Outboard gear also plays a part in his signal chain, with Pultec, Tube-Tech and SSL compressors all tickling his tracks. “With the Moog cards it’s like having eight Minimoogs together,” he says, his eyes lighting up. He also mentions the Studio Electronics Code. Of course, he still maintains a collection of analogue synthesizers and drum machines: a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, Sequential Oberheim-6, Roland Juno-106, Sequential Circuits Pro-One, and Roland TR-909. But I’ve had Neve, I’ve had a small SSL, a Matrix.” Now, he’s added a rackmount SSL Sigma for summing. The Theo Parrish track (‘ Falling Up‘) was done on that. It’s an Amek BC 10 or something like that. “I still have a small one that I use every so often. “I got rid of a big console a long time ago,” he explains. Carl Craig performing live with the Chineke! Orchestra. Currently, it’s a hybrid setup, with digital equipment sitting alongside analogue gear. His studio is in flux, with new gear often coming and going, all in his search for the right sound. Some artists set it and forget it but Craig is not one of them. We get into it about gear and all the changes that Craig’s studio has been through over the years. Songs may be imperfect but – at the end of the day – they still have to sound good. I love the fact that things can be so imperfect.” He had different guitars because the tuning was specifically for that song in particular. He just tuned it up, whatever worked by ear and that was it. I think Ricky Wilson didn’t even really know how to tune up his guitar. “One of my favourite groups growing up as a kid was the B-52s,” he says. We agree, noting that there’s a real drive towards technical perfection in music these days, even at the expense of emotion and originality. But the song had character and it was saying something.” I’ve had tracks that weren’t very well engineered that did very, very well. And that’s the way that I want my music to always be, whether it sounds perfect, or whether it sounds flawed. “If you look at music in the same way as art,” he continues, “you might like to have a Warhol… because it has that character, and it’s always going to have that character. But they do have a sonic quality, a quality of sound, that makes them unique. The songs that mean the most to us, that matter the most, often aren’t technically perfect.
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