Sir Needs To Mixalot

In 1959 EMI bought a batch of Altec 436B compressors for Abbey Road. By 1960 three of its engineers, Bill Livy, Len Page and Mike Batchelor, had reworked them enough to give them a new name: the RS124. It’s a variable-mu tube design. Slow, smooth, and more about tone than catching peaks.

According to Recording The Beatles by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, an RS124 may have been used on every Beatles album from Please Please Me to Abbey Road. The Shadows and The Zombies went through them too, and they did duty on the mix bus and in the cutting rooms. From Revolver on, Geoff Emerick also leaned hard on a Fairchild.

Chandler Limited, in Shell Rock, Iowa, is the one company licensed to make official EMI and Abbey Road gear. Their RS124 recreation was modeled on three surviving originals, which matters, since no two vintage units sound quite the same.

How we’d use one

Bass and vocals. Two or three dB of gain reduction, slow release. It isn’t going to flatten anything. It makes things sound settled, which is a different job.

Watch and read

• Abbey Road Studios: RS124, the gear that made us
• Sound On Sound: Chandler RS124 review
• Chandler Limited: EMI RS124

Sears sold the Silvertone 1484 “Twin Twelve” from 1963 to 1967, and Danelectro built it. It’s a piggyback head and cab, somewhere around 50 or 60 watts into two 12-inch speakers, with tube tremolo and reverb. It was meant for a kid’s bedroom or a church basement.

Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner were on them early. Jack White did more than anyone to make them expensive. Reverb’s page on the JHS clone runs through Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, Vampire Weekend and The White Stripes and calls it about as indie as a vintage amp gets, which is hard to argue with. Premier Guitar’s review of the Jackson Audio version puts it in the backline of punks and garage bands.

It’s loose, a little hairy even when it’s clean, and it breaks up early. The low end gets flubby when you push it, which is charming right up until it isn’t.

Recording one

Don’t fight the looseness. Back the mic off a few inches from the grille, keep the gain lower than you think, and let the bass and drums carry the bottom. A 57 is fine. A ribbon a few feet back is better.

Watch and read

• Reverb: JHS Twin Twelve
• Premier Guitar: Jackson Audio Silvertone 1484 review

Fleetwood Mac tracked much of Rumours at the Record Plant in Sausalito, in Studio B, on an API console with 550A EQs, going to 3M 24-track tape. Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut produced and engineered alongside the band.

The first days didn’t go well. As Vintage King’s write-up tells it, Caillat spent about nine days moving mics and swapping amps and still didn’t like what he heard. What finally fixed it was the desk: opening up the preamps and, in his words, “+12 on every EQ channel.”

For mics, Caillat told Sound On Sound he used a Sennheiser 441 on kick, an AKG C414 with a 20 dB pad on snare and AKG 451s overhead, with the bass through a DI and a 414. Nothing exotic.

Big boosts aren’t a crime

The 550A uses what API calls proportional Q. The more you boost, the narrower the band gets, so small moves are broad and gentle and big moves get more focused. That’s a large part of why you can push one hard and it still sounds like music. If you’ve been told to only ever cut, try a bold boost on something that sounds dull and see what happens.

Watch and read

• Vintage King: The making of Rumours
• Tape Op: Ken Caillat interview
• MusicRadar: Rumours track by track with Ken Caillat

The 4038 started out as a BBC design in the 1950s. STC built it first, and Coles has made it since the mid ’70s with the same specs. It looks a bit like a small waffle iron and it sounds dark, wide and very natural, especially on loud things.

At Abbey Road, Norman Smith used a pair as overheads on Ringo Starr’s kit, and Geoff Emerick kept experimenting with them. Ken Scott told Sound On Sound he used one on Paul McCartney’s bass cab and on the Hammond during the Sgt. Pepper and White Album sessions. Glyn Johns’ well-known drum setup often used two of them, and they’re on Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn too.

A Glyn Johns-style setup

Excuse the drawing.

One mic three or four feet above the snare, pointing down. A second just past the floor tom, low, looking across the kit toward the snare. Use a mic cable as a tape measure to get both the same distance from the center of the snare, then add a kick mic. It’s simple and very hard to make sound bad. With 4038s you’ll want a preamp with plenty of clean gain.

Watch and read

• Abbey Road Institute: The Coles 4038 at Abbey Road
• Vintage King: Coles 4038 history
• Wikipedia: Coles 4038

Highland Dynamics is Bryce Gonzales in Los Angeles. Before this he built the Lisson Grove AR-1. The BG2 is a mono, all-tube variable-mu compressor, transformer-balanced and wired point to point.

It has two feedback modes. “British” is the cleaner one and “American” adds more harmonics. There’s also a line-amp mode for when you just want to run something through the tubes and transformers without compressing it.

Sound On Sound’s review called it astoundingly good on vocals. John Vanderslice, who runs Tiny Telephone in the Bay Area, told Vintage King they keep a BG1 and a BG2 in both rooms. That’s a decent endorsement from a place that has tracked a lot of indie records.

On a vocal

Set it so the loudest lines get three or four dB of reduction and then leave it alone. Variable-mu compression gets gentler as the signal drops, so the quiet lines barely get touched. Try both modes on the same take before you decide.

Watch and read

• Sound On Sound: Highland Dynamics BG2 review
• Tape Op: BG2 review
• Vintage King: Highland Dynamics BG2

The RCA 44 is the mic you picture when you picture 1940s radio. It’s a figure-8 ribbon, and when Bing Crosby leaned in close, the proximity effect gave him the warm, intimate low end that became crooning. Frank Sinatra sang into them early on. Les Paul used a 44-BX when he recorded “How High the Moon” in 1951.

RCA stopped making them a long time ago. AEA, in Pasadena, started servicing RCA ribbons in 1976, and by 1998 it could make every part of a 44 itself. That became the R44C, a replica of the 1936–38 44-BX. Les Paul told AEA’s Wes Dooley it was his favorite mic, and Eddie Van Halen bought a pair to record drums in stereo.

Singing into one

Distance is the tone control. Close in, you get the low-end bloom. Step back a foot and it thins out and the room comes in. Because it’s a figure-8, the back hears just as well as the front, so think about what’s behind it. Give it a preamp with a lot of clean gain.

Watch and read

• AEA: Our story
• AEA: The last 20 years of the R44
• Vintage King: The RCA 44

Coil Audio is a small company in Lawrence, Kansas that builds tube mic preamps from very old circuits.

The CA-70 is a two-stage octal tube design (a 6J7 into a 6C5) based on the Western Electric circuit that RCA, Gates and Langevin all built versions of. It’s thick and creamy, heavy in the lows. The CA-286 uses a two-stage EF86 circuit in the same family as the Telefunken V72 and the old Langevin, Collins and Gates broadcast amps. It’s more forward and detailed, with a bit of edge.

Tape Op’s reviewer put it about as well as anyone could: “CA-286 would be Lenny Kravitz, CA-70 would be Beck.” Vance Powell, who has engineered for Jack White and Chris Stapleton, keeps CA-286 modules in his rack.

One practical note. Neither one supplies phantom power, so condenser mics need it from somewhere else.

Watch and read

• Tape Op: Coil Audio review (issue 121)
• Tape Op: Coil Audio review (issue 107)
• Front End Audio: Coil Audio CA-70
• Equipboard: Vance Powell and the CA-286