Top 5: Martin Terefe

This one was built in the early ’70s by Malcolm Toft. One of around 30 all-discrete A and B Range consoles he built. I bought it a long time ago and only last year, Malcolm Toft visited me in the studio and told me he remembered building that B Range console and that the reason he made the smaller version of the A Range was so he could fit one at his own place and because engineers had asked for the sound of the A range in smaller frame. Eventually Trident made the Series B, which was a whole other thing and not discrete. I’ve had three B range consoles over the years and this one I bought in 1997 mostly because at the time I couldn’t afford a Neve. I’ve become so attached to the sound and the simplicity of the EQ now, which does all the right things in the right frequencies. It’s also unbalanced, which is quite unusual and gives it an incredible openness in the top frequencies. Whenever I record at my studio in London, I use it and I just love that console! For a long time, I used a Neve 31102 preamp for my vocal chain. But I needed to service it at some point and had to put my vocal chain through the Trident B Range preamp. It sounded so nice that I never went back to the Neve again.

I bought it when I moved to England three decades ago. It’s an early serial number… 850 or something like that. It’s one of the examples Telefunken made before they started exporting mics outside Germany and it became the ELA M 251 E [E for export]. They made the early ones for the German Broadcasting company and it’s got an AC701 tube in it which has to be soldered in. For the export model they switched to a more readily available tube. When I bought it, it came with three extra AC701 tubes as well, which was insanely lucky. It was one of the things I bought despite really not being able to afford it. I took out a loan for that mic and never regretted it! Microphones of that age all sound different to each even if they’re the same model. Depending, I guess, on lots of factors and compared to other 251s I’ve tried, mine is particularly open at the top end. It’s like you can really make the vocal sound so present and sweet without it sounding nasty or sibillant.

It is one of the things I’ve collected over the years; tape delays. The Roland 201 and the 301 are my favourites. The 201 is the real classic, obviously, but the 301 added this button called ‘sound on sound’ mode, which puts another delay onto the delay and it comes out very random. I like both of them. In terms of using it, for the vocal, I generally use them to create the long delay tails or sometimes for slap-backs. But for other stuff, I use it really aggressively. For drums I use it to create interesting rhythms. When I play guitar, I use the Space Echo to make everything from beautiful ambient arpeggios to create noise and mayhem. A studio without a Space Echo is definitely a bit less fun than one that has one.