If you listen to my show “darkroom live” on Tuesday nights, You might have figured out that I am a musician and an audio engineer. As a matter of fact, The indie darkroom broadcasts from my studio in Brooklyn “Four Foot Studios”.
What dose this have to do with anything? Well, we only play Independent artists and most indie artists record, mix and (sometimes) master their music themselves. Also, without the monetary support of a big dumb label , most of you will probably be operating on a very tight budget and often the actual equipment you use to record will be the last thing you are thinking about on your artistic priority list.
Thats why im going to start to periodically offer my suggestions and reviews on equipment and techniques to help you get the most out of your recordings with the budget of an Independent artist in mind. Although I do have a lot of fancy mics, outboard gear and plugins, the fancy shiny stuff wont be my focus. For now we will focus on Free, Cheap, DIY and modifications to make cheap gear outperform equipment that costs thousands of dollars.
That being said, here is my first endorsement. The Golden Age Projects Pre-73. Aside from the instrument itself and the mics you choose, I really Feel the mic preamp you choose can make or break your recording. If you are going to buy one preamp to use on your projects you better choose wisely. A cheap preamp will be noisy, have little headroom and often color the sound in a very undesirable way. Sometimes a cheap pre by itself can be transparent enough if you don’t drive it too hard and the performance itself is so powerfull that it would sound good even if recorded in a garbage can. But once you start layering tracks using that same garbage can, the garbage stink will realy start to distract from the track.
A realy nice preamp can cost you Thousands of dollars and can be anywhere from completely transparent to adding the most beautiful musical color to the sound. But what if I told you you can spend under $300 and get a preamp that could make you want to throw away the one you borrowed from your rich naighbor that cost him $3000.
Well, that preamp is the golden age pre-73. this pre is an exact clone of the preamp circuit for the Neve 1073. The Neve 1073 is celebrated by the recording community as one of the best sounding preamps ever made. If you were to get your hands on a “real” 1073 it would cost you many thousands of marshmallows and you would probably still have to build a power supply for it. Go ahead, name a great recording,…. Okay, let me think.. Yes, the 1073 was used on that.
The Golden age Pre-73 costs $300 new (I bought mine used on ebay for $230). It costs so much less than the real thing because its manufactured in china and uses cheaper components and dosnt have the Neve name on it but other than that it is exactly the same circuit. Right out of the box this thing sounds great and much like a pre of 6 times the price and much like the neve. A lot of folks replace some of the components with higher quality ones, but in my opinion there is only one mod needed and a lot of people agree. I opened it up and replaced the cheap Chinese transformer with a carnhill transformer i found on ebay for $75 . The Carnhill (formerly St. Ives) transformer is the same one used in the original Neve 1073.
The thing is, you don’t have to do any of the mods to this unit, its still going to sound better than a pre that costs many times the price (when I get the time i probably will replace the caps with the tantalum caps of the same value).
Next time I am going to talk about some free VST plugins that outperform some of the best bank breaking plugins out there.
love alwas,
-Gabe Galvin
just fill out the survey and afterwords you will be directed to the download page where you can get all 5 tracks. YAY! 
