Above & Beyond

While Logic is their main DAW for producing tracks from scratch, Above & Beyond use Ableton Live to put together and mix the radio show, and sometimes to separately work on some rhythms and grooves.

Above & Beyond's Jono can be seen wearing the Sennheiser HD 25-1 II Headphones while DJing.

In this tweet, Jono Grant of Above & Beyond praises PreSonus Studio One by stating "Studio One is pretty amazing". Due to the date of this tweet, it can be assumed the discussed version of Studio One is version 3.

Above & Beyond's Tony McGuinness says "...I've been using it for eighteen years in one form or another, the guys are much the same I think, so I guess because we're used to it, but it does allow you to do so much. There are lots of annoying recent bugs, especially automation chase issues and rogue cache pops and stuff like that, but it is so incredibly powerful and, with the key commands and multi window thing, really fast."

He goes on to say the group uses Logic's ES1 synth and ESX24 sampler heavily in their productions. About the ESX24 he says "...we all know it so well you can get up and running so quickly. A lot of our pianos are just the Garageband Piano sound running in an EXS24." And of the ES1, "The ES1 is just fabulous, it’s in almost all of our productions somewhere."

Tony McGuinness of Above & Beyond lists the Omnisphere as one of the plugins he comes back to time and time again. He says "Omnisphere does synth strings so well its hard to wean yourself off that thing."

"...Spectrasonics Omnisphere and the Arts Acoustic reverb are probably the most used things on our computer over the last few years."

"...the Arts Acoustic Reverb is transparent and fabulous."

Above & Beyond use the Neumann KH 0 300 D studio monitors as their primary monitors, as can be seen in a video of their equipment setup.

Evidence of Paavo Siljamaki mixing in the box whilst monitoring on the Audeze open back headphones (Link to photo taken in the Above & Beyond Studios [London] by Jono Grant).

Above & Beyond use the Pure Evoke 2S radio to test their mixes on, to make sure they sound good on an "average" sound system.

"Back in the day, to get that sound I put a jack cable into a guitar distortion box and sampled it. Then I tuned it to a note then played it on a sampler. These days it is much easier; you have Access Virus and all these software synths that come with those sounds... I don't think there are good pads in the Virus, but it is really good for sequences."

At 1:46 into this video of Above & Beyond's studio, to the right of the shot you can see their red Tannoy Reveal studio monitors. They likely serve as secondary monitors to check their mixes on.

Selfie taken by Jono himself recording vocals (bonus: if you can name the mic technique pictured!) in the Above & Beyond studios, wearing the DT770s. Identical headphones are also spotted once again in a group photo with Grant & Anjunabeats' artists [source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BV4UyjgBIND/?taken-by=jonogrant&hl=en ]

Tony of Above & Beyond on the Waves L2: "...we've done Waves and still use the L2 (who doesn't, let's be honest!)"

"...our current favourites are the PSP Vintage Warmer (sex in a box!)..."

We spotted Barefoot MicroMain 27 Studio Monitors in an Instagram photo of Above & Beyond's studio setup.

A photo on the Miloco Studios website shows Above & Beyond using the Crane Song Avocet II Stereo Monitor Controller in their studio setup.

"The sample pack KICK FREE Revolution is essential – what’s great is the material sounds very fresh. We’re already using this in our productions, and it’s very easy to drop them into apple loops and get working straight away."

Listed as a user on the official product page.

Endless Smile is already being used by Steve Angello, Zedd, Tritonal, Axwell, Deniz Koyu, Hardwell, Thomas Gold, Diplo, Chris Lake, Above & Beyond, Blasterjaxx, GTA, Bassjackers, TJR, Bingo Players, Tommy Trash and many other DJ/producers.

Tony of Above & Beyond says the group occasionally uses the Nexus synth to instantly and easily create "classic trance sounds."

Jono says "NEXUS sounds and plays like it was made for musicians by musicians.

You are going to install this synth and get using these sounds in your tracks straight away, and very little additional processing is necessary. It's also great to find a built in reverb that is so smooth and rivals good quality hardware reverbs. In a digital sample-based synth, the raw currency is good quality samples. Rather than see how many gigs they could fill with average samples, it feels like a proper RD team has put the kind of energy into the plugin that a big hardware synth manufacturer would have in the past. Something I feel that's been missing from the virtual synth world."

"Firing up the old Roland JV2080 in the studio. That deserves a tweet! :)"

In the Anjunabeats Forum, Jono talks about the soundcard used by Above & Beyond: "2x MOTU 2408 MkII and 3xRME ADI-8 A/D D/A converters providing 24 channels of conversion (a total of 40 24bit i/o). We don't use the MOTU converters, the RMEs are hooked up using ADAT light pipe."

In 2005, Above & Beyond's monitoring setup consisted of Mackie HR824s with a Mackie subwoofer.

From an overview of their studio setup from 2005 - Above & Beyond brought 24 tracks of audio out of Logic via three RME ADI8 units hooked up to an RME Hammerfall sound card, and fed that into a Soundcraft Ghost analogue mixer.

Above & Beyond preferred analogue mixing over digital mixing, and thus opted to use a Soundcraft Ghost mixing console. [from a 2005 article on their studio gear setup]

Seen on the twitter photo of one of the members.

Above & Beyond's Jono Grant shared a photo on Twitter featuring the Clavia Nord Rack 2, highlighting its use in their music production setup.

The first synth in a rack in Above & Beyond's studio setup is the monophonic Waldorf Pulse.

The SPL MTC 2381 can be seen on Above & Beyond's desk in a video of their studio gear setup.

"We have a whole bunch of outboard gear including the Sequential Circuits Pro One that made that dark sound in the Madonna remix..."

In talking about the EQ plugins they use, Tony from Above & Beyond says "...we were fond of Sonalksis EQs for a while..."