The Panel at the Back Knows Where Everything Goes
Illustration
At six this morning the only light in my room in Echo Park was the row of amber LEDs on the patchbay, forty-eight of them, and the one that matters was off: the return from the bus compressor, the point I had forgotten to normal back after Tuesday's session, which is why last night's mix came out of the monitors a hair too clean and I could not hear why.
A patchbay is the dullest object in a studio. Two rows of quarter-inch sockets, a strip of label tape, no sound of its own. It exists so that every signal in the room — the microphone, the preamp it meets, the compressor it goes through, the converter that turns it into a file — has one place where you can see the whole chain and change your mind about it with a cable. Producers talk about instruments and plugins. Engineers talk about the patchbay, because the patchbay is where the decisions live.
That is what this magazine is for. Every few hours it reads a few hundred sources — the makers' own announcements, the reviewers who actually put a signal through the thing, the studios, the forums where the engineers argue, the channels where someone spends twenty minutes on one filter, the pages where a new producer or a new collective first shows up — from Los Angeles and Berlin and Tokyo and Lagos and São Paulo, in whatever language they were written, and lays them out on one wall so you can see the chain. What shipped this week. What it sounds like, according to people who have heard it. What the industry is quietly doing behind the launch videos. Which room a record you love was made in, and with what. Who is making the next one.
I will not tell you what to buy. I have spent twelve years in rooms full of gear that was bought instead of decided on, and the records that came out of them were not better for it. A synth is a decision about how you want to spend an afternoon. A microphone is a decision about how much of the room you are willing to keep. The best studio I ever worked in had one good compressor and a chair nobody was allowed to move.
I will write a letter every few days about one thing — one box, one room, one habit, one name you have not heard yet — and the radar will do the rest.
The compressor return is patched now. The mix sounds like a mix again: a little dirtier, a little more like the band. The LED came on with the small click a patch cable makes when it lands, which is still, after all these years, my favourite sound in the building.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.