Vinyl is having a revival – sales have boomed from some copies to some more copies of the old oil based discs.  6music went as far as having a vinyl only policy on new year’s day complete with pops, crackles and wonky speeds.  The appeal to me is aesthetic, the blank canvas of four 12″ square spaces and two labels enabled designers to create amazing themed designs.  Starting in the 70s the likes of Hipgnosis were responsible for such landmaks of popular culture as Wish You Were Here and Dirty Deeds as well as XTC’s Go2 which deconstructs album art brilliantly.  Then came Barney Bubbles with his neo-vorticist graphics, Bill Smith’s pop art extravaganzas and Peter Saville’s spooky monochrome designs for Factory.  Add in an insert or a gatefold sleeve and you had an artefact to keep you entertained for the length of the album.  Failing that you could always try reading the label of the spinning record.  Sound-wise, I’m not so convinced.  There are many audiophiles who will tell you that the sound quality of a record pisses all over an mp3 and while I wouldn’t dispute that necessarily, the hassle of running a good quality deck and speakers is too much for most.  Handling and looking at them though – nothing to compare it.  There is a growing market for modern facscimiles of rare and striking releases; I was tickled to be confronted by a display of lurid yellow reissues of the Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks at John Lewis last Christmas.  Each one bearing a reassuring sticker “also contains CD version of album”, thank goodness for that, you can only push us so far.

In one sense, recording a choir is simpler than a band as you are dealing with only a few elements.  In another, it is harder because you have no place to hide audible flaws.  This is how I got on one long autumn weekend.

The first step is get a good choir.  They must sing at about the same volume, blend together and all be familiar with the material.  Then you must find a good space.  Small stone churches like we used are ideal as the ratio of reflected to direct sound is balanced at the start.  Larger stone spaces are OK but there is a trade off in vocal definition.  Many ‘classic’ choral recordings are by cathedral choirs which sound warm but refracted with reverb, smearing the intelligibility.  This is OK when the tracks are well-known carols as people recognise the melodies and fill in the gaps, plus this is singing not reciting.  My choir was an operatic society and so aiming for a more defined sound with descants and harmonies not obscuring the main melody.  The larger spaces in the church we used would have drowned the choir in echo and larger modern buildings use materials which do not have the warm quality of soundwaves bouncing off thick stone.

Concentrating intently - note ghost of Xmas past on right

Mic-wise I have found a stereo pair in ORTF the best for the voices, in this case AKG C451s.  They were raised about 2-3 feet up and 6 feet out angled downwards at the singers, no pad but high pass engaged.  This gave a strong vocal signal whilst pushing the nulls towards the ceiling where the noise of passing jets comes in.  Another option is Neumann KM184s, and hire if you don’t own them as cheaper Rodes, Studio Projects, Oktava etc tend towards harsh top-end, the German mics are much silkier.  Accompanying instruments you must experiment.  For pipe organ I found an SE1a condenser offset by 20 degrees and pointing to below the opening of the bellows gave the best result.  My AT 4033 LDC performed OK, but I preferred the less coloured sound so listen before committing.  A ribbon wasn’t for me but by all means try.  Most of our carols were electric piano led and I used a combo of indirect sound through the main mics and a cheeky DI which gave more flexibility at the mix.  For ambiance I used a measurement mic pointing at the stone wall from a foot out and away from the choir, plus an Samson LDC in figure of 8 lower on the floor pointing up at the centre of the choir to fill the hole but I didn’t need it much as our choir was a compact 12 or so.  Three tracks were done with a pair of Fathead ribbons in Blumlein at head height and the choir in two groups on either side.  This was cumbersome to set up and it can be tricky to keep performers from drifting into the phased quadrants but it really does provide the “you are there” feel.  With a bigger choir you could probably get away with the Bruce Swedein ‘in a circle method’, but check the result in mono for phase.

