Top 5: Leo Abrahams

The Empirical Labs Fatso is a classic, and the UBK version is even better. This is the one compressor I can’t live without. It’s amazing for controlling vocals and I often run it in parallel while the singer is tracking. It’s fantastic for bringing out the transient attack of the drums and has some really unusual compression curves which kind of breathes life into drum loops. It’s the best compressor for bass that I’ve found, and if you use the side chain input you can control the threshold of the compressor and unlink it from the tape saturation. It’s beautifully simple to use, so versatile — if I could have a whole rack of them I happily would!

This is made by a company in the UK and is a recreation of the preamp section in the Grampian 636 reverb. It’s a germanium distortion with very high spec transformers and SoundGas have put a crazy amount of effort into sourcing the best germanium transistors they can. It can generate extreme fuzz but what I particularly like it for is adding subtle saturation which imparts this absolutely gorgeous creamy sort of… ‘authority’ is the word I would use. Pushed harder, it’s incredibly exciting on drums as well. When I bought it, I was in the closing stages of mixing an album and I reprinted probably half the stems from the album individually through this thing which revolutionised the sound of the record. There are lots of plugins that aim at doing the same thing, but I’ve never found anything that does it as well as this.

This instrument was only produced by Hohner for a few months in the late 1950s. It’s like an electric kalimba but it sounds a little bit like a Fender Rhodes, and has the notes laid out like an accordion. It was given to me by Brian Eno when he was having a clear-out of his studio. It was given to him by Holger Czukay. It’s a gorgeous, ambiguous and evocative sound, and I’ve played it on so many albums and film soundtracks. When I’m on a session and sight-reading under pressure I need all the help I can get, so I had to put stickers on it to show me where the notes are! I’m embarrassed to say that it’s looking a bit dirty — I need to give it a clean.