The Korn Neve 1073 story

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@aetrion-music asked, so rather than hijack yet another tread, I’ll just post this here.

This was all back in the dark ages of Y2k.

A long-time friend of mine had borrowed a pair of Neve 1073 preamp-eq from Michael Beinhorn. Back then analog and vintage gear was already a fad, but was still kind of underground.

My friend showed me these antiques and asked if I could make a plugin that sounded just like them. I said “I can make an EQ plugin with exactly the same frequency response, but I can’t emulate the low frequency distortion from overdriving the input or output transformers. Is that good enough?”. He said it was. “the great thing about these things is that the discrete settings are all at the perfect place – it’s super easy to get the sound that you want.”

Afaik there weren’t any other Neve 1073 emulation plugins around back then.

So we picked which of the two sounded “better” and spent the day in his garage measuring the frequency response of the EQ at perhaps 200 different settings, using a windows program that I wrote for this purpose.

Then I took all the responses home, and modified my analyzer to be able to compare the frequency response of a plugin to a sampled response from the Neve 1073. I used that tool, and a ton of trial and error, to make an EQ that was within 1/8 of a db at every setting we had measured.

My friend liked the results. At the time he was helping Beinhorn mix a Korn album. I think it must have been “Untouchables”, since the date is right and that seems to be the only one that Beinhorn did. My friend later said “we used your plugin on the snare drum on some songs on the album”.

So that was the one and only time someone used any of my non-work gizmos. Until VCV came along.

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Ah. The interconnectedness of everything. :+1:t3:

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Thank you so much for sharing this! Such a great story and a clear showing of your inventiveness that we all appreciate with your VCV models.

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Thanks for reading my ancient reminiscence!

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Amazing story, thank you for sharing :+1:

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No appreciation at all. Thanks for sharing this episode of the sad kind. As a bloody beginner in retirement age in the field of modular synthesis I am very glad about the many helpful tips as well as the great modules around VCV Rack, from you and all the other good spirits here in the community.

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Ah, sorry, when I moved this to a new thread some context was lost. The original thread was about VCV being a good platform to develop for, an I was saying that the ability to get your stuff to actual users is a really amazing thing about it.

I wasn’t trying to say “poor me, no-one used my stuff”, although lacking any context that’s a reasonable reading. Actually, I decided long ago to do music and DSP as a hobby, and do something else for a “day” job.

In this particular case it was a fun project making all the analysis tools, blundering around in filter design, and then actually having it used for something.

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