Man that qualifies as vintage now don't it? Nice!! I was just doing some reading about Joe Meek the other night....quite a guy.
I bought it after seeing one in Ty Tabor’s rack.
Used mainly for vocals, but fantastic for D.I. Bass.
Having the VC5 dual EQ is great too.
The VC1 has a transformer-coupled output and an FET output. So for guitar tracks, I can add an extra bit of iron if wanted.
I like to virtually finalise all my sounds in analogue, and try not to EQ at all in DAW if I can help it.
I can then use EQ, compression, panning, and reverb to place stuff in my stereo image in the way I like.
Joe Meek was a master at balancing. He could position 12 players around one microphone, and you could hear their positions on a mono recording - which is legendary.
He could also stagger into his flat, naked, at 6am. Black and Blue, and bleeding out of his arsehole. 2 cups of coffee and 10 Woodbines, and he’d be knee-deep in tape by 9am, and chugging down Dexedrine. By midday he would have a finished single and B-side. It would be number 1 in the charts that week - knocking another of his singles off the top spot. Then, just as it was getting dark, he’d be heading up Holloway rd. again, to the public toilets, Hampstead Heath, and maybe some rough-trade club - for another whole night of sustained physical abuse.
Sad story indeed. That German bastard that took him to court effectively froze his royalties from Telstar.
The funds became available 3 months after his death, and were in excess of what a state of the art new studio would have cost. We were robbed of Britain’s finest ever pioneering recording engineer/producer.
Can you imagine Joe Meek and Eddie Kramer with Jimi Hendrix at Electric Ladyland!
