I’ve used the hardware model for many years but I never fully appreciated just how magnificent the piece is until studying it during the modeling process. The FG-GREY starts off with a very precise model of the classic British “4000 series console compressor”. But you can try cranking it all the way for an interesting effect! When you push the DRIVE knob, you get a beautiful punch and articulation of the transients, and you can control just how much you want, regardless of whether or not you use the makeup gain! Famous rock mixer Justin Netbank beta tested the FG-RED and loves the drive, suggesting ‘6.6’ as the magic number. Howie Weinberg, the famous mastering engineer who has a studio on our campus, let us in on a little secret: He uses his RED not for compression, but just to use the output gain to get that amazing effect! So I decided to do something that the original unit cannot…I put that output transformer effect on a knob called DRIVE. After more examination, we realized that this was due to a series of nonlinear reactions caused by the output transformer. The attack and auto-release work in an interesting way and are very musical, but the real magic we found was in the output section! We found that just pushing the makeup gain a few db did some insane things to the sound! A little push and things got a ton more punchy, fat, and aggressive. When Fabrice and I analyzed the RED, we found out that it was indeed a very unique beast.
WOW! One of the clearest, punchiest sounding rock mixes I’d ever heard come out of my own speakers. The first thing I did was put it on my mix in the settings that Chris showed me… 1.5:1, attack around 10/11 o’clock, auto release, compressing just 2-3db tops. This was puzzling because I usually associated a faster attack with a loss of transient punch, but if you’ve heard Chris’s mixes you know that they are the exact opposite of that! So being the classic gearslut, I bought one, (I got the unit with both input and output transformers). I thought it was odd actually: here was this compressor that nobody else seemed to really use, and it was on a setting at 1.5:1 and the attack looked very fast for a Mix-Buss compressor. This compressor is based on the classic RED-faced compressor that has been a favorite of mix legend Chris Lord Alge, who first showed it to me when I visited his studio years ago.
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