The Gear in Moonage Daydream

Brett Morgen's Bowie documentary shows the very first Trident A-Range console ever built — the desk that recorded "Five Years," "Soul Love," and the song that gave the film its name.

The Scene

Brett Morgen spent five years assembling Moonage Daydream from thousands of hours of archival footage, much of it never before seen. The result is less a biography than an immersion — a film that drops you inside Bowie's creative process, his performances, and his studio sessions. For gear enthusiasts, the studio footage is revelatory, because it captures equipment that was state-of-the-art in 1972 and is now virtually priceless.

The film's most significant audio artifact is the Trident A-Range console at Trident Studios in London's Soho neighborhood. The A-Range was a custom desk designed by Malcolm Toft and built in-house. The unit shown in archival footage is the very first one ever constructed — the prototype — and it recorded some of the most important rock albums of the 1970s, including Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

The Gear

The Trident A-Range was a Class A discrete analog console with custom EQ modules that became legendary for their musical, forgiving character. Engineer Ken Scott, who recorded Bowie's Ziggy-era albums, worked on this specific desk. In a Mix Magazine interview, Scott described the setup: the tracks were recorded on the Trident A-Range downstairs, then mixed upstairs on a Sound Techniques board.

The monitoring at Trident used Lockwood cabinets fitted with Tannoy Red drivers — dual-concentric speakers that handle the full frequency range in a single coaxial unit. The Tannoy Red is one of the most coveted vintage drivers in existence. A matched pair in good condition sells for $3,000–$8,000, and the sound they produce — detailed, warm, slightly forward in the midrange — is the sound that Ken Scott and Bowie heard when they were making decisions about the mix.

The documentary also captures the EMI Stylophone — a pocket electronic organ played with a stylus that Bowie used on "Space Oddity" in 1969. It's a charmingly primitive instrument, somewhere between a toy and a tool, and it became one of Bowie's signature sounds.

"The tracks were recorded on a Trident A Range — the very first one — and upstairs in the mix room we mixed on the Sound Techniques board. The monitor speakers at that time were Lockwood cabinets with Tannoys in them."— Ken Scott, Mix Magazine "Classic Tracks"

Why It Matters

Moonage Daydream premiered at Cannes and was released in IMAX — the first documentary about a musician to receive a full IMAX release. The sound design was built for immersive audio, and the film's presentation of vintage studio footage in a modern theatrical format created a unique bridge between analog recording history and contemporary cinema technology.

The Trident A-Range console is one of the most significant pieces of recording equipment in rock history. Only a handful were ever built (Trident was a studio, not a manufacturer — they built consoles for their own rooms and occasionally for clients). Complete A-Range consoles do not appear on the open market. Individual channel strips, when they surface, command $3,000–$5,000 each.

The Tannoy Red drivers shown in the Lockwood monitors are more accessible but still premium collector's items. They represent a specific moment in British audio engineering — the point where the BBC's monitoring standards, British cabinet-making craft, and Tannoy's dual-concentric driver technology converged into something that studios around the world adopted as their reference.

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