The Secret Sound of a Lexicon PCM60

hey hey i'm dave rat and today i got a fun video i'm going to talk about the lexicon pcm 60. uh when i first got one late 80s i believe it was it i was just so excited well it just sounded it was the go-to reverb i've been using some other stuff on the market but this just had the ability to bring that snare and those toms and make them thick and uh super fast you could punch there's a plate and a room and then small green yellow orange red going some small large and green orange yellow green yellow orange red going from short to long and then a bass roll off and travel roll off pretty in a bypass so pretty simple stuff out of those combinations you can get a bunch of different sounds i toured with it for quite a while and then lexicon started putting out some newer units they came out with the pcm 91 which actually had a pcm60 emulator in it and the pcm60s were getting old had to maintain them they saw a lot of wear and tear and i was super excited starting up a tour i went and got a pcm 91 got that emulator went out and started doing shows and a little ways in i just could not get the sound i was looking for it seemed right it just wasn't working for me um and as soon as possible i went back and got an actual pcm60 and boom there was the sound so it got me curious what was it what was wrong with the emulator what was it that um was causing the emulator not to give me the sound i was looking for and i put them side by side and sure enough they sound really similar i mean close enough to where who cares it's it for what i'm doing you know i'm not looking for absolute perfection and it was hard to hear the difference but the 60 was giving me a sound that was drastically better i started paying attention and i found out why it's not always how we do things right but it's how we do things wrong that sometimes gives us the desired sounds or the desired outcome we're looking for guitar distortion tube amp distortion guitar feedback flanging and phasing and these are all side effects of doing things wrong that have become desirable sounds that um people and you know the whole industry embraces depending on the music type so i'm gonna do a demo of the pcm60 and show you how to get the new how to get the sounds out of there that i find desirable and why i believe this unit is um so popular and better than the emulators um and also something to think about with plug-ins too i mean if the plug-ins are emulating the actual sound but are they emulating the real world usage where we might not be doing things as the manufacturer intended uh so i've got the i've got a snare drum sample just repeating every couple three seconds or so and it's run into this console it's wide into two channels if i bring that up and bring this up we should be able to hear it i'm gonna put these headphones on so i can hear what you're hearing and you should just hear ludwig snare drum and what i'm gonna do is we'll put this in a room sound yellow orange and i will turn on the reverb return it's pretty big let's go ahead and let's do a few yellow yellow [Music] yellow yellow play yellow yellow [Music] and plate yellow orange light yellow red okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to do the exact same thing but i'm going to overload the input of the unit and i'm going to show you the same sound so we'll do let's say a plate yellow orange um and then i'll put a plate yellow orange and i've got this set up with two return channels i've got two different sands i'm going to mute so that it drives the uh unit harder off of the other channel and it returned back so it should be similar in levels uh we're just kind of running hotter into the unit and then turning it down [Music] afterwards [Music] all right that was a plate i'll do a room yellow uh room orange yellow same thing we'll start with the um and let's do one more let's do like a plate um green orange and we'll do this um all right you should be able to hear that uh one of them sounds kind of like uh reverby room and the other sounds like a reverb room with a bunch of crunch um and that crunch is overloading this front end in order to get it and without overloading the front end you're limited to only half the abilities half the sounds that this thing's capable of making and the more you overload it the more you get the less you overload it the less you get so you have this ability to transition between this kind of more natural into super crunchy by um the front end overdrive all right that's why i think this unit is not only good for its normal sounds but i think that that's really the dynamic where you can get the unique beauty out of a pcm60 extremely powerful and a very simple package and if i had one reverb to carry with me that'd be it all right fun i'll have some more gear hacks as well i got one for a dbx subharmonic synth and maybe i'll do another one on the um pcm60 too because i use it for another type of effect as well cool cool and um i'll do more soon [Music] hmm

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 14,809

Rating: 4.9702826 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Rat, Rat Sound, Digital vs Analog, Pro Audio, Soundcraft Spirit, Pro Sound, Lexicon, PCM60, PCM 60, Reverb, PCM60 Hack, PCM 60 Secret

Id: GmA5ej2w3UM

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020