One of the lamentations of the modern world is the loss of the concept of apprenticeship. That is, as a young student, one’s pathway to knowledge and professional growth is to align oneself under a master, or at least an experienced professional of a certain field, and thus learn firsthand by observing, assisting, and eventually assimilating that person’s ethos into one’s professional life. Perhaps the rugged individualism found in today’s creative world is the natural byproduct of our current digital technology, laptops, and the ease of software, allowing virtually anyone to venture into the world of recording and mixing music on their own. However, once doing so, many students find themselves in a position where they are equipped with mind-altering amounts of technology, yet feel a deficiency in time-tested technique and well-informed guidance. After all, access to a kitchen full of state-of-the-art utensils does not a good chef make.

In talking with students, this writer has heard this desire and concern echoed in many contexts. Whether it be the desire for an internship under a more experienced professional or time with a certain instructor, many young engineers and music producers are hungry to interact with a professional elder with years of experience who can sit down with them and walk them through the essential foundations of creating great recordings. It is in that spirit, that engineer, instructor, and all-around music philosopher Steve Savage unveils his new book, entitled The Art of Digital Audio Recording. From start to finish, Savage’s book reads like a conversation with an elder craftsman, providing a practical and thoroughly comprehensive introduction to the processes and considerations of today’s recording environments. For most new students of digital recording, Steve Savage’s book will prove to be a more than useful tool in their arsenal of information. His writing style conveys a non-condescending and encouraging tone that will inspire and equip the most novice student in their production technique and skills.

Where many books aimed at students of music recording and production can veer too deeply or too quickly into tangential issues or get bogged down in subjective taste making, The Art of Digital Production distinguishes itself by approaching complex issues with simple, yet balanced explanations, steering the reader through varying topics with an ease of language and description that feels akin to a one-on-one dialogue.

And that’s not to say that the book doesn’t delve deeply into the necessary arenas of audio for any aspiring engineer. With a logical and personable approach, Savage journeys through session basics, recording protocols and technology, editing and mixing fundamentals, as well as basic overviews of mastering, file delivery, and helpful recommendations in establishing good repertoire and communication with clients. The book does a superb job of providing a thorough and developed introduction to newcomers who are working in the digital environment. In fact, the primary focus of the book is how to operate in the realm of the DAW technologies that dominate the recording field today, which current students will find extremely valuable (as this is the main way that most of them are starting up in the infancy of their recording careers). Although Savage makes it clear that the crux of the book will rest in operating within the context of a DAW, that doesn’t stop him from providing the necessary background and explorations of analog concepts on which the principles of good recording are founded upon.

The strength of The Art of Digital Recording lies in Savage’s approach to explaining essential concepts in layman’s terms. From the very beginning, it’s apparent that he is drawing from a wealth of hard-earned experience. In the Essentials chapter, Savage addresses some of the most critical components to the recording process that are very-often overlooked, or worse, completely disregarded by young engineers including proper room acoustics, monitoring set-ups and considerations, developing headphone mixes, and principles of signal flow, to name a few. Again, there is a strong overview to these matters, which allows both the beginner to grasp a very broad range of concepts and the expert to be reminded of the core foundations for quality work.

Another helpful aspect of the book is how Savage draws from personal stories in order to share the lessons he has gleaned from his storied career. One can easily appreciate how he consistently steers the trajectory of discussion back to the thing that matters most in recording: the music. Take his constant reminders and admonitions to pay attention to the details that matter, such as communication and talkback habits that respect the musician and their specific needs, paying careful attention to monitor volume and the effect that has on our perception of frequency response, or even the basics of file storage, session set-up and maintenance. As with most recording books, The Art of Digital Recording does a thorough job of exploring recording techniques for nearly every type of expected instrument an engineer is likely to face. Far from laying down an ultimatum approach to recording style, Savage describes the long-accepted approaches to recording traditional instrumentation, but yet encourages the reader to follow their imaginations through a journey of informed exploration.

In dealing with the basics of mixing and manipulating in the digital arena, Savage uses the world of Pro Tools™ as a basis for introducing the essential concepts of comping, editing, and correcting. Although his screenshots and examples are exclusively tied to one platform, it doesn’t stop him from allowing users of any type of digital production software to get a firm grasp on the concepts, allowing the reader to apply them accordingly to their software of choice. Overall, the tone of the book is conciliatory and thoughtful, especially where disagreements continue throughout the recording industry (analog vs. digital, mixing “in the box” vs. mixing “out of the box”, digital vs. analog summing, to a name a few). Savage does a fairly thorough job in presenting both sides of the argument, but then gives a reason for his current workflow of choice and how he has arrived at that decision.

The chapter on mixing will prove especially helpful to students who are seeking to find a way to build their mixes effectively and, develop a framework for understanding the pathways to achieving their creative goals. Whether exploring signal processing or methods in achieving spatiality and clarity, Savage breaks down mix terminology and methodology into intuitive explanations. Especially as he broaches mastering (which is one of the hardest parts of the recording process for both students and clients to grasp), he gives a great overview of what to expect from a mastering engineer and how engineers should prepare their mixes for mastering. Issues such as final mix organization, communication between all parties involved in mixing and final delivery for mastering are all handled with aplomb. The process of mastering could command an entire book of its own, so Savage chooses his issues wisely and thus keeps the reader within a range of concepts that are easy to grasp.

If there is one deficiency with the book, perhaps it is in Savage’s resistance to provide too much artistic input. Given the title of the book, I was expecting a little bit more in terms of his creative techniques in both mixing and recording scenarios from his past projects. The book is littered with examples from his long history of recording, but some more detailed specifics would have helped to personalize some of the information a bit more and give the reader a more in-depth glimpse of his artistic considerations as a producer and engineer (especially with clients such as Robert Cray).

Nonetheless the book remains one of the better and most accessible overviews of the music production process that we’ve seen in quite some time. It’s refreshing to find an author in the recording industry that continually keeps the focus on the major priorities and gives a solid presentation of how a student should begin developing their paradigm of audio recording. Any instructor of music production would be well advised to add The Art of Digital Audio Production to their short list of essential texts to prepare their students for the technical choices, and creative opportunities, that await them.

(Antonuccio is a contributor to TapeOp.com and PopMatters.com, teaches courses in audio production at Hocking College and Ohio University, and is producer/owner of 3 Elliot Studios in Athens, OH.)

Publication Details

The Art of Digital Audio Recording

Streve Savage

Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0195394108

The original edition of Phil Harding’s 2009 recollections of his very productive years with the Stock Aitken Waterman “hit factory,’’ PWL, was an entertaining and amiable read that served dual purposes. First, it provided readers familiar with the principals and their prodigious output during the late 80’s and early 90’s welcome background into the inner workings of what was arguably the UK’s most successful record production organization. Second, it served as a valuable introductory volume for overseas readers who are familiar with some of their hits, but for whom Stock, Aitken and Waterman might not be household names (as they were in the UK during their heyday).

The response to the original edition (which Harding published himself) was enthusiastic enough to warrant the current second edition under review [See interview with Harding, below], this time published through Cherry Red Books. Much more than a simple update, the Expanded Edition adds a wealth of additional interviews, discographies, photographs, charts, technical information and other sections that effectively swells the new volume to twice its original content. In the process, Harding succeeds in elevating his already useful book from a simple recollection of his perspective on an important chapter in popular music production to a crucial resource for students, scholars, researchers and music fans interested in learning more about the nuts and bolts of late 20th century popular music production.

Section A of the Expanded Edition is an autobiographical account of his role and observations as engineer, mixer, producer and writer in the PWL organization. Harding was prescient enough at the time to keep a detailed diary of his activities at PWL, which allows him to render his account with vivid detail, tracing his career from tea boy at Marquee Studios through the growth and glory years of PWL, and culminating with his break with the organization and subsequent establishment (with long-time production and writing partner, Ian Curnow) of a successful independent production company at Strongroom Studios in London. The Expanded Edition allows Harding to provide additional detail and engrossing anecdotes that were necessarily left out of the original edition, which now feels somewhat abridged compared to its generously fleshed-out successor.

Harding’s prose style is appropriately conversational and genial, which renders the many first hand accounts with a sense of “you-are-there” familiarity. This quality is very helpful to overseas readers of PWL From the Factory Floor (this writer included) for whom some of the participants and projects might be a bit obscure. (While artists like Bananarama, Rick Astley, Dead or Alive, and Kylie Minogue were very successful worldwide and widely known, others—like Blue Mercedes, Big Fun, Sinitta and Climie Fisher—are more obscure outside the UK and cult audiences, especially twenty years on.)

His even-handed style allows him to discuss the shortcomings of his former colleagues at PWL with an admirable lack of judgmental animus. This is quite a feat, given the fact that there seemed to be no shortage of oversized egos within the PWL empire. Of course, it is the collective hubris of the Stock-Aitken-Waterman troika that allowed it to dominate the UK charts, and have dizzying success worldwide, during its amazing run from 1987 through the early nineties. However, as the author points out, this also sowed the seeds for its eventual slide, as SAW turned their back on the dance market—which had supported the team in its early days—in search of wider mainstream popular success. In Harding’s view, this was a lapse in judgment from which PWL was unable to recover once the public grew weary of the once successful PWL formula and moved on to other pop styles.

For record makers and those who study the process, the book is also a riveting look at the techniques used to create the signature PWL sound. Gear heads will revel in the descriptions of now-obsolete midi and recording technology that the resourceful Harding and his cohorts used to create their complex soundscapes (Atari computers and Cubase, anyone?) Particularly useful are Harding’s descriptions of PWL modus operandi such as “song and production plotting” (in which key elements of admired contemporary records are appropriated in the writing and production process, and “morphed” in order to create new pop music song and productions). It is also a bit of a revelation that apparently, the entire PWL recording complex—which consisted of several studios, midi suites, and editing rooms—had so few microphones (due to the midi-centric PWL production process) that when Harding decided to cut live drums for Marcalex late in his tenure at the facility, they had to hire in microphones for the task, and train their assistant engineers how to set them up!

Harding paints the artists who were part of the PWL stable with a particularly affectionate brush, resulting in a number of fascinating portraits. Rick Astley (who, amazingly, began his PWL career as an office “gofer”) and Kylie Minogue (who literally waited in the PWL waiting room for a week before hastily recording her first PWL hit—“You Should Be So Lucky”—in piecemeal fashion in the course of an afternoon hours before returning to her native Australia) are two of the better-known artists whom Harding details; it is to his credit that, thanks to his egalitarian approach, even the more obscure artists receive equal attention. This greatly enhances the readability and historical value of the book.

It should be noted that, particularly for those for whom some of the artists and records discussed might be unfamiliar, having access to the tracks under discussion (or what Editor John Palmer describes in his forward as a “comprehensively stocked iPod”) is essential to getting the most out of the book, since Harding takes pains discuss the stylistic elements and production of most of the key tracks in some detail. (This reader consulted Spotify—newly released in the US—and found roughly 60% of the tracks mentioned were available.) According to Harding, Cherry Red will be releasing a double CD compilation in the future, and one hope that it will be included in future editions of the book. [See Harding’s comments, below.]

The remaining half of the Expanded Edition consists of all-new material, which is where the volume increases its bang for the buck for researchers and fans looking for more comprehensive information on the PWL phenomenon. For musicologists and production students, Section B provides a very helpful descriptive section of the various styles employed by PWL (such as Hi-NRG, Balearic Beats, Chicago/London House, etc) with illustrative examples in the PWL canon. This section also includes in-depth description of what Harding considers his key mixes for PWL (including Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Around Like a Record.” Bananarama’s Venus,” and Mel & Kim’s “Showing Out”). Section C gives six key PWL artists (Astley, Minogue, Hazell Dean, Bananarama, Dead or Alive and Mel & Kim) similarly intricate treatment.

This reader found Section D particularly fascinating. Consisting of a treasure trove of studio, session and candid photos, precise floor plans of the PWL complex, and stills from a video tour of the facility, this portion literally puts a face on most, if not all, of the personnel involved in the PWL universe. It is refreshing to see the administrative folks are given their moment in the sun—how many books of this type go to the trouble to list the staff members, secretaries and assistants who helped make the machine run? (They are listed, incidentally, complete with short recollections by Harding—some bordering on the banal—for example an assistant engineer, one Stuart Brown, warrants the following: “well-spoken but quiet, with dark hair.”)

An illuminating recent interview by Editor Palmer with Harding and Curnow provides the content for Section E, while Section F offers a comprehensive discography of Harding’s work with PWL. This is a truly impressive section, as in encompasses what would, for most of us, comprise a couple of lifetimes of creative output!

Finally, Section G tackles the technical issues raised in the text. While the original edition has a similar section, here it is greatly expanded and is very helpful indeed. Those of us who have been at this for a while will be familiar with some of the technology employed in the making of those luminous PWL hits, but younger readers and lay people will find this appendix—which references mentions of things like “SSL Mixer” and “DAT” to the section in which is was mentioned (in this case, Chapters 5 & 7) and provides additional information regarding the equipment or processes involved. Also helpful is a glossary with references to outside sources.

Another highlight of this section is the “Case Study” by PWL engineer Les Sharma of Harding’s mix of Kylie Minogue’s iconic “Hand On Your Heart” (one of this writer’s favorite SAW compositions). It chronicles Sharma’s entrée to working with Harding, the role of an assistant, track notation, mixing and recall techniques, the creation of 12” mix parts, and so on. All in all, an excellent step-by-step account of creating a mix during that era, and it is to Harding’s credit that he gives Sharma his due and provides the space for him to make this contribution to the book.

All in all, PWL From The Factory Floor: Expanded Edition takes an already admirable book and turns it into a truly useful text for a variety of audiences. It works as a research reference, as a potential text for college courses (one can envision a popular music course that examines the record “factories” from the 20th century, such as PWL, Motown, Stax, etc, for which this would be a great resource) and finally, as an entertaining read about a fascinating era in pop music.

INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR PHIL HARDING

JARP: How did the Expanded Edition come about?

PH: The first edition sold out within 6 months and the response was fantastic from all parties, including ex PWL colleagues. John Palmer, my eventual editor and a long term PWL expert (he has done several PWL CD compilations for Cherry Red Records in the UK in recent years) approached me with the idea to do a second edition, to be accompanied by a double CD compilation of many of the mixes I talk about in the book from the 1980′s. He then set up a meeting with Cherry Red, who also publish music books, with the idea to get them to publish this expanded second edition and to release the CD, which is now ready and due out on November 14th 2011.

JARP: What specifically did you address in Section A of the expanded edition that you were not able to in the First Edition?

PH: More detail on Simon Cowell, more accuracy on some of the factual parts (assisted by research by John Palmer) that may have been slightly wrong in the first version of the book and a bit more detail on Kylie.

JARP: How cooperative were Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the preparation of the book, considering that they have written their own memoirs of the era?

PH: I only approached Pete Waterman for co-operation as he had some specific information that I needed, as well as that I wanted his approval to go ahead with this in the first place and to be able to use the term ‘PWL’ in the title. Pete gave me permission for that and a 2-hour interview, as well as some promo pictures together at the launch of the book at the ARP conference in Cardiff in 2009

JARP: When will the companion CD be made available?

PH: November 14th 2011 via Cherry Red Records UK [See CD listing below]

JARP: Will subsequent editions of the book include the CD?

PH: This expanded edition will be available via Cherry Red, packaged with the CD at a special price on November 14th 2011 and the first 50-100 copies will be signed by me.

JARP: Finally, a more general question: the landscape of record production is drastically altered in the 21st century. What do you feel has changed the most, and what has remained the same? Any advice for newcomers to the field?

PH: The biggest change is the convenience of the technology and the availability of Digidesign’s Pro-Tools software in pretty much every major studio in the world, as well as being present at many project and home studios. This allows us to record our projects and move around the world with ease to collaborate with anybody. The Internet allows us to also stay in our own studios and collaborate with any musicians, producers and engineers with the various file-sharing systems available.

What remains the same is the process of recording a live band in terms of microphone set-up and placement and that whole process from recording area to control room, this has surprisingly changed very little over the years.

My advice to newcomers is to get yourself set up with a mobile rig – laptop, software, interface and microphones – then offer yourself, your expertise and enthusiasm to musicians and groups that want to be recorded wherever they are.

Pete Waterman, Ian Curnow, Phil Harding (1989)

TRACK LISTING: PHIL HARDING CLUB MIXES OF THE 80′S

CD1
01. Michael Jackson with The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back ['88] (12″ Remix)
02. Eighth Wonder – I’m Not Scared (10” Remix)
03. ABC – When Smokey Sings (The Miami Mix)
04. Diana Ross – Love Hangover ['88] (12” Version)
05. Rick Astley – She Wants To Dance With Me (Original Extended R’n'B Version)
06. Four Tops – Reach Out I’ll Be There ['88] (12” Remix)
07. Holly Johnson – Americanos (PWL Extended Version)
08. Godley & Creme – Snack Attack (Extended Remix)
09. Jimmy Ruffin – Easy Just To Say (I Love You) (Extended Club Mix)
10. Basia – Until You Come Back To Me (Phil Harding 12” Remix)
11. Rick Astley – Til The Day That I Die
12. Dead Or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) (Murder Mix)

CD2
01. Blue Mercedes – I Want To Be Your Property (DEF B4 Dishonour Mix
02. Pepsi & Shirlie – Heartache (Dot & Daisy’s Club Remix)
03. Imagination – Instinctual (Jack Leee Freak Mix)
04. Blow Monkeys – Digging Your Scene (Remix)
05. Rick Astley – Stay With Me Tonight
06. Fe Fi Fo Fum – Beat Your Body (Manhattan Mix)
07. The Blue August Project – Oxygen (Extended Dance Version)
08. Sinitta – Body Shopping (New Vogue Version)
09. XS-5 – I Need More (Extended Dance Version)
10. Agents Aren’t Aeroplanes – The Upstroke (12”)
11. Jimmy Ruffin – Truly Yours
12. Five Star – Rain Or Shine (Remix)
13. Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up (Phil Harding 12″ Mix)

Publication Details

PWL From The Factory Floor: Expanded Edition

Phil Harding
Cherry Red Books 2010
ISBN: 978 1901447521

www.pwlfromthefactoryfloor.com

If one had a mind to, the path from Liverpool to London could likely be paved with the seemingly endless array of tomes that discuss, deconstruct and dissect the formidable output of The Beatles, arguably the most revered and imitated group in the history of popular music.  The Fab Four have inspired a seemingly endless array of titles that examine every aspect of the band and its legacy, that not surprisingly run the gamut: amazingly detailed discographies like Bob Spitz’s The Beatles on Apple Records and  The Beatles Solo on Apple Records—not to mention his exhaustive and perceptive titular biography; Mark Lewisjohn’s seminal look at the band’s studio process, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions; memoirs by their gifted support personnel (such as Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Music Of The Beatles by Geoff Emerick); hatchet jobs such as Albert Goldman’s muckraking The Lives Of John Lennon; and of course The Beatles’ own auto-hagiography, Anthology.

However, if one had to choose a single book that provides the clearest assessment of The Beatles’ achievement (along with sober-minded deflating of some of the band’s most popular numbers) Revolution In The Head: The Beatles Records And The Sixties by the late Ian MacDonald would be a strong candidate.  A former New Musical Express editor, as well as a musician, composer and producer, MacDonald applies the rigor inherent in each of these disciplines, and holds The Beatles to very high critical standards, indeed.  Examining every known recording by the band (including the infamous thirteen-plus minute long “Carnival of Light”) he analyzes each track in terms of the contributions by each writer, melodic approaches taken in its composition, lyrical development, instrumentation and recording technique. He also peers inside the state of mind of each track’s composer(s), offering sometimes surprising but always well-thought out and supportable evaluations of how these states of mind helped bring each song into being.

This is no dry musicological treatise.  MacDonald was a gifted and colorful writer, deploying his analysis with a rapier wit and an admirable lack of hero-worship or rose colored nostalgia.  Typical is his wry, yet dispassionate take on an early Beatles album track, “All My Loving”:

The innocence of early Sixties British pop is perfectly distilled in the eloquent simplicity of this number.  Though never considered for a single, it drew so much radio-play and audience response that, in February 1964 EMI issued it as the title track of a best selling EP…at this stage McCartney regarded Lennon as the leader of the group, a feeling more or less echoed by the record-buying public.  With “All My Loving,” he began t be seen as more of an equal with his partner.  Meanwhile, The Beatles’ rivals looked on amazed as songs of this commercial appeal were casually thrown away on LPs.

What makes this book a truly engrossing read is that MacDonald has no pretention of neutrality regarding the relative merits of individual Beatles tracks.  To MacDonald, much of their work takes its place amongst the greatest achievements in popular music (masterpieces like “A Day In The Life,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” are treated by the author as such); at the same time, many Beatles tracks—including some of their most popular—in MacDonald’s view fail to live up to the high standards set by the artists themselves.

Witness his withering appraisal of what many consider to be one of their great anthems, “All You Need Is Love”:

One of The Beatles’ least deserving hits, Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” owes more of its standing to its local historical associations than to its inspiration, which, as with their other immediate post-Pepper recordings…is desultory.  Thrown together…the song is an inelegant structure in alternating bars of 4/4 and 3/4, capped by a chorus which…consists largely of a single note…The Beatles were now doing willfully substandard work: paying little attention to musical values and settling for lyric first-thoughts…

Of course, taking issue with such judgments is part of what makes Revolution In The Head such a compelling read.  Even as one defers to the logic of his sometimes harsh, yet consistently supported estimations, many readers will find themselves quietly fuming over MacDonald’s evisceration of a cherished track.  One of this writer’s favorites from 1969’s Abbey Road, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” is not spared MacDonald’s colorfully conflated dismembering of the song’s conception and execution:

Sexually addicted to [Yoko Ono], he was helplessly dependent, a predicament grindingly explicit in his chord sequence: the sickening plunge from E7 to B flat 7; the augmented A that drags his head up to make him go through it all again; the hammering flat ninth that collapses, spent on the song’s insatiable D minor arpeggio…

Out and out rock Beatles, this is the antithesis of their light pop touch and another of their attempts in the new heavy style…earnest in concept, it is, in the end, bathetic in effect…all told [it] is a bold lunge at something seriously adult which, perhaps doomed by its own desperation, doesn’t quite come off.

Yet, for every sacrifice of a Beatles sacred cow, there are surprisingly idiosyncratic favorable assessments of some of their less appreciated work.  Harrison’s “Within You, Without You,” frequently derided by many devotees as a boring indulgence in Indian instrumentation and philosophical blather, a “blot on a classic LP,” (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) is given a refreshingly revisionist assessment by MacDonald:

…this ambitious essay in cross-cultural fusion and meditative philosophy has been dismissed with a yawn by almost every commentator since it first appeared…[yet] “Within You Without You” is central to the outlook that shaped Sgt. Pepper…

Stylistically, it is the most distant departure from the staple Beatles sound in their discography—and an altogether remarkable achievement for someone who had been acquainted with Hindustani classical music for barely eighteen months.

