How a studio compressor became the secret ingredient in an iconic Led Zeppelin guitar moment – the story of Universal Audio’s 1176 compressor
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There’s an argument to be made that the 1176 Peak Limiter is one of the most important bits of studio gear ever made. Launched by Universal Audio founder Bill Putnam in 1967, this studio compressor has become a bedrock of pretty much every recording studio, and a vital tool for a truly gobsmacking range of artists and producers – from Prince and Vangelis to Rick Rubin and Steve Albini.
“The 1176 has sustained UA’s reputation for tone and quality more than any other product,” says Will Shanks, Universal Audio’s Senior Product Designer. “Before the 1176 there was the 176 – that was a tube design, and the first to have dedicated attack, release and ratio controls. Bill Putnam wanted an extremely fast attack time with even greater range for gain reduction. He got there with the FET-based 1176, and the rest is history.”
The UAFX 1176 brings the iconic Peak Limiter to a pedal format (Photo by Adam Gasson / Guitar.com)
Whether used to bring character to 50 Cent’s vocals, Kenny Beats’ samples or Travis Barker’s drums, the 1176 has played a part in countless iconic recordings, but it is the compressor’s use in guitar that’s perhaps its most interesting – because it shows the wonderful ability of musicians to take a piece of gear and utilise it in a way that its creator never intended.
Hair Of The Dog
Perhaps the most famous example of this regarding the 1176 is how Jimmy Page got the iconic guitar sound on Black Dog. It’s a sound that launched a thousand bands, but despite producer Andy Johns admitting that, “it sounds like some guy in the Albert Hall with a bunch of Marshalls” it was actually recorded with a pair of 1176s running straight into the desk.
“The guitar parts in Black Dog sound like nothing else,” Shanks exclaims. “Keep in mind, there are no guitar amps, just a pair of 1176s: one overdriven with no gain reduction, into another 1176 with all ratios pushed in. With Jimmy joyfully rushing the beat!”
But how exactly do you overdrive a compressor? Well, again it comes back to what we said up top about musicians taking gear and using it in ways the creator never intended. In the case of the 1176, Putnam surely never intended for users to push in all four of the unit’s compression ratio buttons at the same time, but when they did, some British studio engineers soon discovered that this ‘All Buttons’ mode actually created a wonderful harmonic distortion sound that was perfect for guitar. This trick was an insider secret amongst British studio engineers at the time, but Page’s Black Dog tone needed a little extra, as Johns explained back in 2003.
“I had been trying to get this sound from Buffalo Springfield for a long time and I met Bill House. He said, ‘I just put two of them in series.’ He didn’t really want to let me know what ‘they’ were. Anyways, he meant two 1176s in series, one of which has the compression buttons punched out, so it is like an amp. You hit the front of the next compressor really hard and make the mic amp distort a bit with the EQ —a bit of bottom to make it sing.
“I couldn’t have done it without the 1176s. There is not another compressor that will do that, because you can take out the compression stuff.”
Getting It Right
The 1176 features a dual mode that emulates the classic Led Zeppelin tone (Photo by Adam Gasson / Guitar.com)
The impact of Black Dog’s guitar tone can still be felt to this day, and so it’s not surprising that many people want to emulate that sound. Universal Audio’s industry-leading digital circuit emulations have made the 1176 available as a plugin for some time, but now for guitarists who want that sound in their effects chain, we have the UAFX 1176 pedal – a stompbox-sized recreation of the legendary compressor.
And just like its big brothers, the UAFX 1176 doesn’t just function as a fantastic studio-quality compressor, it has a unique Sustain mode designed to replicate the soaring lead lines created by Lowell George, but also a ‘Dual’ mode that takes the double-1176 sound of Black Dog and distils it into a pedal.
But how do they do it? It’s surely a lot more straightforward to create a digital recreation of a pedal doing what it’s supposed to do, but how do you make it do what it’s not, such as with All Button mode?
“It starts with a circuit diagram. Almost all of our emulations are based on circuit emulation,” explains Shanks. “Once the circuit emulation is completed by the software engineer, it is then “fit” to a physical unit to account for the real, measurable component values of the reference hardware that make it unique. We call these the “golden” reference units. These are great specimens and serviced to what they would have been new. The 1176 pedal is based on the 1176LN Rev E. For my part, I listen to the software side by side against the hardware until no matter what type of signal I put through it, at every possible setting, I am getting a great match.”
It turns out that UA’s approach to modelling the actual circuit, not just the sound, means that getting that famous ‘All Buttons’ sound just happens automatically with the recreation.
Photo by Adam Gasson / Guitar.com
“The circuit recreation should automatically provide these uses,” confirms Shanks. “The most famous unintended use case is ‘All Buttons’, and is available on the 1176 pedal. This operation rewires the unit in a unique way, and messes with the bias, getting an even dirtier, more explosive sound when pushed. I recall the software engineer telling me the plugin’s all-buttons mode just automatically worked like the hardware from the moment he finished the code. It was validation that the circuit emulation was done correctly.”
Good Things In Small Packages
The 1176 is a great compressor regardless of how you want to use it – as proven by the artists that have used it. Jack White’s //Icky Thump// tone? That’s an 1176. Dave Grohl’s guitars on Foo Fighters, The Pretender? According to engineer Rich Costey, a pair of 1176s was used to “pump them up a bit and make them sound more aggressive”. Steve Vai buys them whenever he sees them, Joe Satriaini and Matt Bellamy use them heavily in the studio… John Frusciante has six of em’!
And that’s the magic of the UAFX 1176 pedal – it offers all the wonderful versatility and tone-enhancing features of a full-sized rack unit in a pedal that can squeeze into even the most compact of pedalboards. For decades it’s been a secret weapon of some of the biggest names in music history – and it’s now more accessible and guitar-friendly than ever before.
Find out more about the 1176 and all the UAFX range at uaudio.com
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