ROAD HOUSE
Jerry Barnes of Chic on recording at Abbey Road “It’s a home from home as far as studios go. The people are so nice and so accommodating, and the engineers are so trained and ready to do whatever you need. That’s one of the things that makes it memorable. I work a lot out of the Power Station in New York, and the Abbey Road staff are all up there with the Power Station as far as having the right gear together, having the trained engineers, having good maintenance. Of course, it has history, too. I did a recording in Studio Two a while back: I was producing an artist where the echo of the room is on the recording, and it hit me that you can’t get this sound anywhere else. “They have a particular UREI 1176 compressor at Abbey Road that I request for every session that I do there. That particular 1176 is from the Sixties, or possibly the Seventies, and it’s one of my favourite bass sounds that I’ve ever gotten in a recording studio. The 1176 is usually a blackface unit, but this particular one is a silverface. I normally don’t compress that hard when I go to the digital audio workstation – but with this one, you can really smash it!”