Exploring Plugins with Matthew Kleiman from Kit Plugins & NoiseHub

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Just to give us some background, Yeah, absolutely so. I don't know if my story is unique or generic at this point in our industry, but I was a mixed engineer by trade. Moved down to Nashville after I lived in New York growing up, moved to LA like most of us do in the US, and then eventually found my way to Nashville working for a fairly successful pop record producer here and kind of cutting my teeth mixing his demos and his songs, and towards the end of my stint with him, we were doing quite well. I was mixing a lot of songs that were getting played a lot, but I was also starting to sour on the business side of the industry. Didn't really find that I was as passionate about it as I was when it was my hobby. And I did some soul searching and said, look, I don't want to leave music, but I don't want to make music for a living either. I want to make music for fun. And I came up with the idea that I wanted to start my own business, and the idea for plugins came in the form of my relationship with John McBride, so the engineer the producer. I was working for a rented studio space monthly from Blackbird, so we had a permanent studio in the back of the building and I had met John periodically through it. I didn't know him super well, but I had the connection, and most importantly, I had access through that rental to a lot of Blackbird's gear. On the weekends, I could go into the studios that were empty and work on the consoles. And when I would travel and I had to use plugins, I didn't like what I was getting. I mean, I had a lot of the plugins from a lot of the major companies and they're good, but they didn't sound like Blackbird and I had kind of grown partial to it. So I went to John and I said, look, I want to want to start a business. I want to raise money from investors, and I want to build plugins out of your collection a gear. And that was it. There was no plan or idea at that stage. But I went to John. He said yes, And then I spent about a year sort of working backwards into Okay, well, actually, how am I going to do this? What does this look like? How much money do I need? Who do I need to hire? There's you know, I'm not a software developer. I understand how plugins work, I understand how the gear works, but I can't write the code. So you know, I had to sort of back into it and learn on the fly. But it all started with this is the idea that I wanted selfishly Blackbird plugins on my laptop. We and grew from. There because we were talking about this before we started recording. But Blackbird, I do remember when Slate Digital got going, they did do some emulations of Blackbird as well. So what is different about what you're doing as opposed to what Slate did? Fundamentally, the only you know, the only difference that matters to the end user, in my opinion, is what we modeled. So Blackbird with Slate had three products at the time. Two were already out when I decided to start Kit. One had not come out yet, but they had created the drum pack, which I was already a user of, and they had created the microphone modeling for VMS, which I owned and was using. And at that time, the headphones, so I think they're called VSX. They had not come out yet, but they were in the sort of in the development process. They had already licened it's Blackbird's control rooms for the headphone virtual mixing stage, but Slate had at the time, and as far as I know, there were never any plans to do any of the actual equipment, the consoles, the compressors, the reverb chambers, and that for me, was what I wanted. I mean, the microphones were cool, but modeling microphones are only useful if you need to have just one microphone. And I was lucky enough in my situation that when I recorded vocals, I had access to the Blackbird miclocker, so I didn't I didn't need a model of U sixty seven. I just grabbed a U sixty seven. I recognized like that was a that was a privilege and I and I very much appreciated it. But I selfishly, like I said, I wanted, I wanted the studio a recording console because I would put every mix I could through that console. I wouldn't do anything to it. I'd mix the whole thing in the box and just dump it out onto the board. But that board just has a unique tone to it, and whether it's psychological or real doesn't really matter. It did something I wanted, you know, Martinez, Compressor, her fair child, and so U. When I approach John, the idea was basically, look, Slate did what he did, We're not going to do that. We're going to do totally different pieces of gear for the same audience, but different applications. And that's the real differentiator is we just did different things and we don't have any plans at the moment of doing modeling, microphones or anything like that. So well, you're saying that whatever it is the set the console does, it does something. Did you give us a little background on when the console and you know, the topology was it based on or anyone any way related to some of the other you know, well known builders of consoles at the time. What specials eighty seventy eight, eighty seventy eight Nive. Yeah, and with thirty one one oh five modules in it. The thing that makes that console special. I mean, like any console, especially any Neve, there's always somebody famous recorded on it, some story. Right. No one bought a Neive console and then didn't use it with someone famous, But yeah, I hope that you did. It was a bad investments, really bad investment, but this particular one was with Fagan and then John bought it. But this is really for me where the story started and how we advertised. It isn't the past. It isn't before John Body, it's after John bought it because John bought it, and then he did what over the years I've learned John does better than anyone, which is he forgot that money exists. He forgot that there was a budget or a reason he was trying to do is to make money. It wasn't about that, it was about a passion. And if you do it right. He John believes and has proven it to be true that if you do it right, people will respect it and you will make money. And if you try to save money and do it cheap, you're just gonna make your life harder. And when you have the money to execute on that, like John did, you end up doing what he did with this console, which was basically taking the console, flipping it upside down on the ground, and bringing in Kneve engineers who were at the factory back in the day when it was built to say and to here's a blank check. Fix everything you wish you could have fixed when you were building it originally. And that's what they did. So every capacitor is changed to the capacitor that John picked. All the wiring was swapped out for the wiring that John picked. Different routing or component issues that the consoles had developed over the years were fixed and replaced. So you know, it's actually