The Neve 8068 MkII is one of the most highly regarded consoles in music history. Its sound can be heard on multiple records and its feature set has helped engineers and artists create timeless classics.
In this pureMix.net Exclusive, Grammy Award Winning Engineer, Andrew Scheps goes over the feature set of his 64 channel Neve 8068 MkII, originally from his Los Angeles based studio, Punkerpad West, that now resides in the stunning Monnow Valley Studio in Wales.
Learn the ins and outs of the Neve 8068 MkII console as Andrew explains the signal flow, eq section, routing, and bussing as well as the role this console played in the development of his Rear Bus mixing technique.
00:00:07 Hey kids, we're back once again
at Monnow Valley Studios in
Wales and very appropriately
we're going to talk about
the Neve 8068 Mark II console
that I have installed here.
00:00:20 It partners with the studio,
which is a really cool thing,
amazing tracking room and now an
amazing tracking console with it.
00:00:26 And we decided well,
while we're here,
shooting all kinds of videos,
we should talk about the console itself.
00:00:32 So really briefly, this console was
built in two halves, it's two consoles
put together, the first one
was built in I believe 1979,
I think the other half
was built in 1981 ish,
sort of the end of the run for the
8068 mark 2.
00:00:47 And also,
the 8068 was the last model of
large format Class A and Class AB
console that Neve built,
after this they went into
the 8100 series and then
that led on eventually to the V, the VR,
the 88 R and all of the modern consoles
that are built under the Neve name.
00:01:08 So the first thing to talk about this
console is that it is an In-line console.
00:01:12 Traditionally recording consoles
before this point were split consoles.
00:01:18 Well traditionally the very first consoles
just had a certain number of channels
and that would be for microphones
that would then be combined
to mono to either go to tape or to
go to broadcast and that was it.
00:01:31 Once multi-track tape became a big part
of studios, then you actually started
to need part of the console to monitor
all of the different tracks coming back.
00:01:40 So the first consoles that were built
for that would have a channel section
and a monitor section.
00:01:45 The channel section
was for the microphones
and the monitor section
was for returning the tape.
00:01:50 And for instance,
if you've seen the Sound City documentary,
that is a Neve console
that is a split console,
the channel section looks very
much like this Neve 8068,
and then the monitor section
is very very simple.
00:02:01 There is just a knob for level
and then there is an assignment
for left speaker or right speaker.
00:02:07 So it really truly was just
to monitor the tape machine.
00:02:11 Then the idea of an inline
console was born
and this is one of the first
consoles that was built this way
but there were several others
built around the same time.
00:02:22 And what it does is it combines the channel
section, which is the microphone preamp
and equalizer on its way to tape
and the monitor section
which is the tape track that you've already
recorded coming back through the console
so that you can hear it going to the
speakers and combine it into one module.
00:02:39 So this console has two modes that
you can work in. One is record mode,
which I'll go through briefly first
and then the other is remix mode,
where you take the idea of the
split console and then say:
"You know what, at some point
I'm not recording I'm mixing,
so I want to use the entire
console as the Monitor section".
00:03:00 All right. So in record mode, this module
here is basically split in half,
the way it works is the channel
side is the microphone preamp
through the equalizer,
and then that comes down
to the fader at the bottom.
00:03:17 That fader feeds 4 Aux Sends here,
which I'm gonna talk about
in a little more detail
when we go into the remix mode,
I'll talk about everything on the console,
and then this fader also feeds
the multi-track buses which are up
at the top and this console was built
with 16 multi-track buses because 16 track
tape machines were the new standard
when this console was designed,
24 track tape obviously came later.
00:03:40 Now the Neve 88 RS is will have
48 buses plus multiple stereo buses,
things like that. But when this was built
16 tracks was kind of state of the art.
