Grammy‑nominated producer and musician Hunter Lea is also a curator and co‑producer of Light In The Attic Records’ Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood Archival Series. He currently produces and engineers out of Uptone Recorders in Tacoma, WA, a fully functional vintage recording studio based around equipment from the golden age of recording technology. Some of this was used to produce his nominated favourite sound: the swelling oceanic tones on the 2024 track ‘Real Shoring’ he made with Mike Dumovich.
“I first ran a Vox Continental organ right into my favourite amp, a ’62 Fender Vibrolux, a brown Fender amp that has a single 12‑inch speaker. It sounds amazing for guitar, but for keyboards, a lot of stuff sounds really good on it too. I miked it using an AKG D19C microphone, but upon listening to it, it sounded too dry. So, I added spring reverb and liked that, but then I added a Maestro Echoplex EP‑3 tape echo, and that was sounding cool. The final missing ingredient was a volume pedal, but I put that at the very start, so I could swell the sound. I would hit a note and swell it up with my foot and it would go through the echo and then the reverb and it created this washy oceanic sound.
“I did a random take just improvising to hear what it sounded like with this new sound I’d found. And that was the perfect feeling. So, I just improvised the entire take. I didn’t write anything. I just did a pass where I was sort of swelling the notes in between to not cover up the beautiful melody or any of the piano or anything.”
Seascape
“In the end, it was more like a sound, an ambient sound that complemented the piano, this washy oceanic feeling. I didn’t want it to be too literal with the song, but I liked the idea of creating the sound of an ocean wave with a Vox organ because it’s not typically how these organs are used. And it gets a really unique sound that kind of sounds like a synthesizer, and kind of sounds like an organ, but is definitely unique.
“In addition to that, the Vox has four drawbars, where the tones go from basically the brightest to the darkest. So, I scooped all the highs, so that the right three drawbars were all the way down, and had no sound coming from them. And because it’s just the lowest drawbar, it almost sounds like a sine wave. A really gentle, nice tone. Voxes are usually known for their cutting, harsh tones, and while I love those tones too, this sound is really subdued and mellow and unique. It was perfect for the track because it was kind of haunting and ghosty, yet didn’t take up any of the frequency of the piano and vocal, because I didn’t want to obscure that in any way.
Hunter Lea: the same mixing board that recorded ‘Heart Of Gold’ also recorded my organ track.
“It all was put through a sidecar that was made up of channels from a late ’60s Quad Eight console, which was the console Neil Young recorded the Harvest record on. So, the same mixing board that recorded ‘Heart Of Gold’ also recorded my organ track.”