Our team recently had the privilege of catching up with John DiBiase, and spoke with him about his affinity for the 260VU, and his application of it on Taj Mahal’s 2024 Grammy-winning album.

“The 260VU is such a versatile compressor and great sounding compressor that I use it on every recording session and mixing project. When I’m recording, my favorite uses are on vocals, bass guitar, and drums. When I’m mixing, I have it setup as a hardware insert that I can use for individual tracks, group tracks or the mix bus. This unit can go from crush to gentle touch and everything in between, and that’s why it is the workhorse in my studio. 

Taj’s album was cut live off the floor at The Church recording studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and when you put great musicians together in a great room, you can great results. As the mixing engineer on the project, I wanted to maintain that live feel and also allow the listener to feel as though they are in the room. 

I also had to keep in mind that it was a live performance, and that there would be more dynamics in the vocal than if they had comped together several takes of each song. This meant using a compressor that could smooth where needed, remain transparent, and enhance the performance as best as possible. Since the 260VU can do all that with 3 knobs, that was the obvious first choice.

I used the 260VU on Taj’s vocals and Trey’s vocals as well and since they are both great singers I just needed to make sure they were front and center in the mix. I have the 260VU setup as a hardware insert in Pro Tools so I can route anything I need to it and then I will commit that track to Pro Tools with the compression processed once I’m happy with how the vocal is sitting in the song. Each song required its own setting and sometimes that would change from section to section of the song, and usually I set the compressor so I’m just reducing any peaks slightly and getting the vocal to sound solidified. 

Once I had a balance going on the overall mix of each song, then I engaged the 260VU on the mix bus. I always use it judiciously, meaning a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio and just enough threshold engaged to get somewhere around 1db of gain control depending on the song and then some output gain to compensate... sometimes more output gain than needed because it just sounds good!

The 260VU is a unit I use all the time because it’s easy to use and really effective at helping get to the end goal, which is great sounding music.”