Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid (Live At Abbey Road)

"I am a fan of saturation. The Waves SSL 4000–series stuff, I like the EQ on that, you can get distortion out of it that sounds like saturation. We have to use that subtly, but it works well on Guy [Garvey], not necessarily for air but for brightness."

— Craig Potter, bandmate and producer of The Seldom Seen Kid

Used for the vocals on The Seldom Seen Kid: Live at Abbey Road, as mentioned by producer Rupert Flindt in this 2009 Sound on Sound interview.

"Once you get a load of multiple mics out, compression becomes a real beast, because it alters spill continually. With a multitracked rock recording, you can compress things perfectly for each track, but the minute you've got two compressors going in the same room on two mics, when this guy plays his level's there — fine — he stops playing, whoop, up goes his gain and the spill floods across, so all sorts of weirdnesses happen. You'll find this if you're doing a vocal and a guitar: if you start putting in your standard vocal compression, when you stop singing, the guitar sound goes weird. So in this show there was a limited amount of compression. I used Al Smart C2 on kick and snare, mono on each, I used Urei 1176s on the vocals, and a little bit of desk compression on the keyboard parts — really as a safety net, because live keyboard players can be unpredictable."

Used for the kick and snare on The Seldom Seen Kid: Live at Abbey Road, as mentioned by producer Rupert Flindt in this 2019 Sound on Sound interview.

"Once you get a load of multiple mics out, compression becomes a real beast, because it alters spill continually. With a multitracked rock recording, you can compress things perfectly for each track, but the minute you've got two compressors going in the same room on two mics, when this guy plays his level's there — fine — he stops playing, whoop, up goes his gain and the spill floods across, so all sorts of weirdnesses happen. You'll find this if you're doing a vocal and a guitar: if you start putting in your standard vocal compression, when you stop singing, the guitar sound goes weird. So in this show there was a limited amount of compression. I used Al Smart C2 on kick and snare, mono on each, I used Urei 1176s on the vocals, and a little bit of desk compression on the keyboard parts — really as a safety net, because live keyboard players can be unpredictable."