weird for me. If I go to another studio with the same model console, it takes me an hour to remember how to use the console because the one at Blackbird doesn't work the same. You know, even the little buttons that turn on off the eques are different. There's a second stage of it. Is it different? My daughter was just at East West actually, and her school basically recorded their orchestra to the East West, and I was in that room with the eighty seventy eight that's over there, which I don't know how many eighties seventy eights there are, but they probably count them on your finger. Gosh, I knew I recognize that console. It was in Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, were interned. I had to recall that console a couple of times. Oh my gosh, that's crazy. So John's there's just little differences in the way it's patched or the way certain functions work. He has the flying faders set up on the entire board, and right above that there's these little automatable digital buttons to pull EQ in and out and things like that. Not everyone I've been on has and I don't know if that was a Kneve option or if that's something they put in when they modified it. I don't think that's option. I don't even know if flying faders were originally an option on that board. I don't think they were originally they were there, but that's that's a John thing. They they have a bunch of the flying fader systems actually just in their warehouse, so if he buys a new console, they can just put him in cool and you know, he he just likes having him there. And then one of the other modifications that was done to that board is there's a second there's two master busses. There's an A bus and a B bus. The B bus was modified with a large transformer on the output, the details of which were never fully disclosed to me. Yeah, they're they're John's secret. But when John uses the board, he prefers that bus. And so when we modeled the plug in, it was our first plugin we ever did, was that console. We modeled it using that bus in the chain. That was some of the stuff that I learned because I'd worked on similar consoles, and since I've worked on very very similar consoles and they always sound different, they sound a little brighter, a little less I can't even think of the technical term right now, but less weight to them. And the Studio A console, you put something on it, it always feels like it glues everything together better, like you don't need to do as much work on it. Is that And that's so compared to the Studio E console, which is a that's a sixty eight, right. Yes, the one that's now in Studio E. That console. I'll be honest, I've only used it twice because I haven't been in E much since they put it in. I used E a lot when we first started the company for testing, but it had a pair of sixteen oh eight with a sidecar at the time. But the one in E, I don't know what was done to it, and it's not original the way the workflow works, but the routing and everything. There's actually a little guide they put in there because no one could ever figure it out. But the few times I've used it, the one that one, it has that classic nive grit, but it's much brighter, and the one thing it doesn't seem to have for me at least is the sort of clarity. Again, I'm gonna kind of move away from technical terms. I haven't spent enough time in E to analyze why as I have with A. But when I mix on the E console, when I record on it, I find that I have to do more work to sort of make sure my headroom is right and my clarity of my recording is good, whereas an A you pull up the faders. I've been in a before where the console wasn't properly zeroed and the preamps are all over the place, and I pull up the faders without gain staging anything, and it just sounds great. I did a drum recording recently where my gain staging was totally wrong because I pulled up the faders. It sounded so good. I was like, I'm just not touching it stands off. Yeah, nobody look at the console. We're just gonna record like this because it sounds great. And that's something that really only happens in that room for me. Onto the NEED you were saying about the one that John's got, a Blackbird. You were saying, it's less top end and more bottom end on that desk than the other NEED consoles that you've used before, And I'm kind of wondering if he's done a mod on that desk based on current technology, because I'm guessing the original NAVE was when they were recording for Vinyl, which meant you didn't want too much bottom end because it's not going to fit on the record. Yeah, I don't know that that was necessarily a conscious decision, especially given how much Vinyl people that John works with will record, you know, for like you know, a lot of Martinez records have been cut the Vinyl I think, and I don't think it necessarily has less high end as much as it has more low end and a more solid low end than other consoles, you know, because that always can create the perception it's less bright and less brittle. But I think what it is is John, when he went in under the head of the console, didn't necessarily say I wanted to sound like this. There wasn't a vision of a certain curve or certain weight. John said. When you built the console, there were all these restrictions. It had to be built in a certain amount of time, It had to cost a certain amount of amount of money. You could only use the capacitors who had access to You couldn't use the most expensive parts. John said, to forget all that put the best stuff in here. You know, there's a certain transformer or capacity that John likes. All the caps were changed with that, and I think the byproduct is that more low end can pass through all the circuits and there's less signal loss. It's just generally a bit quieter and a bit cleaner. And you know, we're gonna make the assumption it's an analog console that's vintage running in a commercial recording studio. So on any given day it'll be noisier or broken or problematic or you know, when I go in there, I have to find the channels that didn't get broken by the last guy. It's just, you know, the way life is. Yeah, one of the beauties of Blackbird is if a channel's broken, you just I can go in the back, pull a new channel and stick it in. Because they have so many extras, but I think John kind of just told them just do it quote right and then we'll see what happens. And then it just sort of worked. And that's the magic of Studio A. It was the first room John Bill, and so much of that room was not necessarily consciously I want the loan to be better. It was. I just want it to be done right, and let's see what happens. And it's when somebody says, we're building a room and we're not going to restrict it with how much money we want to spend or any of that. We just want to build the perfect space for making records. You end up sometimes with magic and that's what that's what studio A is for me. You know, the big live room with the double height ceiling