Engineer, producer and educator Bob Bullock began his career in Los Angeles working alongside Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac and Art Garfunkel during the 1970s – as a number of LA studios were installing Harrison Audio’s first mixing console.

Having relocated to Nashville in the early 1980s, he has been reacquainting himself with its sound through the addition of Harrison’s new 500 Series analogue modules to his Cool Springs Mix studio.

Harrison’s 32C, introduced in 1975, was the first to offer 32 tracking buses and inline monitoring. Bullock was on the staff at Kendun Recorders in Burbank, California, when the studio installed one of the first 32C consoles in the LA area, with other facilities soon following suit.

‘I worked a lot on Harrison consoles in the late ’70s,’ he recalls. ‘They were all over Los Angeles at that time. A lot of its appeal was the channel strip layout. It was a very well designed desk, and I loved working on it.’

Coming up to date, Harrison has not only released the 32Classic analogue mixing console, but also introduced three 500 series modules that share some of the DNA of the original 32C and other early consoles – with Bullock taking three pairs of units. The first, the 32Cpre+, incorporates Harrison’s renowned high-pass and low-pass filters, as well as the same transformer-coupled microphone preamp as the new 32Classic console, which derives its design from the original 32C. The MR3eq also includes a high-pass filter and is based on the three-band parametric design originally developed for the Harrison MR3 console, which was introduced in 1981.

‘The preamp and the EQ modules are very much the same as the desk,’ Bullock says. ‘I was quite impressed. They work just as expected,’ Bullock reports. ‘I’m so familiar with the preamps, which sound very clean to me, and the EQs. I like them now for the same reason that I’ve always liked them. I’ve always been a fan of that EQ, because I can zero in on things and they’re very smooth.’

Bullock has worked on more than 50 gold and platinum albums, and nine Grammy Award-winning projects. His credits include such country music legends as Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Tanya Tucker and Patty Loveless.

These days, he focuses on helping independent artists worldwide refine their sound.

‘My wheelhouse of music is what I would call more organic stuff,’ he says. ‘I track with live musicians, usually six to eight musicians on a tracking date. Kyle Hirschman – who does a lot of the engineering with me – and I have tried the Harrison modules across as many different instruments as we could, mostly acoustic stuff like acoustic guitars, mandolins and fiddles, and we’ve been very pleased with them.’

The third new 500 Series module, the Comp compressor, owes its design to decades of experience in signal processing design. ‘The only module that was new to me was the Comp,’ says Bullock, since the original 32C didn’t offer a built-in compressor. ‘It works really well and has very few controls, so it’s quick to dial in. One of the things that my assistant and I both noticed, working on a few different projects with the compressor, is that it’s very musical, which just means that it’s not harsh sounding. You don’t really hear it working and I feel like I can’t over-compress with it. You can compress quite a lot and get that compression without feeling there’s any pumping. I can’t make it sound bad, and that’s a good quality to me.’

Like the classic outboard compressors that Bullock has been using for years in the studio, Harrison’s Comp module offers few controls – makeup gain, release time, ratio and threshold. ‘You plug it in and you don’t have to fuss with it very long,’ he says. ‘It either gives you what you’re looking for at that moment or it doesn’t, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time. So I really have nothing but favourable things to say about it.’

Reflexting on his time in LA, he says: ‘One of the things that was always appealing to me about the Harrison desk in the ’70s was the layout, because we had to work quickly and efficiently. You also want stuff that you can depend on to work well, and that’s not going to easily distort or break up on you. Because when you’re moving quickly, you’ve got to count on the gear being there for you. You want it to sound great – and it did – but you also have to be able to move quickly. And with Harrison’s inline channel strips, I could do all the things I needed to do very quickly.’

Bullock had an opportunity to visit Harrison Audio in Nashville to try out the new 32Classic console and compare it to the 32C, which is still very familiar to him. As with the original console, he was able to get the sounds that he wanted on the 32Classic quickly and easily. ‘I was very pleased,’ he says. ‘We recorded some things that turned out like I expected, and I didn’t have to do a lot to make them sound really good.’

More: www.harrisonconsoles.com