While such song-by-song analysis take up the lion’s share of Revolution In The Head (and are in fact the most absorbing aspect of the book), the Introduction provides a necessary cultural overview that that provides the sociological component alluded to in the books title.  MacDonald means to use the Beatles musical canon to illuminate the importance and impact of the decade in which their work was created.  Political upheaval, the rise of the drug culture, changing sexual mores and cultural shifts are seen by MacDonald as being mirrored in the Beatles work, forming a sort of self-propagating loop.  Not only did the Beatles reflect the world around them, but they also influenced it like no other pop band before or since.  In MacDonald’s words:

The Sixties seem like a golden age to us because, relative to now, they were…now radically disunited, we live dominated by and addicted to gadgets, our raison d’être and sense of community unfixably broken…far away from us on the other side of the sun-flooded chasm of the Sixties—where, courtesy of scientific technology, The Beatles can still be heard singing their buoyant, poignant, hopeful love-advocating songs.

Making this volume even more useful to scholars of popular music, and a boon to younger fans and students, is the books final section, “Chronology: The Sixties” which provides a very helpful timeline of signal moments in the Beatles career and how they coincided with key events in UK Pop, Current Affairs, and Trends in Culture.  It is instructive and fascinating, for example, to be reminded the recording of what many consider The Beatles’ finest moment, the 1966 album Revolver, was concurrent with Bob Dylan’s controversial Royal Albert Hall Concert with The Hawks (later The Band), that in the same time frame Chairman Mao declared the beginning of the brutal Cultural Revolution, and the same year also saw the release of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and William Burroughs’s Junkie.

Finally, a handy glossary of the technical and musical terms used in the body of the book brings Revolution In The Head to its conclusion.

Taken as a whole, MacDonald’s examination of the Beatles’ recorded work and what it represented in its own time remains one of the most cohesive and coherent critiques of their oeuvre in pop music literature.  Making clear what he regards as the band’s strengths and weaknesses (to the author, they were peerless pop composers and musicians, somewhat less inspiring when they attempted harder material—“Helter Skelter” for example is skewered mercilessly) as well as the triumphs and foibles of the era in which they were  created, MacDonald provides a first rate understanding of what the Beatles did along with why and how they did it.  And it makes for a revealing, vibrant, and fascinating (if occasionally vexatious) read as well.  Highly recommended.

Publication Details

Revolution In The Head: The Beatles Records And The Sixties (Third Revised Edition)
Ian MacDonald
Vintage Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0805042450
(Kindle version available online from Amazon.)

The idea that music and music production can look backwards or forwards, often at the same time, acts as an overarching theme for the papers found in the journal. The way our ‘art’ changes through technology and the use of technology is an example of where people make choices between, for instance, old technology and new technology – between old sounds and new sounds, with articles continually exploring the tensions, transformations and innovations between these two theoretical poles.

Four areas of discussion emerged from the conference. Theme 1 was alternative realities: (re)presenting sound and raised important issues around the way that the recording constructs reality. Theme 2’s area of interest was in song writing and the studio. Song writing remains a dominant tradition within record production but covers an enormous area of activity.  Theme 3 was concerned with the field of education and the idea that change and continuity can become a site of resistance. Theme 4 of the conference was electronic technology and the production of music, which provided an opportunity to consider the way that creative ideas have emerged from our efforts to subvert or control technology, sound and performance and to gain expressive control over production.

Focusing on change and continuity raises questions concerning the agents not only for transformation and innovation, but those which create resistance to change. Writing in 1990, Middleton made the point that “‘Popular music’ (or whatever) can only be properly viewed within the context of the whole musical field, within which it is an active tendency; and this field, together with its internal relationships, is never still – it is always in movement” (Middleton, 1990, p. 7). In a solitary journal we cannot hope to define let alone map out the entirety of our field, but as part of a continuing project, linked to previous and future journals, we have the potential to locate areas of interest and to develop a critical and grounded approach to the Art of Record Production.

Alternative realities: (re)presenting sound arose from the idea that the recorded ‘performance’ is often not the performance heard in the studio. Reality is, of course, a philosophical issue and there are several papers here that explore this issue. One of the advantages we have in the ARP is that much of what is discussed is grounded in practice. Paul Draper’s and Stephen Emmerson’s paper presents a practical exploration of the idea or (re)presenting sound through combining remix technology with the music of Berg, Schoenberg, and Bartok. Alternative realities are explored in Alan Williiam’s look at the way the studio is represented in film. Justin William’s   takes a different view of representation and considers genre representation and the extra-musical discourse that informs our listening. Emotional arousal, modes of listening and consumer audio technology add to the debate on this topic.

Songwriting and production is informed by the historical tradition of writing songs and the possibilities presented by studio practices. This is an under-represented area of research given that so much recording time is devoted to song. The mythology of the singer songwriter is confused by the collaborative nature of recording studio practice. This area has been extensively researched and evaluated by Philip McIntyre who has provided a strong theoretical basis for much of the discussion of this field, which has informed and is acknowledged by other contributors here.

Education, as we say later, remains a perennial concern of the conference and the challenges of teaching music production invites a number of innovative approaches. Philip Richardson and Rob Toulson demonstrate the need for new approaches to tasks specific to the art of recording. One perceived tension in education is the shift from the apprenticeship model of training studio production teams to university-based experiences. Rob Toulson’s discussion of media based learning provides an interesting discussion of the way this gap between education and professional practice could be bridged by the use of interactive media. Toby Seay introduces the Drexel University Audio Archives which not only provide rich primary sources for research, but also alert us to the role that institutions might play in archiving recordings and the skills involved in such a task.

Electronic technology and the production of music provides a rich area of thought encompassing both the technical, textual and theoretical. One of the great advantages of the conference is its ability to present and discuss topics and information which are rarely found in established literature. Mark Mynett, for instance, reminds us of the importance of the sound at source in his discussion of recording drums while Jay Hodgson explores other relatively unchartered territory in his discussion of what he terms ‘Lateral Dynamics Processing’.

As JARP is re-launching with this issue, it may be useful to consider how far the articles here are representative of the proposals submitted for conference and papers presented at ARP10 in terms of the broad themes they explore and reflect on what this may tell us about the ‘topography’ of the Art of Record Production.

Theme 4 generated the largest number of conference proposals and tied with theme 1 for the highest number of accepted paper presentations at the conference (17), followed by theme 3 with 15 and theme 2 with 8. However, only approximately one quarter of the papers presented for themes 3 and 4 reappear here in full article form compared to roughly half of the presentations for themes 1 and 2. While any conclusions that may be drawn from this can be only speculative, it may be worth noting that there are potential specialist homes for papers concerned with themes 3 and 4. Rather than suggesting that themes 1 and 2 are somehow more representative of ARP’s “core business”, we think we would not be alone in welcoming the broad interdisciplinary nature of the contributions both here and at the conference and express the hope that this re-launch of JARP will further help to encourage a wide range of approaches to the study of music production and technology. ARP11 will retain education as one of its themes which will be the third consecutive year that we have considered this area as either an academic or pedagogic discipline; as the majority of contributors to the conference and this journal are both researchers and educators it is right and proper for us to continue this discussion.

The selection of articles presented in the current journal confirms that we need be in no great hurry to narrow the scope of the art of record production. It may, however, suggest that we are beginning to map out our territory and in doing so, create clear distinctions that set us apart from other fields of musical study.  Each new conference brings some continuity through the sustained discourse represented in this and previous journals. At the same time, as the articles presented here demonstrate, we can look forward to change through the shift in perspective that the ‘next best’ conference brings.

Bibliography

Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

Bibliography

Buskin, Richard. 1999. Inside Tracks: A First-hand History of Popular Music From the World’s Greatest Record Producers and Engineers. New York: Avon Books.

Chanan, Michael. 1995. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music. New York: Verso.

Clark, Rick. 1996. “Emmylou Harris: The Making of Wrecking Ball” in Mix. Vol. 20, No. 2, February 1996.

Cogan, Jim and William Clark. 2003. Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Cunningham, Mark. 1996. Good Vibrations: A History of Record Production. London: Sanctuary Publishing Ltd.

Daley, Dan. 1999. “John Storyk: Thirty Years of Studio Design” in Mix. Vol. 23, no. 6, June 1999.

Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Fyfe, Andy. 2003. When The Levee Breaks: The Making of Led Zeppelin’s IV: Chicago: A Cappella Books.

Gaisberg, F.W. 1942. The Music Goes Round. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Gill, Andy and Kevin Odegard. 2004. A Simple Twist Of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood On The Tracks. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Granata, Charles L. 1999. Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording. Chicago: A Cappella Books.

Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kenney, William Howland. 1999. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewisohn, Mark. 1988. The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books.

Massey, Howard. 2000. Behind The Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft The Hits. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books.

Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound Of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Newell, Philip. 1998. Recording Spaces. Oxford: Focal Press.

Philip, Robert. 2004. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Porcello, Thomas. 1996. “Sonic Artistry: Music, Discourse, and Technology in the Sound Recording Studio.” PhD Dissertation: University of Texas at Austin.

______. 2003. “Tails Out: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation of Technology in Music Making,” in Music and Technoculture, Rene T.A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay, Jr. eds. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Williams, Alan. 2007. “Divide and Conquer: Power, Role Formation and Conflict in Recording Studio Architecture” in The Journal of the Art of Record Production Vol. 1 (i), Simon Frith, ed.

______. 2010. “Pay Some Attention to the Mand Behind the Curtain” – Unsung Heroes and the Canonization of Process in the Classic Albums Documentary Series” in Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 22, Issue 2.

Zak, Albin J. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Filmography

A Star Is Born, Warner Bros. 1954.

Aerosmith: The Making of Pump, Columbia Music Video, 1990.

Boogie Nights, New Line, 1997.

Coal Miner’s Daughter, Universal, 1980.

I am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco By Sam Jones, Plexifilm, 2003.

Jailhouse Rock, Warner Bros., 1957.

Laurel Canyon, Sony Pictures Classics, 2002.

Let It Be (1970), taken from The Beatles Anthology, Apple, 2003.

Meeting People is Easy, Parlophone/Capitol, 1999.

Nashville, Paramount, 1975.

Ray, Universal, 2005.

Rock Star, Warner Bros., 2001.

Some Kind of Monster, Paramount, 2004.

Sympathy For The Devil, ABKCO, 1970.

The Buddy Holly Story, Columbia Pictures, 1978.

The Harder They Come, International Films/Xenon Pictures, 1972.

The Kids Are Alright, Pioneer/EMI, 1979.

This is Spinal Tap, Studio Canal/MGM, 1984.

U2: Rattle and Hum, Paramount, 1988.

The degree subject of Audio and Music Technology is a broad multidisciplinary field encompassing aspects of electronics, mathematics, computing, acoustics, music and psychology. This brings a considerable challenge for delivery of deep and effective course content and engagement with all students. Furthermore, the professional fields of music technology and music production are dominated by a need for experience above raw academic ability, so novel and diverse teaching and learning strategies are required. Audio and Music Technology courses have become well subscribed in UK Higher Education, but, being a rather modern academic field, these courses have not benefited from substantial research, analysis and development of learning and teaching strategies.

In particular, professional level case study material is required to cover practical areas of the field that are challenging to teach within a classroom environment. For example, the practice of recording a 70 piece classical orchestra cannot easily be taught in classroom alone. Practical skills of project management, pre-production, project budgeting, engineering techniques and post production all need transferring to the student, which is a considerable challenge in a purely academic environment and with large class sizes. Furthermore, there is a need for experience to be gained in a professional and industrial manner similar to that in which the music and recording industry operates. The author has developed professional level case study material to aid learning in this challenging field. The case study material, in the form of interactive DVD with multiple film and audio options, allows students to effectively be at the recording session, in the meeting, making the decisions. This article, therefore, tackles a unique area of pedagogy with respect to Audio and Music Technology by evaluating existing and well known teaching strategies and applying those to the specific field. Furthermore, as the applied learning and teaching strategies are captured within media based material, future analysis and reflection on the effectiveness of these techniques can be evaluated with student and course tutor feedback.

The particular case of Audio and Music Technology shares common challenges for teaching and learning with other new media fields, for example, video production and digital media production. The examples and outcomes of this research will therefore also benefit educators from wider fields in their approach to delivering diverse, deep and effective course content.

Simple teaching methods

A number of music recording and production skills can be taught as individual knowledge areas that make up the skills necessary for managing a larger project. For example, if it is desired to teach students how to record a multitrack studio project, than this can be done by discussing aspects of music production as discrete skill sets. In this case it is possible to discuss industry recognised (and referenced) techniques for recording, for example, a popular drum kit and perform a simple practical exercise to implement these skills. Similar skills and knowledge can be transferred to the student for all instruments which may be recorded.

In popular music production, it is indeed possible to record each instrument individually and layer the audio to create an illusion of a unified performance. Here producers may only need to work with one musician at a time, and in a relatively small (and inexpensive) space. Furthermore the skills of mixing recorded audio into a finished artifact can be taught by example, with respect to published cases and by reflective review with the student.

These types of ‘discrete’ music recording projects allow a number of simple knowledge areas and skills to be transferred to the student who can then develop and critique their own ideas and preferences through reflective practice. However, these types of projects do not expose the student to the wider aspects and skills of music production which are essential for building a successful career in the field.

Challenges with live recording and education

Live recording projects bring a unique set of challenges which allow students to experience relevant industry demands. Here the specific challenges revolve around teamwork, project planning and dealing with unpredictable events. In many cases of music technology education, the opportunities to experience live recording projects are limited, because they are reliant on events being accessible for students to become involved in. At Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), a number of opportunities do exist given the diverse nature of local musicianship and, in particular, the excellent Lunchtime Concerts series organised by the ARU Music Department.

During this research and wherever possible, students have been encouraged to participate in live recording events. In all cases students are observed to develop enhanced skills which have in turn improved their studio recording skills. Furthermore, the opportunity has been taken to ‘teach by example’ where the author sets coursework for students to record a live event and then in the first week of teaching performs the coursework assignment as an example of good practice, to engage with students at an early stage of the module. This method of teaching by example reduces the fear-factor involved in such exercises, as students have observed first-hand the assignment in action before having to take responsibility for their own assignment.

As discussed, larger scale projects rely heavily on skills which are both subject specific and personal skills. A good example here is an assignment to record a 70 piece concert orchestra on location and within an allocated time constraint. Students therefore need to understand the technical aspects of the project, but they also need to be able to practically deliver the project. The key skills required can be broken down into technical, project management and personal (communication) skills as follows:

Technical skills:

• Recording skills
• Mixing skills
• Technical knowledge

Project management skills

• Planning
• Financial management
• Time management
• Resource management

Communication skills

• Team working
• Artist management and an understanding of the creative process
• Studio and venue contacts
• Record label contacts
• Entrepreneurialism

It can be seen, as discussed above, that the technical skills can be taught and developed through standard classroom and practical session learning. However, the project management and communication skills cannot be so easily taught, as these must be developed through exposure and experience and enhanced through continuous reflective practice. It is therefore no surprise that practitioners in the music industry regularly report “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and that “experience is more important than knowledge”.

Bloom’s cognitive domain

It is apparent that the quest to develop experience and skills above raw knowledge in the field of Audio and Music Technology aligns with Bloom’s cognitive domain for learning (Bloom et al, 1956), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Bloom’s Cognitive domain (Bloom, 1956).

Bloom et al describe that knowledge transfer alone only leads to shallow learning, and that deep learning is only developed by moving up through the cognitive domain. As discussed it is indeed possible for a number of students to acquire knowledge and comprehension in the field of Audio and Music Technology. However, effective application of this knowledge is essential for ensuring a successful career. Furthermore, reflective analysis is essential for practitioners to learn from their mistakes and handling unpredictable issues.

The key to deep understanding and high level practice however is in the innovation (synthesis) and evaluation of new and bespoke techniques. Here, practitioners can develop their own ideas, put them into practice and evaluate and evolve to perfection.

Effective Learning Strategies

A number of well known learning strategies can be employed within Audio and Music Technology courses to assist practitioners in climbing Bloom’s Cognitive Domain.

Learning from mistakes

Learning from mistakes is a well known method of learning, however, mistakes can only be used in learning if the mistake is first identified and evaluated. Therefore there is a deep requirement for feedback to be provided by educators and for the move towards autonomous learning which enables students to self evaluate and generate their won critical analysis and feedback. Hattie (2002) states: “Feedback has been shown to be the single-most contributing factor for influencing the level of students’ achievement”.

It is possible also for practitioners to learn from the mistakes of others, facilitating accelerated learning. Accelerated learning can be achieved if peer review and case study analysis is incorporated into teaching. It should also be noted that case studies of good practice can be presented along with case studies of bad practice in order for students to identify potential hazards and common mistakes made in professional practice. Failure should also be considered as an essential aspect of learning, however it is the educators responsibility to ensure that failure and mistakes encountered during learning is of a low risk nature. The fear of failure can cause students to disengage, as discussed by Covington (1985) who states: “Fear of failure can be a barrier, students need to learn to handle failure in safe environments”.

Music and audio recording environments can be stressful, hectic and finance-critical places, and so in the professional scenario failure can be with a high cost. Educators therefore need to re-enact and prepare professional scenarios where the results don’t actually matter; for example recording events at no cost, so if the end result is unsuccessful, nothing of great value is lost.

Maintaining student engagement

Student engagement is essential to facilitate deep learning. A diversity of teaching methods can help to keep students engaged and to ensure that each student’s individual learning methods are catered for. For example, some students may engage best with practical hands-on exercises while others respond better to autonomous research tasks:

There are many roads to learning. People bring different talents and styles of learning to college. Brilliant students in the seminar room may be all thumbs in the lab or art studio. Students rich in hands-on experience may not do so well with theory. Students need the opportunity to show their talents and learn in ways that work for them. Then they can be pushed to learn in new ways that do not come so easily. (Chickering and Gamson, 1987)

Furthermore, “the type of teaching aids and learning materials used can heavily influence student interest and participation” (Petty, 2004).

It is therefore the educator’s responsibility to deliver with a diversity of teaching methods, particular given the fact “students’ engagement and attention wanders after 10-15 minutes” (Thomas, 1972). In the field of Audio and Music Technology this can be translated by providing a number of learning strategies including classroom lecture, technical demonstrations, practical recording exercises, case study analysis, guest lecturers etc.

Teacher as mentor and role model

“No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be.

Not all the books on all the shelves – but what the teachers are themselves. “

Rudyard Kipling, discussed by Rose (2004).

It is obvious that students learn from their mentors and role models. It is therefore good practice for Audio and Music Technology educators to be professionally active also. Students need to see that their teachers as successful in their field, not just well educated. Teachers need to be practicing at the top of Bloom’s Domain if they are to help their students up to the highest level too. Here it is valuable to maintain industrial links and partnerships. In particular the connection between academia and industry should be strong, as neither can succeed without the other. Moves to utilise visiting guest lecturers and for academics to engage in industrial sabbatical projects can help enhance this link.

Learning by doing

Learning is an active experience, as discussed by Chickering and Gamson (1987):

Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.

Education in Audio and Music Technology requires practical engagement, perhaps more than most subjects given the unique blend of disciplines it touches. The practical aspects of courses should be designed to engage students in climbing Bloom’s Cognitive Domain. Raw knowledge can be taught and investigated, however students need to be encouraged to attempt self assisted learning by practical methods, particularly with respect to music production which is both technical and subjective and highly reliant on experience and critical listening. Unfortunately, it is challenging to provide opportunities for the most challenging of practical exercises, in which case unique case studies can be developed and discussed to allow deconstruction of a project, even if it cannot be practically prepared.

Cases studies to assist learning

The use of case studies can assist the path of a student up through the levels of Bloom’s cognitive domain. As mentioned above, seeing a practitioner work first hand at the desired level can inspire and engage students to achieve similarly. Unfortunately many projects in the recording industry are regarded as too important or critical to allow external observers, so students may have limited opportunity to observe. A valuable case study in a large scale music production project is that of Elbow’s performance with the BBC Classical Orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road. This performance brought together a rock band with a classical orchestra and choir, requiring in excess of 100 microphones in all. The performance was broadcast live on BBC radio, filmed for BBC TV and released as a commercial music CD. The production methods are documented by Inglis (2009) which give valuable insight into the techniques used and issues encountered and resolved.

The author has similarly developed case study material to document both the technical aspects and project management of large scale recording projects. Firstly, a samba band recording project is presented (Toulson, 2010a) which describes the technical aspects of recording an 11 piece samba band under live conditions. This production served as a pilot study for the later orchestra recording project (Toulson, 2010b). See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Case study footage (available from http://www.robtoulson.com/video.php).

Here, aspects of project management, entrepreneurialism and technical details (as listed in Section 3 above) are discussed and evaluated. The orchestra recording session is used as a case study to encourage interactive reflective practice by allowing the listener to evaluate three different audio recordings, each conducted using a different stereo recording technique. The developed case studies therefore allow students to identify the importance of climbing the levels of Bloom’s cognitive domain and allow firsthand account of such projects. The student is therefore able to learn, somewhat, from other peoples’ experiences and mistakes and thus climb Bloom’s cognitive domain quicker. This is not to take away the importance of students engaging with the practical aspects and skills discussed, moreover to bring visualisation to the anticipated experiences and to reduce the ‘fear-factor’ for students engaging in advanced and large scale projects.

The results of this research and case study development have already encouraged students to engage in more challenging and valuable music production projects, which shows that the route to deep autonomous learning can be accelerated. These results will be evaluated continuously through feedback sessions with current and future students, so that teaching and learning methods can be evolved further and subsequently continue to enhance the student learning experience.

Conclusions

It is evident that specific research into effective teaching and learning strategies for Audio and Music Technology should be conducted. Those topics discussed with respect to Bloom’s Cognitive Domain and the identified strategies for learning from mistakes, learning from a role model, enhancing engagement and learning by doing can be evaluated to identify how students engage and achieve given different methods. It still remains that the challenges with respect to cost, space, cross-disciplinary skills and the need for professional level experience make it difficult to provide education for every scenario. However, development of case studies can help to reduce this issue and, particularly with the sharing of information amongst education peers from parallel institutions, it is possible to enhance and improve the skills and experience for graduating students of Audio and Music Technology courses by effective use of media based material.

Bibliography

Bloom, B., Englehart, M. Furst, E., Hill, W., & Krathwohl, D. 1956. Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook I: Cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green.

Chickering, A. W. & Gamson, Z. F. 1987. I. AAHE Bulletin, 39(7), 3-7.

Covington, M. V. 1985. Strategic thinking and fear of failure. In J. Segal, S. Chipman, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Relating instruction to research (pp. 389-416). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hattie, J. 2002. ‘What are the attributes of excellent teachers?’ in B. Webber (Editor), Teachers make a Difference: What is the Research Evidence? Conference Proceedings, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington (New Zealand).

Inglis, S. 2009. Rupert Flindt: Recording Elbow Live at Abbey Road, Sound on Sound, September 2009.

Petty, G. 2004 . Teaching Today (3rd Edition), Cheltenham, Nelson Thornes.

Rose, D. 2004. ‘The potential of role-model education, The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, www.infed.org/biblio/role_model_education.htm.

Thomas, J. 1972. The variation of memory with time for information appearing during a lecture. Studies in Adult Education, 4, 57-62.

