Vic Keary & Nick Terry : Behind The Gear with Thermionic Culture

Vic Keary and Nick Terry, along with partner Jon Bailes, are the people behind the UK gear company Thermionic Culture. Larry and I both have several pieces of their gear that we really like, so when the chance to meet the Thermionic team at Nick's London-based The Premises Studios came up we hopped on the Tube and dropped in. Vic's career goes back to the days of Joe Meek [ Tape Op #100 ] and he built his first limiter for Pete Townshend. The partnership works well, with the younger Nick running his studio, making records and coming up with ideas that he bounces off Vic, while Jon handles the mechanical design and look of the gear. They met years ago at Chiswick Reach Studios when Nick was fresh out of college, playing in bands, moving into engineering and knew a bit of electronics.

JB: Vic, you have a long history of working in studios and designing tube gear?

V: Yeah. I was inspired by Joe Meek — I used to work at Lansdowne Studios and Meek had just left there. I came to work the day after he left and someone else went up the ladder. I was impressed with the stuff that he had made. He had some compressors, which were based on the Altec [436/438] design, but they were absolutely an improvement. I always thought, "I could make this better still." So I did. I made a couple of compressors for myself and the first limiter I ever made was sold to Pete Townshend of The Who, and of course, he's still using it! He told me about five years ago, "I haven't changed a valve in it yet." After I left there I didn't do any designing at all for quite a long time. I ran Chalk Farm Studios and on to various other ones. The next studio was Chiswick Reach, and I thought, "Well, I ought to get back into designing again." So we made the Chiswick Reach Compressor, which later evolved into the Phoenix.

JB: So the Phoenix is just a very refined version of those early compressors you built? I have one — I love it.

V: Yes. I always thought I wanted to make a compressor that didn't cover the sound too much, that just sounded really natural, nice and warm without being over the top — unless you really wanted to make it that way. That's how we came up with the Phoenix. There's quite a lot of differences between that and the Altec -the power supply is quite different, it's much more refined. We use negative feedback direct from the output valve to the input valve, which tends to give it a very natural sound without too much pumping. Basically that was it — and different valves now. There are PCC85s in that whereas the Altec used 6BC8s.

JB: I was really impressed with the Phoenix- it's very rare to find a piece of gear that's wired point-to-point.

V: I think it's the only one at the moment that we make completely point-to-point, although we are going to do it with the Fat Bustard as well. Why not? It doesn't cost that much more to do and things always sound much better when they're point-to-point. They just do. There's a version of the Earlybird [mic preamp and EQ] here that's point-to-point and it's the best one we've ever made.

JB: How do you spec your valves? I at one point came across some new old stock tubes and I went through my studio and re-tubed everything that had funky, Russian tubes that should have been good 12AX7s or something.

V: There's nothing wrong with Russian 12AX7s. We use them all the time, but anyway...

JB: We opened up your box and we were like, "There's some weird tubes in here. We haven't seen any of these." So how did you come to the design of those?

V: It's quite simple. 6BC8s, which the Altecs were using were rare — I went to the RCA Receiving Tube Manual, which was like the valve designer's bible. It's got specs pretty much of every tube that's ever been made. I came across the 6BQ7A, which is what we used to begin with, but they were getting a bit scarce. I talked to a friend of mine and he said, "Why don't you try a PCC85?" I'd never heard of it and I'd never used them before — they were made for televisions. He said, "Try using it for audio." So I did, and it worked. It's very similar to the 6BQ7A, except that it's much better quality.

JB: And that's the actual gain change tube?

Yes. The Phoenix is actually just two stages — the gain change tube and then the output.

JB: Where do you do the manufacturing? Is it something you contract out?

V: We contract it out. Jon Bailes does the design for the front panels and the wiring and the circuit boards. He won't do point-to-point wiring [laughter], but he does do all the circuit boards, which is the Culture Vulture [stereo valve distortion unit] and the Rooster [preamp] — the Earlybird's actually a hybrid. He's got a separate company where he designs circuit boards, which are made in China, as is almost everything! We've got another guy called Dave Barrett who does all the point-to-point wiring. He's got a workshop and sits there and this is all he does.

JB: How many Phoenix units does he kick out in a month?

V: [laughter] How many do you think we sell? [laughter] Let's say twenty. But the Phoenix Master Compressor version is actually outselling the standard [valve compressor] version. N: It's got a side chain filter in it now. V: If you're doing stereo master you can control how much of the bass you're actually compressing.

JB: One of the engineers that works in my building owns a mastering studio and he uses the Phoenix all the time on the bus and just raves about it.

N: Yeah, I use this on the mix bus and I find that it is really handy. You can really crank the bottom end and the Phoenix won't overreact.

JB: The other piece of gear that I have is the Pullet EQ, which is just the best sounding guitar EQ.

N: I was doing an album with someone and we were in a little basement studio and the idea came from those little Langevin passive EQ cassettes [EQ-251-A]. This guy had one lying around and I plugged it into a Telefunken mic pre and it was just great. It has two faders-one for the top and one for the bottom-you can select which frequency. And then I went away and thought about it. 

V: The whole idea was to have something to expand the Earlybird [mic preamp], so it's not just sitting there doing nothing while you're doing a mix. I thought it would be nice to have a passive EQ to go with it. 

JB: I have two of the cassette Fairchild passive EQs, but the Pullet blows them away. At first I thought, "Why did they do all midrange frequencies?" And then I started using it and I was like, "Oh, okay. I get it."

