famous through misuse, happy accidents or their own idiosyncratic sonic character.
Starting with EQs and compressors, they were both intended to do fairly simple jobs. Compressors were initially designed to bring some evenness to recordings back in the ’50s and ’60s, to tame erratic vocals or other instruments. EQs would be designed to boost or cut certain frequency ranges, and that’s it. But a lot of vintage EQs and compressors imparted a special colouration or sound on a track, not something that was particularly asked for at the time, but that the electronic circuitry naturally generated. Before long these old pieces started to be used just for the sound and not necessarily their original intended purpose.
The UREI 1176 compressor is a case in point. It delivered a bright, energetic sound and was used by producers including Bruce Swedien when recording Michael Jackson. The same compressor also has a famous ‘all buttons in’ mode, an almost accidental find which results in more distortion for bass and guitar. Some producers even used this unit, and other pieces of vintage gear with its original function – in this case compression – disabled, just to get the crispy sound of the hardware.
For EQs we have a very similar story with the Pultec EQP-1A. Here’s another piece of classic hardware where simply running your signal through it will give your sound a hard-to-define extra sauce. And it too has a classic ’shouldn’t do that’ trick. This time it’s the famed Pultec ‘low-end trick’ where the low end can be boosted and cut at the same time. Because of the circuitry in the original machine, rather than the boost and cut cancelling one another out, it actually delivered a new EQ curve that delivers a much tighter and more characterful low end.
Character study
With other gear, it’s not so much about misuse, but simply goes back to that undefinable analogue character that it imparts. Channel strips that replicate the inpu
