Chris Lord‐Alge

Chris Lord-Alge is an American mix engineer. He is the brother of Tom Lord-Alge, another audio engineer. Chris Lord-Alge is known for his use of dynamic range compression. He is also known for collaborating with Howard Benson, who has produced the plurality of the albums Lord-Alge has mixed. Chris Lord-Alge gained notoriety while working at Unique Recording Studios, New York City in the 1980s for his mixing on James Brown's Gravity album (which included the hit song "Living in America"), the Rocky IV soundtrack, Prince's Batman soundtrack, Joe Cocker's Unchain My Heart album, Chaka Khan's Destiny album, Carly Simon's Coming Around Again album, Tina Turner's Foreign Affair album and 12" remixes of Madonna's "La Isla Bonita", the Rolling Stones' "Too Much Blood" and Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark", "Cover Me", and "Born in the U.S.A.". While working in Japan (1995–1997), he worked with Tetsuya Komuro, No! Galers, Namie Amuro and hitomi. Chris and his brother Tom are known inside the music industry for crafting their mix with an abundant use of dynamic compression for molding mixes that play well on small speakers and FM radio, thus somewhat contributing to the loudness war. In early 2010, Waves Audio released the "CLA Artist Signature Collection", a collection of six application-specific audio plug-ins for vocals, drums, bass, guitar and the last two of them called "unplugged" (designed for acoustic elements) and "effects" (a collection of six different effects). Slightly before that, Waves had also released a bundle of CLA-branded compressors, featuring the CLA-76 (UREI 1176LN), CLA-2A (Teletronix LA-2A) and CLA-3A (UREI LA-3A). These are among Chris's favourite dynamics units. It is assumed that Waves were unable to get a license to produce authorised versions of the 1176, LA-2A and LA-3A as their current manufacturer and owner, Universal Audio, already produced their own range of audio plug-ins modelling these units; so they branded them under CLA's name instead.