Livingston Studios: New gear alert!

New year, new gear! We didn’t mean for that to rhyme, promise.

The famous north London studio, Livingston 1, underwent a complete refurb in 2012 and like all our studios, benefits from constant upgrades and additions to instruments, gear and backline. This week has seen the addition of some special new pieces of gear to the racks, so all you music geeks out there (that includes us), feast your eyes on these…

Here we have the Urei 1178 stereo FET compressor, the stereo equivalent of the legendary Urei 1176. This is a fantastic overhead compressor that adds some real body to the room.

Underneath the Urei we have the EAR 600 mono compressor. This baby was hand built by Tim de Paravicini, it’s a similar design to the very rare (and expensive) Fairchild 660.

Next up is the 5 Calrec PQ 1161-02 mic preamps and EQs. Each module is a discrete mic pre and 3-band EQ and pass filters, with identical EQ points to a Neve 33122.

These are a pair of EAR 822Q EQs. Also hand built by Tim de Paravicini, they’re passive mono valve EQs based on the Pultec design. These guys are designed to be highly flexible, making them useful in any application.

Last but certainly not least is a Roland Juno-106 analog polysynth. This is a very popular analog synth and widely used due to its amazing sound a simple programming systems, and was one of the first Roland midi-equipped synthesisers.

All this added to an already impressive gear spec (check the full list here) truly makes Livingston one of the best tracking rooms in London and the birthplace of recordings by Hozier, The 1975, Björk and many more.