Vampire Weekend Goes Mobile With Apollo and UAD Powered Plug-Ins

Vampire Weekend’s joyful melding of indie rock and Afro pop has lifted the band to international A-level status. Their newest album, Modern Vampires of the City, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 chart. Producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Rostam Batmanglij recorded, produced, and mixed the album in Los Angeles studios and Brooklyn apartments, lounges and backyards — a mobile strategy made possible by mirrored recording systems, Universal Audio’s Apollo audio interface, and Thunderbolt technology.

[Apollo] powers UAD Powered Plug-Ins, which are essential to my process,” explains Rechtshaid (Usher, Major Lazer, Charli XCX) in a recently published interview on the UA Blog. “The headroom is great, direct recording is great, and the preamp is transparent and works well with the color of the plug-ins. Once I got the Thunderbolt Option Card, it was even better… Midway through recording this album, I actually moved to strictly laptop recording, rather than desktop. That became possible with the Apollo, and also with Thunderbolt technology.

Vampire Weekend songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij routinely employed UAD Powered Plug-Ins during the project to get the unique analog tone he was looking for, “Ariel and I like to do things a little differently each time, so we’d just open up a plug-in and start adjusting parameters as we saw fit. The Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape Plug-In was one of the last things that I needed to really help me achieve the vintage sounds that I heard in my head.

Read the full interview on Universal Audio’s blog: www.uaudio.com/blog/artist-interview-vampire-weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

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