Thrills Spill and the Art of Making Records
:That Thing about Music
“Without music life would be a mistake” Friedrich Nietzsche
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent” Victor Hugo
“Sam Philips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted but never to copy, that was a great gift he gave me: believe in myself, right from the start of my recording career. If there had been no Sam Philips I might still be working in the cotton fields” Johnny Cash
What is it about music?
What is it about music?
Have you ever been at home ironing or driving down a clogged up M6 listening to the radio, or actually, not really listening to the radio, when a certain record comes on. You may have heard it before, it may be your favourite record ever, it may just feel like you heard it before or maybe you’ve never heard anything like it, but it grabs you. It takes over your attention, it infects your whole self like a virus and launches your conscious and unconscious self into another place.
What is that thing that music does? How is it made, created, cooked and served and what is the secret ingredient? Well before we go any further I have an admission to make….. I’m not sure, but I’m keen to look for some clues.
First of all as we consider That Thing About Music we need to remember that there are two very different perspectives from which music is seen and heard. The perspective of the audience and the perspective of the artist. Both listen to the same sound but hear very different things. The musician needs to listen as a musician and at the same time, if he is going to add the magic ingredient he must hear the music as the audience. Let me give you an example:
“Dancing in the Moonlight” by Toploader. As the audience I love this record, it lifts me from the first tinkling keyboard phrase. I also play this song, I play the bass. From the point of view of the musician it is deeply tedious. There is a simple 4 bar bass riff that repeats and repeats and repeats through the song. The only variation which occurs in this cycle of repetition is when the bass falls silent for 8 bars. When this song comes round on the set list you can’t help feeling “Oh no not again”. Then I must take a deep breath and move into the head of the audience. Then as I hit my cue my concentration is on playing the riff but I hear it from the perspective of the audience. So it is from the audience that the magic ingredient is added.
When you make a record (now known temporarily as a CD) the relationship between audience and performer remains the key. As the tracks are recorded, the arrangement developed and the performances executed, the focus needs to keep coming back to the way this music will affect the audience. There are no good or bad musical styles but there are good and bad records. The good records connect with the audience. They have an emotional impact. They draw the audience into their world and they affect.
In the studio the ingredient, The Thing can be added at any stage. It may be written into the song by the writer (Bob Dylan, Carol King), it may be inserted into the arrangement (Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson). It could be in the performance (Rod Stewart, Liam Gallagher), it can be placed like a cherry on a cake in the mix (Brian Wilson again, Phil Spectre). In any or all of these cases, the studio is the kitchen of musical cooking.
One Two Three Four
So you buy a guitar (keyboard, penny whistle, Jews harp; insert as appropriate) and you learn to play it. Three chords will be fine, four would be nice, 300 might actually get in the way. Remember we’re looking for The Thing here, the magic ingredient.
Next you learn to play your favourite songs. Your mate learns to play his favourite songs. You and your mate form a band with his brother on drums (his brother is 11 and can’t actually play the drums). You argue over who will play the bass and who will play the lead. Nobody wants to sing. Everybody wants to sing. The band plays a disastrous gig at the school hall then the whole thing falls apart in a flurry of embarrassment and acrimony.
You meet someone at a gig (Lennon and McCartney), or on a bus (George Harrison) or some bloke knocks on your door and asks if you want to form a band (Johnny Marr and Morrisey). You form another band. This time the drummer used to be in a band that once got a demo played on local radio and can actually play the drums. This time you have at least a vague idea how this is done. Things start to gel. Everyone at least starts and finishes at the same time. The noise you make starts to sound like your favourite records.
Now it starts to get interesting. You start to believe in yourselves. You write a song. It sounds like a poor imitation of your favourite song. You write more songs. Some of these songs start to sparkle. People start to say things like “Oh I like that one”. (Tip; if your mum/boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/special other says “Oh I like that one” take no notice. They will probably like everything you ever do and cannot be trusted as objective critics).
We are definitely getting somewhere now and it’s time to make a record.
Making a Record
Chapter 1
The Song
The first rule of writing a song is that there are no rules. There is no second rule.
There are however tricks, guidelines, musical theory and perhaps most importantly formulas or genres. We will come back to this later.
First this: there is a factor common to all (all?) successful songs. They all build on what went before. A writers work may develop or evolve from it’s predecessors or it may react against it but nothing comes from nowhere.
Artists take what went before, what excites them and they change it. Sometimes the changes are a conscious (concept albums, Prog Rock) and sometimes unconscious (Psycodelia). Changes might be technically driven (80’s Synth Pop and anything with an electric guitar on it). For me the most interesting changes arise through cock-ups. The cock-up theory goes like this: they tried to do that but it came out like this, but this sounds great!
There are endless examples of these processes:
Elvis Presley’s Rock’n’Roll comes from a combination of Black American Blues and Country filtered through Presley’s persona.
The Rolling Stones think they are playing the Blues but it come out as Rock Pop.
Led Zeplin think they are playing the Blues, those who steal from them call it Heavy Metal. Bands playing today take Heavy Metal and it become Thrash Metal, Deth Metal and various other metallic genres.