00:03:50 So that's the channel side of things
then the tape machine return
would come through the line input,
which has a trim right here,
sort of like a mic pre but for line
input, then it would come to this knob
which acts like a fader so this is purely
for level, you would hit a quad bus,
so a front bus and a rear bus,
which you might recognize
from my mixing techniques,
with a pan pot,
and then 4 Aux Sends once again.
00:04:17 So, again, the channel side
is a mic pre with the EQ
going through a fader to 4
sends and multitrack buses.
00:04:26 Then the monitor side is a line input
going through a knob instead of a fader
having four sends and
hitting the quad bus
which is what goes to the speakers
and what you will ultimately hear.
00:04:37 When you go into remix mode,
what you're doing
is you're combining the channel
section and monitor sections
so that there's one input that can be
either microphone or line level,
it doesn't matter which, and that goes
through the EQ, the fader, all 8 Sends,
all 16 multi-track buses and the quad bus,
it goes absolutely everywhere
and I'm going to walk you
through the entire channel
so you see what these things are
and what that does is it leaves
this knob completely unused,
so this knob is obsolete
when you're in remix mode.
00:05:08 Let's talk about the actual channel itself.
00:05:11 The heart of any
older Neve console
is the microphone
preamp and the EQ.
00:05:15 This you've probably
seen a million times
racked up, used separately.
00:05:20 So you've got a
microphone preamp here
which is based on
a 1272 amplifier,
and then you've got on
this particular console,
a three Band EQ with high-pass
and low-pass filters.
00:05:32 So the model number on
this console is a 31102.
00:05:36 It is exactly the same microphone preamp
an equalizer as the 1084,
the difference is this only has a
microphone input whereas a 1084
had a microphone
input and a line input.
00:05:49 The 1084 was built for
the split consoles.
00:05:51 This was built specifically
to be used in an inline console
so that the line input comes
from elsewhere in the channel
and when you switch to line it just
basically turns off the microphone preamp
and puts the line input in instead.
00:06:07 So the very first part of the channel
is deciding whether you're going
to listen to the microphone input
or the line input.
00:06:13 And there's a master switch for the
whole console or you can individually
have any channel be any input.
00:06:19 So for mixing let's say
this would be on line input.
00:06:23 In that case this microphone preamp
is completely unused,
and you've got this line trim right at the
beginning to help set your gain structure.
00:06:31 Let's say something is recorded
very quietly or very loudly,
you can actually tweak the input level
to the channel with this line trim here.
00:06:38 So that's the first thing that happens.
00:06:41 The next thing that happens is
you go through the equalizer.
00:06:43 So there's an EQ in and out button,
you've got a high-pass filter here
with some fixed frequencies
and I'm not going to bother
documenting the frequencies but there
you go, all just fixed frequency here.
00:06:56 You've got a low-pass filter here which
is not on most of the three band EQs,
the 1084 and the 31102
I believe are the only three band
Neve EQs that have
the low-pass filter.
00:07:09 It's a good sounding filter.
It doesn't go down that low.
00:07:11 I think 6 kHz is the lowest it goes
so you're not gonna get
telephone effects out of it
but it's great if you're using
more traditional low pass filtering.
00:07:20 Then you've got a straight 3 band EQ
with a high-shelf and a low-shelf
with selectable frequency
and then boost and cut,
selectable frequency, boost and cut.
00:07:28 And again, the 1084 is the only
3 Band EQ I believe,
with selectable frequency
for the high-shelf.
00:07:36 The 1073 is fixed at 12 kHz
and the 1066 is
fixed at 10.5 kHz
whereas on this particular
EQ you've got 10 kHz,
12 kHz, 16 kHz,
so you can really use
it as an air band here.
00:07:48 And then the low-shelf is
a traditional low-shelf,
bunch of different frequencies,
boost and cut,
then you've got a mid-range band
which is a bell curve which has
a lot of frequencies,
it goes all the way from
350 Hz up to 7.2 kHz
with a bunch of stops in between,
mostly set in octaves but not exactly.
00:08:08 And then you've got a boost and cut
but then you also have a high Q button.
