![]() ![]() I ended up purchasing a Soundcraft that I modded and went with a patch bay. Unfortunately, it’s not that great in terms of the EQ and it can be noisy. It also has 6 aux sends so you can connect a wide array of effects. I liked it because of the incredible routing capabilities and that I didn’t need a patch bay. If you were a student of SAE, you are very familiar with this board. When I first started out, I was recording on a 32 channel Mackie 8 bus console. You must create depth(front to back) and if you listen to most Soul and Reggae records of the 1960s, they seem to be so deep in the way they are mixed. Mixing in mono isn’t as easy as people think it is. I have found my strengths and weaknesses over the years and what I want my listeners to hear in the final mix. I mostly work in Mono but sometimes I do Stereo. Then I output back to the mixing console to mix solely in the analog realm using my preferred outboard gear and make a final mix recorded back into the DAW. I prefer to record analog on the front end and use a DAW as a tape machine. What made it great was his creative ideas, the feeling that the players had and the messages that the singers wanted to tell the listener.įirst decide if you want to go all digital, all analog, a mixture of both “in the box” and out. ![]() If you look at his Black Ark studio compared to other studios of the time, it was the furthest from a professional studio. By the time the mix was ready for mastering, the drums often were almost non existent due to the constant back and forth bouncing to add more tracks. He also used tape decks from the home recording market and bounced often. He used a modded Soundcraft Series 1 which wasn’t a great console to begin with. Lee Perry had probably the most lo-fi sound of them all. Other equipment of this circuit design were the Cinema Engineering 6517, Langevin 255 and the Altec 9069B. This gave him a very distinct filter sound that was at the time and still highly sought after today. It featured the Altec designed Low Pass Filter which he modded the output to run out of phase. Studio One used Sound City guitar and bass amplifiers, their console in the early days was a Collins and if you check the build quality and today’s prices on one, you will find that they aren’t cheap! King Tubby and Bunny Lee used an MCI console made by Sony which Tubby modded himself. ![]() In fact, most of the studios had high end top of the line equipment. People confused that with the fact that they are hearing a really worn vinyl record. There has been a common misconception that Reggae was supposed to sound lo-fi but this is completely untrue. I believe in setting your sound apart from others because it becomes your trademark and people will come to you to get that sound. You are more than welcome to track down the same consoles and outboard gear as what they used back then but I believe that it might just be a money pit and in reality everyone does that. Once you have your players, then you can focus on the equipment. It may not come naturally for most people. It was a starting point but I certainly had to train my brain to think a different way. I didn’t grow up with any of that but I did grow up with Jazz and Blues. Non Jamaicans rarely grew up with influences of traditional African music and that plays a huge part in Reggae. Drummers hit differently, they may push or pull the beat in different ways that affects the whole ensemble. There’s a huge difference in terms of feel when you take a Jamaican recording and put it up against a 1990s Southern California ska or reggae band. The players will make or break your recording. My advice to anyone that wants to record instruments is focus on finding the best players and worry about the equipment later. I also found that it was less about the equipment and more about the players, energy of the vocal groups and the creative ingenuity of the engineers. Other equipment has fell victim to the rise of the vintage gear market and the price gouging that came with the trend. Some of the consoles that were used are left into obscurity or are still kept secret. ![]() I did that when I first started and realized that many things were just unobtainable and a waste of my time and a drain on my creativity. When it comes to Reggae music, often times budding engineers will approach it with a sense of recreating the older sounds. Beginning Your Journey Into Recording Reggae ![]()
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