Toulson. E. R. 2010a. Samba band recording case study, available online at http://www.robtoulson.com/video.php, accessed May 2011.

Toulson . E. R. 2010b. Orchestra recording case study, available online at http://www.robtoulson.com/video.php, accessed May 2011.

http://streaming.inspire.anglia.ac.uk/media/recording_an_orchestra.html, accessed September 2010.

Toulson, E. R. 2008. Managing Widening Participation in Music and Music Production, Proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society UK Conference, Cambridge, April 2008.

Discography

Elbow. 2009. Seldom Seen Kid Live [Bonus DVD: Live at Abbey Road], Polydor.

This paper presents the final stages of a two-year action research project, where a number of insights into a single recording endeavour have been published along the way (Draper & Emmerson, 2009; Draper, 2010). The music itself dates from 1908, regarded by many as a landmark in the history of European Modernism, with some of the 20th century’s most remarkable composers finding their distinctive voice via seminal works for solo piano. These include Alban Berg’s ‘Sonata Op.1’, Arnold Schoenberg’s 3 ‘Piano Pieces Op.11’, and Béla Bartók’s ‘Bagatelles Op.6’. The works were performed as a centennial celebration in 2008, followed later by studio recordings involving a close collaboration between the authors – one a classical pianist and musicologist, the other a sound producer and electric guitarist. As such, this represents the meeting of two different paradigms in pursuit of a shared understanding of ‘artistic practice as research’ (QCRC, 2010). The recordings were recently released as a double CD set entitled Remixing Modernism on Australian label, Move Records (Emmerson, 2010).

In what follows, we firstly outline some of the musicological considerations which underpin the project. We then detail an overarching research methodology to frame the three case studies presented here, as well as clarify our approach to their representation on record. Finally, some conclusions are drawn both from the authors’ research and from various stages of peer review of the recordings themselves throughout the production process leading to market.

Approach

It is useful to reflect upon some of the historical trends in the representation of Western art music on record. At one time, prominent Classical musicians like Leopold Stokowski, Herbert van Karajan and Georg Solti enthusiastically embraced recording technology. They worked with sound producers such as John Culshaw to deliberately manipulate ambience and balance to create soundscapes that were not possible to achieve in the concert hall. As Avard Ashby notes, “. . . it is difficult to separate technology from musicianship in Stokowski’s work and thinking: the two converge in service of beauty, expression, and convenience” (2010, p. 48).

In the 1960s, Glenn Gould became an important spokesman and exponent to argue for recordings as a distinct (and for him preferable) mode of both presenting and listening to music. For Gould, “recording and concert performance were distinct art forms, each with its own premises, priorities, ethics, and possibilities” (Bazzana, 1997, p. 244). He also argued that recordings would serve some types of repertoire more than others, particularly in relation to certain types of intimate and esoteric music better suited to private contemplation rather than the usual public forms of presentation and reception. For example, he wrote that,

Schoenberg’s theories . . . [attribute] significance to minute musical connections . . . they deal with relationships that are on the whole subsurface and can be projected with an appropriate definition only through the intercession of electronic media. (cited in Riley, 1989, p. 235)

Gould claimed that Schoenberg was in fact one of the first musicians to grasp the significance of recording to the composition process and appreciated the opportunities for works to be presented in novel ways. As Schoenberg himself wrote,

Imagine a musician attendant upon a mechanical instrument which he commands. This is what he has to do: he needs an exact knowledge and understanding of the work he is to perform, and has to influence the reproducing apparatus so that, in the matter of dynamics, the performance attains the degree of clarity and expressiveness matching his insight and taste. He is in a position to draw for this purpose upon every means of altering the tempo and the sound. (1926/1975, p. 329)

More recently however, prevailing notions of authenticity have driven a purist approach involving the production of high fidelity recordings and the release of so-called ‘live performances’ (interestingly, just at the point when popular music began to exploit multi-tracking and was in fact moving in the opposite direction). Modern recordings of Classical music generally promote the illusion of transparency, aiming to resemble as closely as possible the ideal concert performance. Under these circumstances, while audiences appear happy enough to accept recordings as surrogates for the live concert experience, many producers of classical music continue to go to great lengths to maintain such a delusion.

While some recent music research has focussed on recordings – particularly historical ones – as a means of analysing performance practices (e.g., CHARM, 2010), many Classical musicians continue to harbour deep suspicions of recordings as a valid representation their art-form. For example, Simon Rattle has claimed that “music was not meant to sound like gramophone records” (cited in Ashby, 2010, p. 1), and sprinkled throughout the recent Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009) are various opinions that reflect similar unease. These include: concerns about technological interference as a form of “cheating” (Greig, 2009, p. 23); Donald Greig’s noting of an underlying belief of many classical musicians that “in the age of mechanical reproduction . . . something is inevitably lost in recording” (2009, p. 23); through to Susan Tomes’ admission that “for me [a recording] is never something I can wholeheartedly endorse because with the best will in the world it remains an artificial construct” (2009, p. 11).

The underlying assumption seems to be that recording “by its very nature falsifies the art music experience” (Ashby, 2010, p. 8). The prevailing discourses around Classical music still remain primarily in terms of works and their live performance, with recordings being viewed “at most, accessory to the performance” (ibid, p. 35) and as a technical rather than aesthetic process. As such, there has been “an almost wilful ignorance of classical production, an attitude seemingly shared by performers” (Grieg, 2009, p. 21), and in stark comparison to the production of popular music in recent history, arguably, few classical musicians have engaged with sound producers in a genuine artistic collaboration of this nature.

Aims

The brief exploration above therefore sets the research space for our project. Here we now document our own recent sound production collaborations in order to examine, understand and interpret the music of the aforementioned important composers who lived and wrote a century ago at the time of the birth of recording technology. In particular, Glenn Gould’s concept of ‘acoustic choreography’¹ (Bazzana, 1997) was in many ways a starting point for us, but also in his conviction that technological interventions may be justified in service of the work.

As our project developed, a number of research questions came in focus in relation to the representation of Classical music on record. Although these works are heard relatively infrequently in concert, there are already a multitude of other recordings of them. What would be the purpose of yet another recording of these pieces? Moreover, as we came to contemplate the developments over the century since their composition, the question arose as to what sort of recording would be appropriate. Subsequently, we became increasingly intent that whatever interventions were made, that these should reflect, underline and enhance our interpretation of the work – of both its form and language. The overall aim was to extend the music’s meaning congruent with the work rather than imposing a new one upon it.

Methodology

At a quite time around Christmas 2008, we appropriated our university’s best Steinway concert grand piano to record it in our 700-seat concert theatre, primary for the pianist’s comfort given the familiarity of the acoustics. Performances were tracked using microphone pairs variously spaced throughout the hall as well as close to the piano. These included omnis at a distance, an MS-pair, large diaphragm mics at the end of the piano, cardioids above the strings, and PZMs attached to the soundboard. Passes were variously recorded as complete takes, some according to specific bar numbers, others overdubbed as left and right hand parts. With 80 minutes of programme material recorded at 24bit /88.1kHz, this left us with considerable raw material.

Our methods unfolded as we began to work together in the studio, a collaboration between very different sets of ears that were bought to bear upon every aspect and every decision involved in the process. Given our quite long prior relationship within the university, there was no sense that either one of us had priority (although we do recall some slightly testy moments!). Both had powers of veto if anything moved in a direction that seemed to be inappropriate. In fact there was an unspoken openness to explore, experiment, and especially to improvise.

Our first deliberations about the takes eventuated in the compilation an intermediate set of edits in the ‘horizontal’ time-based domain. During this process we also became increasingly conscious of the ‘vertical’ domain, that is, in the multi-track lanes of ProTools containing overdubs and the multiple microphones spaced around the piano. Somewhat surprisingly, much of the distance mic-ing was simply too unrefined, often noisy with external sounds, AC hum and the odd door slam, and overall, did not provide a particularly pleasing or ‘authentic’ production ambience. Subsequently we arrived at just four stereo tracks which were then consistently coded throughout the project as: ‘Main’ AKGs at piano end (in green), ‘Close’ Neumanns above the strings (blue), PZMs attached to the soundboard (red), and the MS-pair (purple) 10 meters out into the hall, as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1. Schoenberg’s ‘Piano Piece No. 1’, edits and track compilation.

While this thinking initially arose from our technical judgements, we also aimed to incorporate broader aesthetic concepts via this same colour-coding of audio regions. This included descriptions like ‘bold, positive, uplifting’ (green), ‘intimate, fragile, plaintive’ (blue), ‘scary /intimidating’ or ‘bitter and twisted’ (red) and ‘soft, distant, wistful’ (purple), and later to the various possibilities for combinations of tracks – the overall schema for which was refined and fully documented in an earlier paper about the Bartók Bagatelles (Draper & Emmerson, 2009). Overall, this approach resulted in the conceptualisation of the recordings in their final form as a two CD set with a short explanatory booklet. The first disc we called the ‘Horizontal album’ in that it works from a largely traditional approach of compiling best edits along the time axis. The second ‘Vertical album’ then adds changing ‘colours’ and sound combinations up and down the ProTools lane domain.

As the project developed, there were other notable elements worth briefly mentioning here. As a matter of course, the Horizontal album did not finally take the form of a ‘middle of third row’ concert perspective, but more that of a studio-based, contemporary production supported by the exclusive use of the AKG-C414s, together with carefully designed Altiverb virtual spaces. There were multiple reasons for this, including the fact that we enjoyed the greater detail of piano technique through this treatment (although a little plagued by pedal and hammer noise), but also because we felt this approach might offer somewhat more ‘shelf life’ via a potential to be better heard across a range of perhaps less than ideal contemporary environments (e.g., iPods, ghetto blasters, home entertainment systems, etc).

By contrast, the second Vertical album steadily evolved a life of its own through the greater part of the project. Initially we were working with a traditional, ‘invisible’ approach to the use of equalisation, dynamics and the like. However, there was a  decisive moment as we worked on the Schoenberg during some especially surreal passages. We had not until this point added more extreme FX. What started as playful experiment, followed by “how does that strike you?”, resulted in an approach that broke the illusion of transparency, one that was no longer concealed but explicit. This became a turning point in our method and significantly, a turning point for our conceptualisation of the two-disc set. After that moment, things were never the same again.

The second Vertical album mix therefore utilised the aforementioned four sets of stereo microphone pairs, but also borrowed from contemporary production techniques including the detailed automation of DSP plug-ins for equalisation, pitch, reverberation, stereo field, distortion, compression and other miscellaneous effects (FX). However, unlike much popular music production, this often occurred at a score level to emphasise individual notes, chord clusters or musical gestures. Overall, this led to an approach detailed in a subsequent paper as “DSP orchestration” (Draper, 2010, p. 3), indicated here in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2. ProTools automation lanes as ‘DSP orchestration’.

The remainder of this paper will now discuss aspects of the works from each of the three composers in turn, illustrating the reasoning behind some of the decisions that were made along the way. Necessarily selective, Figures provided throughout show some of the detail by which sounds were manipulated in order to enhance our concepts of the music’s meaning.

Three case studies from the Vertical album

Alban Berg’s ‘Sonata Op.1’

Of the three composers’ works, our version of the Berg Sonata was by far the one where the outcome most closely matched a preconceived concept. Although it was the last piece we mixed, it is the only work that was produced in line with Gould’s concept of ‘acoustic choreography’. It was important that our treatment reflected the nature of the work’s musical language.  Unlike the later pieces on the discs, the Sonata has no sharp contrasts or abrupt juxtapositions, but evolves gradually from one tonal area /texture /dynamic to another, and as such, it reflects the Wagnerian ‘art of transition’. We wanted to reflect this quality of the work while also underlining the structural divisions of its traditional sonata form. We resolved to use different qualities of mixes to underline the formal divisions and gave each section a sound quality which we felt was appropriate to both its structural function and its expressive character. Table 1 (below) outlines this structure, followed by Figure 3 which shows the ProTools tracks and form divisions /markers.

Table 1. Berg Sonata structure.

Figure 3: Berg ‘Sonata Op.1’ with volume automation following the sonata form.

Traditionally, the analysis of Classical music has tended to focus primarily on tonal aspects, with the dynamic shape seen to be of secondary importance to the articulation of sections. In this case however, the complex harmonic language creates an ambiguous floating sense of tonality. Consequently, as contrasting key areas no longer carry the traditional structural function, the role of other factors such as dynamics and texture are greatly enhanced. The volume curves shown in Figure 3 provide a clear overview of this shape in relation to its sonata form. To underline the primary sections we wanted a subtle but distinctly different sound quality, for example, to contrast between the first and second subject areas. As such, the second subject area (D–A2) has a more consoling and nostalgic quality from the first (A–D). Note the smooth transitions across most of the formal divisions as microphone pairs are joined or replaced by another and how these are relate closely to the dynamic shape of the music.

The piece opens with the distant quality of the MS-pair to provide an appropriately plaintive quality. As the dynamics grow, the AKGs are added to the mix to give more immediacy. Notice how the gradient of the volume from these microphones grows with the sound dynamics, with the swells towards the two fortissimo passages (bars 8 and 23) while the original pair drops. As the Figure shows, the MS-pair drop slightly in the first swell but then return for the transition before falling away by the second subject (at D /bar 29).  The Neumanns take over and are gradually introduced until they dominate the sound of the whole subject area (D–A2). The shape of AKGs also reflect the dynamic swell here, and again in the closing theme section (from H).

As is traditional in a Classical sonata form, Berg’s Sonata repeats the exposition (at A2–J). One option would have been to give the repeat a completely different arrangement but, as the goal was to underline the form, we decided to give it a similar but not identical shape to the first time. Just as the repeat is not simple duplication in the playing, the microphone distribution follows the same basic shapes but differs in various details. This is evident in the large-scale Figure 3 overview, but the differences are even more apparent when comparing closer views. The most immediately noticeable difference is the absence of the MS-pair at D2.

The ‘art of transition’ (evolving smoothly) meant that changes in sound were often prepared over a number of bars/seconds. For example in Figure 4 (below), at around letter J the volume of the PZMs and MS-pair remain constant while the respective automation shapes for FX including digital delay (DDL1) and chorus (CH1) underneath are deliberately not aligned. On the MS-pair both the reverb (VERB1) and CH1 build from H2 (though their highpoints do not coincide). From J, VERB1  continues to climb while CH1 gradually reduces.

Figure 4. Berg ‘Sonata Op.1’ with FX automation following the sonata form.

Other aspects were enhanced to underline specific musical features of the work, perhaps best observed in relation to the development section (J to R) by comparing the contrast between the two soft passages at either end – from J (bar 57) and from P (bar 100). We wanted both these to sound exceedingly precious, fragile even. The first, at J, presents a colour and character unlike anything else previously in the piece and we felt that it was important to introduce this with an unprecedented quality of sound. The second at P is in a dreamy manner that recalls the second subject closely – in fact, its function is that of transition back to the recapitulation. Berg’s recapitulation is far from a restatement of the Exposition and this is reflected by mixes that are comparable, yet significantly different in detail. This approach is exemplified in the volume curves, J dominated by the PZMs and MS-pair, and P by the Neumanns and PZMs. Note the added reverb on both the MS-pair in the first section transiting gradually from H2, and in the second section using the Neumanns – both options giving varied softer qualities to the sections.

Figure 4 (above) also shows some prominent spikes in the DDL automation. This is used to cite specific musical references to perhaps the most notorious single chord of 19th century music – the first chord of the Wagner opera, Tristan und Isolde – the so-called ‘Tristan chord’². We were intrigued to find the chord so prominent in the Berg Sonata (and in the Bartók Bagatelles). Suffice it to say that the spikes evident in the DDL1/2 lanes coincide with the placement of the Tristan chords and are intended to give them a special ambience. For the pianist /author, these were intended as much more than analytical observations – once he had earlier learnt to recognise recurring strategic placements of this chord in various pieces (always in close proximity to climaxes), his interpretation in performance gave particular prominence to these chords by way of placement and dynamics. This is also something we had never heard in other recorded interpretations of Berg’s Sonata, and while the sonic enhancement here may be subtle, it exemplifies a very specific way in which an understanding of the piece is enhanced.

Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Three Piano Pieces Op.11’

The Three Piano Pieces are truly a landmark works, not only for being among the first examples of atonality in music, but also in embodying confronting new concepts of form. Thus, in original intent, these pieces are profoundly different to the Berg Sonata. Beyond an intuitive rather than traditional sense of shape, there are sudden and abrupt changes at time involving extreme and explosive contrasts.

As explained earlier, we had originally preconceived our treatment of the works in terms of four distinct, colour-coded sound settings, but we ultimately went well beyond this, recognising that the radical nature of the Piano Pieces deserved an equally radical approach from us in the studio, one which involved a new level of complexity in responding to the kaleidoscopic musical gestures. Initially we had conceived this in terms of contrasts of space – metaphors of closeness and distance. But also these pieces had always been highly suggestive visually to the pianist /author, informed by his musicological expertise and interest in the life and works of the composers under discussion here.

Around the time of composition of the Three Piano Pieces, Schoenberg was exploring the idea of klangfarbenmelodie, where aspect of tone colours were to be the most prominent and form- determining of the musical parameters. Schoenberg had taken up painting in 1908, and along with close contact with Expressionist painters, this was a deep stimulus to his musical development, enabling him to achieve a truly atonal language through what he famously called ‘the emancipation of dissonance’ (1926/1975). When this programme was first performed at our university in late 2008, images of Schoenberg paintings were projected above the piano. These included landscapes and abstract images in the ‘Piano Piece No.2’ and increasingly grotesque self-portraits in Piano Pieces No.1 and No.3. Like our sound productions to come, this approach was intended to reinforce the visually suggestive nature of the music itself and to assist listeners to find other ways of accessing this difficult musical language.

It was therefore one of our objectives to develop the potential visual quality of this music. However, we believe that the final outcome does not resemble just a two-dimensional painting, but intends to suggest the depth of three-dimensional space and contemporary aesthetics in this sense. The musical image moves both by panning and/or by moving near and far in the reverb field, and through this the recording suggests immersion, aiming to draw in and support the listener in a unique sonic world, perhaps informed by familiar treatments from film music. These are also hopefully congruent with some of the composer’s original musings about just such a potential for new contexts in another era. Schoenberg writes,

Not only does each age have a different tempi and make different demands on performance . . . but even the demand for greater or less clarity in the constitution of texture alters. (Schoenberg, 1926/1975, p. 327)

Moreover, Schoenberg saw the defining attributes of the music as embedded in only certain parameters, noting that other characteristics may be freely adjusted according to interpretation:

For the true product of the mind – the musical idea, the unalterable – is established in the relationships between pitches and time-divisions . . . all the other things – dynamics, tempo, timbre and the character, clarity, effect, etc, which they produce – are really no more than the performer’s resources, serving to make the idea comprehensible and admitting of variations. (Ibid, p. 326)

Schoenberg’s ‘Piano Piece No.1’ is the most complex of our interpretations and the Protools screen shot is shown in overview at Figure 5 (below). Overall, this came to be a result not only guided by aforementioned artistic and historical considerations, but also via an ongoing, lengthy ‘sandpapering’ process – that is, through evolving decision-making processes in relation to just how extreme to make these effects.

Figure 5. Schoenberg ‘Piano Piece No.1’.

The work came to be remarkably detailed, often focussing on momentary effects. In general we wished to err on the side of the bold, and our first attempts involved many long hours adjusting a couple of seconds of music. It became a perpetual challenge to keep such effects in proportion to the overall flow and structure of the piece, and so we often would move on to other tracks before returning to this piece and reconsidering it. We lived with various versions for some time, and played these to friends and colleagues for feedback – not unlike an action research project with its cycles of action and reflection. In general we tended to start with more extreme treatments effects than what we ended with. One of the last sessions – several months after we did the first versions – involved simply ‘turning down’ many of the FX, not just to ‘play safe’, but mostly to try to keep the effects in suitable proportion to the whole.

In Schoenberg’s ‘Piano Piece No.2’ at Figure 6 (below), additional multi-track recording of overdubs (brown /gold coded) was employed to record hand parts individually. This approach is rarely used in piano music but it seemed appropriate when the musical content overtly highlights the distinction between the two hands (see Figure 7 below). Probably more than any other work on the disc, this piece evokes a sense of moving through three-dimensional space, and this was likely reinforced through the additional separation of hand parts.

Figure 6. Schoenberg ‘Piano Piece No.2’, multi-tracking.

Figure 7. Schoenberg ‘Piano Piece No.2’, opening bars of score.

Different musical materials are reflected in distinct sonorities (e.g., in the first two minutes of the recording). A pianist would be aiming to achieve such contrasts as written into the score, but here this was deliberately exaggerated in the studio. Letter B (at Figure 6, above) shows a change of microphones to the PZMs to give a close, thin sound. As the sonority builds, quite suddenly towards the first forte at 24:00, the AKGs (marked ‘Main’) cross-fade so the forte jumps out as a dramatic effect in quite a different space. At letter C, the same musical idea from B recurs, but now in augmentation – it develops quite differently and is given another new sonority. As musical ideas recur throughout the piece they are almost always varied and so, to match the nature of the score, variants of the corresponding tracks and DSP FX are employed.

Thus the treatments of the Piano Pieces are quite different to the Berg Sonata. The forms of the Schoenberg pieces are much less traditional, and being quite fluid they are difficult to describe in traditional terms. Nonetheless, in the case of the ‘Piano Piece No.2’, Figure 6 does in fact provide an impressively clear representation of a sound structure which is complementary to the musical argument in the score – one might say that it moves in counterpoint with it.

Béla Bartók’s ‘Bagatelles Op.6’

The range of techniques adopted in Bartók’s Bagatelles were heavily influenced by the individual nature of each of these 14 short vignettes. We refer the reader to our first paper in the series (Draper & Emmerson, 2009) which documents the production of Bagatelles No.1, 4, 6 and 14, along with arguments for our preliminary approaches to the production schema. Here in this paper we now focus on aspects of the Bagatelles which have not been explored, firstly in overview at Figure 8 (below) then followed by closer inspection of Bagatelles No.7, 9 and 11.

Figure 8. Bartók Bagatelles Nos. 1–9.

Figure 8 shows a variety of approaches (for Bagatelles Nos. 1–9, given space considerations). Some of these maintain a single production setting throughout (e.g., Nos. 5/6), while others are multi-tracked yet also maintain a consistent sound (Nos. 1/3). Some are straightforward where the ternary form is aligned with the treatment (No.2), or as in No.4 where each successive phrase is given a different sound quality. Others receive highly complex treatments in response to their detailed musical nature, and in general, there are more of these as the series progresses.

Such decisions were guided by what the piece suggested to us. For example, in No.13, we felt that the recording needed to reflect the music’s dirge-like quality and sense of obsessive focus³. In response, we sought an appropriate sonority to capture this oppressive heaviness but then left the music to speak for itself without further treatment. Similarly No.6 is full of highly personal expression, and once we landed upon what we considered to be a particularly beautiful piano sound – clear, intimate and tender – this was then ‘let sit’ for the entirety of the piece. No.5 has a single treatment, using a plug-in to give it the quality of an old scratched LP record.

