Ears Behind the Gear: Gregory “UBK” Scott of Kush Audio & Sly-Fi Digital
Gregory Scott (aka “UBK”) is the founder of Kush Audio and Sly-Fi Digital.
“UBK” is an acronym that stands for “Useless Bank of Knowledge.” It was intended as sardonic and self-deprecating nickname, and Gregory Scott, owner of Kush Audio and Sly-Fi Digital, uses it in place of his real name, almost like a signature, on all his cutting-edge hardware and software designs.
But if you peer even slightly into the inner workings of Gregory’s brain, whether through his wildly entertaining and thought-provoking podcast, The UBK Happy Funtime Hour, his unique and idiosyncratic audio products, or even this very interview, you will find that his internal bank of knowledge is anything but useless.
With the recent unveiling of his latest product line under the name Sly-Fi Digital, Gregory brings his own spin on classic analog staples into the digital realm, breathing new life into timeless pieces of gear we know so well.
Why did you feel the need to re-brand these new twists on classic pieces of analog gear under the new name “Sly-Fi Digital”, instead of Kush?
I love that you asked this, because before Sly-Fi launched I wouldn’t have been able to answer it.
The truth is that I do almost everything in life by following my instincts. I have strong intuitions and weak rationales, so I’m rarely able to articulate ”why” I do the things I do. The answer is generally “because.”
It’s only after a decision has had time to play out that I’m able to get a sense of why a choice worked—or didn’t. Now that Sly-Fi is out and its standing side-by-side with Kush, I can see clearly that it very much is supposed to be its own thing.
For starters, Kush is primarily an analog company. Everything starts in world of circuits, and the trademark quality of Kush gear is “one-of-a-kind”. In that space, I focus on creating processors that are either radical departures from past designs or, with something like the Clariphonic, are genuinely new, and unlike anything before it.
Kush plugins follow the same philosophy they and are either direct emulations of our analog stuff—like the Clariphonic and Electra—or are equally quirky and inventive stuff that still has a clear bias for analog thinking, like Pusher or UBK-1.
Sly-Fi was born from a totally different mindset. For one, it’s a digital-only company whose products are not original—they are very direct homages to my favorite gear. They make no claims of being groundbreaking. What they offer instead is a series of tasty refinements and thoughtful modifications to classic designs which change, often in fundamental ways, the things you can do and the ways you can do it.
So, if you want a completely faithful API EQ emulation, you get the Waves or the UAD version and you’re set—there are no surprises or twists. Sly-Fi comes along and instead offers Axis EQ, a different flavor that’s in the same family but which has a distinctly darker, warmer tone, tighter punch, and a gorgeous saturation that melts into the eq’s curves rather than laying on top of it. It doesn’t replace the emulations, it expands the vision and possibilities and puts another color on the artist’s palette. I love colors!
What is your left brain/right brain percentage split when you’re designing your gear? At any point in the design process do you find yourself abandoning the science and math associated with wiring equipment and writing algorithms to pursue visceral creative instincts?
Well, I don’t actually write the algorithms nor do I have any desire to. It’s far too technical to hold my interest. Likewise with the actual circuit implementations, I can do basic breadboards but I work with a couple of geniuses who bring my ideas to fruition on the pcb, and I’ll focus more on fine tuning things until they go from ‘functional’ to ‘musical’.
That process can be insanely detailed: The Tweaker took about 6 months to get into prototype form. I then spent 3-and-a-half years tweaking, massaging, and bending the circuit through 4 more prototypes until we had the final design. And even then, we were tweaking the stereo linking behavior as we were heading into production. I spent a week just massaging the way the meters responded to music!
And even so, there are no numbers on my meters, and very little numeric information on any of the controls. That annoys some people, but it does force you to listen and respond, you can’t bring your preconceived notions to the table. I mix in as dark a room as possible, and I never have my eyes open when I’m turning knobs. I just can’t hear as well if my eyes are processing information.
What do I care if the attack is 3ms or 15ms, or if I’m cutting 500Hz vs. 880Hz? All I care about is how it’s affecting the tone, balance, and energy of the mix, how it’s making the sounds hit my body.
So when designing, I have no clear awareness of the specifications or numbers in anything. I tune the attacks and knees and releases on my compressors by ear. I choose frequency ranges and curve behaviors by ear. I test the gear on sounds I record. I never measure or sweep or scope anything, although I do have a gifted tech who does that stuff just to make sure there’s no crazy humming 90dB down or wild oscillations at 100k which I can’t hear but which affect headroom and transient behaviors.
I’m not saying this is a superior way to work, or that ears trump measurements. All I’m saying is that it’s the only way I know how, and it works for me. The word that most often comes up in reviews of my designs is ‘musical’, which makes sense. I’m a musician, music is all I know, and music is all I focus on when designing. I make stuff for people who make music.
