EQ Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 24)

lost boy John Wood mixing at Sound Techniques. wouldn’t want the same amount of “space” on a string instrument as you would a brass instrument. Boyd: The best and most memorable sounds, to me, were on “The River Man.” This was done with 12-string instruments set up in a semi-circle in the middle of the room, with Nick on a stool in the middle. There were no overdubs. There weren’t even baffles between the performers— they were just all there together with a conductor. You could do that kind of thing at Sound Techniques studio, because the signal bleed was nice if you were in the right position, and if the microphones had the right relationships to each other. You attribute your ability to record the sonic structure for “The River Man” to the room at Sound Techniques. Can you paint a mental picture of what the studio was like at that time? Boyd: Sound Techniques was situated in an old dairy in Chelsea. There was a big room, and there was an office on one side, and a control room on the other. The control room was deeper. It had a lower floor, and the office had quite a low ceiling. The middle of the room went straight up to the original ceiling of the room. You had three different ceiling heights in the same room, so you could move a musician under the office, under the control room, or out in the middle, and get different acoustic atmospheres based on that. Eventually, they built a vocal booth under the office, which you entered through a sliding door. You could put strings in there, or just something you wanted to record separately. The best sounds were always in the middle of the room, though. That’s where we’d put the drum kit, and that’s where we set up the musicians for songs like “The River Man.” While recording “The River Man,” how were you affected by Drake’s performance? Boyd: With Nick, it was quite simple to keep focus, and not be overcome with emotion during the session. What I learned very early on while recording Nick was not to monitor what he was doing, because he was always perfect. We just turned his mics off in the control room, and listened to what everyone else was doing. Then, you could really concentrate on whether a violin was out of tune, or notice if somebody came in out of order, or be alerted when there was something wrong with one of the sections. You didn’t want to be distracted by enjoying Nick’s performance. Wood: The thing about Nick was that he was so good at what he did. People sometimes ask me, “How do you get the Nick Drake guitar sound?” The simple answer is this—we would just stick a microphone in front of him. You never had to provide him with any guidance in the studio? Boyd: We pretty much let him do whatever he wanted. That said, there was obviously a lot of discussion around what we were going to do to streamline the session, how we were going to approach capturing the songs for the album, and the positions we were going to set everyone up in to play. Did you record everything live? Wood: All Nick’s music just went down live, with just a couple of exceptions. To this day, people cannot believe we made those records that way. For Five Leaves Left, we knocked off “Way to Blue,” “Fruit Tree,” and another track I can’t remember in three hours. Was there any specific gear you used to capture his performance? Wood: I’ve always believed that recording studios are nothing more than working environments. I’ve never 24 EQ MARCH 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - March 2008

EQ Magazine - March 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Tool Box Dream Theater Nick Drake LO-FI Recording Tricks Guitar Trax Bass Managment Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Tascam Gigastudio 4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Crane Song Avocet Cad Signature Series Mic Packs Waves GTR3 Kjaerhus MPL-1 Pro SE Ableton Live 7 Centrance Micport Pro, Tapco LINK.midi 4x4, Multi-Gigabyte USB 2.0 Memory Sticks Digital Redux Electrotech, Nine Volt Audio Action Drums, Big Fish Audio Hadeeth 2 Room with a VU

EQ Magazine - March 2008

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