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In this month's Staff Picks blog, we're chatting with Vintage King Audio Consultant Chris Karn about his favorite equalizers for tracking and mixing.
Before joining the Vintage King team, Chris established himself as an accomplished musician and producer, securing multiple record deals and landing placements in major TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Scrubs. His work alongside legendary producers like Daniel Lanois, Joe Chiccarelli, and John Shanks has given him a unique perspective on crafting great sound.
Read on to learn more about Chris's favorite EQs and how he uses them in the studio.
After spending countless hours behind an API 1608-II console, the 550A has become Chris's go-to equalizer for tracking and mixing.
"I love it. It's so easy to just add a little brightness to something and not completely reinvent the wheel," Chris explains. "But if you do have some 400 Hz that you want to pull out of a kick drum or 800 Hz out of a floor tom, you can cut it and it has that concentric EQ so it pulls the Q in."
Chris also appreciates the 550A's versatility: "Whereas other EQs can be broad, with the 550A you can also grind. You can really cut or you can really boost, which is cool."
“The 550A is absolutely one of my favorite EQs. I do like the 560s as well, but I'm a little more grindy with those, I tend to just grab them with all four fingers and make a shape and they work. Those are really fast as well. They're not quite as ‘paint with a feather’ as the 550A is.”
“Something that I'm thinking of adding in my studio is API 5500, which is a 4-band 550A on steroids. You can knock it from 1 dB all the way down to ¼ dB in changes, so they're great on the mix bus.”
When asked why Chris prefers the three-band 550A model over the four-band 550B, he said “Whenever I'm tracking, I don’t like to use four bands of EQ. If I'm grabbing four bands, I got to go move the mic. I did recently use the 550B for background vocals on this last record and it just sounded amazing. No compression on the way in, just an API preamp/EQ and a Coles 4038 ribbon mic. It sounded great!”
For vocal recording and mixing, Chris turns to Mercury Recording Equipment's tube EQs, particularly when he needs to shape the character of a performance.
"Another one of my favorites is the classic Pultec circuit," Chris shares. "A good friend of mine, David Marquette, makes the Mercury Recording Equipment stuff, and I love his EQ-P1s and EQ-H1s—they're really great. I love the EQ-Ps for tailoring a microphone more towards the vocalist."
Chris recently put these EQs to work while recording harmonizing vocals on a session with The PawnShop Kings. “All I had in the studio were two Telefunken ELA M 251s, so I set them up and they performed at the same time doing vocals because they harmonized beautifully together.”
“One of the brothers has a very strong mid-range but not much air, and the other one has kind of a hollow mid-range and an airy top end. So, it was really cool getting in there with the Mercury EQ-Ps and adding that 3 kHz to the brother that didn't have enough mid-range, as well as adding some air to the other brother.”
“It just kind of pulled those two vocals together. I haven't found a solid-state EQ that can do that as beautifully. I'm sure you could do it with the GML 8200, but it's just so much easier with these tube EQs. I love the Mercury EQ-Ps for that. They were absolutely invaluable in that recording session.”
When it comes to mix bus processing, Chris is a big fan of the Dangerous BAX EQ's transparent sound and musical controls.
"It's really great if you already have a great-sounding mix. You can mix into it," he explains. "If you want to lift the top-end or increase the low-end, you can do that without any weirdness where all of a sudden the kick and the bass start coming out of balance. That's the thing that I love about that EQ—you can't make a bad sound with it."
Chris particularly appreciates the BAX EQ's high-frequency filter: "Pope makes a BAX EQ as well, but the thing I really love about the Dangerous BAX is the filter. There's this really killer filter up around 70 kHz. That’s way above the human hearing range, but there’s absolutely frequency information up there garbling up your mix.”
“Every now and then you'll kick that filter in and you don't know why, but you can actually pay attention to the song more. It just kind of gets rid of all that hash, especially with digital recordings these days, The high-pass filter is really great for getting rid of some of that mud down on the low-end, too."
When it comes to mastering, Chris believes that less is more. That’s why he relies on the trusty Maselec MEA-2 over some of the more colorful stereo EQs commonly found on the mix bus.
“Sometimes you're mastering a mix that already sounds incredible, you just kind of want to EQ it. You just want to master it,” says Chris.
“I've owned a Sontec MEP-250, the mastering versions of the EQ-P1, and plenty of old API EQs, but the Maselec MEA-2 is the only EQ I've ever encountered where you can't make a track sound harsh no matter how hard you try.”
“The most important thing is that when you take it out of bypass and engage it with no EQ, there's no phase shift, there's no image shift. Your song is there."
No discussion of favorite EQs would be complete without mentioning the classic Neve 1073. "We're all using those all the time—can't live without them," Chris says. "1073s usually end up on guitars or overheads or something that I just need a little more saturation, a little more smoothing from the circuit. They're more of a broad stroke."
Available in a variety of form factors, Neve’s range of 1073-style preamp/EQs offers the same classic sound as the original design, coupled with fresh new features for modern studios. Each unit stays true to the iconic Class A discrete design and custom-wound transformers that gave the 1073 its legendary status, delivering the unmistakable punch, warmth, and musical clarity it's known for.
