How UA gear and UAD plugins were used in the creation of the sound for Shadow of the Tomb Raider
“Since we owned a few Universal Audio Apollo interfaces (first gen Silver Faces, Black Faces, Twins and Twins MkII) with Unison preamps for a long time, we decided to put their Unison emulations to the test and to be honest, we couldn’t hear the difference between our Neve preamps through the Burl converter and the Neve Unisons through the Apollo converters on a 100+ tracks piece of music,” Cravo explains. “Maybe we would be able to if we did more scientific tests, with same sources, recorded at the same time with matched microphones, but in the real world, they sounded at least as good as the more expensive signal chain.” Once the team decided to go with the Apollo setup, they had the Apollo console running two stereo inputs at all times. One input always had the Josephson C700S in M/S mode into a Neve 1073 Unison, while the second input was an U87 together with a Gefell UM930 in M/S using a different Unison preamp. “Lots of tracks used the UA610 or the Manley VoxBox or the Helios 69,” says Cravo. “The input chain choice was made in real time, playing through both sets of mics and choosing the one that fits the track. “Brian and myself are longtime UAD users, and because their software and hardware is both bulletproof and sounds amazing, we could rely on it to deliver the best possible quality in the shortest amount of time, every time, without cutting corners.”