When designing a piece of gear, what are your go-to sources on which you test your work? Do you always start with the same thing?
Drums are huge, probably the biggest. That’s partly because I’m a drummer, so I know how that instrument sounds and feels in response to being played. If gear is doing anything wonky or undesirable to the sound, I’ll know it. Likewise, I’m always trying to bend or break drum sounds in a way that is totally unnatural but which creates the same emotional response I get when laying into a ferocious groove while surrounded by gifted players. That’s why the Electra punches the way it does, that EQ’s curves can make any crappy drum sounds hit my face and kick my chest the way live drums do.
I’ll really test on anything and everything to see what it does. I’ll try to make a vocal natural and present, but I’ll also try to make it crunchy without harassing out, which is a serious trick to pull off. Likewise, with getting bass that’s heavy and fat but not bloated and slow, or synths that cut without sounding brash.
Ever feel like you’ve got it dialed in, only to change sources and feel like you’re way off? Too much processing can make almost anything sound bad, so when do you know it’s time to stop?
I never think of anything as ”too much processing”, because there are entire styles of music now that hinge on overcooking everything in artful and interesting ways. It’s all just texture, and the more textures I can coax out of a design, the more useful it will be to a wider variety of artists.
You put a heavy emphasis on analog gear, both in your marketing and on the UBK Happy Funtime Hour podcast. Are you partial to analog 100% in your own productions, or do you find that sometimes you can only achieve your vision via digital processing?
Well, I have two companies that make plugins, and I use plugins in every production I do. But I think people appreciate my honesty, even if they don’t agree with me, when I say that if I have the option to use an analog piece vs. its digital equivalent, I will use and prefer the analog every single time.
That’s not just about sound, it’s also about ergonomics: it is incredibly difficult to manipulate plugins with your eyes closed! Plus the screen has to be close by, making my dark space not so dark as I like.
That said, there are some plugins that count as desert island tools for me. iZotope’s RX Denoiser is one, and it will absolutely salvage an overly noisy vocal or guitar track. It takes deal-breaking hiss and annihilates it with almost no coloration. UBK-1 is another. There is no piece of analog in the world that can squeeze sounds and make them wiggle and move the way it does. And my recordings would all sound like 1996 if I didn’t have brick wall limiters to make the volume levels contemporary.
In your opinion, who are some of the most important recording equipment companies (past or present), and why? This can apply to software as well.
I’ll avoid the cliché answer and skip all the vintage stuff we all love. I’d say in the past, Tascam is hugely important. For one, their early 70s ”semi-professional” stuff sounds awesome, I don’t care how many boutique snobs say otherwise. All the right kinds of grain, grit, and warmth, but more importantly they brought this rarefied and esoteric technology down to a level normal people could afford to invest in.
People in normal towns with normal incomes could go to places and record their music, and hear it back in a way that they never could before. Entire musical genres evolved out of this, and places like India, Africa, Carribean Islands, and middle America alike could grow their own scene. Their cultures could thrive independent of large [record companies].
Alesis blew that up even more with the ADAT, and in the wake of that, Steinberg, eMagic, and Digidesign all pushed the state of the art into the realm of the ordinary. Waves was on top of that as well, making plugins that, if they didn’t exactly sound that great, ingeniously pushed the envelope of what was possible.
EMT gave us the plate reverb, so thank you Germany! Eventide easily changed the effects landscape forever with their early harmonizer and digital delay. Every company that ever made multi-track tape, each doubling of track-count radically changed the way music was conceived, written, and performed.
In some way, any company that’s ever done anything is important. Something about the collective brain trust and the fact that every single piece of technology is somewhat-to-mostly derivative… Some people and devices deservedly get bigger props, but everything matters, y’know?
Are there any current mixers who you feel are on the cutting edge of making new and exciting sounding records?
Unfortunately, because of the way I consume new music now (Tidal playlists and Pandora streams) I am generally very unaware of who is involved in current music production. When I bought CD’s or vinyl, I read the credits, I knew who was involved. Now… not so much.
But I’m friends with Andrew Maury in NYC, he’s got his finger on the pulse of a young and vibrant scene there, and his mixing is very creative: very heavy-handed and as much a part of the music and the songs and performances. That’s generally how it works to my ears now, production is aggressive these days!
Some digital music services provide the option of a higher-fidelity listening experience these days. What are your thoughts about the current state of file compression, and where do you see it going in the next 5-10 years?
I give very little thought to stuff like this. I’ve used MP3s almost since the beginning, when the Fraunhofer codec was $30 and it sounded 100x better than all the other, and it allowed my music to be heard by people in Russia whom I’d never in a million years meet or otherwise connect with.
Nowadays, when I’m parked in front of the speakers or listening deeply on headphones I use full-res wherever possible because there is still a difference and those differences matter when I’m immersing myself. But Pandora and its “dubious” sound are essential for roadtrips, and for background music when hanging with friends there’s no way I give a crap about whether it’s a 128kbps MP3 or 24/96 full-res file playing, you gotta keep your crazy in check!