Even genres which seem dissociated from what went before, aren’t. Punk is 50’s/60’s Rock’n’Roll played badly and fast to annoy the Prog Rockers. Psycodelia is any genre you like on drugs (Pet Sounds is barber shop quartets on drugs).
The moral of this story is start from what excites you then do it your way. Don’t be afraid to steal but make sure you put something of yourself into it. Without your creative input stealing is just theft.
So each genre builds or changes what went before but let’s return now to what defines each genre as different from the other ….. The Formula. Formulas, predictable patterns, are important because they allow, even invite the audience (remember them?) in. Use The Formula to draw the audience into the world of your song and when you have them there, all comfy in their knowledge that chorus follows verse like night follows day …… surprise them! Give them something new, something different. Stimulate them!
Be aware however that there are pitfalls here. Leap too far, too soon and you’ll loose the audience and you will have affected no one. Stick too rigidly to the formula and your audience is bored into disinterest.
Do not misunderstand me, I am by no means talking about just the mainstream genres. Niche and underground genres are often the most rigidly formulaic. If you are a Thrash Metal band with a Thrash Metal audience and you don’t stick to the rules, they’ll walk. Folky Bob Dylan picks up an electric guitar and he is Pop, a Judas, and the audience literally leaves the auditorium (luckily for him he found an even bigger audience quite quickly).
So start with the formula and then push the boundaries but take your audience with you. Get it right and you’ll succeed on all levels. The Beatles go from Please Please Me to Strawberry Fields Forever in five years and take the whole world with them. The Beach Boys go from Surfing Safari to God Only Knows and Brian Wilson is hailed as a genius (not just by me). So best do it that way then.
Chapter 2
The Arrangement
As with the song, the arrangement can be adapted from, derived from, borrowed or stolen from, what went before and, as with the song, this theft is only a creative act if you add something of yourself.
The arrangement is as important a part of the production of a record as any other aspect. The arrangement must fit the song. In style and approach the arrangement needs to be in tune with the song giving the performance an appropriate space in which to resonate.
The arrangement must tell the same story as the melody. It needs to build with the emotional impact of the lyric and to support and reflect the sentiment and the message of the song.
A particular pitfall of arrangement to be avoided is the inexorable drift towards the grandiose, the complex, and the use of synthesisers to imitate orchestras. Following the mood of the song on many occasions actually leads to simplicity in the approach. Listen to Tapestry by Carol King. The lyrics and especially the melodies are allowed to emerge powerfully from the simple backdrop of the arrangement.
On the other hand listen to The Long And Winding Road as post-produced by Phil Spectre. Part of the lyrical idea of the song is clearly loneliness so what is the 90 piece orchestra for?
So as a song writer or a producer you need a clear view of the style and approach you want to take in the arrangement of your record if you want to maintain control of the finished product. The best arrangements support and amplify the message of the record, the worst will undermine it.
Chapter 3
The Studio
The Studio Part 1: The Difference between the Live! and the Recorded Experiences
The Live! Sound
I saw The Jam live at Leeds University. They were going into “Down In The Tube Station At Midnight”. They tried to start it with a tape of a tube train but the tape just spluttered then stopped. There was a nanosecond of silence lasting at least 23 minutes before Paul Weller uttered an unheard expletive and then launched into the most searing rendition of the song you’ve ever heard.
I saw Brian Wilson at the Manchester Apollo. Brian wasn’t quite all there. Important parts of him were still in bed in California. There wasn’t another Beach Boy in sight. His voice was weak and he avoided the high notes that on record could make your soul weep. This concert was possibly the best I have ever seen. Grown men cried and hugged each other. We didn’t so much applaud as worship.
I saw a band of no fixed ability in a pub last Friday. They started hesitantly. They finished on a roll. People danced, jumped around, yelped and screamed. “More! More!” they shouted at the “end” (the bit before the encore). I smiled.
These are gigs, live performances. At a gig it’s not just the artist that performs it’s everyone present, including, if not especially, the audience (them again). A gig is an event, a collective, shared experience. If it’s not …… it’s a crap gig.
A record tries to capture the experience of actually being there as the musician played. Once captured it can be endlessly repeated just by pressing play. Naively, the obvious way to capture the experience would be to take your recording machine to the gig and press record. Or, if you’re clever you can take your multi-track recording machine to the gig and tap off the big mixing desk at the back of the room. The result of this approach is the live album. Have you ever heard a good live album? One that you can play more than occasionally, or even more than once, or even all the way through. One that gets anywhere close to reproducing the feelings buzzing through the people in the audience at the gig. So can we agree that as a general rule of thumb the live album approach doesn’t work.
“Why?” you say. Why? Because all that the recording machine captures is the sound in the room at the time (which compared to the sounds normally emitting from your average sound system at home is probably pretty poor). You hear the sound of the gig when what you wanted to reproduce was the experience.
So it seems we have issues here.
The Recorded Sound
So you want to capture and reproduce the experience, the emotional impact you would get if you were actually there with the performer at the performance when in fact you are sitting alone in your lounge/bedroom/car/kitchen and the performer is in a sterile studio at another time on a different continent.
