Max Richter

In a studio video for Wallpaper* magazine, Max Richter can be seen using the Anamod Audio ATS-1, positioned beneath the Thermionic Culture Vulture.

In a MusicRadar feature on Max Richter's Oxfordshire studio, the Thermionic Culture The Culture Vulture is visible among his recording gear, highlighting its role in his studio setup.

"My audio interface is provided by a MOTU 24I/O, and I have a 16-fader Mackie Logic Control and the Samson C-control, which is just a monitor controller and talkback. The Mackie is fantastic for orchestral mixing, when you need to move lots of faders at once. If I had more space, I'd have more of these, because they're brilliant. My master clock is a Rosendahl Nanosyncs, which makes a huge difference for digital playback. I used to have a Yamaha 02R, and it made it sound like a desk five times the price, because the clocking got so much better, all the jitter was gone, and imaging was razor-sharp."

"Outboard gear is a TLA Indigo EQ2012 parametric EQ, which is very nice, SPL Vitalizer and Transient Designer, which is fantastic for shaping the front of the note; if you want things to sound a little further away you just make the attack a bit softer. The TC Gold Channel is a nice mic preamp; my TC M3000 is a beautiful reverb, very true. The FAT PCP330 vocoder is something I use all the time, and I like the FAT Resonator. The Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes is very cool, as well as my Bob Moog Moogerfooger. I use the Hot Tubes as a kind of mastering box, for pianos, anything digital that sounds a bit plasticky goes through it. It's a fuzzbox, it adds a bit of grit. If you listen to the final track on Memoryhouse, 'Quartet Fragment', you'll hear it on a 60-piece string section. The drums on the track 'Arboretum' on the Notebooks also went through this."

”If I have time, the reverb I use most is the TC Electronic Reverb 6000, which I think is the best reverb ever in the universe".

In a feature on MusicRadar showcasing Max Richter's Oxfordshire studio, the Native Instruments KOMPLETE KONTROL S88 is visible in the background, indicating its presence in his setup.

"Outboard gear is a TLA Indigo EQ2012 parametric EQ, which is very nice, SPL Vitalizer and Transient Designer, which is fantastic for shaping the front of the note; if you want things to sound a little further away you just make the attack a bit softer. The TC Gold Channel is a nice mic preamp; my TC M3000 is a beautiful reverb, very true. The FAT PCP330 vocoder is something I use all the time, and I like the FAT Resonator. The Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes is very cool, as well as my Bob Moog Moogerfooger. I use the Hot Tubes as a kind of mastering box, for pianos, anything digital that sounds a bit plasticky goes through it. It's a fuzzbox, it adds a bit of grit. If you listen to the final track on Memoryhouse, 'Quartet Fragment', you'll hear it on a 60-piece string section. The drums on the track 'Arboretum' on the Notebooks also went through this."

“I use a trashcan Mac, which does all the heavy lifting, but the central writing environment is done using Logic and Sibelius".

The heart of Max Richter's current system is formed by his Apple Mac G5, with dual 2GHz processors and 4GB of RAM. "I dislike OS X, because it's much less stable than OS 9," says Richter, "but in order to run the VSL library, I have to run OS X. Logic is sequencer-wise the way to go. It's really very evolved. You can set it up any way you want, it's very quick and very easy to use, and it's pretty stable. Melodyne is by far the best pitch and time tool out there — massively better than, er, the one everybody uses, which sounds phasey and nasty. I don't really like messing with people's pitch and timing — I'd rather get good takes — so I don't use it for that, more for abstract type stuff like changing the tempo of audio from say 80bpm to 0.003bpm.

"My audio interface is provided by a MOTU 24I/O, and I have a 16-fader Mackie Logic Control and the Samson C-control, which is just a monitor controller and talkback. The Mackie is fantastic for orchestral mixing, when you need to move lots of faders at once. If I had more space, I'd have more of these, because they're brilliant. My master clock is a Rosendahl Nanosyncs, which makes a huge difference for digital playback. I used to have a Yamaha 02R, and it made it sound like a desk five times the price, because the clocking got so much better, all the jitter was gone, and imaging was razor-sharp."

"My audio interface is provided by a MOTU 24I/O, and I have a 16-fader Mackie Logic Control and the Samson C-control, which is just a monitor controller and talkback. The Mackie is fantastic for orchestral mixing, when you need to move lots of faders at once. If I had more space, I'd have more of these, because they're brilliant. My master clock is a Rosendahl Nanosyncs, which makes a huge difference for digital playback. I used to have a Yamaha 02R, and it made it sound like a desk five times the price, because the clocking got so much better, all the jitter was gone, and imaging was razor-sharp."

"Outboard gear is a TLA Indigo EQ2012 parametric EQ, which is very nice, SPL Vitalizer and Transient Designer, which is fantastic for shaping the front of the note; if you want things to sound a little further away you just make the attack a bit softer. The TC Gold Channel is a nice mic preamp; my TC M3000 is a beautiful reverb, very true. The FAT PCP330 vocoder is something I use all the time, and I like the FAT Resonator. The Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes is very cool, as well as my Bob Moog Moogerfooger. I use the Hot Tubes as a kind of mastering box, for pianos, anything digital that sounds a bit plasticky goes through it. It's a fuzzbox, it adds a bit of grit. If you listen to the final track on Memoryhouse, 'Quartet Fragment', you'll hear it on a 60-piece string section. The drums on the track 'Arboretum' on the Notebooks also went through this."

"More outboard boxes: the Emagic AMT interface, Sony VHS player — short films are sent to me via broadband, but longer films on VHS — Tascam DA45 HR DAT machine, HHB compact disc player. The Kawai K5000R is a wonderful additive synth that can be very analogue-sounding — you can tune every bit of the sound, so you can build up partials and move them around, and get it to be slightly out of tune, so that it drifts, just like the Moogs and ARP synths, giving it more of a perceived analogue feel. My three Emu E4 samplers are in storage at the moment. My main keyboard is the Yamaha P300 MIDI keyboard."

"More outboard boxes: the Emagic AMT interface, Sony VHS player — short films are sent to me via broadband, but longer films on VHS — Tascam DA45 HR DAT machine, HHB compact disc player. The Kawai K5000R is a wonderful additive synth that can be very analogue-sounding — you can tune every bit of the sound, so you can build up partials and move them around, and get it to be slightly out of tune, so that it drifts, just like the Moogs and ARP synths, giving it more of a perceived analogue feel. My three Emu E4 samplers are in storage at the moment. My main keyboard is the Yamaha P300 MIDI keyboard."