Unlike the advanced dissonant musical languages of the other Bagatelles, Nos. 5 and 4 stand out as being remarkably conservative and reactionary. They are essentially folksongs, and in the case of No.5, giving it the quality of an old recording was to signal how this piece didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. Indeed, this was also part of the composer’s intention – to contrast the highly personal expression elsewhere in the set with the purity of folk music.  (It was to be some years before he was able to forge a language where these two divergent aspects of his style could be reconciled rather than dramatically juxtaposed as is done here). There was also another resonance: Bartók, himself a fine pianist, recorded a few of the Bagatelles in 1920s, but the sound quality is very poor and distorted. And so, the performance style in which our new recording of the piece was played is similarly anachronistic, with less than stable rhythm and sounding as though it could do with some editing.

Figure 9. Bartók Bagatelle No. 7.

Bagatelles Nos. 7 to 9 all have sharp juxtapositions of textures and our treatment responded to these in detail. No.7 in Figure 9 (above) is particularly playful but also ironic and satirical in tone, and so we sought a quality far removed from the beautiful sound of No.6. As the Figure shows, in the outer sections it largely uses the PZMs together with some more extreme EQ to accentuate a somewhat fraught character. This is not a natural sound at all, but one which we hope underlines the mischievous and sardonic character of the piece.

Bagatelle No.9 as shown in Figure 10 (below), takes the interventions of No.7 even further. This is easily the most complex and detailed of our treatments thus far in the Bagatelle series. Overall, the sound alternates between the Neumanns and PZMs before these are combined in the second half. However, this is interjected by three loud pronouncements from the AKGs – perhaps we imagined, assuming ‘the Voice of God’ – which seem to interrupt the rather skittish playful proceedings elsewhere in the piece. The AKG treatment stands out dramatically from everything else here thus articulating the formal concept.

Figure 10. Bartók Bagatelle No.9.

These more complex treatments in No.9 continue a process across the series where the faster pieces (Nos. 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14) become progressively more grotesque. The juxtaposition of the last piece following the funereal dirge of No.13 was again of personal significance to the composer, with No.14 subtitled ‘Ma mie qui danse’, the macabre element related back to Romantic precedents from Berlioz and Liszt. No.14 is a bitterly ironic waltz that twists the theme from the ‘Violin Concerto’ Bartók had written earlier that same year⁴.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic response was to Bagatelle No.11, as shown in the short DSP spikes in Figure 11 below. This relates back to our point about the Tristan chord. The chord turns up in all sorts of places and because its role was built into our conception of how these pieces work and what they express, we were keen to also reflect its various placements in Bartók’s Bagatelles. It is most pervasive here in our working of No.11, as follows.

Figure 11. Bartók Bagatelle No.11.

No.11 was seen as a series of humorously misguided attempts to arrive at the Tristan chord⁵.  Given Bartók’s own rejection in love (see Notes 2/3 re. the ‘Stefi Geyer affair’), the symbolism is apt and the treatment is deeply ironic. He nearly achieves the Tristan chord in bar 2 but instead is one semitone out and thereby arrives on a chord in quartal harmony. He stops as though to think on it, tries again in bars 3 and 4, then approaches once more through bars 5–9, only to end up further away each time. He tries to repeat this in case it works out, but it doesn’t – each of these failed attempts are made to sound somewhat ridiculous by the DSP spikes, and in the final section, he seems to have landed on it almost by chance. The piece finishes far from where it starts, in fact in some desolation, significantly on the notes of the Tristan chord.

One might consider our studio interventions as a kind of musical arranging with alternate timbres, not to mention means of distortion – hence, our earlier references to DSP orchestration (Draper, 2010). The sentiment in many of the Bagatelles is overtly ‘bitter and twisted’ and so we wanted to find sounds that matched that quality (including a hideous merry-go-round effect in one piece). To underline the point once more – the recurring idée fixe of this article – our interventions here were to merely reinforce /enhance /exaggerate certain characteristics of the work that musicians would variously be trying to accomplish in live performance.

Conclusions

We hope that this has been a useful, if necessarily limited exploration of our work given the restrictions of a short text accompanied by some simple Figures. Certainly we encourage the reader to become the listener by expanding their judgement of our success or not through the recordings of the work on disc (Emmerson, 2010).

In recent peer-reviews, the Horizontal album attracted a largely positive but somewhat predictable response, perhaps given the familiar treatment and the difficult beauty of the music. Conversely, reactions to the Vertical album have been strongly polarised: “An assault on the Viennese tradition!” was one strident response. Or alternately, some (younger) listeners were so enthralled with certain tracks that they went back to the CD again and again. Early testing here would appear to indicate that our double CD ‘alternate realities’ concept works to a point, that is, simply choose which interpretation you prefer (interestingly, one postgraduate research student quipped: “so, just which one is the fake?”). Access to both versions is made reasonable with the enthusiastic support of Move Records who allowed us to market the double CD set and booklet for around the same price as a conventional single CD. However, even Move themselves offered numerous opinions about the Horizontal album re. ‘third row’ concert perspective vs. our close mic’d studio approach. And so the arguments go on . . .

We don’t imagine that this will please everybody, and this was never our intention. Neither in this paper, nor in the double CD and booklet has the intervention of contemporary sound technology been concealed. It is potentially provocative and challenges some deeply embedded assumptions about Classical music – from the original intentions of the composer, to the concert performance experience, through to how recordings might relate to the work. Musicians have long been divided on these points, but we fall squarely within the view that the performance history of a work and its reception – ultimately its meaning – goes far beyond and transcends the composer’s original context and intentions. To limit interpretation otherwise may indeed be counterproductive to the ongoing legacy of the Classical music canon.

A century after these compositions were first written by Berg, Schoenberg and Bartók, it now seemed an appropriate time to reconsider and hopefully contribute to a revitalisation of this seminal but challenging repertoire. We sincerely hope our recordings do so, and especially for a younger generation who primarily experience music through forms of digital mediation, and who may be comfortable with the ethos of processed sound and the general concept of ‘remix’. The history of the art of record production throughout the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrates just how profoundly music, performers and audiences can evolve in symbiosis. Therefore if a work is to remain relevant and to continue to speak to subsequent generations in distant contexts once unimaginable at the time of composition, its performance practice must continue to be re-imagined – and long may it be so.

Footnotes

1  Gould likened advanced recording techniques to filmmaking. He used different takes in order to assemble a narrative, whereas a concert was more like a stage play. Another film-inspired idea of Gould’s was to place various microphones at different distances from the piano. He dubbed this technique “acoustic choreography.” Gould composed a shot list of microphones ranging from inside the piano’s body to five feet away, nine feet away, at the back of the room, etc. This way, he created audio panoramas. Unfortunately, they didn’t influence recording standards. (Keilor, 2007).

2   Wagner’s Tristan chord is a made up of the notes F, B, D# and G#. More generally, it can be any chord that consists of these same intervals: augmented fourth, augmented sixth, and augmented ninth above a root. The notes could be re-spelled to form a conventional half-diminished seventh chord. What distinguishes the chord is its unusual relationship to the implied key of its surroundings. At the time Tristan und Isolde was first heard in1865, the chord was considered innovative, disorienting, and daring. 20th century musicians often identify the chord as a starting point for the modernist disintegration of tonality (Wikipedia, 2010).

3  Bagatelle No. 13 had deep personal meaning for the young Bartók relating to his distress over his rejection by violinist Stefi Geyer with whom he was infatuated. The piece was apparently sketched out on the day of the separation, marked Lento funebre and given the subtitle ‘Elle est morte’.

4   Again associated with the beloved and estranged Stefi Geyer, Bartók was later to orchestrate Bagatelle No. 14 as the second of the ‘Two Portraits Op.5’ which similarly expresses rather grotesque sentiments.

5   For example, compare to Debussy’s ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ which again fails to arrive on the chord – with various humorous substitutes for it.

References

Ashby, Arved. 2010. Absolute music, mechanical reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bazzana, Kevin. 1997. Glenn Gould: The performer in the work: A study in performance practice. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHARM. 2010. The AHRC research centre for the history and analysis of recorded music. (available at http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html)

Draper, Paul. 2010. Foreign objects and the art of interpretation. In proceedings of The 2^nd International Conference on Music Communication Science, (ICOMCS) 3–4 Dec. 2009, Sydney, Australia. (available at http://marcs.uws.edu.au/links/ICoMusic09/fullreviewedpapers.html)

Draper, Paul and Emmerson, Stephen. 2009. Music, recording and the art of interpretation. In proceedings of CreateWorld 2008, 9–12 December 2008, Brisbane, Australia. (available at http://www29.griffith.edu.au/imersd/draper/publications/research/draper-emmerson_cw08_paper.pdf)

Greig, Donald. 2009. Performing for (and against) the microphone. In N. Cook, E. Clarke, D. Leech-Wilkinson, & J. Rink (Eds.). The Cambridge companion to recorded music (pp. 16–29). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Keilor, John. 2007. An appreciation of Glenn Gould the studio engineer. Sound and Vision, 11 October 2007. (available at http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/gouldstudio.html)

QCRC (Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre). 2010. Artistic practice as research cluster (APaR). Brisbane: Griffith University. (available at http://www.griffith.edu.au/music/queensland-conservatorium-research-centre/research/artistic-practice-as-research)

Schoenberg, Arnold. 1926/1975. Mechanical musical instruments. In L.Stein (Ed.) & L. Black (Trans.), Style and Idea: Selected writings of Arnold Schoenberg (pp. 326–329). London: Faber.

Tomes, Susan. 2009. Personal takes: Learning to live with recording. In N. Cook, E. Clarke, D. Leech-Wilkinson & J. Rink (Eds.) The Cambridge companion to recorded music (pp. 10–12). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wikipedia. 2010. Tristan chord. (available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_chord)

Discography

Emmerson, Stephen. 2010. Remixing modernism: Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók (1908–1909). Move Records MD4431.

These days, as the chief engineer at Jukasa Studios in Caledonia, Ontario, Nick is supervising the creation of a film audio post-production studio. He recently finished Canadian progressive metal band Protest the Hero’s new album Scurrilous (2011), mixing the tracks on his instrument of choice, a Solid State Logic 8072 G/G+ console. Though considered a consummate mix engineer by most who have worked with him, Nick follows a holistic understanding of record making, and he explains much of that understanding below. Canadian rock bands such as April Wine, Kim Mitchell, The Tea Party, and Alexis On Fire have all benefitted from Nick’s unusual approach.

During the transcription process a final, and somewhat humorous thought occurred to me: Nick Blagona has necessarily forgotten more about the landscape of sound engineering than most people will learn in a lifetime, and if the goal of this Q&A was to gain a better understanding of his tacit knowledge, more interviews are needed to unpack almost half a century of professional experience.

How do you account for the ease with which you combine sound and technology?

Nick: As far back as I can remember I’ve always had sound in my head. My parents gave me a crystal radio set at the age of six because they noticed I was always interested in the radio. When I first heard a radio station it was in the middle of winter. I got it for Christmas. I heard a radio station from Chicago and I remember, to this day, the music was Count Basie. I even remember the sound of the band. When I think about the old bands, any record or any genre, I hear and see the sound in my head. And when I work with sound my body produces as a gut reaction. I’ve always had that response to music. It’s like a child prodigy playing piano instinctually.

Like playing an instrument by ear?

Nick: Yes. That’s what it came to mean to me. When I took up the bass as a kid, I already heard the sound of the band. Even to this day when I start a project I can hear the final product.

What kind of music were you playing?

Nick: R&B. We were called TJ & the Germs; an all white band with a black singer. I had a Silvertone bass from Simpsons bought with money from a summer job with my father.
But, I’ve always had that feeling inside me of making records and every time I saw a movie like The Girl Can’t Help It or High School Confidential or one of those Rock’n’Roll movies from the 50s – where they’d show people in the recording studio – I always thought, “How did they get that sound?” Or when I watched the Perry Como Show I thought, “That vocal sound is incredible!” I found out that it was a boom mic and I wondered, “How the hell can they get that fat sound?”

Are you talking about the Crooners?

Nick: Yeah, and all the great TV shows in the 50s had great audio. So the sound of it always intrigued me. When I got into making my own records in the basement with a Heathkit tape recorder…

Heathkit?

Nick: Heathkit was a mail order company that sold electronics kits you’d assemble yourself. They were an American company with a warehouse up in Oakville, Ontario. One day I was looking in their catalog – because I was already a Hamm radio owner and operator – and I saw this tape recorder that really intrigued me. I bought it and the parts came in a box with instructions. I already had a soldering iron from the time I built my radio. So I used that to build a mono tape recorder, and then I built a compressor.

Did you build your compressor from a Heathkit?

Nick: No the compressor design came from Popular Electronics; they had a schematic of a simple optical compressor like an LA2A or something like that. I built it from scratch, from the chassis up.

What year is this?

Nick: 1956, ’57.

What year in high school?

Nick: [Grade] twelve, Thirteen. ’55, Ten, Eleven, Twelve …Grade ten was when I had my Hamm radio system set up…

Did you build the Hamm radio as well?

Nick: Oh yeah, I built everything. It was cheap. I mean it was cheaper than buying the real thing and I loved building them. And I always had parts left over… [laughing] I could never figure it out. I don’t know why.

I’ve always had this inner vision of sound. My whole curiosity about sound peeked when I was at a concert at the first or second Montréal Jazz Festival. I think I was twelve when I saw Duke Ellington and his band. I’d heard them on record and radio, but when I saw Ellington at the Capitol Theatre – it used to be a movie theatre on St. Catherine and McGill – my jaw dropped. I said, “I can’t believe this sound!” The sound…the sound of it! From that moment on my senses began to focus on recreating the sound in my head.

Why did you go to the United Kingdom instead of looking for a studio in Canada or the United States?

Nick: My parents and I had moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland and my first priority was get out of there. There were only two studios in Canada in 1965; both of them owned by RCA. One of them was in Montréal and one was in Toronto on Mutual Street. In those days the United States were very slack about immigration. You could go there to work and you wouldn’t have the problems you do today. However, I had to consider the fact that, if I stayed there for more than six months I would have been eligible for the draft, and back then, of course, the U.S. was in Vietnam. England seemed like the closest safe destination and I knew somebody there, so it was the ideal move.

At that time of my move, there were only three big recording studios: EMI on Abbey Road; Decca in West Hampstead; and Pye in Mount Lawrence. All three were major military electronic industrial companies. They made everything from television sets to gun sights, to cannons, to radar systems. Decca was a radar specialist, but they also made record players and radios. As well, they held part interest in the new independent radio stations.

When I got the job at Decca they asked me what I could do. I said, “Well, I’m a pretty good editor,” because of the practice with my home studio when I would splice create different takes. I also discovered that you could overdub by taking the erase head off to go sound on sound. I read a lot, but in those days there wasn’t much literature on how people made records, so I learned to record and edit mostly on my own. By the time I got to Decca I knew how to edit and with my background in music I had a basic understanding of form. John Middleton hired me: first as an editor and then as an engineer. They saw this talented kid from Canada, so I didn’t last very long as an assistant engineer. Actually, as dumb luck would have it, I went directly to engineering sessions because folks were sick. My boss said, “Nick you’re the only bloke that can cover. The rest are in the hospital or in bed.” So I did my first session with Tom Jones. He loved my sound and because I already had it in my head I worked really fast. But, the most important consideration – even back in my basement – was to always get a good drum sound.

Were you working on a 4-track for the Tom Jones sessions?

Nick: Yes.

Were you close mic’ing the drums?

Nick: No, we weren’t allowed to close mic drums. You couldn’t get very close to drums because the ribbon microphones would blow up. There were strict rules in the studio.

In Geoff Emerick’s Here, There And Everywhere he describes the studio environment and what the workplace was like at EMI with all the rules.

Nick: When you’re finished I’d like to read it. EMI was heavily into rules, Decca too. I can remember Ken Scott, who produced Supertramp and a lot of other great records, worked at EMI as an assistant and then an engineer. He did a lot of the Beatles records too. And he was always in trouble with the manager because of the set rules about recording. So he left for Trident and he became a producer, too. Similarly, when the manager at Decca heard one of my sessions he said, “You can’t have this kind of bottom end.” He had his rules, too and I was constantly breaking them; we all were. I said, “Well the band and the producer like it.” To which the manager replied, “No matter what the producer says we have set rules and that’s why they come here.”

Did Decca make you wear a lab coat?

Nick: No, but we had to wear suits. Though in the end it didn’t matter because I left for Wessex.

Did Wessex come to you with an offer?

Nick: The folks at Wessex were making offers to everybody because they knew we weren’t very well paid at Decca. When I arrived at Decca, Britain’s recording industry was changing because pirate radio stations were starting to flourish. Earlier, all aspects of recording were tightly controlled in English studios, so there was no autonomy. You knew you had to record a certain way. You were afforded no artistic expression and never included on album credits. As an employee you were expected to wear a shirt and tie, and you had to have a haircut. And then, all of a sudden, the BBC and the pirate radio stations started to offer everybody a lot of money. That’s how I ended up working at Wessex. And Tom Jones migrated, as well.

Can I run some names by you? Les Reed.

Nick: He was a songwriter and he was quite well known for songs he wrote with Tom Jones. He was also a partner at Wessex.

With the Thompsons?

Nick: Yes. Very good, Ted.

Those names came up when I looked into your session for “21st Century Schizoid Man” with King Crimson. They kept the first take! Unbelievable.

Nick: I recorded The Moody Blues there too. They left Decca and went to Wessex…

Did you work on In Search of the Lost Chord at Wessex?

Nick: Yes. I had a real problem at Wessex. I was hired because of the overflow of work. Michael Thompson and Robin Thompson were both engineers, so I was the third engineer. They were a tightly knit family and they referred to me as the Canadian chap. The Thompsons always took the credit, even when they weren’t there. Consequently, I never received credit for the sessions I engineered there.

Here’s a funny story about Michael Thompson – I’m skipping ahead here. André Perry and I were recording the music for the Montreal Olympics (1975-6). At the same time, I was working with the Bee Gees and didn’t have time to mix all the anthems and the opening and closing day ceremony sessions. André suggested that we needed to bring in another orchestral mixer. I said, “Well, hire Michael Thompson.” So I flew my old boss into Morin Heights to help with the mixes. It was very strange, very surreal that I was giving orders to a man who used to abuse me verbally.

Giving orders to your old boss Michael Thompson sounds like the sweet taste of success. I’ve read that Wessex was built in an old church and you couldn’t record when it was raining.

Nick: You couldn’t record when there was thunder and you couldn’t work on Sundays, but that was a general rule in Britain. Anyway, the Thompsons wanted to fire me, but they couldn’t because there were too many clients asking for my services. So they fired me because I broke the Lord’s Day Act by working till 2am one Sunday morning. I ended up going to the Middle East, picked up some work on a spaghetti western that went bankrupt right off the bat, and got stranded in Tel Aviv, Israel.

I’m astounded by the lack of credits for the music you’ve recorded.

Nick: George Martin never got credit on any of the first The Beatles records because he was employed by EMI. In fact, he didn’t get any royalties until he left EMI and then the Beatles gave him royalties. He became a rich man from that deal, but, like him, none of us were credited. It was never considered part of the business. The labels avoided the possibility of their engineers and producers becoming stars because it meant that they’d have to pay more money to their employees. Being freelance in those days didn’t exist. You had to work for somebody. If you wanted to work for yourself, you had to start your own record company like Jack Holtzen of Electra Records. The only reason A&M Records started was that nobody wanted to buy The Tijuana Brass. The Lonely Bull (1962): nobody wanted to buy it; they thought it was a lousy record. But a young lawyer, Jerry Moss, who believed in the song and Herb Alpert, who believed in the song, obviously, recorded it in a garage. They said, “Forget it, let’s start our own record company A&M from the first letter of their names.” They released it, and bang, a big hit, and then they signed more artists. Every small company, like Geffen; he started Asylum and signed the Eagles when nobody else wanted to sign them. Back in the 50s there were a lot of small labels like Cameo in Philadelphia; Regency label that had Little Richard; and the Brunswick label.

Right, these labels would find and develop the talent and then the majors would take them.

Nick: Sure, Buddy Holly was signed to a small label a first.

So when you arrived in London you were in a situation where you had to work for a major label.

Nick: I had to work for somebody.

Were the other studios in England at the time – like Trident or Olympic – associated with a record label?

Nick: No they were independent and the major studios didn’t like the competition. Since the major studios were all major electronics companies they had staff to build their consoles and their tape machines. As a result, Decca had a different sound than EMI. To start an independent studio you had to be able to build your own equipment. When Rupert Neve started making consoles and Willie Studer started making tape machines, they made it possible for the independents to exist. They were the first two men to build off-the-shelf audio equipment. You could make a call to Rupert Neve and ask, “I would like to have a 24-in-8-out console.” And it would be delivered in a month or so.

Were tape machines 8 tracks at this point?

Nick: Yes, however the main change during this period was that people decided to start making their own consoles. On the other hand, independent studios like Trident designed and built their consoles. Malcolm Toft, who was Trident’s chief engineer, had a technical background. He designed the Trident A console, which was Le Studio’s console before the SSL.

The rest of us could make a phone call, buy a console, buy a tape recorder, buy microphones, and be ready to go. All of a sudden these independent studios like Trident, Olympic began to establish themselves and the recording industry opened up. You would be hired as an engineer and if you were making good records you’d make a good salary. The same thing happened in the states when companies like MCI and Ultrasonic developed consoles you could buy off-the-shelf. That’s what started the whole independent studio boom.

Normally, engineers develop their listening skills in the controlled environment of an acoustically balanced recording studio. Over the course of your career it must have been challenging to get good results working in the wide variety of situations, varied environments, with different styles of music and sound.

Nick: I’ve always had good results because I have the sound in my head. It doesn’t matter where I record, it always works out quite well. Keep in mind also that I can think rather abstractly, so I like diversity. For instance, right now I’m producing a smooth jazz record, but I’m also doing a rock record, and I’m doing a hip hop record. On one day, I’ll master an album at Metalworks, the next, an artist will come to my place to master. It could be anything from hip-hop to classical to spoken word records. The music I work with changes constantly, which is good. I wouldn’t like every project to be the same. All my life I’ve been involved in music. From my earliest childhood memories I can’t remember a time when I haven’t thought about music.

After the Middle East fiasco I went to Canada to see my parents because my wife Veronica was pregnant with our son Sasha, who was conceived in Israel; he’s a holy baby. While I was there, I looked into the studios in Montréal and that’s when I met André Perry who had a beautiful place in Amherst Square. At that particular time we got on extremely well. It was the fall when the colours are beautiful and he invited me up to his place in Morin Heights. We had dinner and drank some wine and that’s when we decided to build a studio. It was André’s idea to build a studio out in the country where artists could get away and stay at a five star villa. I designed it, we built it and the studio worked out very well.

When you were designing the studio floor and the control room did you bring in an acoustician?

Nick: It was all Andre Perry’s idea. Designing the studio was a series of discussions we had in what we liked and didn’t like about studios and the end result was Morin Heights.

