Korneff Audio's Level-Loc plug-in.
To mark the company’s 100th anniversary, Shure have teamed up with Black Lion Audio and Korneff Audio to reissue the infamous ‘secret weapon’ that powers many of Tchad Blake’s greatest recordings.
“I was working with Tom Waits on his album Bone Machine,” recalls producer and engineer Tchad Blake. “He wanted to go to a flea market one day while we were working. And when we got there, we said ‘We’re going to split up and go just look for something.’ We liked to do that. We would to go places and find one little thing that you could use on a session. I went looking around and ended up with a microphone from a submarine, and the Level-Loc. I paid $5 for each of those things. I just got the Level-Loc ’cause I liked the name. I had no idea what it was.
“When I took it back to the studio, I plugged it in on the desk and ran something through it from an aux and it just made one little cap sound and then nothing and: shit, I think I just blew it up. Tom just said, ‘I know a TV repair man up in Santa Rosa, just up the road.’ I don't remember what he said I blew, but he had to replace something and he didn't have the right things, and he had to improvise. And he said: be careful, because this is a mic-level in. We used it that day plugging a microphone into it, and it just sounded amazing, and I've used it on every record I've recorded since. In mixing, I bought some of the Shure step-down inline pads so I could plug it in off the desk without worrying about it. So it's been such a part of my life and my sound.
“I’ve got a few things that just changed the way I did things in the studio, and they're all a bit different, but they all have to do with distortion of a kind. In 2010, I pretty much went to just mixing, and it was really difficult to use the hardware in Pro Tools with the way things were going, revisions, people calling up a month later wanting something. I could record all the stuff I was doing, but it was unwieldy. So, I ended up going with plug-ins that were similar, just finding something that sounded kind of like a Level-Loc or the other thing I used, which was a Spectrasonics 610. The Sansamp was another one of my big things. Pro Tools was on to that one and the guy actually made a pretty good one for Pro Tools, but the Level-Loc has never been there.”
In that time there has been one more or less explicit plug-in copy of the Level-Loc, SoundToys’ Devil-Loc. “I tried it,” says Blake, “and I actually thought it sounded really good as a plug-in — but it didn't sound like a Level-Loc.”
Black Lion Audio's Level-Loc hardware.
Levelling Up
Enter Matt Engstrom, a long-serving Shure employee who for many years oversaw the company’s headphone and IEM development teams. Taking up a new role within the company, it fell to Matt to think of ways in which the company’s 100th anniversary could be celebrated by shining a light on legacy Shure products. The Level-Loc was one of the first to spring to mind.
“About 24 years ago I remember an interview with Tchad, where they said ‘What are your secret weapons?’ and Tchad basically said, ‘I think every studio should have a Level-Loc. This thing is crazy.’ And I got obsessed, and of course in Chicago where Shure is located, you see a lot of Shure stuff at yard sales. So we bought one way back, and we used it on a couple records, and it was pretty fun.
“And when that studio split up, I took the Space Echo and he took the Level-Loc. So I always wanted one, and I bought plug-in emulations of it, and I've tried to build them myself. Recently I moved into a different role at Shure for licensing. Shure has not done a lot of outbound licensing. We've inbound licensed people's patents and so forth, but we have not offered up anything of ours. And so when I moved into this role, I said to my boss, ‘I’ve kind of always wanted to make a Level-Loc,’ and I have business plans that go back over a decade where we talked about reissuing the hardware or trying to get a version of the plug-in done.
“As big as Shure is, we're still kind of a small and hyperfocused company. We're very focused on our core markets right now, so we don't have slush funds of money available to go do these pet projects. So I had the idea to find some partners, and we're working on two versions of this: a hardware box, and a software version. Black Lion's been hard at work on the hardware, and we'll be announcing that at NAMM as well.”
The under-the-hood options available from Korneff Audio's Level-Loc plug-in.
The official plug-in version of the Level-Loc, meanwhile, has been developed by Dan Korneff of Korneff Audio. “I’m a customer of Korneff Audio,” explains Matt. “I have bought their plug-ins. Starting on tape, I never really went away from that workflow or from the gear that was available in tape. And I never really got into purely digital plug-ins for the sake of digital. So, what drew me to Dan's plug-ins was the quirkiness. You can flip the front to the back and you can make adjustments. I always wanted to do those things with plug-ins, and they did it in such a way that it was fun. It let you experiment more, and wow, if they didn't sound awesome. So I reached out to him, and he pretty quickly said, ‘I would love to do that!’ And honestly, I've just been kind of giggling ever since. For me personally, this was the first time I heard a Level-Loc that was not in a Shure box.”
Ant Music
Dan Korneff takes up the story: “Yeah, I was just over the moon when Matt called. I mean, here's him saying that Shure is a relatively small company is … ‘Holy crap, if Shure is relatively small, what am I?’ We're like an ant!
