Rupert Neve, father of modern studio recording, dies at 94
When the Seattle grunge band Nirvana recorded their breakthrough album, “Nevermind,” at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1991, they used a massive mixing console created by a British engineer named Rupert Neve.
The Neve 8028 console had by then become a studio staple, hailed by many as the most superior console of its kind in its manipulating and combining instrumental and vocal signals and as responsible in great part for the audio quality of albums by groups like Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.
For Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and later the leader of Foo Fighters, the console “was like the coolest toy in the world,” he told NPR in 2013 when his documentary film about the California studio, “Sound City,” was released. “And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it.”
He added, “What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you.”
In 2011, long after forming Foo Fighters, Grohl purchased the console as Sound City was closing, took it to his garage and used it to record the band’s album “Wasting Light.”
Neve’s innovative, largely analog equipment has been used to record pop, rock, jazz and rap — genres distinct from his preferred one: English cathedral music, with its organs and choirs.
After his death Feb. 12, the influential hip-hop engineer Gimel Keaton, known as Young Guru, tweeted: “Please understand that this man was one of a kind. There is nothing close to him in the engineering world. RIP to the KING!!!”
Neve died in a hospice facility in San Marcos, Texas, near his home in Wimberley, a Hill Country town that he and his wife, Evelyn, moved to in 1994.
He was 94. The causes were pneumonia and heart failure, according to his company, Rupert Neve Designs.
Arthur Rupert Neve was born July 31, 1926, in Newton Abbott, in southwestern England. He spent most of his childhood near Buenos
Aires, Argentina, where his parents were missionaries with the British and Foreign Bible Society.
Rupert developed a facility with technology as a boy taking apart and repairing shortwave radios.
During the 1950s, Neve found work at a company that designed and manufactured transformers. He also started his own business making hi-fi equipment.
He delivered his first custom-made transistor console to Phillips Studios in London in 1964, and its success led to thousands more orders over the years — bought by, among others, Abbey Road Studios in London (in the post-Beatles years), the Power Station in Manhattan and the AIR Studios, both in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, founded by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer.
Neve received a Technical Grammy Award in 1997.