Featured Artist – Guy Massey
Guy Massey cut his teeth working at Abbey Road, where he got to work with some of the biggest names in music, assisting John Leckie on Radiohead’s “The Bends”, recording and mixing for the likes of The Bees and Spiritualized and even re-mastering the stereo versions of “The Beatles: Remasters”. Last year Guy picked up the prestigious MPG Recording Engineer of the Year award, at a ceremony where he also walked home with the Album Of The Year award for his work, again with John Leckie, on The Coral’s “Butterfly House”.
When we caught up with him, Guy was mixing two new projects at his home studio; “I’m mixing two albums back to back at the moment, which were both recorded at Snap Studios. I’m just finishing mixing an album for Bill Fay – his first for many years – and I’m also doing an album for Ultrasound. I assisted a friend on their first album at Abbey Road, and they remembered me and got in touch.”
Guy has recently equipped his home studio with a Universal Audio UAD-2 Quad Satellite FireWire plug-in system, which provides external DSP power to run processor intensive emulations of some much loved studio equipment. “I’m using the UAD constantly on these projects, to the extent that I’m maxing it out on a lot of stuff, so I need to get a UAD-2 PCIe card as well to double up my power. They’re my go-to mixing plug-ins. I’m also a big fan of the SoundToys stuff as well for more effects based things.” Since his home rig is based around in-the-box mixing, it’s important for Guy to be sure he can monitor his mixes properly and on as many systems as possible. “I don’t monitor loud and I listen through a whole load of different reference monitors, the iPod dock, the car radio – even the TV speakers.”
Thanks to the UAD-2 plug-ins Guy is able to get comparable quality to the type of big studio mix that would normally require plenty of outboard. “I’ve done an EP with Ultrasound before and the results from mixing that at home were really good. We did a couple of experiments where we took some stems up to Snap Studios and ran those through the Neve console. If there were any improvements, they were so marginal that we decided to do it all in the box this time. So we spent the majority of the budget recording, and the mixing just involved sweetening and balancing things at home.”
For this kind of a mix, Guy likes to take advantage of the studio time while he has it, making use of the analogue hardware before taking the recordings home to mix through the UAD-2 system; “When I know I’ll be mixing a project at home, I try and get all the sounds I want as I record. So for drums for example I’ll process them a bit more than I would if I was going to mix them in a big room. If that isn’t the case and I’ve not recorded or produced something, then I’m big into what the UAD-2 can offer. Effects-wise I don’t use a huge amount of the UAD-2 plug-ins, but for EQ and compression I think it’s stunning.”
The UAD-2 platform has a total of over 50 plug-ins, which can be a little overwhelming at first, with the ability to even choose between different editions of the SSL channel strip. So how did Guy cope with this sudden influx of plug-ins?
“The first ones I gravitated to were the ones where I knew the original hardware and what they could do. The emulations seem so faithfully representative of the original units. I do the same thing in a studio – if there’s a certain mic preamp or compressor or EQ, I’ll gravitate towards that because I know what it does and what it’ll sound like. I suppose my go-to plug-ins are very similar to the equivalent hardware that I’d use in a studio. So some of the other funky stuff I probably haven’t really attempted to use yet.”
Despite using his time in studios to get the sounds he wants, Guy still finds he uses the UAD-2 plug-ins to add further colour to his mixes. “I often run things through the Neve 1073 plug-in and it sounds a hell of a lot better, even if you’re not using the EQ. On the mix I’m doing now I’m using a lot of compression especially on the drums and the bass: I’m using the UA LA-2A plug-in alongside the Softube Tube-Tech CL 1B. Sometimes I’ll use the Precision Maximizer plug-in over a group, so I’ll have both an uncompressed group and a compressed group and I’ll use the Maximizer and accent it a bit. The Fairchild 670 plug-in is amazing used in that way on drums. It seems to work really nicely in a parallel arrangement like that.”
Tracking to analogue tape can really help to bring a sense of warmth and space to your mixes, and the subtle saturation can work magic on drums, bass and even vocals. Given his experience, it should come as no surprise that Guy is happy working with tape when the project requires it, tracking the latest Bill Fay album onto a 2” Otari MX-80 at Snap. When audio comes in for a project that hasn’t been tracked to tape, Guy again turns to the UAD-2, which has emulations of both Studer A800 and an ATR-102 tape machines. “The new tape plug-ins, especially the ATR, are plug-ins I’m using a lot. They’re quite hungry plug-ins processing-wise, but I was mixing a track today with some Mellotron on it, and it didn’t sound quite ‘old and wobbly’ enough. So I put it through the ATR-102 plug-in, and used a preset on there called “Sunbaked Cassette” – it’s really cool. I’ve tweaked that, and now it’s turned a really good sample of a Mellotron into something that sounds like a real Mellotron to me!”
Looking forward, Guy is excited about the prospects for the UAD-2 platform, with new plug-in partnerships being developed with Thermionic Culture, API and Sonnox. He also hinted at what was on his wish-list: “The Empirical Labs Distressor is something I would be really interested in UA emulating. It’s so intuitive, you can just put your hands on it and you know what you’re doing.” While the Distressor hasn’t yet been modelled for UAD-2, Empirical Labs has already developed one plug-in for the system – an emulation of the Fatso – which Guy has already put to good use. “The Fatso is a great piece of kit and I often turn to that, especially for drums and occasionally for vocals too.”
The latest product announcement from UA is the new Apollo audio interface, which provides high-quality UA mic preamps, A-D and D-A conversion and includes a built-in UAD-2 processor. In addition to giving you access to all these plug-ins for mixing, Guy was interested in the prospect of using them during tracking, “Some engineers say that they wouldn’t want to record through plug-ins, but since you’re using them in mixing and because they sound good, there’s no reason not to use them when recording too. I suppose when you’re recording you’re more likely to have the original hardware available – and with budgets shrinking money is being spent on the recording rather than the mix – but if the hardware wasn’t to hand and I wanted an LA-2A or something I’d definitely try it out.”
It is thought that the album will come out in late summer of this year via Vertigo Records.
