Waves Abbey Road EMI TG12345 User Manual - page 4
Waves / Abbey Road TG12345
User Guide
4
For several months in the summer and fall of 1968, the new desk was placed in the studios’
‘experimental room’ for testing. Abbey Road’s engineers ran ‘clone’ sessions to compare TG12345
and REDD, with two sets of mics placed in the room: one going to the REDD .51, the other to the
TG. The results were superb: TG12345 proved to have a cleaner, brighter and punchier sound than
its predecessor, with unprecedented top end sheen and sparkle.
On the weekend of November 23, 1968, TG12345 MK I was installed in the control room of Abbey
Road’s Studio Two and connected to the 3M 8-track tape machine. It was first used in a recording
session with the Shadows. In mid-1969, the very last Beatles album, Abbey Road, was made on the
TG12345.
The TG12345 went through several revisions during the 1970s. TG12345 MK II replaced the treble
filter with the same presence filter that existed on the main and group cassettes of MK I. The
ergonomics of the dynamics section also underwent changes. MK III and MK IV added new utility
options, but the sound processors (dynamics and filters) remained unchanged.
1.3 The EMI TG12345 Plugin
The TG12345 plugin is a channel strip with a three-band EQ. Its treble filters deliver a fixed bell filter
at 5K for boost, and a fixed shelf filter at 10K for cut. The bass filters are fixed shelf filters at 50 Hz.
We have also added a bell filter for presence boost/cut, ranging from 500 Hz to 10 kHz. In the
original TG12345 MK I desk, the presence filter was part of the group cassette. We have added it to
the TG12345 channel strip for a better user experience.
The TG12345 has a Dynamics section with a limiter/compressor (7:1 and 2:1, respectively) that has
a fixed attack time and six options for release time.
The plugin offers three routing options, allowing users to determine where to place the EQ (Bass +
Treble), Presence, and Dynamics sections within the signal flow:
• EQ>>Dyn>>Pres – EQ first, then Dynamics, then Presence.
• Dyn>>EQ>>Pres – Dynamics first, then EQ, then Presence.
• EQ>>Pres>>Dyn – EQ first, then Presence, then Dynamics.
The default setting is EQ>>Pres>>Dyn. Together, these three options run the gamut of the routing
options offered by the different versions (MK I-IV) of the original TG12345 desk.