00:08:12 And this is one of the earlier sort of
not variable Q equalizers but selectable Q
so you could have a wide bell
or a tight bell.
00:08:23 So those are your choices in the equalizer.
You come out of the equalizer and then
you start feeding the
rest of the channel,
now the phase button is
up here on the equalizer,
it's not actually in this
part of the signal flow,
it comes at the very beginning.
00:08:38 Doesn't really matter but
inside of any piece of analog gear,
unless it's been very heavily modified,
the audio is actually unbalanced,
you don't have balanced audio going through
this EQ and going
through this fader.
00:08:52 The balancing of audio was
only done for interconnecting
it helps you run audio
over long distances,
it helps take care of interference from RF,
that sort of thing across mic cables
but once you get into the piece of gear,
the very first thing you do
is you lose usually the negative
side of the balance signal
and you're left with a
ground and a positive.
00:09:12 So there's absolutely no way
to flip the polarity at that point,
you only have one signal,
so flipping the polarity
happens at the very
input of the channel
and that's the way most
analog gear is set up,
it's either at the very
input or the very output
because you don't have a
balance signal to flip.
00:09:28 Anyway.
00:09:29 Moving on, you come out of this EQ
and then you actually go over
to the patchbay and that's where
the insert is on this console.
00:09:38 So if you think about the Pro Tools
mixer you have the concept of plugins
which are on inserts or hardware
inserts and those come at the beginning
of the channel before the fader and
it's exactly the same here on this Neve.
00:09:50 You go out to the patchbay through
a piece of wire where you have
an insert Send patch point so you can
put a patch cord in, patch in another EQ
if you want to use a different type of EQ,
or a compressor, or a Sansamp
or a guitar pedal or a modular synth,
whatever you want to do,
then you come back
into the patch bay
to the insert return and
a piece of wire brings you back
into the channel.
00:10:11 Then at that point
you hit the fader,
so this fader takes the signal after
the EQ and after the insert and turns it
up and down and then in remix
mode the output of this fader
goes to lots of different places.
00:10:25 First place we can talk about is all
the way up at the top
which are the 16
multi-track buses.
00:10:30 If you want this to go to
track one on your tape machine
or input one on your Pro Tools rig
or your Cubase rig or whatever it is
you're recording on and you have it
wired so that bus 1 goes to input 1,
you just hit the number one button
and now whatever is in this fader
comes out of bus 1.
00:10:47 If you also want it in bus 2 you can
hit bus 2 you can put in all 16 of these
and it will go to all 16
bus outputs of the console.
00:10:56 Now the reason you have this is,
let's say you're recording
a electric guitar,
and you've got two
microphones on the amplifier
and you want to mix
them together,
and I highly recommend combining
your microphones as you record.
00:11:08 You would have two channels
side by side and you would EQ,
you maybe have an insert.
00:11:13 You set the balance,
you like the way this sounds,
you would take both
channels to Bus 1
and now there's a little mixer
that takes the two channels
mixes them together and
they come out of one wire
that can then go off to be recorded
on tape or in your computer.
00:11:28 So you have 16 of these but there's
also a button that says 'Direct'.
00:11:32 Now right now we're on Channel 44 of
the 64 channels of the console.
00:11:37 So, on the patch bay there are 16
group outputs which are all little mixers
for 1 through 16 but then there's also
a channel output 01 through 64,
so every single channel has
its own output.
00:11:50 And the way we have this studio setup
is we have 64 inputs and 64 outputs
of the Pro Tools system and they are
hard wired to line inputs 01 through 64
as well as direct outs
01 through 64 feeding Pro Tools.
00:12:03 So that's the multi-track Busses and
the only other cool thing up here
is that there's a pan pot.
00:12:08 So let's say you're blending
back in the day when you
actually had 16 track tape,
you'd be blending lots of drum microphones
together to be a stereo drum kit,
so you would bring up those
microphones on different channels,
you would assign them all to
let's say 1 and 2.