and the microphones you can hang from the ceiling just sounds like everything came together perfectly. And I don't you know. And as much as I love Studio D in it's a great room, and objectively, you know or not, yeah, objectively, it's probably a better sounding room in quotes, I don't like it as much. I like a A is more creative. I can get cooler, different sounds out of a D. Everything sounds like a you know, top forty radio record. You go in Studio D, the room just sounds like that. And but the A console I think is definitely a byproduct of that. I think the fact that we can put more low end on everything. Even our vinyl these days can have more low end than it did back in the day probably helped in people accepting the common so for what it is, but I would doubt that John actually intentionally made that change. It's funny because I just listened to the fortieth anniversary of the Inexcess record Listen Like Thieves, which is being remastered by Giles Martin at Abbey Road, and I listened to it, and it's the one remaster that really works, And it's quite bizarre what Giles has done. Tons of bottom end, tons of top end. There's stuff in there you never heard before, Like he's actually mixed up a lot of bits and pieces where he's actually pulled the Bassic guitar ride up, which was buried before, and I think it was buried because of vinyl. But anyway, I'm sort of sort of going off in the tangent. But that is one remaster that works really well, and I think it's because now with technology you can get away with it where you couldn't before. Yeah. Absolutely, I'd like to ask about one of the vintage consoles or rooms at Blackbird, the Studio G, that vintage board. So Studio G is the room that I used to work in with my my boss. It's rented to whoever. Is it really still running? A pro control. I don't know. I mean that might be the board, so it's a private room. I haven't been in it since twenty nineteen when I when I quit working for that guy that that particular producer left when COVID hit right after I quit. So now what's his name, Tony Castle is over there now and he has you know, his setup, so I don't know. It's very possible. That's not a public blackbird room, so I haven't been in there. That'sha. It's funny. They have a picture of a pro control there, which is like, I think it's before. That might be twenty sixteen. There was another engineer in there before I was in there, because that I was, that was my boss's room, and then I was one room over There's there's three rooms connected to Studio G. One is like fully built out, the other two are kind of like suites, like lounge suites, and one of them was turned into my little mixing room. So I know that room is super well. But when we were in there, it was empty. We brought our own gear in, so we had the first year we had the box, the API, the box, and then we got rid of that in favor of just an ava Set or Aviset right the crane song. So yeah, yeah, So there is an Aviset sitting smack in the middle of the board of the uh yeah, of the of like a looks like a thirty two channel pro control like from two thousands soap. Basically, Blackbird used an Aviset in there for years, and then when we moved in, we got rid of it for the box because my boss really wanted it. And then I convinced him eventually to move away from the box, get a really good converter in the Aviset, and then just use that, and so that's what we ended up doing for the rest of the time we were in there. So he was summing externally with the box, and then he did he stop summing externally. He wasn't even summing externally. That was that's why I convinced them to get rid of it. He just had the first two channels pulled up on the summing mixer and the only time we used the box was to cut print to tape and come back to pro tools. And then the tape machine that we were barring from somebody got sold and we didn't have a tape machine. So I just said to him, I said, look, it's the box is a very complicated monitor controller, you know. Now, let's just get a really good monitor controller and let someone else use the box. So the box belonged to Blackbird, we give it back to them, and we took the Aviset in place, and that Aviset is actually sitting on my desk right now. It's the one I use in here. Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah, So what's the workflows with the boards? Like how you find you know, like the the eighties seventy it's a split board some of those APIs and there are inline boards, but I imagine they're not all or any more sessions to tape. So what's the preferred doll workflow with a big vintage board that you find people using. I've seen plenty of studios where the preferred workflow is one fader up and that's it, like just a bunch of mics and then just return out of the computer back to one fader. Or do you see lots of people just running it like a split with you know, mics going into the dow and then the dog returning multiple faders back. And I'm curious. It's very and I can only answer this to the extent of the sessions I've been and I was never an assistant at Blackbird so I or an engineer there, so I didn't. I don't have the session experience with a lot of the engineers, but the ones I have watched work in there or the sessions I've been on. It's very dependent. I've seen three ways, mainly the way I do it. I use the board as a front end to pro Tools, so all of my recording tracks come out on big faders because I like using the big fader to send the pro Tools. It's a weird thing, but I like to do that. I send that to pro Tools, and then I just take two tracks on the other end of the board as line input return for pro Tools that are just pulled up for my left right. So two tracks back yep, just headphones and then headphones right off the mics. Or do you do headphones from within pro Tools. No, the headphones come off the cues in the console. So Blackbird in both A and D has a setup where you just pull all the cues up to zero and then they have not D twenty five. I forget the cave the connector, but a multip connector that goes to the back of a rack with a Mackie mixer in it, and each artist mixes their own thing. Those those are the mics going to the cube. But what about the playback, and then playback goes to the the pro Tools. I just put it on two tracks of that MAKI, So I'll send it to like Q fourteen. What are the fifteen sixteen on those consoles because there's sixteen channels? So then how do you deal with pro tools as far as like, you know, pro tools is going to monitor through and you're gonna get a double because you have the board feeding the headphones. I won't send the full two track coming out to the artist unless I have to, in which case I've already kind of thought about what's going there. I'll take a send out of pro tools. So let's say I wanted to send my metronome from pro tools out, I'll take a send, put it on a different track of the console, send that to a different fader on the little Mackie