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Greta Van Fleet Gets Classic Sound from Classic Console

Greta Van Fleet has taken the music industry by storm with their authentic throwback style to classic rock — how appropriate, then, that their initial EP's and recent hit album Anthem of the Peaceful Army were tracked and mixed on API consoles, which helped shape the sound of classic rock itself.

Engineer/Producers Marlon Young, Al Sutton, and Herschel Boone, aka the "Rust Brothers," operate Rust Belt Studios in the Royal Oak suburb of Detroit. At the center of the studio is a 48-channel API Legacy console, on which Peaceful Army was fully mixed and partially tracked; the rest of the album was tracked at Nashville's Blackbird Studio, which is home to two API Legacy Plus consoles as well as two 1608 consoles.

Marlon Young says part of the reason Greta Van Fleet connects so strongly with audiences is their human element, which he tries to keep intact by not coloring it with too much studio manipulation.

This simplicity in the capturing of the sounds serves Al Sutton well in the mixing stage. The tracks are split out into the API console's 48 inputs. "We don't use the computer at all. The songs are really open. It's not sonically hard to battle. We just listened a lot and overanalyzed, but [Young] keeps me from getting too much tunnel vision."