Sick of spending your hard-earned dough on fleshing out your studio with useful gear? Abbey Road now has the paperweight for you.
Let’s face it: Abbey Road used to be a lot cooler than it is now. Yes, it was almost a hundred years ago, but the EMI recording studios on Abbey Road was literally the spot that audio engineering was born.
Studios 1, 2, and 3 were a technological Frontierland where the engineers were literally engineers, with the EMI technicians often being distinguished from the other rabble of sound techs with their customary white lab coats. After all, they were engineers.
The EMI studios at Abbey Road was where the large-format mixing console took shape, initially for radio broadcast and film mixing, but eventually for music as well. As a result, Abbey Road saw some pioneering bits of kit from designers like Bill Putnam aka ‘the father of modern recording’, and icons like Rupert Neve grace their acoustically-treated halls.
But as has been the recent way for many contemporary commercial studios, no longer is it enough to just run the space and make music. Horizontal integration seems to be the catchphrase of the decade for Abbey Road, with their website featuring a variety of different online mixing services that access remotely, a series of boutique plugins and sample packs, and an education stream under the Abbey Road Institute.
These are neither here nor there (the plugins are actually pretty amazing, though). Abbey Road’s latest memorabilia sojourn: a paperweight! It features an XLR port from one of the ancient desks they’ve fished out of the tech dungeon they keep under the studios.
Preserved in beautiful epoxy resin, these paperweights are selling for 150 pounds, which is a perfect price if you’ve finally decided that you just have too many plugins, or that your sample library is just too big.
Yes, it may be a decent piece of memorabilia, but keep in mind that you’re also basically buying recycled garbage. Yes, it’s garbage from Abbey Road, but you could also just pocket the £150 and go through their bins. Who knows, there might be some of Paul McCartney’s 60-year-old cigarettes hiding deep at the bottom! Toss that in some epoxy and you’ve got another fantastic birthday present for Dad.
Thank me later.