mixer. So everything always has its own place, and then you know, that's my personal workflow. I have seen engineers do a full split on on a console, the API console and studio d is so huge. It's in line, in line, but. It's ninety six channels, so so a lot of engineers will just use the first bunch of channels to send, and then instead of doing inline, they'll just come back on the other side of the board and use them. To They'll run the inline board like a split board base. I've seen that done at least once or twice. I'm sure people do it other ways. The thing with Blackbird is so interesting for me. Up until Blackbird, I always worked at studios where the producers and engineers were mostly in house. A couple exceptions, I did some work at Milk Boy and Philly. It was a little different, but I didn't spend much time there. But like I worked at a place called The Forge just outside of Philadelphia, and there was a house engineer who was the engineer on just about every session. It wasn't the kind of place where a producer came in with his engineer. Blackbird is that old school place. A lot of times the room's just rented by the artist, and no Blackbird's staff is in there other than the assistant who's just sure that nobody breaks anything in the patch. Bait works right, And have you ever seen this one like so insert send to pro tools, insert return out of pro Tools back to the board headphones So. Not here, but I did in Philly twice, two different to remember, two different studios that did it that way, and it always threw me off, but it was cool. It worked, but it took me like a day the first time I saw it to be like, what is happening? How is this working? Well, you gotta have an HDX system. Yeah, you have to have an HDX system to make it super low latency because at least, like when you return it off to the right side of the board and you don't send on the headphones out, you could be running like pro tools on a native thing and it wouldn't matter. But as soon as you run it through like that, you got to have like zero latency. So you got to HDX system. What was the purpose of that routing? It feels really natural because your pre amps it's it's sort of like pseudo inline, right the preamp goes in or the mic goes into the preamp, it goes right to pro Tools. The track of pro Tools go straight out, so you're not mixing in pro Tools. Every track Approach Tools has its own output and it goes right to the faders and then the faders and then you got your your oxends going to headphones, and it feels very tapeish. Got it? Got it? Well, now we've sort of like gone off in the tangent, which is unusual for us. It never happens. Well, we're supposed to be talking about plugins kids plugins. Well, we're building up to the reason why someone would bother making plugins emulatings like. The Twisted Jewel It was a nice one. Yeah, So with your plugins, what makes your plugins different? And are they based exclusively on studio eye at Blackbird? What makes them unique? There's a couple of things, and it's developed over the years. So our early plugins, the underlying software was relatively commoditized, you know, for lack of a better word. It was, you know, the same technology any other top level plug in company was going to use to make a plug in. It was strictly about we want to capture the sound and the vibe of Blackbird and John specifically. You know, by the by the time we actually went to build our first plug, and we'd been doing it for about a year, is it Jews. I've gotten to know John very well. Is it juice that you're using Juice. Yeah, so everything's built in Juice with but we don't use the stock Juice modules for anything. It's all C plus plus code our developers, right, We use the Juice framework just to make a lives easier. But the first plug in, the first couple plugins were built using more sort of traditional technologies. As time's gone on, and I'll get into in a second, as time gone on, we have sort of developed our own proprietary technology that's gotten more and more complicated to achieve new and different things or just better sounds specifically for different types of gear. But with the first plug in, what the whole the goal was, basically in our business pitch to our investors was the technologies relatively commoditized. We're not going to invent something new. We're going to take IP like HBO does. We're going to take Blackbird's IP and we're going to present it to people because it in and of itself is unique. And that's why we picked the studio a console to start. It had the unique benefit that it was COVID. I couldn't come back down to Nashville. I was stuck up in New York because I was in New York onand Lockdown hit with my family, and John could ship me a channel of the console to start playing with and start taking measurements off of. And then by the time Lockdown lifted and I could travel, I flew down with a mask and all the you know, nobody near me in the room, and we took more samples of the console and measurements off the circuits and all that. But that was the idea, and that's what we went for, and it still to this day is in the ethos of what plugins as a sub brand of our new brand, noise Hub does, which is we want to do analog modeling, but we don't want to just be scientifically perfect. I don't particularly care what a plugin looks like on a graph if it doesn't sound and work well right like you tell me it lines up perfectly with the original gear, But when I go to use it, I don't feel like it's the original gear. That's that graph is useless to me. That's not going to make my song sound better, make me like it. So we really wanted sort of what I always said is what happens both what do I hear and what do I feel when I turn it off when I do that on the plug and it needs to feel the same. That's what matters more than anything. Even if it means on a graph we're slightly different, it doesn't matter to me. There are other compan it'll build, you know, scientific heritage models just for the sake of doing it. That's not us. We're here to make plugins that are more you know, for the creative, for the people actually making records every day, and so. You kind of emulate and then you deviate or you know, kind of work from there as a baseline, then as needed. Yeah. So the final step of every Blackbird plug in is very simple, very tedious, but very simple. John and I will play with the plug in profusely over the course of anywhere from a couple of weeks to months, and go back and forth with changes that we feel that needs compared to the original gear. So we will sit there for hours together, sometimes separately, with the gear and the plug in and playing with it in a session. You know, put a vocal through it, play with it, put a drums through it, play with it, put another so out through it, play with it. And John will send me a text or off I'm in the room. He'll tell me, you know, two K sounds a little off. It's a little harsh, the distortion