Eric Valentine listens to a lot of 1960s instrumental records. Command Records, Provocative Percussion, exotica guitar albums.
"The sounds on those records are absolutely mind-blowing. And part of it is that you're hearing it off of vinyl, and vinyl does this thing where the higher you get in the frequency range, the more distortion there is. Because of that, it can allow you to have more brightness in the sound, but it gets smoothed out in a way that's very pleasing."
Recreating that was a big part of why the MPEQ-1 exists. Three examples from the deep dive.
The surf part was a Fender Bass VI through a Silvertone amp, miked with a Neumann M49 about six feet away. Eric liked the sound and didn't need to change the balance. He wanted "that coming-off-of-vinyl high end."
The move: a high band at 9.32 kHz with the shape control turned up and a lot of drive.
"If I turn this down, you just get a peak EQ, and I can control how much of the information above this move I want to have included in this. And then a lot of drive."
Without it, the guitar has "that slightly muted quality where it just feels like it didn't have a chance to really open up." With it, there's air without poke, on a part being picked hard near the bridge.
"You can't get that kind of high end by just EQing something. It doesn't work that way. Gotta have this. It's why I made this EQ."
Model used: Smooth, the algorithmic one. "It just sounded great for this."
A 1940s Gretsch New Yorker on an RCA 77 ribbon, aiming for an old Django record. After a steep high-pass at 254 Hz and a midrange lift, the high band goes into notch mode with gain fully up. That replaces the whole frequency range with the filtered version, so when drive comes on, you hear distortion entirely in that range rather than blended with the original.
"When you combine this drive and various EQ shapes, the phasing gets extremely complex. What this ended up doing is increasing the harmonic distortion as the frequency range increases. This is very similar to what you'll get from vinyl."
A second instance smooths the strumming: "It's converting those transient peaks in that frequency range into harmonic overtones." Bypassed, you hear more scratch and detail, which here is the wrong answer. "That sounds more like just a mic on a guitar. And that sounds a little more like it might have come off the record."
The steel was recorded as a DI through a GB Tracker, re-amped through a Magnatone 20 feet from a pair of KM56s pointed away from it: pure room. A band at 6 kHz with the Tube model (RCA console) and shape fully up adds "thickening and air." Then Eric did something worth stealing: he added a second, clean band on top just to turn up the range that already had the distortion.
On a test tone, the fundamental rises a little; the overtones rise almost 20 dB.
"I'm turning up these overtones, but I'm not actually increasing the amount of distortion on this band. It's a way to turn up the effect without changing the dynamics of it. If I turned the drive up more, it would soften it too much, and I wanted to actually hear the scrapiness of the slide."
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