Which brings me to my secret mix weapon, phase inversion.  When recording rock or pop phase is your enemy as it attacks principally the low end, sucking it out along with the excitement and power.  But the low of of the human voice is not all that low, even with basses and the rumbly ambient rubbish lives down there too.  As the choir was often divided into male and female voice parts I started experimenting with phase early on and found certain inversions pulled the two sections apart and gave a nice springy clarity to the sound.  This took reverb really well and I added some Waves and Altiverb convolutions to the ambient mics to make the natural churchy reverb richer.  Where necessary I restored bass frequencies with some gentle EQ.  The end result had good stereo imaging, clarity, warmth and nice reverb tails.

So to sum up; if you ever need to record a choir.

1) Choose one that can sing in time and tune, the Hounslow Light Opera Coy did great.

2) Record in an old stone building if possible.

3) Don’t skimp on quality of the mics, and feel free to spread the love with ambient placement as they can be useful at mix down.

4) Phase is your friend, experiment with inversions on the stereo signals, and maybe try Phase Bug or Voxengo PHA-979 plugin to find the sweet spots on the alignment.

5) Give em regular breaks and encouragement.  A good musical director is a boon too as he can fill the role of taskmaster.

The result is a limited edition CD, details are here if you would like a copy.

Cover design by Lee Campbell - click for details

In no particular order:

1 Mick Glossop (Ruts, Skids).  Widescreen is the word.  Mick skillfully captured on tape the wide stereo sweep of the Skids Absolute Game album, keeping the rhythm section tightly meshed with multiple guitars and Richard Jobson’s foghorn vocals.  Other highlights include Magazine’s surging “Shot By Both Sides”, PIL’s harsh and uncompromising “Metal Box” and the Ruts thunderous “The Crack” still one of the most hard-hitting UK post punk LPs.  Later he transferred the same feel to looser folk-punk material by the Men They Couldn’t Hang, as well as other left field sounds by X-Mal Deutschland and er, Furniture.

2 Steve Lillywhite (U2, XTC).  Obvious choice, but like all the genius producers Steve covered an incredible amount of ground in his career.  His head-exploding drums on Siouxsie & The Banshees “The Scream” led to XTC whose “Drums & Wires” and “Black Sea” are true landmarks.  Superb songs, fat analogue production and stone room drums that shake the foundations.  U2′s “War” may have been responsible for starting a trend for bloated stadium rock but the tubs recorded at Windmill in Dublin are totally awesome.  If you can get with a mile of such sounds, pat yourself on the back and double your rates.  He helmed Peter Gabriel III which is pretty ground breaking and assembled an album out of the wreckage of the La’s recordings.  This guy rises to a challenge.

3 Martin Rushent (Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Human League). Not many knob twiddlers get to work on huge selling records in contrasting styles.  Rushent was an engineer at EMI moving into production with the Stranglers who he helped get signed to United Artists.  Their debut Rattus Norvegicus surprised even him by hitting big, he says that the band were very rough in the studio but when their parts were blended together their sound took off.  Equally tough productions for Buzzcocks and Dr Feelgood put him in the front rank of punk producers.  Tiring of guitar rock he taught himself synth programming and in 1981 he was employed by Virgin to produce Dare.  It led to a flood of offers from similar acts but Martin instead chose to slip out of view.

4 Bob Sargeant (The Beat, Haircut 100).  Abandoning attempts to forge a solo career in the proggy early 70s UK music scene Sargeant opted to move into production in the 80s, specialising in multi-instrument pop groups. His work with the Beat in particular is amazing, three albums varying in styles but always tight, effervescent and uncluttered despite large line-ups and lots of percussion and brass/guitar interplay.  He also spent a period working on the Peel sessions, leaving his fingerprints on lots of famous groups sound.

5 John Leckie (Stone Roses, Dukes Of Stratosphear).  Leckie has been active for 40 odd years sprinkling magic on a vast range of artists.  He seems almost ego-less adapting to almost anything that comes his way and avoiding a signature sound that could have put him out of fashion.  Its easier to pick a few highlights – the Stone Roses album, with guitar textures like no other, Psonic Psunspot, a vintage psych pastiche production that outdoes the originals, The Fall “This Nations Saving Grace” and Muse “Origin Of Symmetry”.  Can you get two poles further apart, proof if it were needed of colossal technical smarts and adaptability.  His no BS views on production are very encouraging for novices.  The material comes first.