doesn't quite feel right, and we just keep tweaking and iterating, just like you would with an artist on a song. Right. You know, if you if you're the artist and you have a mixed engineer, you're the producer. You have a mixed engineer, you tell him it feels a little bright, it feels a little harsh. If you want to be on the more creator side, it feels too blue. Make it more red. Right, Well, we all have comments before, but you know, my job is to have these court sort of creative conversations with John, and then I translate that to technological or scientific Hey, here's what we need to change. My engineers change it, they give it back to me. If I think it's in the right direction, I bring it back to John. And that process is what makes our plugins really unique and magical, because you know, something like Martinez Fairchild, which was one of the longer and harder projects we've taken on in the history of the company. Because it's not only something that was a challenge from a technological standpoint, we had to develop some new technology to handle it, some new you know, sort of mathematical algorithms, but also, you know, such a weight on me and on John to get it right, because there's something about that that unit is so unique, is so special, and it's it's specifically her, her fair Child specifically. And one of the things Sir John, over the years his own the number of changes depending on who you ask, so I don't have an accurate number, but somewhere between fifteen and twenty five different Fairchilds have been in his possession and ownership over the years. There was a point where there was twenty seven channels of Fairchild at Blackbird at the same time, between the six sixties and six seventies, was full the. Whole concert of pull, text and Child exactly. They could have a lot of those have since, you know, been sold because nobody needs that many fair Childs, and you know, John wanted to buy other pieces of gear and you know, make sure that things get used. But there's one fair Child over all of those that he thought sounded better, and that's the one that he put into her vocal rack that they used to tour with. They don't tour with it anymore, but now it's you know, every time she records, it gets used and what kind. Of makes it special for her child? Wow, yeah, it's not. It's not available like you can rent Blackbird and that that is not something that most people can get access to her use. It's it's locked away in a back room and not in one of the like Mike lockers where you can see it. It's it's hidden in the back in someone's office. And a very few I've heard of one or two artists that asked John personally for access to it that he said yes, and but but that's it's few and far between. And so you know, when we went to do that that six sixty, you know we had to get it right. It had to be perfect. John started using our plugins to mix Martina Live on the Yamaha consoles now, and that was a big step because John had a fully analog mixing rig live too and did not want to deviate from it. And once we came out with the Neve channel from Studio A, he started using the Yamaha consoles and running sixteen channels of the BBN one oh five, which is our original leave channel to mix Martina Live. So when we did the Fair Child, I said, well, I gotta get it right because he's going to use it and it's got to feel and sound like her unit. And that's the other thing you ask about. Kind of coming back to the point. Sorry, sorry for the segue, but we can we can bring it back. Now. What makes our plugins unique? There's a lot of fair Child plugins out there, and I knew that there'd be more. I mean, I didn't know who would doing. But as it is, unfair Child came out with their plugin, like I don't know a month after mine came out. Yeah, I was gonna say, did you guys come up with like a fun name for it, like the puke Child and unfair Child in. So we we were gonna come up with a funny name. We had some options, and we just decided from a branding standpoint, it wasn't on brand for us, so we kept it boring. It's just the F sixty six and the F sixty seven. But it was something that we said, like, we don't want to build the same fair Child of Renald Spilts. John has a six to seventy sitting in Studio A. He has an original one well, and actually it's not there anymore. The original is now in rentals, so you have to ask for it. It's not just there for anyone to play with. But he has a couple original six seventies. He has another six sixty that sound more like every other fair Child I've heard. I mean, every fair Child's unique, but there is a baseline. Martinez just sounds different. It's in my opinion, I'm going to use my own words here, but it's it's a bit warmer, it's a bit softer sounding. It's it's smoother, you know. And it does have a far more dramatic low frequency boost curve inherently when you turn it on than any other fair Child we tested. And so we said, look, let's be unique. Let's build Martinez Fairchild, because nobody has that. Everyone has a fair Child and that's great. I mean, I still use some of the fair childs for my competitors when I'm mixing, because I don't have a standard Fairchild. I have Martinez, which has that low end boost and that kind of slightly less aggressive attack on it, but it makes it unique. And that's what we try to do. John and I try to pick a piece of gear that is unique to Blackbird Weather, being something no one else has, like the Motown Eque, which several other companies have come out with plugins, but not of the same circuit version that we have. The one we have is the original. It's so funny. I was in a Sapphire group meeting and they had a guy who was like, literally he put the plaster on the walls at Motown. Yeah, And he was saying how that when they moved Motown from Detroit to la and they ordered like fifteen of those eques and the first batch came out with the six D cycle hum in them, and he was pretty sure that like those like got emulated like at first or whatever, because like they're out there and like people, I got motony Q and the history's lost and this one has like this like band circuit in it. So when they first watched it. There are there were three versions of the circuit. There was an original version which were handmade by the engineers at Motown locally, and that's why so John has two of those original ones. The front panels are different thicknesses and the numbers don't all quite line up because they were handmade. They were not made in a in a shop that did this. The front panels probably came from an autobody shop down the street or something, you know, you know, scrap metal. Then there was a second version where they actually said, okay, this is the circuit, let's build them right, Let's have an audio company make them. And they made a few of those, nobody knows exactly how many, and then very soon after those were designed, they moved to LA and the first batch in LA came out with the sixty cycle