TG desks were used to record our two most famous albums: The Beatles’ Abbey Road and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

Not to mention All Things Must Pass, Instant Karma, McCartney and even the Raiders of the Lost Ark film score.

When transistors began to replace valves, EMI was at the forefront, developing these ‘solid-state’ mixing desks. The first of which was installed in Studio Two Control Room over the weekend of 23 November 1968.

Designed by former chief engineer Mike Batchelor from 1968 to around 1974, the “TG12345” series became the last of the EMI-only designed studio desks.

These were much larger than the REDD consoles and had many more features including three times as many mic inputs and a compressor/limiter on every channel.

Every TG desk has a distinctive character, each producing a sound slightly different from the next. Perhaps that’s why the Mk.IV used to record The Dark Side of the Moon sold at auction for around 1.4
million pounds!

* TG stands for The Gramophone Company, a nod to the pre-EMI days of the 1920s.

In 2014 we created the EMI TG12345 Channel Strip plugin in collaboration with Waves Audio.

Thanks to meticulous component modelling, it captures every celebrated feature of the original console: the input mic preamp, the harmonic distortion, hum and noise, the bass and treble EQ bands from the mic cassette, and the console’s famous compressor/limiters.