Top 5: Colin Elliot

This is a lesser-known compressor which was used widely by the BBC for broadcasting. I track through it more than I mix through it, and it’s the most transparent thing I’ve ever come across. You don’t know it’s there, yet somehow it just gives quality and control to everything — tracking through it seems to make life a lot easier when it comes time to mix.

More frequently these days people are doing recordings remotely and then sending them to me. They’ll send me a vocal that they’ve recorded without compression, so I’ll run it through the Calrec and back into the computer. I’ll then do my mix and put another compression — such as the LA2A — on top of it with, but this is more like compression as FX. I’ve had it 25 years and it’s just one of those things that I can’t really do without. If it was easier to remove from the patchbay, I’d take it on the road with me.

This is a British desk, made in the north of England. It was designed by Graham Langley, and mine is from 1988. It originally lived in another studio in Sheffield where I had been working quite a bit. When they moved to a Neve desk we jumped at the opportunity and grabbed it from them.

It has quite a crisp, lively sound to it, and the EQ is just phenomenal. It has four frequencies for each of the low and high shelves — with a massive sweep from 60Hz to almost 5k on the low-mids, and 300Hz to 18K on the high-mids. It’s really versatile, and great as a shaping EQ. You can put a bell shape — winding in 18K on the high-mid sweep — and then you can use your top shelf which will do 5/10/15. The mic pres are really good too, clean and quiet.

I still prefer mixing on the board rather than in-the-box, and as such it’s brought a lot of life to the work I’ve done. As the world changes I find myself working more in fits and starts, so mixing in-the-box is the most practical approach. However, when I’m doing an album start to finish it’s great to have it all out on the board as it’s much easier to visualise the mix as a whole.

A lot of my work involves arranging strings. I’m now spending almost half of my time working as a string and orchestral arranger — most of my production work will still require arrangements of some description. As such, I’ve looked into a few orchestral libraries but for me nothing else does what the East West sample library does.

If I’m mocking up some strings that will be later performed by an actual orchestra I’ll use the East West Library. It sounds really full, and you can get it sounding pretty close to the desired final outcome. You can make it sound like a huge orchestra, or you can even go down to a quartet. Because I know it so well, I’ll always go straight for the East West stuff to create my mockups, and then we’ll get the string players in which completely brings the samples to life. 

What I’ve been doing lately is working with a live quartet and capturing their parts as the string section’s ‘lead’, and then flesh out those sections with East West content. This means that you can quickly get all the phrasing and bowing from the live quartet whilst still having the fullness of sample library behind them. I can achieve a pretty convincing symphony orchestra with only four people. Even with a live eight- or twelve-piece string section I’ll likely still add in some East West material — especially double basses and the wider orchestral sections. I’ll then make a blend of the two as this offers better control over whether the mix is focussed on the raw, intimate sound of the live instruments, or the full sound of the sampled orchestra.