Old gear and technology is revered and desired by many in the audio industry. But not everything which is old gets as much attention as a Fairchild or a Neve. In this article Julian considers some of the things which aren’t getting talked about quite as much.
Samplers
It’s difficult to relay to people who weren’t around at the time but the introduction of affordable digital samplers was completely world changing. The Synclavier and Fairlight had been around for a while by the time Akai, Roland and EMU rolled out products which were so revolutionary they very literally changed music. Products like the Fairlight and Synclavier weren’t just expensive, they were expensive in a way which doesn’t really exist any more. You can buy a second hand car for the cost of a Mac Pro but you could buy a house for the cost of a Fairlight!
Counterintuitively, hardware samplers arguably became less desirable the better they got. The magic of early samplers was that their sounds sounded ‘like’ the real thing. Later samplers didn’t sound ‘like’ the real thing. Sonically they were the real thing. The sound of the Akai S950 shaped the sound of Hip Hop and Roland’s W30 shaped early Techno. Although hugely more capable, no-one talks about later iterations like the Akai S6000. Look on auction sites and you’ll find a 6000 offered for half the price of a 950. The reason is that the 6000 sounds like your DAW. The 950 sounds like a 950.
It’s unlikely you don’t have a software sampler available in your DAW but for me the thing we’ve lost with our hardware samplers is their difficulty of operation. Sampling, by which I mean recording audio into the sampler’s input in real time, was an appalling faff which we were only prepared to tolerate because it was the only way to do what we were trying to do. Because of this loops were often a little off. Repeat a schonky loop a few times and what was an imperfect loop could become a unique groove. Particularly as it meant you could stop peering at a tiny LCD display. Crunchy, weird and stilted loops could be great, and happy accidents are really hard to create on purpose.
I’m not sure I’d give one space in my rack today but if you’ve never used a hardware sampler you’ve missed out on something very creative and also on lots of neck-ache!
PZM Microphones
Cheap condenser mics have been available for so long now that it’s easy to forget that there was a time when your choices were between relatively inexpensive dynamic microphones, professional European built condensers or an AKG C1000. The exception to this was the Pressure Zone Microphone and Tandy/Realistic’s version of the PZM was a staple of the early home recording scene.
With the advent of affordable condensers from companies like Rode, the desirability of this odd, square metal plate mic was far less compelling because the majority of those PZM users were using them as an alternative to an expensive condenser to get some high end onto the rather rolled off cassette multitrackers which were so popular at the time. Nowadays if you want condenser brightness then use a condenser but there is more to the PZM than extended top end.
The Pressure Zone from which the PZM gets its name refers to a way of mounting a microphone capsule close to a boundary. In this ‘pressure zone’ there is a ‘free’ 6dB of extra level to be gained due to the physics in play so close to the boundary of the space. Importantly, unlike placing a conventional mic close to a room boundary where interference between the direct and reflected sound will cause a degree of comb filtering, a PZM doesn’t experience this and because of this they are an excellent choice for recording in small spaces like drum booths.
I think of PZMs as the microphone equivalent of soffit mounted monitors, and proper PZMs are very impressive mics. The Shure Beta 91 is a Boundary mic but is something of a special case, and used almost exclusively on kick drum. The original PZM from Crown was hard to find when I tried to buy a second one and while quality PZMs exist, beware of cheap ones which are usually noisy things designed for recording meetings.
Noise Reduction
It’s not hard to understand why noise reduction systems have become a thing of the past. For the studio of 40 years ago noise was a constant preoccupation. Analogue tape is inherently noisy and large format mixing consoles and connected outboard were all sources of unwanted hiss. Tape noise is tricky to eliminate but careful setup of tape machines, improved tape formulations and of course hitting the tape hot enough to push the noise down relative to the signal without overcooking things too much and introducing distortion all helped. But noise was still enough of a problem for noise reduction systems to be a feature of studios for years. The various iterations of Dolby noise reduction and the infamously heavy handed DBX system were double-ended processes, meaning that, using companding techniques, the levels of the music would be changed to optimise the noise performance of the tape and the reverse of this processing would be applied on playback.
The hardware used to perform this processing has been misappropriated by some these days to reproduce the trick, used by some engineers, of recording the ‘encode’ process but not applying the ‘decode’ processing to add fizz and excitement. However, most of our noise reduction is now firmly ‘single-ended’, with technologies like iZotope RX and Waves Clarity VX being used to remove noise in a single operation, something not possible in the old days. Check out our noise reduction shootout here.
Of course, the almost total elimination of noise in the DAW era has resulted in the, perverse to some, inclusion of an ‘Analog’ button on plugin recreations of vintage gear to reproduce the noise of the original hardware. Thankfully it is possible to switch it off. Some decry the existence of these ‘features’ but I’m less harsh about it. In a way I see a little noise as being like artificially added room tone in post production. It can add some context around the sound, however some plugins are too noisy and I find myself needing to reduce the noise…
Noise Gates
Continuing the noise theme, in an old school studio significant proportions of the available rack space would be devoted to noise gates, probably the ubiquitous Drawmer DS201. These kept a lid on the inevitable noise of outboard as well as regular duties like keeping drum recordings tidy. It’s easy to forget that back in the day, significant amounts of time could be lost to tasks like programming MIDI controlled mutes on suitably equipped analogue mixers to chase down those offending noises.
Gates get overlooked in these days of largely noise-free studios. Manually trimming out tom tracks or using features like Pro Tools’ Strip Silence have pretty much negated the need for them. I remember raising an eyebrow when Sonnox first told me about Drum Gate. “Really? A gate?” was my immediate thought but I was proved thoroughly wrong when I tried it and realised just how wonderful it was. However there is more to gates than tidying up noise and bleed. Instead of reaching for a transient designer or compressor when you want to get a punchy attack on your kick drum, why not just do what live engineers have been doing for years and use a gate?
Digital Synths
Lastly, what about digital synths? The last few years have been really good news for analogue synthesis. The classics might be less affordable than ever but at least there are new options out there for hardware fans and there probably isn’t a professional analogue synth out there which isn’t available in plugin form. The sonic advantages of analogue synthesisers over their software equivalents will be argued about ad infinitum but one thing which is hard to argue with is that the physical experience of using an analogue synth is a huge difference between the two and one which many people are prepared to put up with the expense and lack of recall of hardware to have.
The idea of vintage digital synths might appeal to you. Machines like the D50 and DX7 certainly cast a long shadow over recorded music, but I’d rather work with virtual instruments than tiny LCDs and menu diving. However while the best virtual instruments produce impeccable sonic results, the best of modern digital synths offer fantastic results away from your computer. Their power combined with their easy navigation and editing puts them in a different category from the synths of the 90s. I recently bought a Nord Electro 6. I bought it for live work but I have found it transformative in the studio. I have a few MIDI controllers but this effectively replaces them all apart from a little 25 note M Audio which only remains because the Electro, annoyingly, doesn’t have a pitch bend or mod wheel.
I expected to use the Nord as a MIDI controller as well as a standalone instrument but I’ve found that a reduced set of high quality sounds often gives me all I need. With virtual instruments it’s possible to ‘channel hop’ through a thousand uninspiring sounds but a really playable and easily editable sound from a hardware synth is often preferable.
Most importantly, being able to access those sounds independently of my DAW means I actually play the instrument, something which is surprisingly difficult to do without distraction while at a computer.
In 2023 some of these seem rightly in the past but not all. Would you welcome the return to any of these? Which are you still using? Let us know in the comments below.
Photo by Alena Darmel from Pexels