Avalon VT 737SP Review

The Avalon VT 737SP is one of those expensive toys you benefit from when you hire either Play It Again for your songwriter demos or Nashville Trax to produce your project. All vocals we track go through it.

We’ve had an Avalon for years now and it’s a great microphone preamp/compressor/equalizer. At $2,400 list it’s beyond the budget of most home recording enthusiasts, and even some smaller studios, because it alone simply won’t make that big a difference. But in conjunction with the right microphone, possibly a channel strip and most definitely run by someone with talent it can. It will make an instrument punchier, make vocals clearer, and make a track sit better in the mix. Basically anything you run through it is improved slightly.

If you’re thinking of purchasing an Avalon it will certainly improve your sound some. An even bigger step up is to use session quality musicians and Nashville session singers.

You can access all of our services that interface with your pro or home studio. including mixing and mastering, by clicking on “more” in the upper right corner of the site.

I love the Avalon on a lead vocal because, by tweaking the EQ section, you can find the “edge” in a singer’s voice and bring it out just enough for the song. With the right microphone and settings acoustic guitar tracks are awesome. In fact, one Nashville session player who has worked at every studio in town remarked to me last year that no other studio delivers the rich, clear acoustic guitar tracks we do, and some of that praise belongs to the Avalon. But it’s great on snare and bass drum too.

In short there’s no way I could produce music at the level achieved the last many years without the Avalon 737SP being part of the front end chain. In fact, I’d feel naked without it, just trust me on this: you DO NOT want me doing your session naked, especially if you;re present!

A home recording enthusiast can twist and turn the knobs on a DBX 463 all day long and will never get half of what the 737 delivers with ease.

Click the pic of the Avalon and microphone above for a great deal on the Avalon plus an AT 4040 condensor microphone. We have one of those too, it’s an excellent mic we use almost daily on drum overheads.

The Avalon 737SP: One more reason to hire a real studio for your songwriter demos or producing needs- Bill Watson

The studio’s Avalon VT 737SP