Le Studio was built beside Andre’s summer home. It must have been a beautiful setting to work in.

Nick: Yes, it was a nice house. Right next to it there was a private lake.

Did you add the villa when you were building the studio?

Nick: No actually, when we first built the studio we had a guesthouse, which was about a half-hour drive away. That place burned down.

What happened? Did a rock star burn it down?

Nick: What happened was Roy Thomas Baker and Ian Hunter forgot to put the grid back onto the fireplace when they went to bed. The fire was still burning and sparks landed on the carpet.

Roy Thomas Baker talks about the incident in an interview I read recently. He said it was the middle of winter.

Nick: He had to jump from a second story bedroom into a snow bank with no clothes on. Anyway, just through the woods from the studio was another house that was owned by a retired army colonel and it was a big place. It had eight bedrooms and we added four more when we bought the place and the grounds. It was right across the lake and it was for sale because he was moving back to England. We used the colonel’s place as our guesthouse and breakfast was included. We had a wine cellar and one of the first huge analog satellite dishes. We had a deal with a restaurant in Saint-Saveur in which their Chef, André Bastion, would make meals and bring them to Le Studio or the band would go to the restaurant and eat. The guests loved it.

Eventually you hired a Cordon Bleu chef.

Nick: In the latter part of the studio’s life we had a Cordon Bleu chef and his wife on staff. There was always a party atmosphere at Morin Heights. That’s what we tried to create. We created the stationary Love Boat with drugs, drink and sex. Nowadays many behave like they’re at work when they’re in a studio. In those days, there was always a party happening. There were always girls around. That’s rare now. Still, all the bands want to hear my stories of debauchery because they can’t believe that it actually happened. I say to them, “Even you guys can make the choice.” But they say, “Oh, I don’t think my girlfriend would like it.” Everybody is so straight these days.

I’ve been listening to many of the albums you made at Le Studio. What kind of gear were you using back then?

Nick: Generally, it was all the same equipment. The recording I did at Le Studio in Morin Heights was through an SSL E console with a Studer 24 track. We had very minimal outboard gear. The thing with the SSL is that every track had a gate and compressor. But that was it.

You must have had a good variety of microphones.

Nick: Oh yeah, we had great microphones: Neumann U87s, U47s, Telefunken tube mics that are standard for professional studios. Microphones were really cheap in those days; two hundred dollars for a U87. These days that mic costs thousands of dollars because it’s considered a valuable retro mic. People say, “David Bowie sang on those!” It’s all bullshit. In those days tape was forty dollars a reel; a good microphone was one hundred and fifty bucks; and SM57 only cost forty bucks. We thought that was normal. Now it’s one hundred and seventy-five for a 57. That’s the way it goes with inflation.

Considering the rural setting of Le Studio did you ever have periods when the equipment was down?

Nick: No. We had an incredible maintenance staff. Every month they would take the 24-track machine apart. I brought Roger Ginsley from Wessex; he used to work as a maintenance man there. And, Jean Luc Lareotour; I found him working as a carpenter when we were building the studio. He also worked as a ski instructor during the winter. I learned that he had a degree in electronics from the University of Zürich and asked him, “Why don’t you work for us?” They were both great, but all we had was the SSL and the tape machine and none of the equipment broke down. We never had one session ever interrupted. We had other problems with other things. We had a very bad grounding problem initially, but we hired a helicopter to drop a thick copper plate the size of this room in the middle of the lake and that solved our problems immediately.

So you ran a couple of leads to the copper plate which then served as a ground for the studio. How long did the grounding problem last before you corrected it?

Nick: The first four or five years. When the Northern Lights were on, we used to get Voice of America broadcasting in Spanish from West Virginia. Oh, we had no ground at all. The land surrounding the studio was all sand.

You didn’t have a backup tape machine?

Nick: No, but we did have extra power supplies for the console. During the first two years the only time we had problems were power failures because of the snowstorms up there in the mountains. So we bought a big Mercedes hospital generator.

As a drummer and a fan of Stewart Copeland, I have to ask how it was working with the The Police? Did you collaborate with Stewart Copeland for the delay sounds on any of the drum tracks?

Nick: I didn’t have anything to do with the delay settings. I got the lines coming in from the band and then the drum technician said, “Here’s six more lines.” I asked, “From the drums?” He replied, “Yeah.” Stewart Copeland had delay machines at his side. When he threw a switch and hit one note and it would go “Ch-ch-ch-ch.” So his playing was delayed continually and everyone thought, “Great hi-hat pattern.” It was a great hi-hat pattern, but he had just hit it once! They were all programmed delays.

Did he tell you he wanted you to mix these sounds?

Nick: Oh yeah, absolutely, but I was told exactly how to do it by Sting.

Okay, so how did you find working with Sting in the studio?

Nick: He was very calm and he knew exactly what he wanted.

Where did you find the keyboardist that played on the recording?

Nick: Well, I knew Jean Roussel very well from my time working with Cat Stevens. He was Cat Stevens’ keyboardist. I brought him into the Police session because Sting came alone from Montserrat in January. I asked him, “Well, what are we going to do?” Sting said, “I’m going to write some songs and I’ll need a keyboard player.” I said, “Well, Jean lives in the next village.” And Sting knew of him because Jean was quite well known from the Cat Stevens days; and that was that.

So the tracking happened at Le Studio in the middle of winter?

Nick: Just for one song, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Maybe a few other songs, but I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that there was a major rift going on between Sting and the band, which involved Hugh Padgham. It was really political.

Was Hugh Padgham there for the sessions?

Nick: No.

Just you and them?

Nick: No, just Sting and me. I recorded the vocals, keyboards and everything else and then he took me down to AIR Studios in Montserrat to mix.

I thought you had recorded the drum tracks for “Every Little Thing…”

Nick: For “Every Little Thing…”? No, the drums I recorded were for a live album.

Are you referring to the time you joined them on their world tour?

Nick: Yes.

Did they ever release a video or live recording?

Nick: I don’t know.

You don’t know?

Nick: I don’t know. I’ve never kept a complete record of my discography.

But they were one of the biggest bands in the world!

Nick: I couldn’t have cared less about that. They weren’t very happy. At the time they didn’t like each other at all. Now that I think of it, I do remember drums being set up at Le Studio and I do remember recording some beds because they all had a fight about whose turn it was for the B-side. Then they did a whole jam of songs. I think all three of them came up to Morin Heights at one point. I know they were up there for Synchronicity. That’s when I refused to work with them. I hate being a referee.

Having to settle artistic disagreements?

Nick: No, there were fistfights between Stewart and Sting. So I just walked away. I think I made a mistake though because when Sting asked me to work on his solo album I turned down the offer. Hugh Padgham stayed with him and the rest is history. It’s one of those decisions. It was a crazy period in my life. In those days I didn’t have a manager or anybody to handle the business aspects of my career.

Who was taking care of the studio’s business?

Nick: Yael Brandeis. She was living with André Perry; now she’s married to him. They’re still together. The three of us ran the studio.

While we’re discussing your experiences as an engineer, what were some of the fond memories or special moments?

Nick: Special moments…hmmm… mixing live sound on Saturday Night Live with the Bee Gees was a special moment only because they were wonderful people to work with…

They had an amazing bunch of players in their band.

Nick: The Bee Gees were very intense, very creative and very smooth. Another highlight of my career was Perfect Strangers (1984) with Deep Purple. The sessions were very creative and a lot of fun. I don’t know how much fun you can have making a record, but that was a tremendous amount of fun. Of course it went downhill after that, but everybody loved each other. Ritchie was in great spirits during that record.

The Deep Purple biography I’m reading portrays Ritchie as the emotional one in the group.

Nick: No he’s just the opposite. He was very cold, but I got along very well with Ritchie. It was Ian and Ritchie that had spats; I never got into it. It was none of my business. I made a decision to bring a great bedside manner to the sessions. Part of making a good record requires understanding human nature, well, at least understanding musicians and the artistic temperament. Since the moment I started working with them, I noticed common traits among musicians. There’s good reason for the stereotypes of bass players, guitarists, drummers and singers; particularly singers, they’re a breed apart. The character fits because that’s what happens when they interact in an artistic setting. Deep Purple have been big part of my life and still are. I recently finished Ian Gillan’s latest solo album and I’ve known Roger Glover since 1972. We used to hang out together for a long time.

Did you first meet Roger Glover when you were hired to engineer the Nazareth albums?

Nick: Yes, Roger was their producer. I ended up taking over for Roger, not as a producer, but as an engineer. Ah, the Scottish boys. I did three albums for them. Playin’ the Game (1976), Close Enough for Rock’n’Roll (1976), and Expect No Mercy (1977). Roger and I became close friends. I’ve always had repeat clients; they’ve always come back to me for the next record, which happened with both Deep Purple and Rainbow. With Rainbow the follow-up recording was Straight Between the Eyes (1982), and “Stone Cold” was a hit.

So the relationships developed during those records made you the obvious choice for Deep Purple’s reunion album Perfect Strangers (1984). How did that come about?

Nick: I was in New York at Quadraphonic Sound in Times Square. I don’t remember what I was doing. Oh! I know it was a reggae guy called Fabiano. He came from Guadeloupe and ended up living in Montréal. Anyway, I was in New York doing his record and I called Roger from my hotel room and said, “I’m in town doing this thing.” He said, “Okay, we’ll meet up.” He called me back and asked, “We’re going to have dinner. Are you free?” I said, “Yeah, it’s my day off.” We ended up at this French restaurant across from Sam Ash, the music store. We were sitting down there and he said, “Rainbow is no more.” I asked, “What happened?” He answered, “We’re going to reform Deep Purple.” We met in Greenwich…

Right. Greenwich, NY was a base for the band.

Nick: They said, “We’d like you to engineer.” I said, “Thank you. Great! Yeah!” Then he asked me, “How are we going to do this recording?” Because the boys were rehearsing at a property in Stowe, Vermont and they like it there.

Did one of them own the place in Vermont?

Nick: Yeah, I can’t’ remember who owned it, but it was a large property with two houses and a pool. It was an estate. So I organized the sessions by bringing up Guy Charbonneau with his Le Mobile from San Diego. He drove up with his Neve console and two twenty-four tracks. Oh, it was great! We set up shop there and it was a lot of fun. Every second day we played soccer.

The creative energy must have been flowing.

Nick: Oh, the energy was great. We recorded in a basement. The ceilings were quite high, but it was all concrete. I’ll show you a video of it. It was a great summer.
After the tracking was completed Ritchie wanted to mix it in Hamburg, Germany because he had a son there and he wanted to play soccer. It took me a while to find a studio with an SSL console, but I did and we ended up mixing at Tennessee Tone Studios.

You searched specifically for a studio with an SSL desk?

Nick: Yeah, I like the combination of recording on a Neve, which Guy had, and mixing on an SSL.

I get it, the warmth of the Neve and the facility of the SSL.

Nick: Yeah. It was a great record. I believe it was Deep Purple’s largest selling record.

You’re mentioned in Dave Thompson’s Deep Purple biography. It says, “Nick Blagona, the Russian-Canadian engineer who’d put up with so much in Vermont, was still available.” Thompson explained that the sessions for House of Blue Light (1987) were difficult which eventually spurred Glover and Gillan to ask you to come to AIR Studios in Montserrat and record the Gillan/Glover duo album Accidentally on Purpose (1988).

Nick: Well yeah, Ian had a separate contract to do solo albums. They were so burned out from Blue Light (1987) that Ian and Roger decided to do a solo album together and go to Montserrat to just chill out, but they had no songs. So they wrote in Montserrat. We went there twice; once in the rainy season in the summer and once in November or December. I can’t remember exactly, but that was a lot of fun.

It must have been a nice change from sitting in the back of Guy Charbonneau’s mobile truck in Vermont.

Nick: Oh yeah, for Blue Light (1987) we were using Guy Charbonneau’s truck again in Stowe, Vermont. Originally somebody decided we would use a studio in Massachusetts called Longview Farm. One of the problems with the farm was that nobody liked living in the same house together. I snored so loud everybody complained about it. Ritchie was in the room next door to me and John Lord was on the other side. It was just too much. There were also a lot of horses on the farm and the smell of horseshit was everywhere. We couldn’t stand it so I called Guy and we ended up back in Stowe.

Back at the same place?

Nick: No we stayed in this condo estate that was part of a golf course. The estate had a playhouse that we used as our studio.

So you were recording the group in an auditorium?

Nick: It was a little theatre; it had a stage and about three hundred seats. It was a good sounding room.

And this is where you recorded the bed tracks?

Nick: Everything. We used the theatre and the dressing rooms downstairs. Ian took up one room for song writing and that’s where we’d do the vocals. We had cameras everywhere to communicate from room to room. It was a tough record to do, but between Ritchie, Ian, Roger, Ian Paice, John and myself we had a lot of fun. After that album we did another, but it got too cold in Vermont. So we moved down to a studio in Orlando. Oh, Florida was where we did that terrible record with Joe Lynn Turner.

Joe Lynn Turner talks about making Slaves and Masters (1990) and maintains that he was the scapegoat for the rising tensions in Deep Purple.

Nick: It was Ritchie’s idea to bring Joe in. Ian left because there was a power struggle and Ritchie won. He had always liked Joe’s voice and Joe was easily handled. Joe liked that commercial American sound that Ritchie was looking for. You know Journey, Foreigner, but that sound didn’t work for Deep Purple. Slaves and Masters (1990) was a terrible record to make. That was my last record with them. I couldn’t take having… You see making these records takes seven months out of your life. Then to try and find work afterwards was very difficult. Basically you disappear for a while and then nobody knows you anymore. Whereas these days I’m freelance, and everybody knows I’m working. I’m always busy, and the difference is the diverse projects. I couldn’t do an album for seven months these days unless you paid me a tremendous amount of money.

Over the course of working with the guys from Deep Purple can you remember a moment of personal creative input or inspiration?

Nick: Roger Glover’s solo album, The Mask (1984), was instigated after I read some of Roger’s poetry. He’s a great poet and talented painter. I kept telling him, “You have to make a record based on your poems.” Finally, I got through to him one night when Rainbow was playing in Montréal. After the gig Roger, and me, and the girl I was with went to Ben’s Delicatessen; you know the one that stays open late with all the pictures of famous people on the wall. It was 2am, we were eating the sandwiches and that’s when he decided we were going to do it.

Biographer Richard Thompson referred to The Mask as “masterful”.

Nick: Yeah, it’s a good record. We tracked it at a studio called Bear Tracks, which was owned by a jazz band out of Buffalo called Spyro Gyra. I basically produced it, but Roger wrote all the music himself.

Well these stories speak to an interaction that’s a big part of making music.

Nick: Ninety percent of making records is in the social interaction between people and that creates that magic.

I’m interested in those moments that reveal your tacit knowledge of engineering. I think of you as a mixing engineer. I’m sure most people do. When you mix on an SSL it becomes rather obvious that you’re making a number of implicit decisions that shape and reshape the sound. It’s an amazing performance to watch and hear, and often the details of your creativity are overlooked because of the speed with which you work.

Nick: Basically, my approach to mixing is always the same; I just hear it in my head. I bring out the drums first. The meat and potatoes are the bass and drums. And if you have a great drum sound the mix is already done. From my point of view a bad drum sound is a bad record. That’s one of the first things I was taught.

A lot of the young engineers have gone back to the most boring way of making records which is the traditional American way where they record everything flat. I don’t agree with that approach. The thinking being, if you record everything flat no matter how bad it sounds; it’s flat; it’s the truth. Then you fix it in the mix. My philosophy is the British approach which is to make it sound right on the playback no matter what it takes. At this particular juncture in my life I already know the sound, so I’ve already set the EQs even before the drums are set up. My assistants can’t believe that I come up with the same basic EQs out of my head from total recall: same thing with bass, same thing with guitars.

You’re methods are a result of over 40 years of accumulated experience and knowledge. You were born knowing the sound in your head, but these preset EQ’s contain an implicit account the room’s acoustics, the microphones used, their placement, the type of music, and the musicians’ performance styles. These are the factors that contribute to how quickly your sessions are set up and running.

Nick: What I also do is get the drummer to play in front of me. Just a back beat. I don’t do sound checks where I ask, “Can you play the kick drum?” and you get a kick drum sound. Checking each drum individually is totally unrealistic. It’s like getting a guitar sound by asking, “Can you play the strings separately so I can get a sound?” I see the drum kit as one instrument. I see a guitar as one instrument; it has six strings or twelve strings or a bass has four strings.

I ask the drummer for a back beat and go back into the control room. When the band comes and listens after I’ve recorded it they’re all amazed by it because I get a drum sound in about twenty minutes. Lately, I’ve been using the woofer cone from a Yamaha NS-10 as another microphone for the kick and it works great. I use a Sennheiser 421 right at the head so you get the attack and the NS-10 has that compact and controllable bottom end sound. Recently, I was doing a band called “Protest the Hero” with producer Julius Butty and I thought, “Okay, besides using microphones for a bass amp, let’s try the NS-10 speaker. And let’s try the same thing on the guitar amps.” The resulting sound was incredible because it created a bottom end that’s unique; that no EQ can give. So now I’m using a speaker as a microphone for much of my stuff.

So you use it on a bass?

Nick: Yes, I put it right against the woofer of the bass amp; woofer-to-woofer. I actually use the NS-10 because one of the amplifiers blew on the V8s in the studio. So I asked the tech to set the speaker up as a microphone and it works really well. It creates so much amplification. When you put the speaker in front of a kick drum, that cone moves. With that big magnet and the way that speaker moves it creates quite a voltage and quite a signal.

Do you pad the signal?

Nick: I have to pad it down, but I don’t use EQ. When I started using the speaker I thought, “I need a really big sound.” We were using two different guitar amps, on the same guitar with a couple of SM57s, but as soon as I put the woofer speaker in front of the amps, all of a sudden, the sound was fat. Then I played with the phase relationship between the two microphones to create the distance. For instance, if you want a tighter kick drum sound then put the mics out of phase. If you want a big rock sound you put them in phase. Here’s an example of the phase relationship between kick drum mics from a band I’m working on right now called Talk Radio. [Listening to playback] That’s my kick… there’s the 421… and that’s with the NS-10.

That’s a great kick sound.

Nick: Combined together this creates a tighter bass drum out of phase. Using a speaker as a mic has been around for a long time. I used a 15” woofer with Nazareth. I did a lot of experimentation because I could; it was my own studio. I had the whole studio at my disposal: the microphones, the environment. I even experimented with trying to write between the left and right speaker.

Trying to do what?

Nick: Write… I’m still trying to figure this one out. You can really hear the effect with headphones, particularly today with iPods; everyone listens to everything on headphones. Depending on the phase relationship you can hear tom-toms go either below you or above you…. When I start panning during playback – I still like to move things around – you know, moving guitar solos back and forth like the old Hendrix stuff. Well, one time while I was working with Nazareth I heard something going like this…

Oscillating in the air between the speakers?

Nick: Yeah. There was depth like X, Y and Z. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to manipulate the phase relationships to write something in the air between the speakers using phase relationships.

Most advice on phase relationships suggest avoidance when it comes to out-of-phase sounds, but you seem to manipulate phase relationships as part of your toolkit. I remember once at a jazz session you inverted the phase on the drum set overheads to create a 3D effect with the drummer’s brush technique.

Nick: The phase relationship gives it a lot more depth. For instance, mid-side, MS mic’ing technique… what happens is you accomplish incredible depth in the sound. It really works well in 5.1. I did that with Tea Party when we recorded the acoustic guitar. I had the acoustic guitar coming out of the centre speaker and I had the mid-side out-of-phase coming right at you out of here. It’s like you’re right inside of it.

The most important thing when I started as an engineer was phase relationships because we did everything in mono. And then, when we moved to stereo, it was even more important to consider the compatibility between stereo and mono. You couldn’t have anything 180 degrees out of phase like you can today. You could record in MS stereo, but it had to be placed in the back of the mix. If anything were 180 degrees out of phase when you were cutting vinyl, the needle would blow up. The voltage would build up because it would keep feeding back on itself and the stylus wouldn’t know where to go. The other problem with tracks that were recorded out of phase was that the cancellation would cause the sounds’ image to disappear in mono. I still think mono is very important and when I listen to a mix I’m building I listen to it in mono. I know the sound of phase relationships so well that nothing disappears for me, but there have been many records that have disappearing images when stereo is collapsed into mono.

When I master I switch playback to mono and, on occasion, the vocals suddenly disappear. The artist may have had some effect on it that sounded great, but I’ll know instantly that the track was out of phase if the centre drops out in mono. Once when I told a client about this occurrence he said, “Well, that doesn’t matter anymore.” I said, “Okay, there are still some mono stations around, but what happens if your song becomes a video? Many people still have a mono speaker on their TV.” I hear it a lot on MTV or Much Music. The vocal is not there and this reveals the inexperience of the engineer.

How have computers affected your approach to mixing?

Nick: Here’s a technique I use in the digital format. I kick the shit out of the SSL compressor plug-in coming from the Liquidmix. Notice when I bypass the SSL the mix distorts.

How did you come up with that trick?

Nick: It’s just feel; same thing with the drums. I have the whole drum sound compressed. The room sound is heavily compressed. This plug-in emulates Abbey Road. And this compressor is a distressor, very little attack and very little release. That’s my drum sound on a Neve. These are real drum sounds, no EQ’ing. Actually, with the toms I added a little top end. He had a great drum set. It’s a custom made Sonor. One of the best drum kits I’ve ever heard.

This track sounds great. Are we listening to a finished mix?

Nick: No, but I tend to mix while I’m doing overdubs so at the end I don’t have a long mixing session. By the time we finish overdubs the mix is almost complete.

You’re mixing the instruments as you track.

Nick: I’m tweaking constantly. The reason I can do that is because of the computer’s recall. Previously on an SSL you couldn’t do that. The SSL was said to have total recall, but it never worked properly. It was a misnomer. So you would have to have a separate mixing session at the end. You’d try to get it close, but you could never get it exact, whereas, on a computer you can store everything.

The computer workstation has democratized audio recording by providing a low-cost format to musicians and amateur recordists. How do you feel about the proliferation of home studios?

Nick: It is common for everybody to have a recording studio at home, but the situation is comparable to me owning a formula one car. I have this two hundred thousand dollar vehicle and I can go fast, but I won’t win any races. In fact, I’d probably kill myself first. It’s the same thing with home computer engineering; I get a lot of mastering work from these musicians and the sound is atrocious. They have no idea what goes into building a sound.

A common problem with project studios is that people have a hard time finishing their recordings. Many amateurs re-track over and over in search of the right sound or overdub without end in attempt to find the right arrangement.

Nick: Yeah, that’s because they have had no real experience with the recording process and no sound vision. Consequently, the recording sounds like a piece of shit. And then all I can do as a mastering engineer is polish a turd. That’s the dilemma today. In the early days, everything was set. You had agents or an agent, who booked the bands. You had A&R guys who did their job. You had producers who did what they were supposed to do. You had engineers who did what they were supposed to do, and artists who were signed to the label. The label paid for the studio time. Everybody agreed on the price. Everybody made a good living. The record might not have been a hit, but everyone still survived. If the record was a hit, so much the better and it made everybody happy. Back then we got free gold records; nowadays we have to pay for them. The music industry has changed.