The environment of the record listener means their sensory experience is completely different from the live listener. The lone record listener can as they say, hear a pin drop. Even the distracted listener, without the benefit of musical training of any kind, could pick out the slightest technical error on first hearing. Likewise without the most basic grounding in the technical practices of the recording engineer, the listener will know almost instinctively that there is something not quite right about the demo his mate made in his mum’s conservatory.
Recreating the live experience on record
First of all there are some technical aspects to the way the sound is generated, and the way the ear and mind work together in hearing that sound, which need to be understood. We need this understanding in order to design and control the sound of the record so that it recreates the affect within the listener of actually being there. The record must possess and transmit the special thing, the magic ingredient.
Hearing is polyphonic and, in a sense, directional. Hearing is not like vision. If you mix blue and yellow you get green which is not blue or yellow. If you mix two sounds, even similar sounds, like for instance an acoustic guitar and an electric guitar, you are still able to hear the two sounds separately and distinctly. In addition to this separation effect, the mind is able to amplify or “pick out” one sound while largely excluding or ignoring the other. In the studio, we are able to use these inherent aspects of hearing to our advantage to create desired effects.
Reverb
When an instrument is played in a room the sound reverberates around that room. The ear hears this reverberated sound but the mind excludes it as extraneous and concentrates, homes in, on the source of the sound, the instrument. If we record the instrument being played in the room then we record not only the instrument but also the sound of the instrument reverberating around the room. When the recording is played back the reverberation has become part of the sound now emitting from a single source (the play back monitor). Now the reverberation is no longer a separate sound but has become a part of the recorded sound as whole. The mind is unable to separate the room reverb or to home in on the instrument alone. Such a recording just sounds wrong.
To overcome the room reverb problem in the studio, sound sources are close mic’d, picking up only that source sound on the recording. Reverb is then added back on to the track synthetically in the post production mixing process to recreate the way the source should sound in a room. This synthetic, controlled technique allows us to manipulate the finished product and so manipulate the way that product affects the listener.
Equalization (Eq)
Like the control of reverb, Eq is a technique which affects the way sounds are differentiated by the ear. More can be found on this subject in the section “The Technical Stuff” later. For now here is a brief summary.
For example: if the note C is played by a band or orchestra then all the instruments in the group emit the sound frequency of C. We know however that each instrument has its own sound and tone. It is the frequencies other than C which give each instrument their identity. To emphasise these individual identities we need to give greater emphasis to these signature frequencies. Eq is used to do this and is best applied by reducing or filtering out the route frequency so that the signature frequencies are relatively increased.
Again, like reverb, once we have this trick available it can be used to differentiate sounds but can also be used more imaginatively to go beyond naturalization into the realm of effects which impact the listener more directly.
Mixing
Essentially, mixing is the step in the record making process where the elements of the record are adjusted against each other to give the overall effect of a harmonious and balanced whole.
If you are the producer however, mixing is one of the best bits of the whole process. At this mixing stage the control freak within us is given free reign. You have at your fingertips the performances of each musician and the cumulative technical trickery developed over decades. You are the conductor of the orchestra, the leader of the band, the puppet master and when you pull the strings everyone jumps.
A good producer will use this power in the way each other contributor did, to support and amplify the essential elements of the record, shine a light on the special thing and maximize the impact on the listener.
The Studio Part 2: The Role of the Producer
Firstly let’s not confuse the two jobs of Engineer and Producer. While they may often be the same person, and the work may overlap, these are two very distinct and different roles.
The Engineer deals with “The Technical Stuff”(see below). With the technical aspects of the process delegated to the Engineer, the Producer is then freed to concentrate on…………………….well, all of the above.
The Producers’ job is one of coach, mentor, planner, project manager and quality controller. Most important of all though is that, in the sterile environment of the studio, the Producer plays the role of the audience, the otherwise missing participant in the musical event.
The Studio Part 3: The Technical Stuff
There are many sources of information on “The Technical Stuff” so I don’t propose to cover this in any detail here. Or even hardly at all. Instead I’ve listed a collection of useful references.
If you are planning a home recorded, self engineered, self produced project, you need to know “The Technical Stuff” to have any chance of producing a sound comparable with a professionally produced product. That is everything on the TV, radio, the internet and everything in the record shops.
While digital technology has made the hardware significantly cheaper and so a viable option financially, it has not simplified the technical aspects of the process. So do your homework.
Postscript
Existentialism and the CD
Finally, “Why bother”?
As our friend Friedrich said “Without music life would be a mistake”.
Friedrich’s comment, though, refers to the music itself, it says nothing about all we need to go through to produce a record. Why wrestle with all the many factors discussed here, like finding structure in the writing and arrangement, the technical stuff, falling out with the band, falling out with the producer?
For me, the answer is that it is self expression and communication which drives us. The need to give form and substance to the special thing seems to be a basic human need and if we succeed in this effort why not share it with the widest possible audience. It is only when someone hears the sound you made that the special thing is brought into existence ..…. in their minds.
Though maybe there is another less generous reason why we bother. If your CD exists into the future then you must have existed in the past. If you existed in the past you may exist now. Maybe?