Respect is due:

George Martin – Made songs sound like oranges whilst wearing a tie.

Bob Clearmountain – America’s own Lillywhite.  Nobody delivers more rawk per pound.

Roy Thomas Baker – Did excess (Queen), did undressed (The Cars), result success.

Bill Price – Leaned more towards the engineer role but an absolute master of bone-crunching rock guitars, he shaped both the Pistols and the Clash’s sound.

Trevor Horn – Very 80′s but there’s no arguing with the barrage of hits.  Frankie’s early stuff remain a landmark, soundscapes in which something new seems to crop up every time you listen.

Brian Eno – Oh go on then…

1.  Artists’s careers are becoming massively front loaded i.e. the first album is the only one that makes a profit.  Rewind to the last century and the standard distribution curve with sales building on the back of airplay, word of mouth, tours etc peaking at #1 or in the top twenty at least was quite common.  The Stone Roses debut never reached higher than #16 but sold hugely over a long period, but such a pattern is almost vanished now.  The first month or even week’s sales is critical, if its going to #1 it will enter there or not at all.  One explanation from an industry insider was that the debut by a new band gets a big marketing budget and the CDs are heavily discounted for sale in supermarkets and online.  Next time out there is not the same push and sales fall to the hardcore fans before slumping to nothing as a thousand new groups push through all demanding money and attention from their label.

2. Albums are having shorter and shorter chart runs.  Many albums that hit the top are fading quickly as the wave of hype subsides and actually registering as droppable offences with the record label that releases them.  Hard-Fi scored a stunningly successful failure with their second album which crashed in at the the summit then disappeared again.  All attempts to resurrect it were in vain.  A #1 release sold about a fifith of the total of their debut – not bad by indie standards but Atlantic had spent a lot of dough promoting it so this wasn’t good news to them.  It’s weeks on chart that denote success not the highest position.

2. The law of diminishing returns is strangling more and more careers.  The number of underperforming second or third albums from the last decade I found nestling among the figures were startling.  Editors, Pigeon Detectives, Rifles, Fratellis, Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand, The Feeling (what is it with F names?) Mystery Jets, Vines, Razorlight, Glasvegas, The Enemy, Bloc Party, Hard-Fi (again! no takers for Killer Sounds).  Even the Kooks who shifted an amazing 2 million of their debut saw their third go south faster than a middle class family with a villa booked on the Cote D’Azur.  It seems that if people are going to buy your albums in any quantity they will do so only at the first time of asking.  After that they do what – stream it? Cherry pick a few tracks off itunes? Illegally download it?  I don’t know, but it is becoming impossible to do a Lazarus and come back from a stiff.  This is not just because you will probably be offloaded by your label but because we the public don’t do second chances.  Though to be frank many groups don’t deserve one as they are all too willing to stick rigidly to the formula long after everyone is sick of it, hello Travis are you still here?  And it is not only in “credible rock” that this applies, pop artists as diverse as Duffy, Kate Nash, Mika and Natasha Bedingfield have had a mare sales-wise a few years down the road.

3.  And now the good news; in terms of returns from recorded music the reality talent show bandwagon is heading for the ditch by the side of the road.  Rash prediction or what?!?!?  Well, only two graduates from the X Factor have sold over a million in the UK, Leona Lewis and JLS.  Another four have passed platinum (600k).  Nineteen have failed to pass 200k which Cowell supposedly uses as the redline after which dropsville beckons.*  The same steep declines from first to second albums is evident.  Leona sold less than a quarter of the total of her first with her second.  Cue panic and her third has been postponed to next spring by when she will be ancient history surely.  As the market becomes saturated with useful idiots dependent on heavy TV promotion and not in control of their careers, “one’s enough” syndrome is taking hold.  But I suppose the telly revenues have always been more important so the ghastly carnival may roll on for some time yet.

