Fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen – because for this SPL User Story we visited none other than the legendary mastering engineer Howie Weinberg at his studio in Laurel Canyon, California.
Howie’s credit list includes artists like Nirvana, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Beastie Boys, Deftones, The Killers, Scorpions and Jeff Buckley – just to name a very few of hundreds of the biggest artist of the last decades.
Have fun watching the video!
“It’s kind of interesting how I got into this whole business. I was at working at Masterdisk in New York and the famous Bob Ludwig took me under his wing and started letting me do sessions in his studio.”
“A lot of music today is more processed, very digital sounding. The analog stuff has such a really rich beautiful sound. When I do a project, I usually do one with a lot of digital processing and one with a lot of analog processing. I do that for a number of reasons. It’s a choice the client can make. Do they want old school with converters, clocks, analog eqs, analog compressors – or do they want more digital type masters. With the analog stuff, the bass is a little tighter, it has a little bit more roundness to it. What I try to do is when I do a project, I do both ways. ”
“SPL devices, especially the PQ, just has the most beautiful rich analog sound. It has a lot to do with their power supply. Even if you are just using it a tiny bit, the unit has a certain sound to it.”
“The IRON compressor has a little more sound to it. What is does is give everything a rich beautiful sound. It has a big kind of body to it.”
“I have the original DMC Mastering Console. It’s precise, works well and it always runs and it always sounds great. It can really make something that sounds small quiet large.”
“This is really my main sound! Everything else is a side chain of that. The DMC is really the glue, that holds everything together. Everything goes in there and out of there.”
“I also have a lot of the SPL plugins, which I quiet like. When I first started using the plugins I though – this plugins sounds good, but I can’t wait to hear the hardware. And then I got the hardware and I was like: wow!”
“I love their gear – especially with the 120V technology – they just have a big creamy, beautiful sound. It’s a special sound.”
If you want to know more about our Mastering devices, explore the
SPL Mastering Universe.
If you want to learn more about the SPL IRON Plugin, visit the Plugin Alliance product page.
