MixStation Review follow-up

MixStation Review follow-up: Mitch Malloy’s enthusiastic review of ASC TubeTraps in our Jan/Feb ’04 issue, I knew I just had to try them myself. I first experienced TubeTraps at a Nashville AES meeting, where their creator, Art Noxon, demonstrated them in a configuration he calls the QuickSoundField.

For many people, the traditional approach to acoustically treating a room has been to remove as many reflections as possible, and worry about recreating ambience artificially at a later stage, using processing. The QuickSoundField takes the opposite approach, flooding the area within the field with many, many early reflections of exactly the right duration and decay pattern. The result is an incredibly natural-sounding “room” that can be created on the spot, in just about any environment imaginable. I first knew I was onto something special when the guitarist at a session asked me what processing I had added to make his acoustic guitar sound so good. Truth is, I hadn’t touched an EQ, compressor, reverb or anything else; I had merely placed six TubeTraps around the guitar mies in the QuickSoundField configuration. I have received similar feedback from drummers and singers. After having used the TubeTraps in numerous situations for several months now, I’ve found that I use far less processing of any kind on most sources that I record, simply because the QuickSoundField sounds so phenomenal on its own that there’s no need for anything else. TubeTraps are definitely not a gimmick; they’ve made a true believer out of me!

– Fett