AnyMotion

28/08/2026

28/08/2026

Automation has a first version in the studio.

You record your fader moves. The console plays them back. Save, load, replay. Right now it's one channel at a time — the next step is bringing it across the whole desk simultaneously, and surfacing it through the console's own controls instead of a debug menu that only I know how to open.

I'm intentionally going slow here, and I want to explain why.

When VCA automation arrived on real consoles in the early 80s — SSL among the first to bring it to a wide market — it didn't just add a feature. It changed the nature of the session. Before automation, a mix was performed live: every fader move, every effect ride, every decision made in real time by human hands. After automation, you could commit to a decision and revise it. You could build a mix over days instead of hours.

The history of records from that period is partly the history of engineers learning to think in a new way. Not "how do I ride this in real time" but "what do I want the console to remember."

I want that same feeling here. Not automation as a button you press on a timeline. Automation as teaching the desk what you want it to do — and having it do that, every time, exactly.

That's worth building slowly.

Link in the first comment ↓

28/08/2026

Fader Friday — Auditronics Model 501, the "Son of 36 Grand"

Every Friday we spotlight a console that shaped the sound of recorded music. This week: a desk from Memphis, named after a price tag.

Welton Jetton was a WWII radar technician. He arrived in Memphis in 1953 as chief engineer of WDIA radio, moved on to Pepper-Tanner, and by the mid-1960s was building mixing consoles out of a garage operation. Auditronics, Inc. grew from that into one of the most respected console makers in the American South.

The earliest Auditronics desks were built under licence from Spectrasonics — assembled, tested and commissioned in Memphis from Spectrasonics designs. Their nickname, the "36 Grand", simply referred to the $36,000 base price. When Welton started designing his own consoles in the 1970s, he kept the lineage in the name: Son of 36 Grand, formally the Model 501.

26 inputs, 16 outputs, a quadraphonic mix bus, and an interface for the Allison Research FADEX automation system — for under $50,000. Serious American build quality without the British price. Valley Audio of Nashville distributed it under the wonderful tagline "Masters of Aural Gratification".

It went into Stax and into Ardent in Memphis, and into 20th Century Fox, ABC-TV, Paramount, MGM, Capitol Records, and National Public Radio in Washington DC.

In 2008 the Ardent Auditronics console was donated to the Stax Museum of American Soul Music — a quiet acknowledgement that Welton's desks had become part of the Memphis story themselves.

Full history on the site.

👉 retrorecordingsxr.com/consoles/auditronics/model-501-son-of-36-grand/

Anyone here worked on an Auditronics? ⬇️