Trident A-Range

The Trident A-Range equalizer is a legendary piece of equipment. As only thirteen A-Range consoles were ever made, it remains a holy grail for sound engineers and producers around the world that hope to create works of art equal to those that were originally recorded on the A-Range - David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, Queen, Elton John, and the list goes on.

It is sometimes said that one of the disadvantages of digital mixing and recording is that the happy accidents one could experience with analog gear just don't happen in the DAW. People saying that clearly haven't tried Softube's Trident A-Range equalizer. Because the Trident A-Range is not only a tremendously nice sounding and highly characteristic equalizer. Its four frequency bands also have a way of integrating in sometimes rather unpredictable ways. More often than not you will find that the equalizer ends up giving you something even better than you may have expected when you made a certain setting. In this sense, the Trident A-Range is more of a musical instrument than a strictly scientific tool. We think this is one of the major reasons it has been used on so many great classic rock albums and why it's still one of the most coveted pieces of audio equipment around.

Only thirteen A-Range consoles were ever built, and the Softube plug-in version is a very exact model of channel 15 of the Trident A-Range at Sweet Silence Studio 'B' in Denmark. This is producer Flemming Rasmussen's favorite channel for recording lead vocals. Flemming also used it for the solo and rhythm guitars on Metallica's "Ride The Lightning" and "Master of Puppets", as well as Ritchie Blackmore's guitar on the Rainbow albums "Difficult to Cure" and "Bent out of Shape".

The A-Range channel features four bands of equalization plus high and low pass filters. By driving the console hot, it is possible to get it to distort with a hairy and effective saturation that is just right in some situations, and just wrong in others! We added a separate Saturation control to let you choose easily. Turn it down for clean (and less CPU draw), and up for the sound of a Trident A-Range hard at work.

Please note: Softube purchases are strictly licensed for sale to customers in the USA only