hum right. Those were quickly thrown in a closet and they eventually made somewhere. I've heard different numbers, but between one hundred and five hundred of them total over the years, and those have circulated. They have a silver face, they have a ratcheted knob, but they're not the original one that's on all the famous Motown records from Detroit. The original one had a fluid knob and it has a black face on it. It's not a silver face. And so when we put out our plug in, there was a lot of pushback from people who said, first of all, you a of course put their plug in out a week after us. I don't know how that always happens, but it always does. Somebody else builds the same plug in or similar plug in, what we're building. But UA modeled one of the second versions, the versions with the ratcheted knob, which is the same thing that most of the modern hardware clones that are made by the hardware clone companies are based off of. And you know, and I've had some disagreements with some people who say there are a few of those clones that are based on the original circuit. I will say that I don't know exactly which ones, but I know I've seen at least one. I don't know what company made it, but I looked inside and the circuit matched to the one that we did. But I had a fight with somebod hit one of the companies at NAM two years ago. I won't name a company, but they claimed they had the original unit and they said, you're plugins wrong. It should be ratcheted. And I said, if you think that, then you don't have an original unit. We got into a whole disagreement over it. But you know, the one thing I have, And maybe you know, maybe I'm too trusting of the people I trust, but I trust John implicitly. And John had back in the day, an original engineer from Motown come and look at the circuit and verify. Yep, those are the ones we built, and it's one of the first twenty six or whatever. And John has two of them, of course, because if John has one, there is only one. That is the That is the rule with people who are friends with John. Which actually the engineer at that group told us that they pulled the circuit from a graphic EQ that had read. Knobbs the Longevin. They basically pulled that circuit like. Yes, it is is that what it was? It's a LONGEVITYQ. But then they didn't have all the right the story, I was told they didn't have all the right components. I don't know if this is true. I want a caveat that. But the Starres told they didn't have all the right components. So some of the center freakies and boost and cut levels are slightly off from a Longevin because they didn't have the exact parts, so they use what they had, which would check out from what we've seen when we did, you know, measurements. The biggest thing for those original units that the newer ones don't do as well but they still do, is there's no distortion. There is almost no measurable total harmonic distortion. In the if it's a graphic eque, it's a passive, and then it's got a game, it's passive, right, yeah, yes, so how like it's well, I mean, I don't know, there's not a lot of graphic passives out there, Like, like the only one I can really think of is like, there's an Avalon that's got one, and I guess that NTI e q is also a graphic passive that night there's I guess there are some. Yeah, there's a few. I think most of them are honestly inspired by either the Longevin or the Motown. But uh but yeah, that's that's sort of the history. But that you know, again bringing it sort of back to the question Andre asked for us, that's how we try to differentiate ourselves. Just go for pieces of gear we know no one have, or pieces of gear that are either modified or or the workflow is unique. We did the twenty two to fifty four compressor recently, and again I had a meeting with John. We decide every plugin together, and we sat down and we said, look, we want to do another compressor. The fair Child's great, but it's not the most versatile unit. Right. Fair Child does what a fair child does. Even Martinez this sort of stuck in that box. Let's do something a little on the other side of the spectrum. It's more versatile, so that we can start sort of advertising. Hey, you can do an entire mix using our plugins. Now you don't need to use someone else's plugin if you don't want to, if you want to keep it old and analog. And we picked the twenty two to fifty four of or anything else because it's a bit more unique. But also John has a version that no one else has modeled, and not that they're not out there, but John had a different revision than the ones done by Universe Audio and plug In Alliance, and so I said, look, it's something a little different. The transformer is a different wind, it's a They change the design of the transform between the revisions, and then we added things for John's workflow, so for example, just the way the attack and release work. John has two of them, and like most of the vintage gear we've found more and more as we do vintage gear, the two units will be further apart than our plugin. In the unit, we modeled it after our at the end because they're just so different. But we picked out of the four twenty two fifty fours, John had, we picked the one he liked the best, and then he kind of walked us through why he liked it, and we made sure that we put that in the plug in. And what he liked about the one that we ended up picking is the way it distorted when it distorted, and the way it distorted versus the other ones was more musical in John's mind, and he never quite quantified it for me, but I just said, Okay, you like this one because it's more musical and it's distorting, right, we'll model it. And over the years we've now developed some proprietary technology, we've expanded how we build plugins. So when we first started out, we were not component modeling most of the circuit, if any. Nowadays, depending on the piece of gear, we could do a lot more component modeling. But our approach is always let's find the best way to achieve our goal. I'm not going to sit here and say I always component model, because I think sometimes component modeling is not the answer for a great result. When you component model, do you have to take the piece out and model that component and measure I mean, it could even be like, hey, here's this sixty year old tube and it hasn't Maybe you don't keep six year old tubes in there, but do you have to like literally take the components out of the unit and then you know, like model because because one method is this modeling the unit as a black box. Like So when we do component modeling, we basically and sometimes we do a hybrid. We have not to date done a plug in that is one hundred percent component. We have some that are very close to that, but there's always something that we do that's not component modeling because during that tuning process, we have inevitably find ourselves saying, look, we need to add an EQ curve or a boost or a cut or change the harmonic