Electric Mastering Records Young Knives Single On Vinyl

Internationally renowned mastering engineer Guy Davie, who recently joined Electronic Mastering in west London after 18 years with The Exchange, has completed an unusual project for Warner Bros signing The Young Knives, by recording the band's latest single, 'Turn Tail', straight to vinyl.
The session, which took place at Electric's facility in Westbourne Park, recaptured the spirit of an earlier analogue age when bands would often record single in this way.
According to the company, it is believed that the Young Knives session is the first time since the early 1970s that a band has attempted a straight to vinyl recording for a commercial release.
Davie said: "It was a really remarkable experience and a new one for me. For something like this to work you have to ensure that the performance is delivered on one take, which puts a lot of pressure on the band and the engineers."
Davie set up a pair of microphones and routed them through a pair of Neve mic pre-amps and a Fairchild compressor into Electric's rare 1970s EMI TG12410 transfer desk. From there, the signal went straight to the cutting lathe where engineer Mandy Parnell was handling the vinyl cut.
Davie explained: "We had to be careful to get the levels right because if it's too loud the grooves can crash into each other. If that happens, the needle will jump when it's pressed and when you play it back. We also had to check for colliding grooves or for grooves that were too shallow due to phase problems. Luckily everything went really well and the session was not only great fun, but also a huge success."
Electric Mastering, established by Pete Hutchison and Phil Vernol, who also run the label Peacefrog, was the ideal place to attempt this project, because the facility offers the perfect marriage between state-of-the-art and vintage technology.
The desk, which was shipped to the facility from EMI's studio in Lagos, Nigeria, is the only vintage EMI mastering desk currently in use outside of Abbey Road - and the only unmodified one in use in Europe. Described by Pete Hutchison as 'a classic as opposed to an antique', it is an extraordinarily versatile piece of equipment that adds distinctive colouration to high-end digital recordings and faithful reproduction of analogue studio masters.
Hutchison said: "We take a purist approach to the desk, favouring simple signal lines with no patch bays to interfere with the clean, unadulterated sonic throughput."
Along with other vintage pieces, including the Fairchild compressor and a 1950s EMI mono 1/4inch tape recorder, the studio also has the latest digital mastering kit, high end Prism Sound ADA-8XR multitrack converters, a Pyramix digital workstation and Meyer X-10 monitors that offer a neutral, linear playback sound balanced and tailored to the room's acoustics.
(KMcA)