4. The album is losing definition and value all the time.  One thing I don’t know is what happens to downloads of individual tracks that aren’t singles, they kind of fall between the cracks but I imagine there just aren’t that many of them.   Single sales of downloads have bounced back dramatically but unless you sell millions of them ala Katy Perry you won’t raise much for your paymasters.  £6.99 against 69p is no contest. And notoriously if you listen on Spotify or similar that doesn’t exactly have the bean counters reaching for their calculators.

5. Cheer up.  Record your first album cost effectively (yes I may be able to help), build your live following and release it yourselves and you may pocket a decent wedge before the spotlight moves on.  Let’s end where we began with Hard-Fi.  Their “Stars Of CCTV” album cost less than £500 to make in a disused cab office.  Cannily they refused to re-record it at Abbey Road because the record company paying the bill would own the masters and so they licensed it instead.  Bingo 55 weeks on chart, 1.4 million sales and a hefty amount of cash trousered by the band.  Anyway you didn’t get into this business to be rich did you?  Well more fool you, have you thought about a career in the city?

*Matt Cardle is 26 and likes pies.  Any kind.

They have then been obliged to follow backing tracks played by session men paid to create that Captain Pugwash feel.  Every yo ho ho cliche has been thrown into the mix, and as their previous CDs featured the odd stumble and rough pitch and this doesn’t, can we assume Uncle Antares has stowed away?  Supposedly they used the same old church as a recording venue; why?  There is a tiny bit of stoney ambience in the vocals but what’s wrong with Abbey Road?  This is not authentic group singing in any way, why try and keep a pretence up?  As for the compressed faux-folk rock music, it’s awful, sounding like a bad copy of the Men They Couldn’t Hang, except “Union Of Different Kinds” which is a bad Strawbs, and “Haul Away Joe” which is a bad Pogues.  Only the mercifully stark “Cadgewith Anthem” hits the target.  As an example of throwing the baby out with the seawater it can’t be beat.  Still, it went gold in the UK so that counts as a success in this dying music business.

Apropos of nothing here’s my own brush with piratical punk, the very fine Sex Pirates live at the Fox in Twickenham (RIP).

Climate change?  meh.  Back in my day you had a proper grown-up threat to the survival of the human race – nuclear war.  There was none of this “it’s happening, oh no it isn’t” nonsense.  Everybody (apart from maybe President Raygun in his more senior moments) agreed that nukes were A VERY BAD THING so obviously the solution was to built silos full of them and point them at the other side, just in case.  This was known as ‘deterrence’; or insanity to use the colloquial term.  It’s now known that at the height of the last phase of the cold war in 1983, tension and paranoia got so bad that there were several war scares where fingers itched, Mr Burns style above the big red button.  It was no coincidence that the period 1980-84 saw the subject of nuclear war rising up pop’s agenda and helping shift units in huge numbers to frightened teens.  Armaggedon might have provided welcome relief from exposure to Enola Gay, Two Tribes, 99 Red Balloons, Dancing With Tears In My Eyes etc. but what about some of these forgotten postcards from the edge?  WARNING:  This post contains 80′s fashions.  Do not leave the shelter of the 21st century until told it is safe to do so.

U2 – Seconds

Sung (on album) by the Edge these are great lyrics about nuclear powerplay, before the preachiness got out of hand.

Iron Maiden – Seven Minutes to Midnight

Even arch metalheads Iron Maiden feared the power of rock would not be sufficient to deflect showers of SS20s but figured they would try anyway.  No I’m not being sarky it raaaawwks!

Rush – Distant Early Warning

You’ve only got four minutes, would you spend it listening to Rush negotiate a modal mock symphony on the futility of war in 12/8 time?  Actually they keep it relatively straight here but even so can I boil an egg instead?

