JMB and the Case of the Ghostly Compressor

Story time:

Here is a picture of a compressor I've owned since 2012. It's called a UBK Fatso and it is a part of the standard lineup at Empirical Labs (also the makers of the famous Distressor compressor), but It has a much more interesting origin story.

A man named Greg Scott, who's also on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TheHouseofKushTV started the audio company UBK, now known as House of Kush (makers of great plugins and hardware units like the Electra EQ). Their first project was not a standalone product, but rather a modification of one made by Empirical Labs. The Fatso is a line of products that stand for FULL ANALOG TAPE SIMULATOR AND OPTIMIZER, which is a fancy way of saying it compresses and saturates in ways that a tape machine would. I can't say for certain how close it actually gets to this or that tape machine but for years many engineers, myself included, have sworn by how it sounds, both with tracking and mixing.

Greg's first foray into the analog equipment world was to open up these Fatso units and hot rod them to include a varied amount of set-it-and-forget-it settings. These included emulations of API, SSL and other compressor settings to allow for all sorts of use cases. This was an interesting thing because, if you notice on the picture above, there are no attack, release or ratio settings on the compressor. There's an input gain and output gain. That's it. This is in a lot of ways pretty old school, but nowadays it's pretty important to have control over those parameters. But what this also allowed to happen was make compression approachable for all.

Compression is the most complicated and elusive part of sound. the amount of detail and control compression gives allows for a lot of settings to give awful results. When you have the space of five presets to cycle through and see what sounds best in concert with the input gain, there's a lot less room for error. And it's true: It's very hard to make this unit sound bad.

And that's why it's essential to my show.

I have owned my UBK Fatso since 2012 and it has made its way into pretty much every record I've put out. It's my secret weapon that I'm sort of shy about revealing to others because of the price tag. It's not very helpful to let someone know the key to better mixes is only a mere 2500 dollars away. But it's true, I have always found this thing to be infinitely usable and always helpful. And as I've moved on into filming these episodes, it's only made itself more useful. Its set it and forget it nature lets me worry about the beatmaking itself while it takes care of the leveling. Obviously I do have to do some work in post afterward but it makes sure that even when I'm auditioning kick drums or a synth comes in way too hot that it's all usable audio. For me in my particular situation, it makes my show possible.

That's why when it started breaking on me last year, I was a little panicked. I had a schedule to maintain with the show and didn't have time to send it off for an undetermined amount of time. But this year it's only gotten worse and worse and a few weeks ago I had to bite the bullet and send it off to Empirical Labs for repair. We had talked beforehand how time sensitive this turnaround was in order for me to keep my show going and they totally understood. I sent it off and waited, hoping to have a day or two turnaround.

...

A week and a half into repair, I get a call from the lead tech this morning giving me some interesting news. He said "there's a ghost in this machine." Apparently he's been working on these units for years and has never seen anything like it. I think I remember him telling me he's replaced almost every individual component and it still won't work properly. He was really kind and offered me another b-stock unit that he just cleaned up and I took him up on it. That's on its way back to me.

Long story short, We'll be back up and running pretty soon, here. Sometimes when you have elaborate setups that also means there's just more for there to go wrong and that's the case with this. Having it outside my studio for a couple weeks now has only highlighted the importance of it in my setup and honestly don't think I'll ever record an episode without it. It's just that essential for me.

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Thanks for reading this. Just a reminder to those not on the Discord, the Living Beat Tape has been regularly updating and I'll likely post a .zip on here to catch the Patreon up to speed. If you'd like the regular updates please go ahead and read the pinned post to see how you can link your accounts. We'd also love to have you on there. We're pretty active and talk about all kinds of stuff while sharing music, conducting sample challenges (if you're a producer) and it's just a nice, neat way to organize all the benefits that you're entitled to as a member. Your participation here is more appreciated than you'll ever know and this channel wouldn't be able to exist without you. Thank you.

Jon