00:12:22 So that would be tracks 1 and 2,
then you hit the PAN button to bring in
a pan circuit and you're panning
between the odd and the even buses.
00:12:32 We could have a rack tom there,
second rack tom there, floor tom over there
and now we're recording a stereo picture
of these three channels,
much like you would while you're mixing
but this mixes to the multi-track buses.
00:12:45 Very cool.
00:12:46 The second place that the
channel goes after the fader
is to all of the auxiliary sends.
00:12:53 In record mode, remember,
they're split up between
the channel input and the monitor input,
in remix mode there's only one input
so all eight of these sends
are being fed by this fader.
00:13:04 If they're in post fader mode,
pre and post fader,
the pretty obvious thing,
if you think about the actual signal flow,
post fader means take the signal after
the fader and that's
what goes to the Send.
00:13:16 So the way this console is laid out
is you've got basically four mono Sends,
which are the light blue knobs.
So 1, 2, 5 and 6 are mono sends.
00:13:27 You bring the button up that's
built into the knob to turn it on
and then you've got level.
00:13:33 Turn it on, turn it up.
00:13:35 That's it. What's cool about that
is you don't have to turn it down
to get rid of it.
You can turn it up,
take it out of the reverb if
that's what you have set up,
put it back in, take it out.
00:13:44 So you actually have an on-off
switch built into the knob
which is a very clever
way to save space.
00:13:50 A really cool design there.
00:13:51 Then you've got two stereo sends
which are grouped for 3-4 and
7-8, and they're identical
so I'll just show you the way
it works on 3-4.
00:14:00 Here you've got a stereo level pot.
So this is exactly the same
as the other sends where
if the switch is up it's on
and then this is the
level going to 3-4
and then this is the
pan between 3-4.
00:14:12 So if you want you can use Aux
3 and Aux 4 as 2 mono sends
by just hard panning
everything that's going to them
or you can use it as a Stereo Send
and pan in-between. So you could
have a nice send to a stereo chamber
or something like that.
00:14:27 The other thing is, you might
realize we've got a switch leftover.
00:14:31 Well, this switch, on the pan pot,
switches this send
to be pre fader.
00:14:36 And what's cool about that is if
you're doing a cue send to headphones
you wouldn't want a fader and
certainly not the cut (mute)
to affect the headphone send.
00:14:46 So back in the day where
the console was doing
all of your routing as opposed to sending
out of Pro Tools or something like that,
this was a way to get a pre fader
send that couldn't be interrupted
by whatever was going on with
the fader and with the mute.
00:14:59 It is also, as it turns out,
I believe on this console
it is pre insert.
00:15:05 So you wouldn't get the benefit
of any of the sound shaping
you've been doing through the channel
but that's just where the
signal gets picked off,
it's from very early
in the channel.
00:15:14 And 7-8 works
exactly the same way.
00:15:16 This is on level, Pan, Pre-Post.
00:15:19 So there are eight Aux Sends,
which was quite a lot for this area.
00:15:25 If you think about it
in Pro Tools right now,
not only do you have
10 Aux Sends per channel
but they can all be different.
00:15:32 On a console like this, Aux 1,
on every single channel,
comes out of one hole on the patch bay
so it goes to the same place.
00:15:39 So you really had to think about what
you were going to put on your Aux Sends
because you would have individual control
of how much of each channel went there
and then for other effects and
reverbs and things like that
you would actually use multi-track buses
to get to the other effects
but you don't have as
much control up here,
you only have on and off
you don't have level.
00:16:00 So you really have to plan out how
your mix session was going to go.
00:16:04 All right, enough about Aux Sends.
00:16:06 Then the only other place the signal goes
is the speakers so you can listen to it.
00:16:10 This console was built when
Quad was going to be a thing.
00:16:14 They've tried that a bunch of times over
the course of the recorded music industry,
it never really caught on.
