Sorry to those of you who don’t give a crap about the “gear reviews” part of this blog but I just got a bunch of new gear and I want to share my experiences with it. Plus, I’m considering making these “home recording” entries a more regular feature here. I figure those who aren’t interested can just skip to the next entry.

Yesterday I posted my review of the Shure SM7 mic and today I’m reviewing the ART Pro VLA II Tube Compressor (which works nicely with the ART MPA Gold Mic Preamp.)

I did a lot of research before buying this compressor, everything I read (by people far more experienced with this type of gear than me) lead me to believe that this was the best deal around.

It gives me two channels (which can be used as two separate mono channels are as stereo channels) to work with and real tubes for a real analog signal path. If I want to get really crazy I can actually replace the stock tubes with higher quality tubes (and this isn’t that difficult to do, I did it with the MPA Gold tube mic preamp.) I haven’t done that with this one yet.

What’s cool about that is that I can put different tubes in each side so I have two different “flavors” of compression to choose from. Now that would probably be a bad thing if I were using it as a stereo compressor but I plan on using it entirely as two mono channels.

So how does it sound? Like I said, I don’t have a ton of experience with different external compressors (but I’ve used plenty of plugins) but to me it sounds excellent. I love the sound I’m getting on my direct in bass and guitar and when using it with my microphones. I think $299 (it’s current price on Amazon.com where I ordered it - it was delivered the very next day) is a pretty decent price to pay for two channels of quality analog compression.

There’s something sort of “magical” about using analog gear like this instead of relying on the plugins inside of the DAW (ie Pro Tools/Cubase/whatever you use.)

There’s a mentality of “fix in the mix” that is very common these days. Don’t worry about how it sounds when you’re recording because you can always fix it later. I’ve had that mentality myself. But now I’m trying to think more about getting the sound I want when I’m tracking. This is how they worked in the “good old days” and I think there’s really something to it. If you can get a good sound on the way in, it saves a lot of trouble when you’re mixing.

And really it’s more than just saving trouble, it’s about capturing something special. It’s far harder (and often impossible) to manipulate a poor recording into something special than it is to work with something that was special on the way in.

Compressor, Home Recording

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