The Scheps 73 is Waves take on the famous Neve 1073 preamp. Originally meant as a module for the 80 series of mixing boards, the hardware 1073 as a standalone has been for over 50 years one of the most used and revered preamps.
Before you do anything else – compare this to the UAD version here, if for no other reason to see a little background on the original Neve 1073.
If you do a quick look at the UAD Neve 1073 or the IK Multimedia TR5 EQ-73 you can see there are there are lots of differences!
Andrew Scheps’ model is different from whatever UAD used. (See below for one possible reason.) Perhaps it has something to do with his beard. All of these plugins sound good, I just lay awake at night wondering which actually sounds most like a real 1073. I do have to say, that 400k dip in the Waves version without even doing anything makes for a pretty sweet pre-amp sound.
According to Kerrin Greally (a sound engineer ‘down under’), Andrew Scheps has said he didn’t want to have it emulate one specific 1073, he wanted it to be more ‘neutral’ sounding so that he could put 20 of them in his mix and not find that there’s a weird build-up.
Hints:
- The Preamp and Drive buttons are pretty cool. You can really control THD and distortion (as in adding, mainly) with the Drive.
- In addition to the mic/line input, you also have input sliders. They (magically) can increase or decrease the volume without messing with the mic/line gain.
- It really takes some experimenting to get the best possible sound for any given input, mics in particular. The various settings for Preamp and Drive can cause some drastic changes, including affecting your EQ curves.