Though, on the other hand, besides the big studios like RCA, Columbia, Capitol, EMI, and so forth, the real pioneers of recording were people who had studios in their home; like for instance Les Paul inventing overdubs. I saw a picture of his studio. It was really cool.

He was cutting discs to do sound on sound recordings.

Nick: And Motown made their big hits in a garage in a suburban area. It was in a house. Hitsville, U.S.A. was written in signage across the living room window. The real pioneers were not the big studios, but the little guys in a room. That will probably be ever the case.

I get the impression that the big studios have always looked to the independents for new music.

Nick: Yeah, like Sam Phillips and the mom-and-pop shops. All over the world somebody was building something innovative in the basement; like Scully, who invented the eight track recorder. Ampex was started by a sergeant in the US army who found the schematics for the Telefunken tape recorder after they entered Germany and he took them and started Ampex in California.

What are your thoughts on the recording industry’s change from analog to digital?

Nick: The application and approach to engineering in the digital domain is totally different from analog. I think digital resolution is better now than when it was first introduced. For instance, this Focusrite Liquidmix has compressors and EQ’s from 1945 on. You can A-B the sounds with the original waves on their website. The emulation technology is incredible; Universal Audio is also very good. Plug-ins today are as good as the real thing; same with the debate over hard disk versus tape. Originally, I was so used to tape I thought tape was better. We did a test a few months back with Protest the Hero. I asked, “Do you guys have any tape left around?” So we recorded the bedtracks with the tape and ProTools at the same time. ProTools sounded better.

Even hitting the tape hard?

Nick: The recording on the tape was squashed. The two didn’t sound the same. Whereas the ProTools tracks through the converters sounded great. I’ll never go back. Today the ProTools HD system is pretty good. If they used Apogees or SSL converters it would be even better. The technology has evolved to the point where there’s no need for the debate. I like to use tape sometimes when I’m mastering to warm it up with 1” tape, but I would never go back to tape for tracking.

Everything has changed with digital recording technology. I started on a three-track tape with so much hiss. Then to Dolby and that cleaned it up, but changed the sound. Then the first computers were integrated with recording technology and then SSL created the new evolution with total recall.

One of Studer’s major mistakes was that they didn’t believe in digital technology. They could have been in a market position like ProTools is today, but they didn’t believe in it. They still believed in tape. They thought tape was going to go on forever. As soon as I saw a computer that could record two-track audio with the capacity for non-destructive editing I thought, “Here we go.” That was the beginning of the end for tape.

Was it the change from 16 bit to 24 bit that improved the fidelity of the digital medium and made it more desirable to change from analog?”

Nick: No, the change from 16 to 24-bit makes no difference. People send me files that are 24/96. The thing you have to remember is that 24/96 is good if you’re doing a string quartet with a lot of dynamics because the noise floor is a lot lower. But you know when you’re doing pop music and you’re ramming it right to -0.1 I don’t hear any difference between heavy rock 44.1 at 16. However, I like 44.1 at 24 for this medium because at 24 bits the reverb sounds better. I would like to go up to 32 bits, but it doesn’t exist. 96kHz is just too high because most hard drives are running at 7200 rpm. If you’re running at 96kHz you need a hard drive that runs at 15000 rpm at least. The processing is so slow at such a high resolution.

Isn’t today’s standard 24/48?

Nick: Yeah, but I like 24/44.1. In fact, right now I’m mixing an album from Newfoundland and they gave it to me at 24/96 and I can’t work with it because at 96kHz this Liquidmix only works on two tracks and my plug-ins don’t work well because they only work at 4 tracks. At 44.1kHz I can run 32 tracks and the session runs a lot smoother. The other problem with running at 24/96 is that once you finished mixing and you have to crunch it down to 16/44.1, that’s a lot of number crunching for all those individual tracks, which makes the mix sound different. Whereas, it sounds better when I only have to convert from 24kHz down to 16kHz. What is interesting is when someone gives me tracks at 24/96 and I crunch them down before I start mixing, it changes the sound slightly. It makes the top end a lot more glossy, which I kind of like.

So there is an advantage to it?

Nick: There is an advantage before I mix. It’s pretty cool.

When you say “more glossy” is it a high frequency thing?

Nick: It’s the timbre of the top end. The harmonic structure changes… What is good is the fact that I can still hear up that high. At 65 I can still hear the top end very well.
I sometimes have a little problem where I have to concentrate on distortion because sometimes when I’m mastering I pump the mix pretty hard. If the band says they hear a little distortion I’ll put on the headphones and there it is. I used to hear it well in my twenties, but at 65 I’m still pretty good.

Musicians are much more involved with the complete process these days.

Nick: They also have younger ears.

Right, but in the past musicians would record, leave, and at the end the band would approve the mixes. Today many bands insist on taking part in the whole process.

Nick: Even back then the mix depended on the band’s input. The only problem with musicians’ involvement with the recording process is what I call “the anal syndrome.” In the earlier days you would mix it, everyone would agree on a mix, and it would be sent out. The reason why was that they were signed to a label. They had a deadline. The art department was ready for the artwork. They were scheduled to go on tour, and the release date was set… and so on. Today independent bands have none of that. Often, if there’s no finishing date, musicians get a completion complex. It gets really stupid. Sometimes when I do a mix, they listen to it and say they love it. They take it home and then come back later and ask, “Can we make some changes?” I say, “Sure.” The requests could be “vocal up or vocal down.” I don’t mind any of that, but when I get requests two or three months into changes and they ask for an adjustment to the hi-hat, “Can you just bring the hi-hat down a half a dB?” Or they ask “Can you bring this thing up,” and so forth, I have to draw the line. That’s why I used to have a clause in my freelance contract that said they have three revisions included in the price, then after that it’s $100 per song. It’s amazing how happy they become with the mixes as soon as they have to pay for the changes. Anyway, it’s that kind of scenario I really dislike about the ‘indie’ world. Plus, many of the bands aren’t disciplined enough.

What do you mean by disciplined?

Nick: Lack of experience. Many independent bands I’ve recorded haven’t been on the road. All they’ve been doing is rehearsing and recording. They have no contact with the outside world. I have an ideal scenario in mind. Normally, when a band gets signed they have songs. The group rehearses the songs during preproduction and the songs are fresh and untested and unsettled when they’re recorded. I’d love to do a record where I do prepro’ with a band; the band goes on tour for six months, rocks hard on the songs, and by the time they come back to record the songs they’re tight. You know they’d have the songs down. Traditionally, bands learn the song in prepro’ and record it immediately. A lot of times I’ll go out to see a band a year after their record is done and they play the music so well. They always say, “We wish we could do the record again right now.”
The bands that have been on the road, like a band from Montréal called “Pete Moss” that I did four songs for – they’re road worthy. They are on the road constantly, so their songs have matured in front of live audiences. They were the easiest band to deal with on the mix. The listened to it, loved it and made no recalls. When you listen to the mixes, there they are and that’s what they sound like.

They’ve already developed their musical identity before entering the studio.

Nick: Yeah, most bands have an identity crisis because they don’t tour. The problem with Canada is that it’s a very hard country to tour and Canadian bands, by nature, can be very lazy. In the United States it’s a whole different scenario. Every 90 miles there’s another city with colleges. For instance, around San Diego there are roughly 200 colleges in a 200-mile radius. Bands can travel to a show and come back home the same day. And the colleges pay, so you can build a fan base.

In terms of distances, population and exposure, touring in the States is a lot easier for bands. We both know that great music has been produced in Canada, but, in spite of that, a lot of Canada’s cultural cues come from the States.

Nick: Canada has its own cultural contributions to popular music, for instance Francophone culture: they make their own films and they have their own stars. I mixed a Linda Lemay record a few years ago and it sold three million copies in Québec, alone. That’s why, when you look at Soundscan and find at least two French records in the top twenty, many people in the rest of Canada don’t know who these French artists are. A significant part of my career involved French Canadian music. When I arrived in Québec in the early 1970s, there was a vibrant music scene. I did three records with Robert Charlebois. I did three records with Jean Pièrre Ferland. Actually, I’d like to get a of copy of Les Vierges du Québec. That was a really interesting record. Jean Pièrre’s album sold a million.

Québec was a really comfortable place to make records. That’s why Nanette Workman – I think I did four albums with her – ended up singing in French because she was having trouble making it as a hit singer in English. She’d come from Arkansas; her father was a trombone player with Glen Miller. Her claim to fame was singing backup vocals on Let It Bleed. She was in Paris trying to get her career going. She was in a bar and another girl said, “The Rolling Stones need another backup singer. You wanna come?” So that’s what started her career.

In between those projects I recorded a slew of other French Canadian artists. At the time French artists had a big fan base and they had huge budgets; 130 grand was nothing because their records sold. Many were signed to major labels and the labels made a lot of money from them because their records sold. All these artists were selling records; it’s and incredibly unique characteristic of our country.

Your time a Morin Heights also provided you with the opportunity to work with Tom Dowd. Would you talk a bit about that experience?

Nick: Tom Dowd was a great guy; I worked with him on the McGarrigle Sisters’ Love Over and Over (1982). Mark Knoffler played on that album. We did it at Morin Heights, we did it in London, we did it at Muscle Shoals, we did it in LA, and we did it in New York. The logistics were a pain because in those days you had to transport the tapes between each studio. You had to make safety copies in case something happened like if they were put under an x-ray at the airport security. We used a company called Rocket Cargo that specialized in transporting audiotape because I certainly wasn’t going to carry around a bag of tapes.

How many tapes were transported between studios?

Nick: Well, we kept the numbers under control by making a master reel. From the multiple takes you would find the one that you liked or assemble a complete song with edited sections from multiple takes. Then you would put these on a master reel by splicing leader tape in between the songs. Each reel was roughly fifteen minutes in length, so you would end up with something like four reels for the project.

How did Tom Dowd influence your approach to engineering?

Nick: Tom Dowd was an influence in terms of feel. Roy Thomas Baker influenced me in the technical aspects of making a record: How to be over-the-top. If anything was worth doing, it was worth over-doing. I worked with him on Pilot’s Morin Heights (1976), and I also did Ian Hunter’s Your Never Alone with a Schizophrenic (1979). Roy Thomas Baker said, “You have the talent to be a good producer.” But I was shy of the position, because I’ve always liked engineering more than producing. I didn’t like the responsibility of being a producer because you had to deal with a lot of record company bullshit. I ran into that very situation while working producing April Wine. After we completed First Glance (1978), we started Harder Faster (1979). At one point during the bedtracks the Capitol Records’ brass from Los Angeles decided to pop in and they were acting like assholes. While we were doing the bedtracks they were saying things like, “Make it sound like The Knack.” At the time “My Sharona” was Capitol Records’ biggest hit. Ohhh, I was mad and told them off. One of them said, “Well, you’ll never work in this town again.” I said, “I hope not, Morin Heights a small town. He yelled, “LOS ANGELES!” I answered, “I don’t live in L.A. so PISS OFF!” Of course, later I received the concerned call from the powers that be.

Yet in spite of that confrontation you continued to accept the roll of engineer/producer on future projects. Roy Thomas Baker provided a pivotal influence on your career. Can you give an example of his “anything that’s worth doing is worth overdoing” approach to sound?

Nick: Yeah, there’s a trick I learned from Roy Thomas Baker. If there were a four-part harmony we would create twelve tracks of each by recording the same thing over and over again. Then take those twelve tracks, invert the phase on every other, and then – because we were working within the limitations of analog – bounce those down to each of the four parts. In the end we would have four tracks each comprised of twelve bounced tracks. The phase relationship that was created in each bounced track gave the vocals a unique character. He called the sound “Gassy Vocals” because it sounds airy.

You’ve told me a few stories of Roy Thomas Baker’s extravagance.

Nick: Oh yeah, he was very extravagant. He would listen to playback so loud even I would have to walk out. He sat in a Lazyboy chair in front of the console with an ice bucket and champagne – always Dom Perignon. He made really good records and he was a great engineer. His career was similar to my own, in that he was an engineer that became a producer; whereas a lot of producers are musicians who become producers. He knew he had a sound, but he knew that it wouldn’t last forever. When I worked with Phil Ramone on Chicago 13 (1979), he was the one that told me that you always have to diversify. And I’ve been lucky because I’ve had the opportunity to record everything from Hard Rock and Heavy Metal to Classical records with orchestras. I’ve learned how to survive. I can go and record a Jazz date, then an orchestral session followed by a heavy metal project.

Phil Ramone must have hired you because your contribution to the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack (1977) – arguably one of the biggest dance records ever produced – yet, in spite of that association you’ve been in demand for hard rock recordings most of your career.

Nick: After that record was made I had so many phone calls to do disco records, but I refused them because I didn’t want to become typecast. It’s weird how one’s career evolves: After I’d accepted the offer to do Perfect Strangers (1984), the Rolling Stones asked me to engineer a record. We were into the third day of bed tracks in Stowe when I got the call from the Stones, but they couldn’t wait for me to finish Deep Purple’s project. At that time Robert Palmer and then Roxy Music called as well. I had all three offers at that time. There were more offers, but I wouldn’t back out on the band. I couldn’t go up to Roger Glover and the boys and say, “I’m leaving.” Who knows how my career would have been affected by those offers. I’ll never know, but I had a hard time sleeping that night after the Stones called because they were one of my favourite bands. I remember they called on a Wednesday and asked if I was ready to start on Monday… in Paris.

Anyway, that’s the way this business works. Similarly, we didn’t know that Saturday Night Fever was going to be such a huge record. We were doing Children of the World (1976) and Robert Stigwood came to the studio with a script and told the boys to read it. Everybody thought it was a piece of shit: A guy who works in a paint store and wants to dance in a disco in Bensonhurst?

When you put it like that the story sounds pretty dry.

Nick: Yeah. Robert asked them to write a song, which became “You Should Be Dancing.”

You once mentioned that they started the sessions down at Criteria Studios in Florida and then came up to Canada, switching studios for tax reasons.

Nick: At that time they couldn’t work in England because they had terrible tax laws for artists. If you earned over a certain amount you were taxed 80-90%, and they would assume if you made a million dollars you made a million dollars every year. What they didn’t realize was that if you made a million dollars on a record or book it was probably the only thing you’ve ever done. In England, I think they still have a law named for Brendan Behan, who was a famous writer, poet and a terrible drunkard. He wrote one novel that made him millions. The government taxed him to the point where he was broke, desolate and living on the street. Subsequently, there were many in parliament who thought that it was disgusting. So now, if you’re a writer or a painter or sculptor you’re not taxed the same way. U2 took advantage of that law by earning millions of dollars tax-free. England has changed the laws and many artists have returned because of the new tax laws.

Anyway, Canada was the only option for the Bee Gees. They’d been in the States for too long and they were going to be taxed. They heard about Morin Heights, came up and they stayed.

How long were they there?

Nick: Five months. There were three engineers in total and two engineers were also the producers. Karl Richardson was one producer/engineer, and Albhy Galuten was the second producer and I was the third engineer. Literally, it was the three of us who handled the board for mixing because Le Studio had no automation. I handled the bass and drums; Karl handled the instrumentation and Albhy controlled all the vocals. It was a great session that was mixed on the Trident A console.

What tracking occurred up at Le Studio?

Nick: Everything from bedtracks to overdubs.

So the tracks that were written after they read the script were recorded in Morin Heights and the rest of the tracks on Children of the World (1976), like “Jive Talking,” were done down in Florida.

Nick: Yeah, at Criteria. The process was a mixture of both studios. They did some of the tracks at Criteria and then they redid some of the tracks at Morin Heights for continuity of sound. Though at one point, they almost left Le Studio because our reverb, the EMT plates didn’t sound like the Criteria EMT plates, which were a lot warmer sounding. I had conditioned the EMT plates in our place to make them sound more British because we had a lot of British bands. Roy Thomas Baker liked the cold icy kind of reverb. They said, “Well, if you can’t get that straight we’re going to leave. We’re going to go back to Criteria or find some place in Toronto.” I was determined to keep their business so I stayed up all night with headphones and I listened to every record I had from Criteria to listen to the reverb. Then I went back at 5am, put a graphic EQ onto the reverb and as I listened to the reverb on my headphones – I took the records with me – I EQ’d it with more bottom end, took the middle off, and so on. So the next day when they arrived and started working and when they heard the new reverb they said, “That’s better than the Criteria reverb.” I said, “Well, I want you guys to stay. I’d be really lonely without you guys.” They all gave me a hug.

How far into the project were you when that occurred?

Nick: Two months. You know, they had been complaining about the reverb not being correct, but after that they decided to stay. With an important client like that leaving it wouldn’t have made us happy at all.

The rhythm tracks on that record have a deep groove.

Nick: I learned a lot from those two producers. A lot about tight bottom end for that kind of music, you know R&B, the American sound. I learned a lot about American sound.

There is a real difference, especially in the bottom end.

Nick: Yeah, you know the tightness of the drum kit is different than the British approach, which is fatter and slightly bigger. The New York sound is tight. I programmed these drums for this smooth jazz record and since their music reminds me of a Steely Dan arrangement, I wanted to make the drums sound as if Steve Gadd was playing them. A simple hi-hat, kick and snare pattern, but it sounds like Steve Gadd. They were programmed, but they sound real.

I was fortunate to learn from some of the best American producers. As an apprentice at Decca I learned the British method of engineering sound, which was different from the American approach, because we EQ’d at the source; whereas when Karl got the drum sounds, there was almost no EQ at all. They would work on the drums themselves and microphone placements. In England, the thinking was “I’m going to change the drum sound anyway, so I’m going to make it sound how I want it to sound right now.” In the 50s & 60s the Brits sound was more hi-fi than the Americans, but that difference doesn’t exist anymore because everyone is using the same gear and the same format; plus, today many engineers trigger the drums and add the same generic drum samples. Another difference in the old sound was that American drummers tuned the drums differently than the British drummers. In those days the American drummers would take the bottom skins off the toms; whereas, in Britain they would leave them on. So Americans would get this different sound, particularly for R&B. Anyway, in the bed sessions with the Bee Gees we used dynamic microphones like the RE20s, SM57 for the snare, 87s for the top.

With the bottom heads removed wouldn’t the engineer mic the toms underneath or inside the shell?

Nick: Yes, both, but I always miked it from the top to get more tone. Inside the shell it would sound a little more tubular. Also the R&B drummers would set up the snare with the Memphis sound; the pitch was lower and they’d put their wallets or whatever on the head.

That brings me to another point concerning Canada, the States and for that matter the world; the unfortunate thing with Canada is that Canada has no sound. There’s no such thing as a Vancouver sound or a Toronto sound. There might be such as thing as an east coast sound because of the Celtic influences, but that makes no difference to popular music. In America, for instance, there was the Kansas City sound. You can tell the difference in sound from Chicago and New York to New Orleans to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Memphis and Nashville. I mean you can place the music in a setting. For instance, if I’m doing a blues album I can ask a band, “Where do you want to go? Where do you want the music to live?” With the Tommy Z album it was Memphis; we had Memphis horn styles, the snare was flapping in the wind, the playing was “Memphis” with everyone playing on the shady side of the beat, you know? Just a little laid back. You have to put it into a perspective of where you are.

Some bands sound uptight. Everybody is on top of the beat. Everyone’s anticipating the next change whereas the American roots music approach is, “So I’m a little late on the downbeat.” And every region has its own unique take on the timing around the beat. That’s what jazz is about too. If everybody hits the downbeat precisely there’s a smaller sound. If everybody hits on a little flam it makes the music sound fat and wide, particularly with a big band. That’s the difference between Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Lawrence Welk’s sound; Lawrence Welk sounds like some kind of uptight machine; Guy Lombardo too. “White” people like that. Guy Lombardo made a fortune, but his music was straight as an arrow. Whereas Dorsey and Miller, those guys swung. The best one was Les Brown and His Band of Renown out of Los Angeles, particularly when they had a young 18-year-old Doris Day singing. That’s the West Coast Big Band sound; laid back and swingin’.

Engineering and production are not just combinations of technology and sound. They involve so many compilations of elements encountered during one’s career that you have to make an effort to understand each form that you’re working in: the personalities involved, the environment where you work, the equipment that you’re using and the picture that you want to have at the end of it all. It’s the same with film directors. Film directors must already have a picture of the final product, but their job is even more stupendous because they have to deal with a large crew, cameramen and actors. The elements of the movie are created in bits and pieces; whereas in music you record a song and that’s the song. But imagine recording a song’s chorus first because you’re in an environment that allows it. They almost never film a movie by following the storyline from beginning to end. They make a movie in non-linear bits and pieces.

In music it’s a little more linear, but at the same time you have to create this kind of magic. The problem we’re having today in the digital mode is artists don’t understand that. The reason why music sales are down is that the public knows why they don’t like some kinds of music. They may not give you or know a reason, but I can see/hear what’s wrong with it. They start with a click track; they start with drums first. The guy plays the song as he’s learned it. Then the bass player comes and puts bass on it; and then the guitar player comes and puts the guitar on it. Whereas in the old days you put the whole band in one room; everybody looks at each other; and everybody feeds off the energy from each other playing the song. That’s how great records are done.

So a good sound begins with a good recording of the rhythm section playing together, but I’ve heard engineers’ mixes that have wrecked the feel of the song in spite of good bedtracks. I’ve also heard mixes you’ve done that have saved the feel of the song.

Nick: Thanks, Ted. I’ve done it many times. It’s injecting a feel into it. You have to imagine that you’ve just recorded the band live and sometimes the difficulty is trying to figure out what to put in it. Whether I play it myself or use someone else, I normally put a shaker in it. Sometimes what I do to loosen up the feel is I replace the hi-hat track with a shaker.

The hi-hat is there, but the shaker is on top of it.

Nick: Sometimes I take the hi-hat away totally. People don’t notice it’s missing because it’s just part of the feel, but with the shaker it feels wider. With modern technology I have a thing called Drumagog so I’ll take a hi-hat and replace it with a shaker. But, most of the time, I’ll take a shaker or a tambourine and create a feel myself, and record it live.

Phil Ramone taught me about feel. In the old days, if you weren’t using a click, and the song was speeding up approaching the chorus you put a rhythm guitar playing half time and then you’d play it full time in the chorus and visa versa if it slows down you’ play double time.

If it slows down in the chorus… if the tempo physically slows down?

Nick: You have one guitar playing a part in the chorus and it slows down. You try and grab it and then you add another guitar in the background playing half time. And all of a sudden it evens out the perception to the human ear. So that’s a trick we used to use.

In the old days there were a lot of people who didn’t like using click-tracks. So what we did was hire the right drummer; players like Steve Gadd and all those other great studio drummers. If you started a click at the beginning of a song, at the end of the song the tempo was exactly the same. The drummer was the traffic manager. He was the one who kept the beat. So that’s why those guys were in great demand and demanded great money because they were solid. Tempo issues are why, in the 60’s, and to some degree in the 70’s, when the band came in to the studio, the band didn’t play. Like the Beach Boys using the Wrecking Crew. In New York they had Tony Levin and Steve Gadd. You know the New York Mafia; David Spinoza on guitar, Hugh McCracken on rhythm guitar. These guys were hired constantly because their timing was impeccable. They didn’t need the click and consequently the feel was amazing. They could keep the groove right on the button. They were masters of time. When producers decided that the band needed to be used, you know good or bad, well then the click came in.