The Fixx – Stand Or Fall

The Fixx were the great hopes of big label MCA in the early 80s but their career went nowhere, despite having a large amount of money thrown at them, most of which they seem to have spent on knitwear.  This is typical new romantics meet plutonium.

Kate Bush – Breathing

The queen bee laments the destruction of the hive in typically powerful style.  I’m sure this was banned by the BBC, though if on the grounds that the video looked like something David Bowie would turn down as too cheap and weird then I don’t blame them.

Queen – Hammer To Fall

First ver Maiden then Queen weighed in with this searingly heavy cry against the threat of annihilation.  Actually I think it was Brian’s turn for single that month and he wanted to cut loose with his fireplace guitar, before we were all turned to ashes.

Men At Work – It’s A Mistake

I loved this record when it came out but I was fifteen and didn’t want to die.  Today it seems hopelessly jaunty but hey everyone deals with doom in their own way.

Paul Hardcastle – Forty Years

Earnest Paul and his wet look perm were late to the party (he did a whole album “No Winners” on the subject of nukes in 1988) and this is really just 19 part 2.  Still fact packed primer on the cold war balance of terror or what?

XTC – This World Over

All these songs appeared in within a few years of each other and strongly reflect their times.  The pounding Linn drum on this track has always irritated me but the melody and sentiments are haunting.  The final line “the end of dreams” sends a shiver down my spine.  Here, who left the fucking fallout shelter door open again!

This Mortal Coil – I Come And Stand At Every Door

This folk tune inspired by Hiroshima was popularised by the Byrds who included it on their Fifth Dimension album.  Gothsters TMC dug it out again to extra spooky effect.  Not requiring light or heat to survive, goths would have had an unfair advantage in a nuclear winter.

Honourable Mentions:

Freshies – Wrap Up The Rockets.  Herky jerky power pop protest.  Funny, and if you didn’t laugh you’d cry.

Scars – Your Attention Please.  A poem about incoming atomic attack set to ponderous Joy Division-ish music.  Recited in a thick Scottish accent – get tae where?  The cupboard under the stairs?

Fischer Z – Cruise Missiles.  Another bitter rant inspred by the upping of the ante, the arrival of US Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe to carry tactical nukes and start a war at the drop of a helmet.

The Beat – Dream Home In NZ.  The Birmingham ska boys sing of escaping the insanity of the arms race to take refuge in the first country to go nuclear free; New Zealand.  Possibly ironic.

The Ruts – It Was Cold.  Epic track from their first album and prescient song about the violence, hunger and social breakdown that would accompany ‘victory’.

So background: Autotune originated eight miles down, when seismic engineer Andy Hildebrand realised that his geological sound mapping could have an application in pop music, detecting and automatically correcting pitch in vocal tracks.  Originally bundled with Pro Tools it became a recording engineers guilty secret, repairing bum notes and wobbles when singers were unable or unwilling to do so.  Developed as a standalone plugin it’s reach widened and it wasn’t long before some bright spark discovered that when the retune setting was at the extreme, Autotune eliminated natural timbre and phrasing as notes were yanked unceremoniously back into pitch resulting in a weird android bleat.  Cher’s ‘Believe’ may have been the track which brought the technique into the open, but no one can establish if the effect was really a vocoder, a longer established toy that robotises in-key singing.

In the world of manufactured pop and r’n'b the use of autotune spread like ebola in rush hour.  Suddenly, TV talent show numpties, stage school fodder for boy and girl bands and rappers with no conventional singing ability were stepping in front of the microphone without fear.  Has any sound so come to define a musical era as the airless, almost nasal drone of heavily Autotuned vocals?  Things moved to a new level when performers started to rely on it for live performance, is it any different to just miming?

New kid on the block Melodyne does the same thing but makes a virtue of inconspicuousness.  Autotune has introduced a “humanize”  control for those who demand perfection but not replacement.  Encouragingly, the stark segmentation of the music biz is leaving blatant pitch correction as the preserve of T4 on the beach, Radio 1 and the X Factor.  But still, the philosophical question remains – if  the technology is rapidly approaching the point where an artist can deliver a terrible singing performance devoid of emotion, power or melody and be processed to sound like a soulless million dollars, who can say what real talent is?