distortion. And rather than trying to figure out, well, okay, from a circuit theory standpoint, how am I going to modify the circuit, we just inevitably end up doing some sort of black box modeling attached to what was a component model. But yeah, to answer your question, we have to go in and we have to measure if not every component, different parts of circuits. So for the twenty two to fifty four parts or component model, parts are not parts are black box and then some parts are a hybrid where we didn't go in and go you know, capacitor, capacitor transformer or whatever, but we took the beginning and end of a piece of the circuit. For example, we took the beginning and end of the detector circuit. We run a bunch of sound through it, a bunch of signals through it at the beginning and end, and we hold it all out on a scope with memory, and we send those files off to an engineer in Germany that we work with who knows how to turn that into the model, and then he sends it back in my engineers here in Nashville put it all together. Is it pretty similar to like, you know, you're running like sweeps and impulses through it. Is it a bit like a. So that's how we do black box. We run test signals through. But what I'm talking about is actually just running a scope. So it's running I don't remember what type of you know, sometimes it's running a sign electrical signal, but it's it's all in the atrical domain. And mainly what we were looking at there was the release circuit. Right. It's a program dependent compressor, which is probably the hardest compressor to model out of just generic types of compressives. Program dependency makes it a lot harder, and of course we chose to do two program dependent compressors as our first two compressors, so we don't make our lives easy over here. But what we did is we actually took the measurement of the release circuit so we could see how it reacted to the incoming signals and how long it took for it to recover and what curve it took on that recover, and then we send that along with a schematic over to this engineer in Germany that we work with who knows how to sort of put it all together, and he put together the schematic exactly the way it said to and it wasn't identical because the schematic doesn't take into account the fact that, like you said, it's a forty year old part. And by the way, those twenty two fifty four's, they only fix them if they break, because those things, you open them up and it's a bunch of cards like this with the pieces are interesting like this, so you can't get in there. I mean, we had one that was broken and I brought it over to the ten shop and they laughed at me and I saw what they go, put it over there in the corner. We'll get to it eventually, but it's not happening right now because that is that is a week of work, and so we ended up luckily it wasn't the one John liked. John liked a different one. But eventually they did fix it. It's just they're so hard to work on. So at some point, because with the fair Child you open it up, there's a lot of open space, and we were able to get in there and probe it. We couldn't get it in probe individual components on the twenty two to fifty four. That's taking it apart, which given that John only has one he likes, I'm not taking it a blake because if I put it back together and it sounds different. The twenty two to fifty four, you're talking about the ones that you got at a Blackbird, that the square ones. Is that correct? Yes? Yeah, they were they were like mounted in the board up on the meter bridge or no, they weren't exactly. Yeah, were they on the meter bridge. They were on the meter bridge. They were below just below it. Yeah, I've never actually seen them mounted in the console. So I'm trying to remember the pictures I've seen. But John has four racked in pairs of two. Two are Revision A, which just have the on off switch. They don't have the three way switch for the limitter like they don't have the fast slow. And then he has two that are I forget the Revision letter but they're they have the fast slow on the limitter. Because I've got one here, I'm looking at it actually, but mine's a neo one of wrecmount you know, nineteen inch rect amount of the twenty two to fifty four. But yours is a what heritage or who who emulated jers. Ams ims need it is ams Okay, yeah, yep, yeah. They remake them in that nineteen inch ract just to make it convenient. But the ones we modeled they look like our plugins. So they're two next to each other. And yeah, they're great. I mean, they're great units. They're very specific, they do what they do. Yeah, but you know they're they're kind of on the opposite side of the spectrum in my opinion from a fair child, and John agreed with that, which is why we went for it. Yeah, so with your plugins that you actually might note that these are from Blackbird, and that's what's unique about them. Yeah. Yeah. The other way, the names of the plugins are special history, you know, like pedigree to. Them exactly, and every plug in is labeled with it. It's the so we call them BB one oh five or BB whatever, but it's the Blackbird. Neve one oh five is what the BBN one o five stands for. Yeah, or in this in the case of the twenty two fifty four, it's the Blackbird. The BBN fifty four, yeah, is the name of the plugins. So these are these are sold as Blackbird plugins and specifically because they're not. It's not the twenty two fifty four, it's Joan's twenty two fifty four. Yeah. That's that's the point and the whole. Thing about this vintage This is what we've always talked about in this show before when we've talked about plugins and you know, sort of mic modeling and stuff like that. It's like, well, you know, maybe the U forty seven or the twenty two fifty four or the ten seventy three or whatever that you didn't emulation of or a plugin of it will sound completely different to another one. So if you're used to using one of those you know, sort of vintage bits of kid and then you take the plug in with you. It's going to sound totally different. Probably absolutely, And you know a fun story that. Again I won't name the company just to not throw anyone under a bus, but I don't want to start a fight. But there's a certain company, a big plug in company that before I got here and started working with John, they rented a piece of gear from Blackbird without telling them they were going to model it. They took it, they modeled it, they sent it back, and it was found about a year later after that plugin had come out everything that the piece of gear was completely wrong. Inside, the whole thing was hooked up wrong. It sounded completely out of whack. And they took it. Up to this day, if it properly, no no, no, no, no no. They didn't take a part. They took it. John bought it from somebody who had messed it up, and they never so they emulated the wrong thing. And to this day everybody goes, why does that one plug in companies? Plug in not work the way it