I don’t know what he used on that particular track but he has got some tube gear, an Avalon mic-pre, a tube compressor and probably a tube guitar amp. I’d be very surprised if that track didn’t use at least one bit of tube kit somewhere; by a musician, Harris or the mastering engineer
How do you know what gear he has got? He's rather successful in music business giving him financial flexibility to get all kind of gear, but up and coming "bedroom producers" may resort to cheap tube emulator plugins after spending all their savings on decent studio monitors and some room acoustics treatment.
There are pictures of his studio online, so I can see what equipment he has and there are probably places online where they’ve already done that. He’s got quite a lot of older analogue gear but most of it is transistor rather than tube based.
Very true but then the major artists aren’t going to use exclusively “bedroom producers”. They’re going to use exclusively commercial studios or at least commercial studios for some of the recording or production and if they do use a producer doing some of the work in their home studio, it’s going to be a successful producer with a highly spec’ed private studio, not a “bedroom producer” who’s “spent all of their savings” just getting a functional studio. In addition, their tracks will be mastered by a highly reputable mastering engineer.
Oh. Yeah there are pictures online, but one has to know what tube gear looks like to identify it in the pictures.
Isn't PinkPantheress for example a "bedroom producer/artist?"
My music collection mainly comprises of classical music. Very little of it is pop or rock music. My collection is a lot of classical music + Tangerine Dream and then "a little bit of everything": Jazz, New Age, Electronic Dance Music, Pop, Rock, Funk, movie soundtracks etc.
Then again you only need to find the correct parameters once and write them up, or better yet make a preset in the plugin.
Well, this wasn't so much about physical gear versus plugins. This was about whether there're tubes inside the physical gear or not. I am not even claiming anything. I was just surprised to hear that almost all pop/rock music produced today involves tubes. I would have thought maybe 20 % does (and maybe more in rock than pop).
True but then I’ve worked at quite a few studios and used a lot of gear over the years. Most gear has it’s name printed on it of course, it’s just a case of knowing (or looking up) whether it’s digital or analogue and if it’s the latter then whether it’s op-amp or tube based. When I started in the business almost all studio gear was analogue, except for the recorders and certain effects (like reverb).
In a sense. If you look up her album list, it’s mainly recorded and mixed by Jonny Breakwell at Battery Studios, a well known studio complex in north west London, famous for its analogue gear (including a lot of tube gear). How much she actually did herself in her bedroom is impossible to say, probably the samples and loops, maybe a fair bit more but this is the popular side of the music industry so what’s hype and what isn’t is probably known by very few and rarely made public.
Even some classical recordings still use some tube gear. For example, the Decca Tree is still quite widely used and was designed for and works best with Neumann M50 mics (which are tube mics). I’d be surprised if Tangerine Dream didn’t commonly use some tube compressors. Jazz electric bass players often favour a tube guitar amp. Pop, rock and funk virtually always uses some tube gear. Movie soundtracks not so commonly but it’s still more common than you’d probably think. Air studios do a lot of film soundtracks and their standard procedure is recording the orchestra with a Decca Tree and M50s.
There wasn’t a single setting even with the original hardware, let alone with a plugin. How you set the hardware depended on what you were recording and what you wanted to achieve, which gain stage or stages within a unit you wanted to overdrive to achieve a specific sound for example. So there is no “correct parameters” you can setup once and save as a preset. At best you can create presets as starting points but that takes time and in practice you often still end up spending considerable time tweaking them. This can often be somewhat of a creativity killer for experienced professionals. You generally don’t want to be spending ages focused on tweaking a single thing and loosing the “bigger picture” you’ve envisaged in your mind.
Mic pres are relatively rarely tube based and most definitely NOT “always”. Avalon’s are probably the most common, although Millenia, Mercury, UA and API also had a tube mic pre model. Far more common are op amp based mic pres though, even amongst the vintage crowd! The Neve 1073 is probably the most famous vintage mic pre of all time and is still very widely used (as it’s been re-issued), Focusrite 110, SSL, API (SS versions) and other SS mic pres are far more common than tube mic pres.
So how do you manage to do the work without tweaking "for ages?" If the original gear has got several settings too, how do you avoid tweaking when using them?
It doesn't help me much if you have worked at quite a few studios. I haven't. The mics I have been working with are completely different kind of mics, Brüel & Kjær measurement microphones.
Maybe a lot of TD had tubes in the past, but how about these days?
Avalon mic pres don’t have a noise gate! I’ve never seen/heard of any mic pre with a noise gate. You sometimes/often find a noise gate on a Channel Strip (that includes a built-in mic pre) but not on a mic pre. And again, Avalons are relatively unusual, so you can’t have worked at many studios if they all had Avalons!
The original gear typically has fewer settings/parameters and they’re far more coarse. So it’s generally a lot quicker/easier with the original gear, this maybe partially psychological because it’s tactile. I could virtually always “dial in” an EQ in just a few seconds on an actual Neve desk for example but the same thing on an EQ plugin would almost always take longer and not uncommonly a great deal longer and virtually all the engineers I’ve spoken to over the years feel the same. I don’t use hardware EQs any more though. The other advantages of plugins outweighs this issue in my line of work.
TD used a lot gear, quite a bit of it was custom gear and they were of course one of the pioneers of electronic popular music. To answer your question, I really don’t know but I’d be very surprised if they don’t still use a lot of analogue gear and moderately surprised if there wasn’t at least one bit of tube gear amongst it.
I try to write my Nyquist plugins in a way that limit the "tinkering" to a few options (e.g. "OFF", "WEAK", "MEDIUM" and "STRONG" or no options at all! It is like cooking with only the options to add 1, 3 or 10 grams of salt. No time wasted on finetuning if it's 2.6 or 2.7 grams, because the obvious option is 3 grams and that's it. It is likely to be close enough anyway (and a matter of taste). Too restrictive plugins are unusable. That's why it is about finding the fine balance. Often it is about writing a very flexible plugin first and then after using it a while I know what are the needed options and can re-write the plugin. For example the original plugin might have option to set a certain parameter to any integer between 1 and 20, but working with it I notice I only use values 2, 8, 9 and 10. That tells me I really should have only options for 2 and 9 (close enough to both 8 and 10). Plugins without options at all are very quick to work with.
Well I guess tubes are everywhere (except in my production chain which is 100 % tube-free).
Well that’s the thing. Sometimes I use 4 bands of EQ, very occasionally 5-8 bands, sometimes a shelf and a filter, sometimes the resonance of a filter or other functions of modern EQ plugins that simply weren’t available with an analogue EQ. If you have a lot of options you tend to try some/many of them to see if you can get a better result. That takes considerable extra time, focuses you on tiny details and away from the bigger picture.
That’s no longer the reason. If they “like the added harmonics of tube gear” there’s no reason not to use plugins, which can emulate those added harmonics and do so much more cheaply, reliably and consistently! The reason for using analogue tube gear is largely fashion/bragging rights or the potential ergonomic reasons discussed above.
With the big studios in the vast majority of cases it’s both. There is analogue gear and DAWs, IE. Even when tube or SS gear is being used for processing, or even the entire mixing chain, a DAW is still used as a recorder (and for editing). In practice a bit of both is most common, some mixing/processing done in analogue and some “in the box” with plugins.
Not necessarily. They’ll surely have some old/vintage mic preamps but most commonly SS ones (by Neve and others), they’ll surely have some tube mics, probably a tube compressor or limiter and it’s very likely they (and/or a visiting guitarist or bass player) will have a tube guitar amp/effects but it’s not so likely they’ll have a tube preamp.