Poor Sheeerl Keeerl is one of many who simply cannot deliver without software assistance but the panic on her face when the crutch is kicked away…

He plays!

He sings!

Someone else has a turn!

He (rightly) looks pleased with himself!

He’s in here somewhere!

Seriously, Phil’s professionalism and talent meant the whole thing went smoothly and the result should be appearing in an i-tunes store near you imminently.  There were no drums on this project but the possibiliities if there had been are amazing.   Are you a musician?  Do you want to record your music in a building similiar in size to Abbey Road with great acoustics for a fraction of the cost?  Then get in touch!

An acknowledged classic first, shotgun mic on snare.  Set to high directional setting and suspended a few feet above the snare pointing straight down at the centre.  A variant is to stick something underneath and key the top mic off that.  Sounds best with a tight controlled snare.

Mini condenser in the back of a guitar cab.  A Karma or QTX stuck in the back of an open cab adds some freaky overtones to the front mics.

Dangle one in the holes of a soundboard of a piano, if you are lucky enough to be recording a baby grand.  Mix with your other mics to taste.

Tape some minis inside the two drums of a pair of bongos and perch them on top of the bass cab.  Blend with DI at mixdown.

Blu-tack another tiddler inside a cowbell and put it in front of the bass drum front hole.  The pressure wave rings the metal in a surprising way.

Place a guitar or bass cab in front of the kick drum, the bigger the better.  DI out to the desk and blend with the sound of the kit, some bowel-shaking bass fundamentals may appear.

Put a dynamic in front of a monitor speaker.  Put a tin bucket over the speaker.  Play a previously recorded track over the speaker.  Route the recording mic to another track.  Try with bits of the drum kit, electric guitar, vocals.  If you don’t have a bucket (?) use an empty fire extinguisher and whack the bass up on the feed signal.

Warning: unorthodox mic use can result in 50% chance of catastrophic failure to sound great.  Which means 50% chance of catastrophic success hurrah!

I had the opportunity to try this plug-in recently.  It originally appeared in 2000 as a TDM/Direct X but recently reappeared overhauled for Mac and PC.  It supposedly mimics the characteristics of a load of vintage mics and can be applied as an insert effect on a recorded signal.  So you can record your guitar or a vocal with an SM57 then make it sound like you used a U47 or a Royer ribbon.  Really?  Well put it this way, Antares know that very few people who fork out for it will have the mics in question to do an A/B test.  If they did, this sort of processing would be pointless.  If you have a well recorded source, uncoloured and free of room artifacts then the simulations are interesting.  You can even switch polar patterns, boost the proximity effect and add tube grit.  But turn a budget mic into a pricey classic?  Nah.  But is that the end of it?  Not quite.

Microphones is one area where Chinese competition has turned the market upside down.  Not so long ago there was virtually nothing in the sub £250 bracket worth a toss because the cost of components and labour in the west neccesitated a higher retail price, unless you were happy to turn out garbage.  Now China’s factories are in full swing, there has been an explosion in affordable mics and the quality gap between high and lower end has narrowed dramatically.  Initially the QC for mics assembled in the east was suspect (I’m looking at you Oktava) but many manufacturers overcame this by moving that part of the process to their home factory, binning sub-standard items and negotiating discounts with their Chinese suppliers.  Now the quality gap between a mic costing £200 and one costing £2000 is there but too narrow to justify the price gulf.  Only Neumann among the big names is holding out against an affordable range.  IMHO the mic comes some way down the chain in terms of creating a great recording.  Strength of the song and performance, the acoustic space, quality of the instruments played, if these are in place the mic becomes not unimportant but non-critical.  So, Mic Modeler, if you’re feeling flush is a good piece of software but be prepared to get it right at the recording stage and piss around with it a lot to get a useful effect.