“I was originally a record producer for the last 25 years or so, and through that whole time, I've always been like a tinkerer, always interested in circuit design and making gear and making custom stuff to use in the studio. That sort of transitioned after a while to thinking ‘I have tools that I use at the studio. I would love if they could just do this or do that.’ And after a little investigating of circuit modelling, it turns out the math is the same as when you design a circuit in the analogue world. So, it was an easy transition for me to move over into making plug-ins.
“And for me, I try to add in things that make me feel like I'm in the shop. Like Matt said. you can flip open the lid, you can tweak the circuit a little bit, you can do a couple things here and there to make it a more unique piece, but at the same time, if you don't know anything about circuit design or you just want to use it, you could use the at face value on the front panel and you still get a fully functional product that sounds awesome. And one of the goals for the company is that everything has to have character. When you can drop one of these plug-ins on your track and just without doing anything, it instantly has a character. It has a vibe. it does something special. And I feel like that's sort of missing in a lot of the plug-in world. They may add some saturation to kind of trick your ears into thinking something's awesome, but at the end of the day, there isn't really something that does a true character-type processing.”
Protection
So, what is the Level-Loc, and why does it have such a distinctive character? Matt Engstrom explains. “The two main businesses for Shure in the ’60s were phonograph cartridges and microphones. The Level-Loc was designed for either television broadcast or or a high school arena, where an announcer would be anywhere from a half a foot to a foot and a half away from the microphone, and either broadcasting to a live television audience or a live audience in the arena. But those amplifiers didn't have any protection built into them. And so, more often than not, if a game got exciting and someone screamed, componentry was broken. So the Level-Loc was meant to just be sort of a brute force limiter to protect it.
“As part of the release, we're going to show some of the old documentation and advertisements for the Level-Loc. It's hilarious when they call it ‘clean limiting’ and ‘clean compression’. They talked about ‘extremely low’ 3% total distortion. And of course, we're cracking up today, but back then that was great. I think 100dB of gain input only resulted in a very small amount of actual output gain, and so the point was just to sort of lock that level in instead of blowing out your cones or blowing up your amplifier. The original version didn't even have a volume attenuator. It was just a distance selector, which affected the attack and release as much as anything.
“After a few years of it being launched, we made a huge innovation and put a volume pot on there, and we also put an auxiliary out, but basically the device was meant to run at mic level. You would either plug a microphone or a microphone mixer into it, and that would sort of be the last line of defence. By the mid-’70s this type of functionality had been incorporated into other equipment and had been perhaps improved upon from what we had done. and there were other ways to compensate for that wide gain range. So we unceremoniously discontinued it, and I firmly believe were it not for Tchad, it probably would have sank into obscurity.”
Black Lion Audio Level-Loc rear panel.
Loc Down
The Level-Loc was one of the earliest FET compressors, but unlike the 1176, for example, it was a mass-produced item made using relatively cheap components. Matt, Dan and the team put the unit’s unique character partly down to the inadequacies of these components, especially the output transformer, and partly to the fact that it was designed to operate at mic level rather than line level.
“A lot of FET limiters have the same design principles,” explains Dan. “I think this company Silinex or something in the early ’60s came up with FET limiting and then Universal Audio saw that and applied that side-chain to their 1108 preamps to make the 1176. But this one's a little different in the fact that it doesn't really have an output gain stage. They plug the output of this thing right into a step-up output transformer. And the whole approach is pretty crude.
“After diving into the circuit and doing the circuit simulation and doing some sound examples, it was very apparent that the transformers are a huge part of this sound. The way that they're crudely used and the way that they saturate. They're really not high-performing transformers, and the way that they shaped the sound going into the compressor was more of the sound to me than the actual gain reduction.
“And also, how many mic level compressors are there?” adds Tchad. “I’ve never used one or seen one. That was the only one. And if you use it as it's supposed to be used, it probably doesn't sound that crazy, when you just use it with a voice at a podium.”
The Level-Loc has a reputation for being noisy, and Tchad Blake typically uses his hardware units with a Rocktron Hush noise gate. As Dan Korneff explains, however, this isn’t so much because the circuit itself is noisy, as the fact that it’s applying huge amounts of gain reduction. “A lot of it just comes from operating points of microphone levels, really close to the noise floor. The noise is sort of built into the real-world physics of it, and that sort of stuff doesn't really get modelled when you create these things in the digital way. So that's how now you're able to use [the plug-in] on all sorts of sources, quiet, loud, whatever it may be, without having that noise getting in the way.”
Team Effort
Although many other Shure employees shared Matt Engstrom’s enthusiasm for the Level-Loc, the company were not really geared up to create either a software or hardware reissue in-house. “One of the engineers in our microphone lab decided he was going to build one, and then everybody all got interested in it. People were kind of looking at me saying, ‘Hey Matt, maybe we could make this for the 100th anniversary!’ But most of our development resources go into our high-level wireless microphone systems, so for us to have a little skunk project was fun, but I didn't think that there was much reality that we would be able to use our manufacturing resources. But then, a couple years back when I shifted jobs, I told my boss, ‘I think I could get this done [by licensing the technology to third parties.’ And Black Lion was interested.