You have to learn how to work with a musician’s performance capability. So overdubbing bedtracks is probably the easiest way for most producers to proceed. Having said that, can you take a moment and explain your approach to mic’ing a band for bedtrack session?

Nick: Every microphone is like the lens of a camera. But I’ve already explained to you how turning the mic preamp all the way down and fader all the way up reduces the size of the mic’s field.

That’s how you can create discrete tracks recording bands live off the floor?

Nick: Yeah, I do it with very little spill. For example: If I’m talking into this microphone and I have the mic preamp all the way down and the fader all the way up while you’re over in the corner talking, the mic won’t hear you that much or not at all. Even at this distance. However, if I had the microphone preamp up and the fader down to match the same level this microphone could probably hear a pin drop in the next room. It’s like setting your depth of field with the F-stop on a camera lens.

If I’m recording drums the snare mic is right on the snare, and I have its preamp all the way down, very little hi-hat leaks into the snare mic. People are always commenting that they can hear the hi-hat over here. Whereas many of the records you hear today it’s just a mush. A lot of the times when I mix a record, the hi-hat track they give me is louder than the snare track, because the guy had the hi-hat mic’s preamp all the way up.

I’ve noticed records being made in Studio One at Metalworks and, you know what it’s like, you hear three hours of kick drum and two hours of snare and then they only listen to eight bars of the drums as a set. Or they record four bars of drums and copy/paste it so that becomes the verse. Or do four bars of chorus and copy that to make eight bars. And then they use a thing called Beat Detective on ProTools. No wonder a lot of the records today sound stiff. Producers are becoming so anal. They think that if you’re using the right material it has to be perfect. Therefore they depend on the machines instead of their instincts for their input. T-Bone Burnett is an example of a good producer, he’s a musician as well, but he doesn’t use clicks. He produced that album with Robert Plant and Allison Krause. There’s another album out there of duets featuring Yo Yo Ma with Allison Krause, with James Taylor and other famous artists. It’s live off the floor; nothing overdubbed. So in some circles the trend in the production process is returning to capturing complete performances.

There’s always a backlash in bad work ethics. The problem with that process is the fact that many bands are so bad you can’t capture a good feel when the band plays together. In spite of that fact, I use the band for tracking as much as is possible. When a band is in the studio I try to record bass, drums and guitar at the same time. And if the guitar player is not playing very well, then I have to conclude they don’t have their sound together.

The light that comes on for me every time is the song. If the song is bad I have a really hard time engineering. I can deal with bad musicians to a point and I can deal with bad singers to a point. Nowadays it’s a lot easier to deal with bad singers because we have the tools. In those days you didn’t have the tools. You really had to have the person sing until they got the right notes. There were constant punch-ins and there were only twenty-four tracks on one machine so it was tough. Sometimes we spent days doing vocals.

But, the light only comes on, and it still happens today, when the song is good. That’s what I look for. That’s been the case with most successful recordings. There’s a difference between finding a good song and finding a commercial song. You’re lucky if you can find a song that’s both. I’ve engineered a lot of records that weren’t good songs, but they were hits because a hit is also a matter of being at the right time and place for that song.

Anyway, that’s a brief look, for now, at my conception of music and how it sits. You know, for me, nothing’s changed. I still have the same view of making records. The tools change and so does technology. When I arrived in this industry, they were just changing from round dials to faders. The old guys couldn’t stand the faders. I didn’t like the pots, so I went for the fader.

In 2005, a culturally significant sound recording collection was donated to Drexel University. The ability to acquire the Sigma Sound Studios Collection for use as primary source material of commercial music recordings within the Music Industry Program was seen as a unique and valuable opportunity. The development of this resource into a research repository has provided a model for institutions of higher learning in collaborating with industry and internal institutional units to provide primary sources for research while preserving culturally significant recording collections. This paper will show the need for primary sources and an approach to developing resources within an institution of higher learning.

The Need for Resources

In his 2004 article in Popular Music and Society, Tom Caw states, “…sound recordings are the essential information need of the popular music researcher” (Caw, 2004, p.50). So, it would seem obvious to educators of popular music and music technology that having resources for study and research are of great importance. These resources traditionally take the form of compact discs, vinyl records and cassette tapes. They are often housed in traditional music libraries where, hopefully, a collection policy is in place to make popular music recordings available. Such policies would be best implemented in collaboration with the music program instructors to insure that materials are current and relevant to the curriculum.  However, there are downsides to this approach. Traditional music libraries are often in place where the institution has an established music program. This situation may not be the case in newer technology driven programs. Therefore, the program would either need to create a resource repository or rely on the institution’s main library for such resources. Another problem is that “most academic libraries have insufficient holdings of sound recordings” (Caw, 2004, p.52). In order to combat this shortcoming, a program would have to use significant financial resources in acquiring and storing such materials.

Sound recording resources are beneficial not only to the study of popular music, but also to the study of music production. Many educational programs are now available for studying music production and audio engineering. Developing listening skills and recording process knowledge used to take place in apprenticeship programs where on-the-job learning created a mentor/student relationship within industry.  However, with the decline of these programs and the increase in formal education programs, there has been a shift of venue for learning recording technology skills. Now, more than ever, there is great pressure on music technology programs to “…provide aspiring sound engineers with access to knowledge and experience that studio apprenticeships once offered” (Porcello, 2004, p.737). Therefore, there is not only a greater demand for sound recording resources, but the type of resource available becomes more diverse.  For instance, a student of music technology can glean a wealth of information by listening and studying commercially released sound recordings. However, greater insight can be obtained if the student were able to review the production multi-track sessions, the various mix-down versions and ephemeral documents made during the process of production. Since most of these resources are owned and maintained by corporations (record companies, publishing companies, etc.), access to these resources is difficult if not impossible.

Imagine the research opportunities if such production resources were made available. For the musicologist it would be possible to research popular musical arrangements, how those arrangements related to technology and how arrangements connected socially to a time period or geographical region.  For the student of music production it would be possible to research aesthetic balances between instruments, individual track processing and how that processing relates to technology. When studying multi-track resources, the musician would be able to listen to individual musical performances out of context with the other musicians or in context with other instrument sets. For instance, one could listen to just the bass guitar for performance study. However, one could also listen to the bass guitar with the drums and rhythm guitar for rhythm section study. These opportunities are just a few examples of possible research initiatives.

To illustrate this further, Figure 1, 2 and 3 display track sheets from different multi-track recordings on different media.  Figure 1 shows a 4-track recording by artist Charlie Feagin from 1968. A full production across only 4 tracks required the drums and bass to be combined onto a single track as well as the guitar and organ. The constraint of 4 tracks can be studied as to its effect on the musical arrangement as well as the technical requirements for combining instruments on single tracks. For instance, listening to the combined drums and bass not only displays the volume balancing between the instruments, but the concerns for equalization and application of time-based effects. In this instance, there is reverb on the drums, but not on the bass. This would have to be applied while recording as post-processing would not be possible once the tracks are combined. In Figure 2, a recording by artist Grover Mitchell from 1969 displays a less constrained situation. Here, the recording is made on an 8-track machine. The need for combining instruments is lessened by the higher track count. In this case, the drums and bass now possess their own tracks. The only track that combines diverse instrumentation is the vibes, guitar and piano track (Note: track 6 contains undocumented background vocals). Advancing to 1978, Figure 3 displays the track sheet for McFadden and Whitehead’s hit “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”. With 24 audio tracks available, this musical arrangement allows for greater instrumentation and expanded recording techniques. For instance, the drums are now spread over five tracks while the background vocals and strings are doubled on separate tracks allowing for stereo spread and greater mixing manipulation. By quickly comparing these three recordings, it becomes apparent the wealth of research possibilities that arise when such resources are available.

Figure 1. Track sheet from the 4-track recording of Charlie Feagin on Philly Groove Records – 1968.

Figure 2. Track sheet from the 8-track recording of Grover Mitchell on United Artists – 1969.

Figure 3. Track sheet from the 24-track recording of McFadden & Whitehead on Philadelphia International Records – 1978.

The Needs of Resources

Not only is there a need for resources for research, but also the resources themselves require housing and care.  The need for proper storage requires space, organization and preservation. Traditionally, these resources fall under the care of the intellectual property owners (record labels, publishing companies, etc.) or the recording facility in which they were created. When recordings are left at the recording facility after the recording process, recordings can become disassociated with the content owners, leaving potentially important recordings under unknown stewardship and in unknown storage conditions. Under current industry and economic conditions, pressure is increasing with regards to finding the proper preservation conditions for sound recordings. Andrew Leyshon describes the “crisis that currently besets the recording studio sector” (Leyshon, 2009, p.1326), and states, ”…the fact remains that recording studios in the Anglo-American world will continue to close” (Melville, 2009). Similarly, Steve Albini stated in his keynote speech at the 2010 Art of Record Production Conference that large recording studios are ”going the way of the dodo bird.” When these facilities cease operation, where do the stored sound recordings go?  Who takes possession and responsibility for maintaining them? In a perfect world, the intellectual content owners would re-take possession and provide proper storage for these recordings. However, justifying the expense for maintaining these recordings is more difficult as these companies evolve and struggle with their bottom line. Another difficulty is determining who is the current intellectual property owner of a recording after decades of corporate buy-outs and mergers.

This situation has led some record companies to seek alternative storage solutions. For instance, Universal Music Group has donated over 200,000 sound recordings to the Library of Congress for preservation and storage as Universal was unable to justify the cost of storing the collection (Cole, 2011).  This situation is beneficial to both Universal and the preservation of the collection. However, this donation required a great deal of planning and forethought on the part of Universal. Many collections could get lost in the shuffle of corporate failure or reorganization. Therefore, it is imperative that stakeholders (current and potential) look for solutions for preserving cultural resources while creating repositories that provide research opportunities. It is proposed here that institutions of higher learning can fill this gap to the benefit of all stakeholders.

Resource Implementation

For institutions of higher learning to fill this resource gap, a number of conditions must be met. The institution must have all the necessary practitioners in place to fulfill the needs of a repository. The sound recordings must also benefit the institution’s internal users in a way that justifies the cost of maintaining the collection. Furthermore, there must be institutional support for such an endeavor with stated goals and purposes for maintaining communication and advocacy. With these issues in mind, resource implementation will be described by using the Drexel University Audio Archives as a working model.  The following subsections describe the Drexel University Audio Archives’ creation while providing a model for institutional units and outlining obstacles to maintaining audio collections.

Drexel University Audio Archives Overview

The Drexel University Audio Archives was created as a sound recording repository when an opportunity arose to take possession of the Sigma Sound Studios Collection.  Founded in August 1968 by Joe Tarsia, Sigma Sound Studios resided at 212 N. 12^th St. in Philadelphia, PA, USA.  It was at this recording facility where the majority of hit records from Philadelphia were made during the 1970’s and 1980’s, placing the Philadelphia music community as one of the elite music communities in the world. By the mid-1970’s, Philadelphia music output had surpassed Motown “as the most visible and representative symbol of black capitalism” (Shapiro, 2005). The session musicians who played on many records created at Sigma worked under the name M.F.S.B. (Mother Father Sister Brother) and created, along with record producers such as Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, Thom Bell, Bunny Sigler, Phil Hurtt, Dexter Wansel, Bobby Eli and many others, what became known as the “Sound of Philadelphia” or “Philadelphia Soul” (Cogan, Clark, 2003).  This musical genre, derived from gospel and rhythm & blues, developed into other musical forms such as funk, disco, hip-hop and house. The Sigma collection consists predominantly of commercial recordings by artists such as Patti LaBelle, Teddy Pendergrass, Grover Washington, Jr., David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Melba Moore, Gladys Knight, Solomon Burke, Gloria Gaynor, and many others. When Sigma ceased operations, the remaining tape vault required proper storage and preservation. The owners of the Sigma Collection found a long-term preservation solution by donating the collection to Drexel University.

By maintaining the Sigma Collection, Drexel University has created a unique sound recording repository.  While many academic institutions hold commercial collections, the Drexel Audio Archives may be the only academic institution in the United States that holds modern master studio recordings. Especially rare are academic institutions that maintain holdings of multi-track studio recordings.  Recordings such as these would usually fall under the care of corporate stakeholders such as record labels or publishing companies.  However, access to collections held under corporate ownership is rarely provided to researchers and, therefore, not represented in the research field. The Drexel Archives is open to all researchers and the Sigma Collection is of particular interest to popular musicologists and researchers of modern recording techniques.  While this access is limited to onsite research visits, access to such a collection is unique and has great potential to impact research as previously shown.

The Sigma Sound Studios Collection consists of magnetic tape sound recordings. These recordings take the form of multi-track music productions, mono and stereo mix-downs, multi-track and stereo advertisement productions, stereo live-in-studio radio broadcasts and multi-track film soundtrack productions. These 6119 audiotapes consist of masters, safeties and alternate takes of twelve different formats that are represented in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Audio Formats represented in the Sigma Sound Studios Collection.

In deciding to accept this collection, Drexel University made a large commitment and investment for the sake of preserving a culturally significant resource.  Space was provided to house the collection and funds were provided for the purchase of playback, digitization and storage systems.  This investment was deemed beneficial to the University for two reasons.  The University can serve the greater community by providing stewardship over this collection while internally providing primary source material for its Music Industry Program.  The Music Industry Program comprises an award winning faculty of music industry professionals, a course sequence that provides a full industry education with coursework in the business, law, technology, theory, and performance of music, a coop program which allows students to gain real world professional experience, five fully professional recording studios and two computer music labs.  This internal user-group justified the investment in this collection and the creation of the Drexel University Audio Archives as a sound recording repository. In the course of creating this repository, a model for institutional collaboration was created that involved multiple units within the University.

Institutional Units Model

When looking at an audiovisual repository, there are many perspectives to consider.  From an archives’ point of view, there is great value in preserving culturally significant materials and providing access for research. From a music technology program’s point of view, there is great value in holding a sound recording collection to use as a resource within the program. From either point of view there is a gap in knowledge in providing the best stewardship for the resources. An archivist’s expertise is in resource arrangement, description and file management. A music technology program’s expertise is in sound recording playback, digitization and resource handling. What makes an institution of higher learning a good candidate for audiovisual preservation is that most institutions have the necessary collective skill-set across various units within the institution (Seay, 2010).

For instance, most colleges and universities have an information sciences unit that is well suited for maintaining proper arrangement, description and catalogues of the collection. The music technology program can maintain proper playback equipment, digitization projects and enrich the material’s technical metadata within the catalogue. Furthermore, computer science and electrical engineering units can implement and maintain proper file storage systems along with machine maintenance and software tools for audio processing. Institutional advancement departments can seek funding and maintain relationships with external stakeholders.

This collaborative approach goes a long way toward providing a good home for sound recording collections. However, the added bonus for the institution is that the preserved resources have internal user groups that will benefit from these resources for research into musicology, music technology, archival practices, systems management, software development, etc. For the intellectual property holder, the institution provides a cost-effective solution to preserving its sound recording assets.

Obstacles to Maintaining Audio Collections

While the institutional units model is a solution for providing research resources and resource preservation, there are obstacles to implementation. Some of these obstacles involve monetary costs, while others involve copyright compliance, efficiency, sustainability and outreach.

One of the most obvious obstacles is space and equipment. Both are very expensive. Providing climate controlled storage space with associated utilities is a huge institutional commitment. Depending on the collection, specialized equipment must be obtained for playback and digitization. While all quality equipment is expensive, specialized playback equipment comes with an extra maintenance cost. Finding parts and maintenance expertise for obsolete recording technology can be both difficult and expensive. These costs will be the first consideration for taking on a preservation agenda. However, these may not be the most important considerations.

Copyright compliance may be the most important issue to consider. If the sound recording collection is of a commercial nature, it is imperative to know the copyright and ownership status of the materials. If the copyright status inhibits or prohibits access, it may not be prudent to take on the project. However, commercial copyright status is not necessarily a debilitating situation. Many libraries maintain copyrighted works within their holdings. The key is to have a clear institutional policy created by counsel that is easily communicated to both repository staff and patrons. In any case, the copyright holder must be protected.

Institutional priorities must be examined to make sure that preserving a sound recording collection is within the scope of the institution’s mission. Though the greater institution may consider the project a good fit, each included unit may have differing priorities. These differing priorities may not kill the project, but they may slow the pace of progress significantly. An assessment of efficiency is needed to determine whether the slower pace is too detrimental to the project.

While the daily operations of a repository are easy to quantify, there must be a plan for sustainability. A long-term preservation plan must be created before the project starts in order to foresee future costs and technological bottlenecks. For instance, if digitization is part of a preservation plan, data migration and long-term storage solution plans must be made. Long-term storage of the original materials may require space and utilities costs that will continue to use a portion of the operational budget. A cost/benefit analysis is necessary prior to accepting a collection.

While these obstacles can be weighed by the institution in determining the benefit of maintaining a sound recording collection, it is important that active outreach measures are taken for recording studios and record labels to know this option exists. The solution that institutions of higher learning can provide is worthless unless interested parties are aware of this option. Discussions and negotiations are necessary between the institution and industry in making this connection. Advocating for the preservation of sound recordings must come from popular music and music technology programs.

Conclusion

While the obstacles for creating a repository of sound recordings are not insignificant, the benefits to researchers and collection holders are great. Popular musicology and music technology programs need primary sources for study while industry content holders need repositories to preserve their sound recordings. By implementing the institutional units model, institutions of higher learning can serve both academia and industry by providing resource access and preservation resources. Thorough analysis of the potential benefits versus the costs associated with maintaining a sound recording collection is necessary along with the creation of preservation and storage plans. However, creating strong connections with industry are important in making apparent the potential opportunity for collection donation to higher education. If these connections are made, a wealth of primary source material can be made available to researchers of popular music and music technology.

Acknowledgments

The Drexel University Audio Archives provided audio resources used in this paper. The Drexel University Audio Archives is a division of the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design’s Music Industry Program.

Bibliography

Albini, S. (2010). Keynote speech. Art of Record Production Conference.  Leeds, UK

Caw, T. (2004). Popular Music Studies Information Needs: You Just Might Find… Popular Music and Society, 27(1) 49-54

Cogan, J., & Clark, W. (2003) Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios. San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books LLC

Cole, T. (2011, January 10). Library of Congress Receives Largest Single Audio Donation, National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/5uttjkc

Leyshon, A. (2009).  The Software Slump?: digital music, the democratisation of technology, and the decline of the recording studio sector within the musical economy. Environment and Planning A, 41(6) 1309 – 1331

Melville, K. (2009). Recording Studios Might Morph Into Museums. Science A Go Go. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/4zz4wyr

Porcello, T. (2004). Language and the Professionalization of Sound- Recording Engineers. Social Studies of Science, 34(5) 733-758

Seay, T. (2010). Using Existing Institutional Resources for Establishing and Preserving Audio-Visual Collections. Annual Conference of The International Association for Sound and Audiovisual Archivists. Philadelphia, PA.

Shapiro, P. (2005). Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, Inc.

Literature on music technology shows a growing interest towards user agency, pointing to how sound recording and music-making equipment is reinvented through imaginative and unexpected techniques¹. Nonetheless, the evaluation of innovation and creativity in music practice too often takes for granted criteria that are proper to technologically and culturally dominant parts of the world, where most technology is also created, patented and consumed, thus reaffirming a subordination of cultural production to the economic system to which it belongs. In any case, little attention is generally paid to non-Western aesthetics of sound, so that those practices, which are either too idiosyncratic or which never impacted on dominant musical cultures and markets, are interpreted at best as exceptions and sometimes even as conceptual misunderstandings or naïve misuses of musical equipment.

At any rate, some scholars, especially in the field of ethnomusicology – most notably Rasmussen (1996), Hayward (1998), Neuenfeld (2002), Mentjies (2003), Lysloff & Gay (2003), and Greene & Porcello (2005) – have already acknowledged the significance in musical production terms of areas previously considered marginal. To quote Greene (ibid. pp. 2–3):

Recording studios have become, among other things, spongelike centers where the world’s sounds are quickly and continually absorbed, reworked, and reincorporated into new musics. Music can now no longer be adequately modeled as something that happens in a local context and employs only the expressive specific to a locality. Instead, music making increasingly employs technology produced elsewhere and is informed by a heightened awareness of sounds that are traveling rapidly around the world. [Ethnographic evidence] shows that people around the world today are merging technological engineering with traditional ‘musicking’ in unpredicted ways, and they are producing a wide array of musics that is only beginning to be studied.

Here Greene highlights the dialectic relationship between technological constraints and user agency, while rejecting a deterministic view of technology:

Technologies of wired sound also have the potential (whether fully realised or not) of opening up new directions for musical expression and evolution, inspiring new logics of music creation and empowering local cultural and expressive values. (ibid. p. 3)

To quote Théberge (1997. p. 160), “the ability of the consumer to define, at least partially, meaning and use of technology is an essential assumption and theoretical point of departure”. Lysloff & Gay (2003. p. 12) agree that a piece of technology becomes something else when in the hands of the user:

Technologies, even the most oppressive and alienating, are thus constantly being reinterpreted in ways that make sense of local circumstances and that intersect with local interests, often subverting their original intent.

Nevertheless, both and Lysloff & Gay (2003) and Greene & Porcello (2005) place a substantial emphasis on digital technology and its presumed disruptive role, by focusing mainly on sampling, the Internet and computers in general: “Music […] happens along a global circuit of rapid communication and varying influence: an accelerating and disjunctive global cultural flow” (ibid. p. 2).

It is not my aim to discuss whether the advent of digital technology has brought about a paradigmatic shift in music making or rather in the understanding of it. Rather, I want to suggest that there is a significant delay in the scholarly interest – and this article makes no exception – in the adoption in non-Western countries of ‘Western’ electronic music devices for distinctive expressive purposes in record production. Consequently, I have chosen to focus on two examples that date back to the Fifties and early Sixties, a time of great experimentation in music production in various parts of the world, India included, long before scholarship would recognise the global nature of ‘wired sound’.

Of course, intercultural exchanges of musical instruments and techniques have been taking place long before the concept of globalisation became fashionable. By focusing on specific cultural meanings of the reappropriation of technology, this paper thus aims to contribute to the inclusion of currently ‘uncategorised’ practices within the main body of scholarship on the art of record production, by showing how different techniques make sense in equally different aesthetic and socioeconomic contexts. Examples will be drawn from music director Kalyanji’s early innovative use of synthesisers in the Hindi film Nagin (1954).

Hegemonic sound aesthetics

The imagery of non-Western individuals side by side with technological equipment evokes a sense of estrangement, a paradox, as in that famous picture (which has a certain resonance with the His Master’s Voice trademark) showing the ethnologist Frances Densmore with a seemingly astonished Mountain Chief of the Piegan Blackfeet – a kind of representation that in hindsight appears ethnocentric, by asserting a superiority that is objectified through the display of technological development on the one hand and traditional outfits on the other. Here, an ideological connection between development and technological devices, and the presumption of dominance that comes with it, is persuasively stated.

