Inside Track

“I don’t think I am a vintage gear snob, who only uses gear built before the 1970s, or something like that,” asserts Augunas. “I use tape machines, but also computers. I use all kinds of stuff. The thing is that I’m not a great technician. I don’t know many technical things in the engineering and mixing process. Instead I just follow my ears. That’s all I’m doing. So I like to surround myself with what I call ‘idiot boxes’, meaning pieces of gear that are so simple that you can turn the knobs any way you want and you’ll get a beautiful colour out of them — it’s just a matter of choosing the colour you want. For instance, if you put things through a Pultec or a Fairchild, you can’t get a bad sound out of them, you just get different sounds. Whereas if you were to put me in front of an SSL, that’s like asking me to fly a 747: I’m probably going to crash it into the ground. There are too many things to mess up, too many dead ends to go down. Put it into the hands of someone really technically savvy and he or she can do beautiful things with it. But it’s not what I’m able to do. I prefer things that have very simple options and choices and yes, I do prefer for things to sound a little darker and woolier than is common today, so tend to work with tube gear and older boxes with certain kinds of transformers in them.”