I mean obviously 5.1 exists now
but there was gonna be quad
and there were quad turntables,
people had four speakers set up
in the corners of the room
and you'd sit in the middle of the room,
put on your quad album of sound effects
which had a siren going around in circles,
and then you might take some
recreational pharmaceuticals
and then you'd go put on
all your stereo records
and only listen to 2 speakers
because that's what everybody
was doing their records in.
00:16:44 So the way the quad bus works is,
the output of this fader feeds
these four buttons
and there's basically a
button for each speaker.
00:16:51 So this is the front left speaker,
front right speaker, rear left, rear right.
00:16:56 And when I was mixing on this
console, what it gave me was,
I have a stereo bus here
for listening left and right,
but then I have an
extra stereo bus
just sitting around doing nothing.
And it's the fastest way to get a copy
of whatever is going to the mix
to go to another stereo bus
which for me would go off
to my rear bus compressor.
00:17:16 That's why it's
called 'Rear bus',
it's the rear bus
of the Neve console
and in my head that label
has just come to mean the stereo compressor
that almost everything is in.
00:17:26 So I've kept the label 'Rear Bus'.
00:17:28 The only thing left on the console
we haven't talked about
is the panning for the Monitor buses.
00:17:33 And basically it is not
a true quad panner.
00:17:37 It is either a left or right panner
or a front back panner.
00:17:41 You switch the pan circuit in and tell it
which set of speakers it's panning between
and then you've got left or front,
right or rear and that's it.
00:17:51 And if you're going to hard pan
then you just switch the
pan circuit out completely.
00:17:55 And remember again in the mode
where we're in remix mode,
this knob is not used at all.
00:18:01 So that's the entire console.
00:18:03 It looks very much like
the Pro Tools mixer
and that's because the Pro Tools
mixer is based on traditional signal flow.
00:18:09 There you go, Neve 8068 Mk II.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Andrew Scheps is a music producer, mixing engineer and record label owner based in the United Kingdom. He has received Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for his work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium, Album Of The Year for Adele's 21, and also Best Reggae Album for Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta.
Andrew started as a musician, but found that what he enjoyed most was working behind the scenes. This led him to study recording at the University of Miami. After graduating, he spent some time working for Synclavier, and then on the road with Stevie Wonder (as a keyboard tech) and Michael Jackson (mixing live sound). But he found his home in the studio, and he honed his craft working for producers such as Rob Cavallo, Don Was and Rick Rubin.
Andrew collaborated with Waves in order to create his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps 73 EQ and the Scheps Parallel Particles.
Andrew is one of the best known mixing engineers in the world, well-known for his Rear Bus mixing techniques that he developed working on his 64 input Neve 8068 console and his love for distortion of any kind. If you are watching pureMix videos you will see that he managed to carry his analog sound signature over to a fully portable digital rig. These days, Andrew mixes completely In The Box as it allows him much greater flexibility and the ability to work on several project simultaneously.
Andrew has collaborated with Waves in creating his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps Omni Channel, Scheps 73 EQ and Scheps Parallel Particles.
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Andrew, come back. Very good overview from this legend console!
JorgeZM
2019 Mar 13
Nice!
andre.mc
2019 Mar 08
Oh thank you so much for that wonderful presentation.I am sure he meant well.But I now have brain fog.The thing for me is that in order to understand anything on any subject, I first need to learn the technical terminology for that particular compartment or profession.The order in which Andrew does things on that mixer is something I will have to apply to the DAW I am working in.I will have to watch the tutorial several times in order to even begin to grasp the theory of it and apply it physically to the order in which I mix.I wish I had his mindset sometimes.
simon.br
2019 Mar 04
He’s a genius and a dude. I loved this video. Having only ever used a DAW the overview of the classic Neve desk was super informative to me. Great work.
mataran
2019 Mar 03
Thanks Andrew! Always instructive and so well explained.
Trace23
2019 Feb 28
Great explanation of a Neve console if you've never seen one. Thanks Andrew.
