1984 — During the last chorus of “Almost Paradise,” 14-year-old gets up courage to lower his hands to partner’s hips before end of junior high dance. 1988 — Peter Gabriel scores Scorsese’s controversial take on life of Jesus. Virtual villagers 5 free download. Thousands give/receive massages to same otherworldly soundtrack 1999 — Cher’s “Believe” wins pop Grammy 2006 — In Los Angeles hillside home studio, analog-weaned engineer enjoys DAW EQing for the first time The layman would say music is the common denominator.

The engineer knows it’s the SSL 4000, the recording console that has channeled more emotional juice than perhaps any other in history. As the de facto popular mixing standard since its introduction in 1977, the SSL 4000 has trained generations of listeners and engineers what a record should sound like. It is a sound so important and a tool so effective that I entertained buying a used SSL 4k console for $60,000 until I realized I’d need also to hire a full-time assistant and a part-time tech to keep it running. Today, Waves has endeavored to channel these 30 years of collective emotion into a more manageable 256MB of data. Waves they have made. Nine years ago, around the time he started mixing his own projects in Pro Tools LE and just after Tom Lord Alge — one of the most notorious SSL 4000 devotees — had mixed seven songs to my three on Spymob’s Epic Records debut, my drummer friend Eric Fawcett (N*E*R*D, Spymob, Lee-Hom Wang) wondered aloud why no one had yet offered SSL processors in plug-in form. In 2004, Digidesign aped the SSL stereo bus comp with its visually similar “Impact” plug-in (“Fool me once, shame on — shame on you.