Producer Cory Rooney and engineer Peter Wade’s recent projects this year have included Jennifer Lopez, Mark Anthony, Toni Braxton, Tamar Braxton (Toni Braxton’s younger sister) and Tarralyn Ramsey at their Pool House Studios in Long Island, N.Y.
“I’ve used all the GML gear for years now going back to my stint at Sony’s studios,” Wade said. “I always find one or two 8200 EQs or 8300 pre’s in the great studios in L.A. and New York. When we designed Mark Anthony’s personal studio, we installed both the GML 8304 4-channel mic preamp and GML 8200 equalizer. Both saw heavy use for vocals, drums and all percussion on his last salsa CD. I love them; it’s quite possibly the most powerful parametric EQ and best-sounding unit in the world. We use it on everything, but mostly we reserve it for mixdown—for the final lead or background vocal EQ or across the mix bus when printing. I keep it patched on an insert in Pro Tools always ready to go. For recording, I do a lot of stereo miking of guitars. There is something about the 8200: It adds the proper amount of life to anything.
“For recording at the Pool House,” Wade continued, “I’ve been using either the Universal Audio 2-610 tube mic preamp or my Vintech X81 modules, which both have EQs. Sometimes I leave them flat and experiment with the 8200 to carve out whatever frequencies I need to dump or boost. I wish I had an entire desk of 8200s. It’s such a great workhorse. You can set up powerful notches or set it for a really broad boosting! For Tamar Braxton, I started vocals with a Neumann U87 and the 8200 helped tremendously with the sound of those vocals. The shelf knob on the right side—20kHz boost—it’ll bring anything into focus!”
On Jennifer Lopez’s album, This Is Me Then, with Bruce Swedien, Wade used the 8200 to track all of the MIDI instruments at the Hit Factory in New York. “We were holed up in Studio 2 for almost a year,” Wade said. “Having the 8200 around was amazing to make synths and drum machines sound ‘bangin,’ and if need be to make them more pleasing. The 8200 makes it easy to clean up grimy-sounding samples or synths. My sounds had to blend with the great live sounds Bruce got on musicians like drummer Omar Hakim and bass player Verdine White. Really what I like about the 8200 is that I know what I can get out of it and I can get what I need—fast! There are a lot of other boxes I could use but they’re just not as fast and don’t sound as good.”
For more information on GML, visit www.georgemassenburg.com or its distributor, Transamerica Audio Group, at www.transaudiogroup.com.