Non-Western popular music productions are often discredited not only in music magazines, advertising and historiographies, but also in educational texts and academic literature, where they are under-represented and marginalised. Most publications about record production show an evident bias towards British and US producers². In general, with a few exceptions, the sound aesthetics related to non-Western sites of production are still largely overlooked, at least in comparison to their impact on local and – as the case of Hindi film music clearly shows – global publics.

My argument is that the more music aesthetics are defined by sound, and hence by technology, the more those who own the means of production and the expertise to operate them will be also able to control the music market and the musical discourse on a global level. Music production technology and the discourse on technology act as gatekeepers: those who lack full access to technology will not be able to participate in the definition of musical aesthetics.

For this reason, it is important to go beyond an explanation of technology that reduces it to material devices, and instead embrace an understanding of it as a process: “Technology is never simply an artefact, but always caught up in social, historical, and institutional webs” (Taylor 2001. p. 31). In this sense, the multidimensional character of technology refers to a “system of material resources, tools, operational sequences and skills, verbal and non-verbal knowledge, and specific modes of work coordination” (Pfaffenberg 1992. p. 497), for the production of both material artefacts (ibid.) and symbolic products. This broader scope allows us to recognise that the meaning and the creative potential of an instrument are constantly renegotiated through use and social interaction.

Otherwise, a reductive definition based on the physical device would place a stronger accent on the role of the industrial product and, by extension, of its brand, thus providing an economic ground for claiming the primacy of Western sound aesthetics. The case of the marketing concept known as ‘world music’ can exemplify the power of brands and corporate capital to define sound aesthetics; as Chanan (1995. p. 177) writes:

The notion [of ‘world music’] corresponds to the globalization of mass culture at a particular stage of development: the moment when the same corporations that tout the ‘information revolution’ become integrated with the established entertainment industry on the transnational level.

At stake here is not only the faculty of Western corporations to control the global market by imposing determined products but also their capacity to mediate other musics through the intervention of record producers, sound engineers and their technological means, including their aesthetics.

In this paper, I take two different and yet interrelated positions in order to reconnect sound aesthetics to specific social and historical contexts: (a) a microeconomic explanation, which will reveal the objective constraints and unveil the economic interests and the social implications behind the adoption of certain aesthetic standpoints by determined individuals or groups; (b) a cultural explanation through understanding the point of view of the participants (desi) within the particular mode of production of the Hindi film³. For this purpose, I will preface my analysis of how the Clavioline has been employed in Indian popular cinema with a brief reference to a different context, which the reader may find more familiar, where this instrument has played a key role in defining the sound of a successful song.

The Clavioline and the Sound of the Space Age

The Clavioline was an electronic keyboard invented in France by Constant Martin in 1947 and manufactured by Selmer and Gibson in the 1950s. A valve oscillator produced a harmonically rich signal, which was then modified through high- and low-pass filters, plus three kinds of vibrato, an amplitude control and a knee-lever volume control, which would normally be used for expression. The speaker cabinet included a power supply and a valve amplifier. Eighteen on/off switches (twenty-two on the Selmer version), called ‘stops’, controlled timbre; Selmer offered suggested voicings, but the switches could be combined to obtain customised sounds. It is worth noting that the Clavioline, which can be considered a precursor of the analogue synthesiser, was one of the first electronic instruments to reach a mass market, thanks in part to its portability and affordable price.

This instrument is often associated with the Tornado’s track ‘Telstar’ (1962), which was produced by Joe Meek at Holloway Road studio, London and is known as the first British single to reach number one on the US Billboard Hot 100. The inspiration for the song’s title was the first commercial communications satellite that AT&T had placed in orbit in July 1962. The Tornado’s single, released around a month later, is also notable for its experimental production techniques, as Irwin (2009) has explained in a former issue of this Journal. The sound of the Clavioline, heard on the main melodic line, provided a novelty effect, which the audience could relate to other elements, concerning both the record release and the wider cultural setting. More precisely, the reference to the satellite not only in the title but also on the record covers, together with the sound of the Clavioline and the use of sound effects, helped to evoke a modernist and futuristic landscape. As a matter of fact, the connection between the Clavioline and such themes as space exploration and sci-fi can be found in other recordings, including Van Phillips’ soundtrack for the successful science-fiction radio programme ‘Journey Into Space’ (1953-58)⁴, Sun Ra’s ‘Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy’ (1967, recorded in 1963), and ‘The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Volume Two’ (1966), the Louis and Bebe Barron score for the film ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956), and Joe Meek’s concept album ‘I hear a new world. An outer space music fantasy’ (1960).

In some of these records, but most of all in the ones falling into the category of space-age pop (clearly not, therefore, in Sun Ra’s albums), we often come across an association between technology and certain values: scientific progress, economic growth, speed, the urge to update, improving welfare and safety, social harmony, comfort and affluence – all aspects that can be associated with consumerism. Although ‘Telstar’ includes sound effects, synthesised sounds and innovative studio techniques to take the audience by surprise, it also features more familiar aspects, like the adoption of the song form and the single format, which suggest that the delivery of this modernist message will be effective only within a given framework of expectations. At any rate, a thorough analysis of the socioeconomic implications and the ideological substrate of this imagery would require a separate discussion that goes beyond the scope of this paper⁵. The inclusion herein of ‘Telstar’ is mainly intended to highlight a widespread connotation of technology in the post-war West; by contrast, I will now show how a different context drastically reformulates the connotations attached to the same technological device, and perhaps even to technology as a whole.

The Clavioline in Indian popular cinema

Nagin (1954) is a film directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal and loosely inspired by Bijon Bhattacharya’s play Jiyankanya⁶ and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen 2002. p. 337). It tells the love story between Mala (Vyjayanthimala) and Sanatam (Pradeep Kumar), two professional snake catchers from different tribal groups that are involved in an ongoing feud fuelled by the villainous Prabir (Jeevan). The plot is rather thin, while song and dance sequences, choreographed by Sachin Shankar, Yogendra Desai and Hiralal, also predominate in the development of the narrative. The soundtrack includes twelve songs sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle and Hemant Kumar, who is also credited as the music director and author of the music, and an instrumental theme entitled ‘Been music’, the been being a double-reed traditional wind instrument made from a gourd; this theme, which on the LP is credited to the two young assistants Ravi and Kalyanji, is used in the film as the introduction to the most successful of the film songs, ‘Man Dole Mera Tan Dole’, and, in the same song, antiphonally with Lata Mangeshkar’s voice⁷. The same melody reappears in different scenes of the film as a sort of leitmotiv representing the lovers’ call.

It must also be noted that the subject of snakes often recurs in popular culture, especially in relation to stories of love, seduction and revenge. This presence, as Kakar (1989) explains, is a mythological legacy and testifies that folk, classical and popular traditions are closely related in the Indian subcontinent:

In literature, folklore, myth, ritual, and art, the snake and especially the cobra (nag) plays a prominent role in Hindu culture. Born of one of the daughters of Prajapati, the Lord of Creation, snakes are carried by Shiva, the Destroyer, around his neck and arms, while there is no more popular representation of Vishnu, the Preserver of the Hindu trinity, than of his reposing on the Sesha, the seven-headed cobra. Sculpted into the reliefs of Buddhist, Jain, an Hindu temples, snakes, both single and entwined, are a ubiquitous presence in Indian sacred space. (ibid. p. 52)

Cinema makes no exception, featuring several films that revolve around snake (or half-human, half-snake) characters, sometimes even becoming new ‘authentic’ sources in their turn, capable of redefining the myths that inspired them. It comes as no surprise, therefore, if references can also be found between some of these films.

Nagin was a box office hit, and the popularity of its music would boost the careers of the personnel involved in the production, especially Vyjayanthimala, who being a gifted dancer trained in the classical style of Bharata Natyam, offered an outstanding visual complement to Lata Mangeshkar’s voice⁸. Nagin also propelled Kalyanji’s career, despite his apparently secondary role as the performer of the ‘Been music’ theme, which moreover was arranged by Ravi, on the Clavioline.

Kalyanji Virji Shah began his musical career like the conductor of live bands before joining the film music industry as a session musician. Ranade (2006. p. 290) believes that this kind of engagement with arrangements for bands helped him to develop a keen sense of instrumental color. Kalyanji, together with his brother Anandji, would later form one of the most successful teams of music directors in India, capable of writing memorable melodies while engaging with different styles, instruments and sound effects in an original and experimental way⁹.

The first time Kalyanji used the Clavioline to recreate the sound of the been was in S.N. Tripathi’s Naag Panchami (1953). Tripathi then recommended Kalyanji to Hemant Kumar, who was able to take advantage of the novelty effect that the synthesised snake charmer’s sound could still achieve, due to the relative lack of success of Naag Panchami – at least as compared to Nagin. What is worth noting here is that the introduction of the Clavioline played such a major role not only in Kalyanji’s career but also in those of Hemant Kumar and Ravi as music directors (Lata Mangeshkar at the time was already a successful star). I will now suggest a microeconomic explanation of this process, as a prelude to interpreting the cultural context in which the Clavioline was adopted in Nagin to become, in the Indian collective imagination, the ‘authentic’ sound of the snake charmer’s been.

Obtaining musical equipment

Booth (2008) sheds some light on the condition of session musicians in the Hindi film industry: percussionist Taufiq Qureshi, for instance, complains that only in the late 1990s, as a consequence of the economic liberalisation that began in 1991, did it become easier to buy electronic keyboards, while previously ‘the customs people were creating problems. They would charge so much’ (ibid. p. 245). Kalyanji, on the other hand, belonged to a Kutchi family of traders. His father, Virji Shah, had moved from Gujarat to Maharashtra to start a provision store (Premchand 2003. p. 246); if this move allowed Kalyanji to get in contact with the flourishing local music community and eventually with the Bombay film industry, his business links helped him to import the Clavioline. Owning the means of sound production could be very profitable, as session musicians would be hired by music directors because of their exotic instruments. This allowed these fortunate session musicians to gain visibility and, with it, more jobs; this explains why they often jealously guarded their valuable assets. Keyboard player Vipin Reshammiya (in Booth 2008. p. 246) recalls:

In those days Kalyanji had one claviolin [sic], and he was playing ‘been music’. That was very popular. He taught me how to play the instrument, so he is my guru. Sometimes he allowed me to borrow that instrument also. He would charge me a small fee to borrow it, but he did not like to lend it.

Reshammiya also belonged to a business family, however, which eventually allowed him to get hold of a Clavioline himself (ibid.):

In 1959 or 1960 I managed to bring one Claviolin [sic] Reverb from London. It was very expensive because the government charged 200 or 300 percent import duty on such things. From then I joined the film orchestra line. I played with Shankar-Jaikishan, and they exploited that instrument very much.

The exchange-value of music gear is sometimes easily quantifiable – Reshammiya, who in 1965 had bought a Yamaha YC-45 for 30,000 rupees, would hire it to session musicians on commission: “100 rupees per song or 350 rupees for a background session” (ibid.).

In summary, until the 1990s, most Indian musicians in the film industry found certain instruments too expensive and hard to obtain, mostly due to customs restrictions, so that those privileged musicians who could afford a synthesiser, for instance, would take advantage of this investment in several ways. Essentially, owning an electronic instrument meant owning the sounds that it could produce and exerting, therefore, a sort of monopoly on those sounds within the Indian film industry. This increased their opportunities to obtain a job as session musicians or alternatively to earn by hiring out the instrument. As we have seen, Kalyanji’s familiar status enabled him to import a Clavioline, although – apart from hiring it out – simply owning it wasn’t enough to transform it into a highly profitable investment. What mattered then was how he used this instrument in Nagin to mimic the been; the reasons behind this choice can be understood only by looking at how Indian popular films were produced at the time.

The aesthetics of playback

Nagin is largely immersed in the dreamy atmosphere of a love fable, where the impression of watching a staged performance arises from several cues, like the aesthetic of frontality¹⁰, the set design and the diegetic staging of some of the songs. Given that the setting, which depicts the deeds of tribal populations, is mainly rural, the music score accordingly employs mainly traditional instrumentation, with the exception of the Clavioline and strings, which feature in some of the songs.

In the twilight of the forest, sound is the force that drives the characters towards each other and away from threats: the sound of the been guides the lovers in this maze of chiaroscuros¹¹, whilst deceiving their respective tribes, who would not approve of the union. It may be argued that sight is deceptive, an idea that is substantiated in the form of the sunglasses that only the villain Prabir wears. Moreover, this particular prop has a disorientating effect on the viewer, as it clashes with the ostensibly historical setting and suggests an uncertain environment in which polar opposites – past and present, tradition and modernity, local and foreigner, good and evil, etc. – coexist. The been, which is recurrently shown in the foreground of the action, is perhaps the element that brings these opposites together, evoking tradition but borrowing its novel sound from the ‘high-tech West’. In this case of reappropriation, what is striking is how, for the sound of the instrument that in the film epitomises tradition (and probably more), it was a synthesiser that was chosen.

In fact, according to the microeconomic perspective that I have outlined, we can understand why Kalyanji was interested in owning a Clavioline; another question, however, remains unanswered: why would Kalyanji decide to use a new electronic device to mimic a traditional acoustic instrument? In order to provide a more satisfactory explanation, we need to look briefly at some of the main features of Indian popular cinema.

The central role of music in this cinematography is unanimously accepted; what Prasad (1998) calls the ‘horizontal mode of production’ allows the music director a degree of autonomy in film production, purely because the popularity of a song can be decisive for the success of the film in which it features (Morcom 2007). Nagin itself, like many other films, is probably remembered mainly for its songs, and most of all for ‘Man Dole Mera Tan Dole’, which has since acquired a life of its own, more or less independently of its parent film¹²; what is particularly significant is that, after the success of Nagin, the snake charmer’s been has become associated with its electronic replica, so that now, for most of the Indian audience, the Clavioline would probably sound more ‘authentic’ than the original instrument.

The song and dance conventions, in which actors lip-synch to a song sung by playback singers and, as in this case, also mime to some of the instruments in the score, are crucial for understanding the nature of this cultural appropriation. In particular, Rajadhyaksha (2007) suggests that it is possible to identify a specific aesthetic that is based on the following traits:

• the use of pre-recorded sound;
• the elimination of ambient sounds for an artificial soundtrack;
• dubbed dialogues;
• playback singing and lip-synching;
• song picturisation;
• frontality (as in visual arts) of sound, which always requires the presence of the source.

In this context, what is surprising is not that Western technology can be reinvented but how sounds are manipulated and articulated to resemble local instruments, thus eventually becoming traditional in their turn. In this instance, however, it is not the instrument but rather its sound that is unconditionally appropriated as part of the local (desi) cultural fabric. This is also possible because the Clavioline allows an articulation similar in some ways to the been – in terms of timbre, glissando/glide, continuous sound (circular breathing), articulation, vibration and drone tone. Of course, the way the melody on the Clavioline is played is also pivotal, since there is an attempt to mimic the techniques of a been player; furthermore, the Clavioline is small and portable, it has a three-octave keyboard and it can be played while sitting on the floor. In other words, it is very similar to a particular instrument – the Indian harmonium – on which music directors normally compose and play their melodies. It is true that there are also several differences: the been has a more fluctuating tone, while the Clavioline is flatter; and the been possesses subtleties in the articulation, pitch, tuning, sound, duration of the notes and in the integration between the melody and the drone that the Clavioline would struggle to reproduce. In any case, these are differences that might interest a musician or a musicologist, whereas the Indian audience, after this film, has accepted that sound as the sound of the been, and as such, of the snake charmer.

The Clavioline as an audience charmer: demystifying technology

Before coming to the conclusions, I would like to draw on Taussig (1993) to attempt a broader interpretation of the appropriation of this instrument in the framework of Indian film culture. According to Taussig (who in his turn has elaborated on the works of Frazier, Mauss and Benjamin), by holding a representation, or a replica of an object, the holder will obtain an influence on the original object: just as the sight of the been charms the snake, its sound charms the audience; just as the Clavioline mimics the sound of the been, that same sound becomes the been itself in popular imagery. The mimetic game implicit in the use of playback, with its reciprocities and subtle deception, allows any implicit subjugating power in (imported) technology to be demystified.

Furthermore, as we have seen, Nagin manifests a sense of temporal displacement: the story is apparently set in the past, yet some aspects, like the sunglasses, suggest that we are in the present. This disorientation, which is also typical of magical thinking, is also expressed in the film through the electronic sound of the been. This sound possesses the power to be both itself and something else, at the same time and with no apparent inconsistency, transcending the principle of non-contradiction. In ‘Been music’, the Clavioline represents the been, sounds (almost) like the been, but also seems to point to something else, to embrace opposites and turn them into complementary facets of the same reality. Drawing a comparison, if the snake is mesmerised by the sight of the been, then the moviegoer, while seeing its picturisation, is haunted by the sound of the Clavioline. In both cases, the attention of the spectator is focused on sound, while the link – the result of an artifice – between sound and vision implies a degree of pretence: the film spectator is mislead by the visual representation of the been, but s/he hears a Clavioline instead; on the other hand, the spectator of the snake charmer’s show believes (or chooses to believe) that it is sound that hypnotises the snake, but the real trigger is the movement of the been. In Nagin, it is just the convention of playback, which is central to the particular mode of production of Indian popular cinema, that allows sound and vision to be reconnected into a meaningful whole, suggesting that sound has a power to control its source; ‘foreign’ technology, consequently, is not merely adapted to a local aesthetic aim, but is even used instrumentally to restate the point of view of the desi. In short, technological devices in the new context are reinvented as means of constructing meanings that can be understood only from the perspective of their creators and consumers.

If the negation of common logic that I have sketched actually contributed to the appeal of ‘Mal Dole Mera Tan Dole’, this cannot be easily inferred. What I wanted to show, however, is that a certain degree of ambiguity is inherent in technological devices, as their use can always be redefined in original and unexpected ways. The fact, then, that the Clavioline would be used eight years after Nagin in a radically different context, in association with the futuristic and consumerist imagery of the space age in ‘Telstar’, only adds to this ambiguity or, better, this potential, suggesting that sounds and their production are more complex than those discourses that often try to herd them into reductive and biased interpretations.

Conclusions

In analysing the use of the Clavioline in the Nagin soundtrack, from both a microeconomic and a wider cultural perspective, what is noteworthy is how the meaning of technology is redefined in the new context. Musical instruments and equipment have an exchange-value that its possessor can calculate in a rational way: sound branding, equipment rental and budget savings on session musicians are all options that can increase the investment on hard-to-find instruments. The way these instruments are employed in practice, however, is also determined by local aesthetics. In Nagin, the connection between technology and modernity is not as evident as in ‘Telstar’, yet it is nonetheless expressed, albeit in a more subtle way. In particular, the continuity between past and present is symbolised dialectically by the interplay between novelty and convention, change and tradition, through the mediation of outfits (traditional vs. sunglasses) and sound (local traditional instruments vs. Clavioline and strings). In this way, the continuity between appropriation and reinvention is reframed so that the contact between the local (desi) and the foreign or alien (videsi) is resolved, not through rejection and autarchy, but through absorption and original adaptation.

If we analyse the sound of the Clavioline in context on those few minutes of been music, we perceive a complexity that cannot be understood without close reference to the modes of production of the Hindi film (especially playback and lip-synching) and, more generally, to Indian popular culture as a whole. Rather than letting mainstream technological discourse define which criteria are relevant for the comprehension of any sound aesthetics, both technology and aesthetics need to be related to the same socioeconomic and cultural context in which they are produced and consumed and in which their meaning is negotiated.

About the Author

Carlo Nardi
University of Northampton
carlo.nardi@northampton.ac.uk

Notes

1 E.g. turntablism (e.g. Katz 2010, Fikentscher 2003) or the use of echo in dub (e.g. Alleyne 2009, Howard 2008, Veal 2007).

2 E.g. see Massey (2000) and (2009); Cogan & Clark (2003).

3 Desi, a signifier for ‘local’, has seen a slight shift in its connotation over time. Although it has now spread past the Indian borders to embrace a community that is more or less loosely related to Indian culture from a linguistic and geographical point of view (e.g. see the many internet forums dedicated to Bollywood), in the past, i.e. long before the idea of India as a state, the word had a more regional connotation. Das Gupta (2008. p. 1) quotes the Sangeeta Ratnakara, a treatise written by Sarangadeva in the 13th century: “Vocal melody, instrumental music, and dancing are known as Sangita which is two-fold, viz., Margi and Desi. That which was discovered by Brahma and (first) practised by Bharata and others in the audience of Lord Shiva is Margi […] while the Sangita that entertains people according to their taste in different regions […] is known as Desi”.

4 Interestingly, this show was also translated into Hindi.

5 For a discussion on this subject, see Taylor (2001) and Théberge (1997).

6 Bijon Bhattacharya was a Bengali actor, playwright, writer, scenarist, composer of stage music, singer and theatre director; initially Gandhian and then Marxist, he was a founding member of the leftist group IPTA, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen 2002. p. 64).

7 It is worth noting that song collections featuring ‘Man Dole Mera Tan Dole’ (e.g. ‘50 Glorious Years, Vol 1’, ‘The History of Indian Film Music’ and ‘Lata: 80 Glorious Years’) generally include ‘Been music’ in the same track and without a separate credit, unlike the original film score LP.

8 Playback became the norm in Indian popular cinema since the forties [reviewer’s note: either ‘Playback became the norm in Indian popular cinema in the 1940s’ or ‘Playback has been the norm in Indian popular cinema since the 1940s’], mainly due to technological constraints (Mukherjee 2007): first singers would record the songs, then actors would lip-synch the song lyrics in what is commonly known as the ‘song picturisation’. Furthermore, it was rumored that Lata resented Vyjayanthimala getting all the credit for the ‘Man Dole Mera Tan Dole’ song sequence (Jain 2005. p. 147) – a resentment that led the singer to fight for the playback singers’ right to be given prominence in the opening credits and to receive their share of royalties.

9 It is striking that, notwithstanding their enormous popular success – or possibly just for this reason – Kalyanji-Ananji have mainly been neglected by musicologists and music scholars in favor of other music directors such as R.D. Burman or Salil Chowdhury.

10 Frontality is a distinctive trait of Indian artistic output, including paintings, miniatures, dance, painted photographs and the Parsi theatre, which took as its governing convention an eye contact and bodily orientation with the audience that originates from earlier open stages: “Turning the body towards the spectator is a sign that there is in this relationship no disassembling between the two: the actor looks at the audience and the audience looks at the actor; both exist – as actor and audience – because of this candid contact” (Kapur 1993. p. 92). Since its inception, cinema has made no exception.

11 Nandlal Jaswantlal was “admired for his sophisticated lighting (with cameraman Pandurang Naik). [He] used extreme close-ups and unusual angles creating disjointed but dramatic and sensual spaces” (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen 2002. p. 113).

12 The been melody from the film, which today is still one of the most popular melodies in Hindi film music, has been sampled in the song ‘Twist’ from the recent blockbuster Love Aaj Kal (2009).

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Discography

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