BE WARNED: the text you are about to read is a transparent attempt to get you utterly psyched to crave, seek out, and ultimately spend your hard earned money on a compressor that i have 50% vested financial interest in. if you find yourself easily offended by my uber-hyperbolic style of prose wielded in service of anything that remotely whiffs of marketing, i beg you please to close this tab in your browser now and read no further. i am absolutely blown away by the sounds that come out of this box and i will spare no adverb or image in the cause of convincing you of its glorious glory.
with that COMPLETELY STRAIGHTFORWARD AND UPFRONT DISCLAIMER submitted for your consideration, this is it folks: the culmination of about 9 months of sweating details, turning knobs a millimeter at a time, soldering hundreds of resistors into the same tiny holes over and over, sitting in 5 different rooms and recording dozens of sounds ranging from the ordinary to the esoteric, and sitting for hours on end compressing each instrument in every manner to every possible extreme that my manic brain could conceive.
in the end, thanks to the unbelievably generous help from dave derr, the genius behind all of empirical labs' alchemical tools, i massaged the voltages flowing thru his Fatso and created 21 new fixed setting compressors, every one of which had some kind of serious mojo. i then tested each of these compressors one at a time using all the sounds i'd recorded, and slowly filtered down the comps until i was left with 5 that kicked total @ss and which absolutely refused to sound bad no matter what i fed it and no matter how soft or hard i hit it. i took these 5 comps back out into the field where i ran them thru the paces with 2 other engineers whose ears i believe to be at least as good as mine (and in many ways better) and we all agreed that of the 5 comps i had chosen, 3 were just plain magical, and better still, each one was very very different from the others.
i stuck a new faceplate on it, and the result is what i have cleverly named the UBK Fatso. this is the first product from KuSh Audio, the inevitable partnership between me and Gil Griffith from Wave Distribution. you can get this creature as a new unit direct from us and thru a select group of retailers in the states and europe, or you can have your Classic Fatso modded to become a 100% UBK Fatso. same warmth, same harmonic saturation and tapey thickness as the original, but with radically different compression styles and aesthetics.
so in the vid below i run a bunch of sounds/mixes thru 2 UBK Fatso's in parallel to give you an sense of how badass this box can get. i tend to start each demo off with a very 'nice' amount of compression, but i quickly move on towards the boundaries of good sense and taste to show you what i mean when i say that you can slam this thing to the gills and it simply will not fold. i am in no way advocating this much compression, but neither am i ruling it out. in the end, whether you're a '2db on the peaks' gentleman or a 'perpetual sea of 15-20db' animal, i fully believe this compressor has a lot of new tricks for you to drop into your secret box of magic.
with that, i shut up and bid you happy smashing.
the hi-res vid can be downloaded here:
UBK Fatso demo
youtube below. enjoy!
gregory scott - ubk
.