“So they went to their transformer vendor and tried to match that. Dan measured all the componentry. And then Tchad graciously brought us his original unit that he first bought when working on Bone Machine. It's got some quirks to it, because when Tchad first used it, he blew it up. and it had to be modified, and who knows what's actually in there. But the sound worked for him, and we didn't want to change that, so Dan very artfully included models of two of Tchad's Level-Locs. So there's sort of a reference one — maybe what a Level-Loc could be — and then there's Tchad's two versions, which add another special flavour that really brings certain sounds to life in a very exciting way.”
Black Lion Audio's recreation of the Shure Level-Loc hardware launched at NAMM 2025.
Running Dry
The Shure Level-Loc has been a mainstay of Tchad Blake’s recordings and mixes ever since he first discovered it. Surprisingly, his fascination with extreme processing was borne out of frustration at his inability to make reverb do what he wanted it to.
“I spent a couple of years trying to be Bob Clearmountain,” he says. “He mixed a few of the records that I did, and I have such respect for the guy. His use of reverbs and his balancing basically is just stunning to me. There's lots of engineers I love, but he still just got a special place there. And he was so good with reverbs, and I tried for two years to do what he did. I even got to go sit in a session of a record that he was mixing, and I still couldn't get it, And at that moment I said, ‘F**k this. I'm going to go the other way. I'm not going to make clean records. I'm not going to use reverb.’ And I went dry and I started using compression, saturation, distortion — not as distortion, to hit you over the head with an explosion, but subversively. So it fools the brain into danger mode if you hear what could sound like an almost clean drum kit, but I've got distortion in there that's giving it ‘length’.
“So if there's a snare strainer that's buzzing, normally with just a microphone, you don't hear it. But if you were to put a Level-Loc in there, or a Sansamp… or you can have a guitar and a beautiful signal and it sounds great. Let's put a preamp on there. Let's overdrive it a bit better. The minute you do that, now you've got three different kinds of buzz and noise. And now you hear all the stuff that was way below what you could hear. And that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm bringing up the sounds that are so much lower, and just that people are trying to get rid of and they're coming up in the mix. And I found I no longer needed reverb with all that characterful sound in there.”
Tchad Blake’s hardware Level-Locs saw most use on drums. “I was taking a Sennheiser 441 and plugging it straight in, and putting it about three or four inches from the kick and snare, right in the middle of a kit. So right there you're getting 110, 115-plus dB SPL going into the thing and it just was fantastic. It was amazing sounding.
“On Bone Machine there's a song called ‘Goin’ Out West’ and that's got Level-Loc on. That's Tom playing drums but he's playing drums in a room on the floor, and he's just hitting all these things. If you want to hear more of what it does, on the Los Lobos album Kiko there's a song called ‘Wicked Rain’, and you'll hear that there's an intro with guitar and drums, and then the drums come in. It’s a combination of things, but it's mainly Level-Loc. The Level-Loc also loomed large on several songs from a band called Soul Coughing as well, where I used it more overtly than I do Now, I'll get into using it overtly again, but I'd say 90 percent of the time it would be something that was subversive; you'd wonder where that sound was coming from, and you hardly hear it going in, but if you mute it, the sort of sound of the kit just drops away.”
The reissue hardware and plug-in Level-Locs were officially announced at the 2025 NAMM Show.
A Tchad Blake Level-Loc Discography
Asked to recall some of his recordings and mixes on which the Level-Loc is particularly prominent, Tchad Blake listed the following. In most cases it was used on the drums, but on Los Lobos’ ‘Everybody Loves A Train’ you can also hear one of Tchad’s unique recording techniques on the vocal, whereby a mic placed inside a long tube is run through the Level-Loc.
Bone Machine, Tom Waits:
- ‘The Earth Died Screaming’
- ‘Such a Scream’
- ‘In The Colosseum’
- ‘Murder In The Red Barn’
- ‘Let Me Get Up On It’
Kiko, Los Lobos:
- ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’
- ‘Wicked Rain’
Colossal Head, Los Lobos:
- ‘Everybody Loves a Train’
- ‘Little Japan’
Ruby Vroom, Soul Coughing:
- ‘Mr. Bitterness’
El Oso, Soul Coughing:
- ‘Rolling’
- ‘Misinformed’ (with Spectrasonics 610 compressor/limiter)
- ‘Houston’
- ‘$300’
- ‘Pensacola’
- ‘Miss The Girl’
Information
Black Lion Level-Loc: www.blacklionaudio.com/store/compressors/level-loc/
Korneff Audio Level-Loc Plug-in is available now at https://korneffaudio.com/product/shure-level-loc/ for $149.99 USD (currently $74.99 USD throughout the plug-in’s introductory period).
More info: www.shure.com