Elephone wrote:Hugh Robjohns wrote: ...I have often found that just running the ITB stereo mix through an external preamp for a bit of analogue-y transformer saturation / distortion / phase tweaking can do much the same thing! H
Do you recommend any particular external preamps for this purpose? Would summing group tracks, then the summing these to a final stereo mix be worthwhile?
Hi Elephone!
For obvious reasons, preamps touted for their clean, transparent sound won't be very helpful for adding mojo, as they are designed not to add euphonic 'extras'.
The three most-often quoted mic preamp makes for adding 'mojo' are:
1. Neve (slight bass bloom, fat, lush & airy highs - the holy grail seems to be the 1073 model, particularly the older ones, but newer clones can also work well ;) )
2. API (loaded with punch and impact, forward mid-range)
3. SSL (to a lesser extent than the other two, but transparent and tight)
As Hugh mentions, simply passing a stereo mix through certain preamps can provide that certain something, but if you have more than two preamps at your disposal then you could certainly treat groups separately for a greater effect, and that does also give you the possibility of running the drum buss through with more extreme settings if that gets you the sound that you want.
If you're thinking of buying a couple of mic preamps specifically for this purpose, there are also a few dedicated stereo 'mojo' boxes available, possibly the most well known being Louder Than Liftoff's
Silver Bullet, reviewed here by Bob Thomas for SOS:
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/lo ... ver-bulletThis not only offers a pair of mic preamps, but both Neve and API inspired mojo that you can even run in series for more versatile treatments.
Martin