Your UBK Happy Funtime hour podcast is not only extremely informative from a technical standpoint, but also very entertaining. I think it offers some priceless philosophical advice on the recording and mixing process. It’s clear the listeners respect your advice there. What do you most hope they’ll take away from the podcast?
Heads up, because it actually has nothing to do with audio, specifically: I would love it if people were to consider the possibility that, with art as with everything else in life, there is no such thing as ‘Truth’, and that every ‘problem’ you face is created in your mind as a result of how you are subjectively filtering an objectively neutral set of circumstances, and that every obstacle or difficulty is in fact an opportunity to learn, to grow, to chill the f*ck out, to connect more to life and to people, and to get where it is you really want to be going. Oftentimes this it is not what you think it “should” be, because we are far less good at predicting things than we believe we are.
Also: Mix more aggressively! Don’t mix for engineers, mix for listeners, because they don’t give a crap about how it was done. All they care about is whether it’s making them feel something.
Where do you draw inspiration for your sounds from? Are there any prominent records that have had significant impact on your designs?
Wow, how much time do you have?! Ok, let me streamline my thinking here… I hear very distinct era’s in sound production, and each one brings something very lovely to the table in terms of the evolution of sonic colors.
As much as I love the older eras, I am most partial to the time we live in now because all bets are off, anybody can do anything they want and it can be relevant, and the possibility exists for every artist to define their sound and find their audience. Likewise, guys like me can make tools that push people to think and work in new ways, which directly influences the way people make their music. That’s a remarkable form of collaboration!
Here’s what I hear and what moves & inspires me about different eras of music:
1953-1960: Jazz. The palpable sense of 3-dimensional space; the sheer size and naturalness of the vocals; the soft air around the instruments; the wide open, highly dynamic, unprocessed sounds of the instruments; the wide variety of rooms and room tone.
1962-1969: Exotica, lounge, and soundtrack music. The enormous reverbs, the plush tones and perfect balance of distortions with clarity, the intricate, dramatically dynamic arrangements
1963-1968: Rock & pop. The fiery, crunchy midrange, the rolled off top, the lean but driving ‘jukebox bass’ tone, tube hair everywhere, the raw energy and often charmingly lo-fi aesthetic
1972-1975: Funk. The claustrophobically dry and dark sensibility; the crunch of transistors on everything; the packed midrange and almost complete lack of high frequencies over 6k make for a very focused, very punchy sound that begs to be turned up to ear bleed levels.
1978-1983: Pop rock. Thunderous drums with heavy thud, still dry but with more space than the 70’s; the concise and near-perfect tone of electric guitars, less distortion than today with snappy riffs that crackled but stayed smooth; tape sound everywhere, more saturation than compression.
1984-1988: Synth pop. Stuff that sounds sequenced by mostly was still played by gifted players, creating nuance and variety within highly repetitive arrangements; bombastic, often overcooked reverbs creating otherworldly spaces that never existed before; bright aesthetics, but still very smooth, more 8k than 5k, y’know?
1992-1998; Everything. I love the sheer diversity of tones, textures, and styles of 90’s pop. Tape was still king, arguably this is the zenith of analog production. For me, the 90’s had the perfect balance of aggressive compression with modest limiting that made for loud productions which still moved air and sounded as good at 95dB as they do at 50dB.
2011+; Some time a few years ago, mastering engineers started getting very very good at making records loud but which still had enough of the right kinds of transient punch to not be fatiguing; a lot of that is the makers of the limiters, and a lot of that is also the mix engineers evolving the art of mix compression. Digital is also evolving its own sort of warmth, and techniques have developed which mitigate the crap and amplify the good stuff.
In all, the state of the state of recording is amazing and only getting better, and we are incorporating all of the best aspects of the past with the more interesting and novel achievements of the present. Count me in!
Are there any specific songs or albums that come to mind when you think of productions that have altered the course of recording/mixing history for the better?
Too many! And as above, I think more in terms of eras and the slow, long-arc evolution of sound. But for giggles:
Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
Cromagnon – Caledonia
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
Issac Hayes – Shaft
Gary Numan – The Pleasure Priniciple
The Cars – Candy-O
Prince – Purple Rain
Tool – Undertow
Massive Attack – Mezzanine
Dr. Dre – 2001
Radiohead – Kid-A
Justice – Cross
Now that you’ve created your own brand of sound with Kush, and have put your personal spin on classic studio staples with Sly-Fi, what can we expect next from UBK?
I’d be extremely content if I could just finish this $&*^$ record I’m working on! It’s been 2 years now, and we’re constantly getting closer, and it will be extraordinary and worth every beautiful painful minute when it’s done, but man, I am so ready to have some completed tunes!
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