N: With that design we could have gotten away with bottom end on it as well.

V: But it dropped the level down too much. Nick was insisting on having a hell of a lot of midrange boost. I mean you can get about 20 dB out of that thing in the midrange. But if you cut the midrange down to about 12 dB or 10 dB then you would have had enough room to put a bass end in as a separate thing, [like] in a Pultec. But because he wanted all that midrange I thought, "Oh well. Forget about the bass. You've got bass on the Earlybird."

LC: I've got the Culture Vulture [stereo valve distortion unit] at my studio. What was the inspiration for that?

N: That was probably partly because the Chiswick Reach compressor really does sound good when you turn the gain all the way up and then put that into another channel and turn that all the way up as well. I worked with Steve Nieve, who was in The Attractions [with Elvis Costello], and he said, "We did this album [Brutal Youth] and we didn't use any reverb. We just used distortion on the drums and stuff like that." So we were doing this stuff and I thought, "Let's try that idea." And it sounded amazing. Then I thought we could have a valve unit that did that.

V: We were sitting in the pub one day having a pint and he came up with this idea. So I got out an old envelope and drew the circuit on the back — and it's still exactly the same. [laughter] It's a very simple circuit.

LC: With the Culture Vulture I still don't know quite what's going to happen.

V: And sometimes you come back to it a different day and it doesn't do quite the same thing. [ laughter]

LC: One thing I do with it is the slightest bit of "warming". It's just a nice, subtle processing which I really like.

V: We sold two or three to AIR Studios and one of the engineers used them on strings, which was quite interesting.

LC: You don't foresee what's going to happen sometimes.

V: You never know, do you? I was surprised how many instruments you can do with it.

LC: Yeah, I mean I've processed vocal parts, drums, room mics — you name it — sometimes for just incredible shredding, ripping sounds.

N: It's quite cool. You can use it in other ways. I used it between a send and a plate reverb, so it was getting these huge drum sounds. You put drums into a plate and they all sound like crap, just kind of a knock-y sound. But I put that in between and it just sounded amazing.

LC: What is the mastering version of the Culture Vulture?

V: It's the same really — it's balanced in and out — you've got the option on the out balance. You can switch it.

N: It's quite sweet.

LC: Is that an option I could do at home — drop transformers into the one I've got?

V: [laughter] Um, well yeah you could do.

LC: My warranty's already dead, right?

V: [laughter] No, you can do it. There's a couple of mods I'd recommend making if you're going to do that. But it's basically the same circuit, yeah. We use expensive wire-wound pots for the bias control. So that's pretty reliable. The others tend to be jumpy.

LC: Yeah, there seem to be ranges where things shift drastically.

V: Apart from that, yeah — it doesn't sound any different really.

LC: One thing that impressed me on the Culture Vulture was having the low pass filters built in — it seemed like someone had actually been working in the studio and said, "Well you have to do this to make it more useable."

V: Edwyn [Collins] kind of set the first one, the earliest prototype. He really likes a light recording with acoustic guitars through it and distorting them quite heavily — he takes the top off of it and they sound quite like electric guitars. I think it was his idea.

LC: That makes sense. His recordings sound like that. He did Robert Forster's Warm Nights record, which I like a lot.

V: He also commissioned the first EQ, and I did a copy of the limiter I did for Pete Townshend for him as well. N: On the Rooster preamp, using it as a bass DI without a filter, the distortion gets a bit crazy in the high end sometimes. You can put the filter in, then distort it even more and then the low end comes back again.

JB: The Fat Bustard's a summing mixer?

V: Yeah. It's got 12 channels in and a couple of aux inputs. We're also gonna have another one called the Little Bustard, so you can actually expand the 12 channels to 16 more — or you can have the option of 8 with pans or 16 without pans. It depends on what you want. We haven't decided on that yet. 

N: You could just use it as a summing mixer or as a drum sidecar. It's got really nice EQ, just stereo EQ over the bus, and the distortion control and the stereo controls as well...

V: There's stereo width and stereo depth control. I wouldn't say it's a pure sounding unit exactly, but it's certainly a natural, warm, valve-y sound. But you can distort it a little bit if you want to. It's got a little bit of attitude. N: Not so much as on the Rooster. . . V: You can distort that quite heavily. It's like a Vulture with nearly 80 dB of gain if you want to use it.

LC: Day to day are you dealing with things like shipping and the business end of it?

V: The great thing is that we've got a really good distributor in Unity Audio. They take care of all of our sales and Kevin Walker has been great. I don't need to worry about anything in the way of shipping. We get a van going over to Kevin's with about 20 units in it. That's all that happens really. I still do a bit of the deliveries. We've got one or two direct customers like AIR Studios — I'll be off and going there in a minute! Just returning some stuff for Coldplay because they bought a Phoenix and a Vulture and we took it back for checking over and changing the valves.

LC: Did they use it on their new record [Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends] with Brian Eno [ Tape Op #85 ]?

V: Oh, I'm pretty sure. [laughter] N: They put their own studio together recently to do that album. They've got an old Trident or something like that.

JB: So any plans for the future that you're allowed to divulge without killing us?

V: I don't know! [laughter]

JB: You haven't been to the pub enough lately? [laughter]

N: That's always a good excuse. V: Not together actually. We hardly ever see each other these days because he's always working flat out down here and I'm doing the same up there in Harlow.

JB: Well we're glad to bring you guys together again.

www. thermionicculture. com, www. unityaudio. co. uk