Nashville-based Producer Bob Bullock Comes Full Circle with
Harrison Audio at his Cool Springs Mix Studio

Having worked alongside artists like Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac and more, Bullock was an early user of the legendary Harrison 32C; now, he's turned to the company's latest 500 series units

Nashville, Tennessee, April 25, 2025 — When engineer, producer and educator Bob Bullock began his career, working in Los Angeles alongside such artists as Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac and Art Garfunkel during the 1970s, a good number of recording studios around the city started installing Harrison’s first mixing console. The 32C, introduced in 1975, was the first console to offer 32 tracking buses and inline monitoring. Recently, Bullock, who relocated to Nashville in the early 1980s, has been reacquainting himself with the iconic mixing console sound following the addition of three pairs of Harrison Audio’s new 500 Series analog modules — the 32Cpre+, MR3eq and Comp — at his Cool Springs Mix studio.

Bullock was on staff at Kendun Recorders in Burbank, California, when the studio installed one of the first Harrison 32C consoles in the L.A. area, he recalls, with other facilities soon following suit. “I worked a lot on Harrison consoles in the late ‘70s; they were all over Los Angeles at that time,” he says. A lot of its appeal was the channel strip layout. “It was a very well designed desk, and I loved working on it.”

Fast-forward 50 years and Harrison Audio has not only released the 32Classic analog mixing console, but also introduced three 500 series modules, which between them shares some of the DNA of the original 32C and other early Harrison console models. The 32Cpre+ incorporates Harrison’s renowned high and low pass filters, as well as the same transformer-coupled microphone preamp as the new 32Classic console, which derives its design from the original 32C. The MR3eq also includes a high pass filter and is based on the 3-band parametric design originally developed for the Harrison MR3 console, which was introduced in 1981.

Good impressions and a familiar sound
“The preamp and the EQ modules are very much the same as the desk; I was quite impressed. They work just as expected, and I'm really pleased with them,” says Bullock, who has worked on over 50 gold and platinum albums and nine Grammy Award-winning projects. “I'm so familiar with the preamps, which sound very clean to me, and the EQs. I like them now for the same reason that I’ve always liked them. I've always been a fan of that EQ, because I can zero in on things and they're very smooth.”

Bullock’s credits include such country music legends as Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, George Strait, Tanya Tucker and Patty Loveless. These days, he focuses on helping independent artists worldwide refine their sound. “My wheelhouse of music is what I would call more organic stuff,” he elaborates. “I track with live musicians, usually six to eight musicians on a tracking date. Kyle Hirschman, who does a lot of the engineering with me, and I have tried the Harrison modules across as many different instruments as we could, mostly acoustic stuff like acoustic guitars, mandolins and fiddles, and we’ve been very pleased with them.”

The third new 500 Series module, the Comp compressor, owes its design to the company’s decades of experience in signal processing design. “The only module that was new to me was the Comp,” says Bullock, since the original 32C didn’t feature a built-in compressor. “It works really well. It has very few controls, so it's quick to dial in. One of the things that my assistant and I both noticed, working on a few different projects with the compressor, is that it’s very musical, which just means that it's not harsh sounding. You don't really hear it working and I feel like I can't over-compress with it. You can compress quite a lot and get that compression without feeling there's any pumping. I can’t make it sound bad, and that's a good quality to me.”

Like the classic outboard compressors that Bullock has been using for years in the studio, Harrison’s Comp module offers just a few controls: makeup gain, release time, ratio and threshold. “You plug it in and you don't have to fuss with it very long,” he reports. “It either gives you what you're looking for at that moment or it doesn't, but you don't have to spend a lot of time. So I really have nothing but favorable things to say about it.”

Assessing ergonimics and workflow
Thinking back to his time in L.A., he says, “One of the things that was always appealing to me about the Harrison desk in the ‘70s was the layout, because we had to work quickly and efficiently. You also want stuff that you can depend on to work well, and that's not going to easily distort or break up on you. Because when you're moving quickly, you've got to count on the gear being there for you. You want it to sound great — and it did — but you also have to be able to move quickly. And with Harrison’s inline channel strips, I could do all the things I needed to do very quickly.”

Bullock had an opportunity to visit Harrison Audio, which is based in Nashville, to try out the new 32Classic console and compare it to the 32C, which is still so familiar to him. As with the original console, he was able to get the sounds that he wanted on the 32Classic quickly and easily. “I was very pleased,” he says. “We recorded some things that turned out like I expected, and I didn't have to do a lot to make them sound really good.”

About Harrison
Harrison has been designing, manufacturing, and marketing audio mixing consoles in Nashville, Tennessee (Music City, USA) since 1975. Our products serve the markets of music recording/mixing, international film and television sound production, audio post production, broadcast sound, and live sound reinforcement. Over 1,500 Harrison consoles have been installed worldwide, constituting a significant share of the overall world market for high-end audio consoles. Harrison's dominance of the high-end market demonstrates that customers who require solutions to complex problems invariably turn to Harrison to provide the answer.