Brian Lucey’s Magic Garden Mastering Rig in the Cloud was designed over 15 years ago and has been used daily on 9 Grammy winning records and thousands of releases. Now available to you for all your stems and mixes, this custom chain was meticulously re-built for Access Analog by Brian Lucey.
Note: Select the rack “Magic Garden” in the plugin just below the password in order to connect to this chain.
Brian Lucey’s Magic Garden Mastering Rig in the Cloud was designed over 15 years ago and has been used daily on 9 Grammy winning records and thousands of releases. Now available to you for all your stems and mixes, this custom chain was meticulously re-built for Access Analog by Brian Lucey.
It starts with the transient rich and punchy Mytek 8 x 192 D/A conversion. More compressed and more transients?! The Mytek is followed by a custom Overstayer Model 3706 Stereo Field Effect for Jensen transformer color, and FET smack. Think of a pair of matched 1176s, with a cleaner transformer. The highly modified Focusrite 315 MKII EQ follows next for clean solid state tone shaping and high pass with 40 caps removed and all ICs now Burr Brown OPA 627s not 5534s. Clean and lovely. Elysia Alpha Compressor serial #001 is next, doing Class A SSL-style VCA compression in MS and Stereo. This piece is incredibly versatile from a touch of comp to a musical slam, and also does MS EQ on the sides. The Fairman TMEQ is an exquisite boost EQ with excellent phase response and 22 ear selected NOS tubes that bring all music alive. The venerable Pacific Microsonics AD conversion sends back to digital. This beast was $24,000 in it’s day and still wins shootouts as a best AD ever. The lowly Waves L2 Ultramaximizer is employed next with a fixed setting of 1.4 db reduction, where it uniquely shines in popping the midrange just a touch. Finally, the Crane Song HEDD 192 rounds off digital waveforms with harmonic color working in the digital domain from subtle settings to heavy ones, adjustable on three green knobs.
The sum of these parts with custom NOS tubes, Acoustic Zen Matrix REF II cables, upgrade or removed capacitors, etc. brings any style alive in ways that have to be heard to appreciate.
Try it on groups, on a mix or for mastering. The rig is powerful and fun!
INTRODUCTION
CHAIN OVERVIEW
CHAIN PHILOSOPHY
SIGNAL FLOW
PRESETS OVERVIEW
GAIN STAGE OVERVIEW
Award-winning Mastering Engineer Brian Lucey is one of the most prominent Industry Engineers and has worked with renowned artists such as Depeche Mode, The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys Liam Gallagher, Royal Blood, Marilyn Manson, “The Greatest Showman” and more.
Beginning in the late 80s NYC East Village, Brian Lucey was a professional musician (guitar, voice, piano) who became a student of Robert Fripp and Guitar Craft through the early/mid 90s. He has many years of experience in band creativity: writing, arranging, performing, tracking, mixing and producing organic music (Ampex MM1200 2″). Mastering began in the late 90s and his experience in all other phases has lead to a uniquely musical take on the craft.
Originally from the secret music city of Columbus, Ohio, he now works out of Los Angeles.
