Boulder, CO (October 14, 2022)—Grammy Award-winner David Glasser, founder and chief engineer of Airshow Mastering, has added a Solid State Logic The Bus+ compressor to his setup.
“I saw The Bus+ when it was announced and it seemed to be a very deep and versatile solution for many of the different types of projects that I work on,” Glasser says. “It turns out that it’s very flexible and can produce many different kinds of compression, providing wide ranging options that extend well beyond the classic SSL bus compressor.”
Glasser masters and remasters projects across a wide variety of music genres, from hard rock to jazz. He founded Airshow in 1983, expanded from Virginia to Colorado in 1997, and currently works out of the new facility he built in Boulder in 2016. Over the years, Glasser has developed a reputation as a go-to mastering and remastering engineer for acoustic music, both modern day and from the catalog, especially Americana, traditional bluegrass and contemporary jamgrass.
Glasser’s two Grammy Awards to date have been in the Best Historical Album category, for a compilation of American folk, blues and country music originally released in 1952 and a collection of the remastered recorded works of blues singer Charley Patton, who passed away in 1934.
Airshow Relocates Boulder Studio
Front panel controls offer three options — Low THD, F/B and 4K — that shape the unit’s overall sonic character. “I mainly tend to use compressors as a color and vibe thing rather than a sledgehammer. With the Low THD mode, for instance, it’s a really clean compressor. I seem to use that almost all the time,” Glasser reports. “I also seem to be using the Wet/Dry Mix at around 40 or 50% all the time, too.”
As for insights into the unit’s use, Glasser finds he uses it to tie different musical elements together, noting, “The Bus+ can sound really heavy-handed. It can also sound really, really subtle. You can make it even more subtle with all the sidechain compressor and sidechain filter options. You can dial out frequencies in the areas where the compressor is hitting it too hard. That turns it into more of an enhancer than a compressor.”