should. It sounds wrong, it doesn't like you turn knobs, and they do slightly weird things and. Special. They just need to market it as such. Well, the problem is they can't say it was John's because even though we figured out that it was John's, because they once the pluggin came out it was messed up. Of John's engineers went, hey, they modeled our piece of gear because ours is broken in that exact same way. And eventually John fixed it and sold it to someone else. But you know, you'd be surprised how many times that happens. Every piece of gear we model sits on Richard's desk. Richard's the head tech here at Blackbird, and he's sort of a legend. He gets to go through everything before we touch it. And if he tells us it's wrong, but John likes it, that's fine. But we know it's wrong, but we never sample. We were starting work on a new plugin now that we we thought sounded great. John thought it sounded great, but something seemed a little off. We sent it to Richard. He called Zach Goes it's fucked. That is the word he used it. He said, the whole thing's a mess. None of the things you none of the measurements were going to be right. It was gonna be a disaster. So yeah. It's the thing at the end of the day with any of these plugins is now that I've been making him for years and I really understand sort of the dirty little the dirty secrets of the industry. It's all about what you can do with it, which is why I've leaned even harder with my company into I want to make plugins that make me, as a creat feel like I want to use it. And when I go to mixing the weekend now for fun, which is what I do in my spare time now that it's not my job, I want to pull up the plug in and have the emotional reaction that I have when I have the physical piece of gear. Right, you buy a five thousand dollars compressor and you start using it, you feel something. It's not just a sound, it's not just a tool. You know, there's an emotional connection to that piece of gear. I want the plug ins to have that same thing. I walk into studio A and I sit down to the console and I have a certain feeling, and I want my plug in too, as best it can look. I'm never gonna recreate this is the feeling of a ten million dollar recording studio. You can't but if I can get you one percent of that in that plugin, then I've done my job. And I think other companies and it's fine that they do this, but they have the approach of it's gonna sound exactly like the thing on a piece of paper, we're gonna put it on a graph, it's gonna line up perfectly, and you're all gonna be happy. And a lot of times they just feel sterile to me. But it's all about how you use it. Yeah, just because I like a plugin doesn't mean someone else will or won't. Ye. It's funny, you know we talk about the you know, getting things that are broken when you're trying to do an emulation or the story. We've probably bought out listeners with this one on numerous occasions. But one of our sponsors, Austrian Audio, were came up the ashes of AKG from in Vienna, so they took over that factory, but all the guys that were doing R and D on the C twelve capsule they were going to rebuild. This backstory was. I remember meeting Martin who's the CEO of Austrian Audio, and we talked about the the R and D that went into making this capsule, and he got a whole bunch of C twelves from everybody that had one. Stevie Wonders a whole bunch of famous C twelves that arrived. And it was funny because he said to me interestingly, Quincy Jones' favorite microphone is the C twelve that he's got, but it was broken. It's broken, yeah. But he just loved the sound of the broken seat twelve. And it's common. There's there's a microphone here at Blackbird that I don't know if John Zy've even used it or knows anything about it, to be honest, because it's not one of the ones he uses. But it's a two fifty one. Yeah, I think it's a too fitning one. But it's too modern, relatively modern tube telephone and microphone that somebody clearly dropped at some point, and the tube is not properly seated because it distorts way sooner than it should in terms of headroom. But it sounds great. And there's actually a little sticker that says do not fix on it now, because a bunch of engineers, including myself, has told the text don't fuck this. Up, specially well, don't don't unfunck this up. But but yeah, there's there's you know, plugins are such a you know, it's such a weird space. People get so worked up over it. And I've started just telling people, you know, the thing is, don't get worked up over it. Like a lot of guys will probably get on a podcast like this and say, my company makes the best thing in the world. And I obviously like my plugins better thannyone else. I wouldn't make them if I didn't, But I fully recognize that there's a reason all these other companies exist, and there's a reason people use them. And look, you go on my computer, I guarantee you're gonna see a lot of manufacturers of plugins that are not mine. And some of them are for test, but a lot of them are there because I use them. Yeah, because they have a purpose. And I reach for my plug in when I need a certain thing, and I reach for theirs and I need a different thing. And that's sort of the beauty of the plug in the world is you really can have all of the color palettes and all the different tools, and you know, just because I like Martinez Fairchild better on certain applications, there are times I reach for a different Fairchild plug in or the same way at Blackbird. Sometimes I have her fair Child and I'll grab one of the other ones from storage and pull it out because it does have a different sound. And that's sort of the point. That's the reason me and John started the company is you know, we wanted to sort of share the color palettes with the world. Just because you work for a Craylo and they have sixty four crowns doesn't mean you can only color sixty four crown colors. That's why you mix them together. Yeah, I didn't realize that John was actually involved with with kit. So that's an interesting revelation that from this podcast. Also talk about interesting revelations. One we can't even talk about. But I know it's going to be announced in July, and that's about all I can say at this point. But what I've seen it's going to be very, very very interesting. Indeed, I think yeah, I think I think so because Yeah, anyway, on that note, Matthew, thanks for joining us. He's big teas big teas well. We have to get you back to talk about the July announcement. Absolutely lovely, Well, thanks for joining us and really enlightening. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you've been had the Pro Audio Suite. Thanks and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robo. Got your own audio issues just ask Robbo dot com. Text report from George and the Tech Window. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, so just the topic or just say good day. Drop us a note at our website audio dot com.