EQ Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 28)

lost boy was going through the chords, and teaching the bass player and drummer the routine of the song, I kept hearing the sound of McGregor’s piano in my head. Chris was hanging around, so I said to him, “Why don’t you go down and play it.” And Chris said, “Sure.” I just told Nick, “Nick, you’ve got a piano player.” Nick wrote out the chords, they played through a verse and a chorus, and then Nick said, “Okay, he has it.” The take on the record is their first take. Wood: For me, “Poor Boy” is an example of the best sound I ever got out of a piano. We had this piano that, if the person playing it was good, it sounded great. If the person wasn’t really good, it sounded like s**t [laughs]. Thankfully, Chris McGregor was good. Nick plays two guitars on this song. One is an acoustic-electric—a Guild outfitted with a pickup. If you listen in the left side, you’ll hear a very jazzy guitar that we had recorded direct. That’s the acoustic-electric. On the other side is a very straightforward rhythm guitar. That’s his acoustic. I would say that out of all the mixes on the album, “Poor Boy” was by far the hardest one to do. To be able to hear everything when you wanted to hear it required a lot of jumping about with the faders—especially considering there was more than one instrument on each track. The reverb on the background singers would have been a combination of plates and tape retard. John, you have been involved in Drake’s recent posthumous release, Family Tree. What are your thoughts on the project? Wood: I have mixed feelings about it. I think in some ways, Nick would have preferred not to have it released. On the record, there is a sleeve note in the form of Gabrielle [Drake’s sister] writing a letter to Nick sort of explaining why it came out. What happened was that, over the years, people had made pilgrimages to his parents’ home, and Nick’s father was sort of a gadget freak with a tape recorder, so he would give people a compilation cassette of stuff he’d made from tapes that Nick had left. Soon enough, people started making bootlegs of it, and making money off it. So, at the end of the day, what this record partly does is that if you’re going to have all this stuff bootlegged, you might as well have it done decently. What technical considerations did you face in creating Family Tree? Wood: We just tried to make it sound as good as we could. I had 170 files to work with, because the same songs would turn up on different tapes. We were getting copies of copies of copies. The only way to do it was in Pro Tools, so we had to transfer it all to Pro Tools, and then line up all the files so we could see which was the best version. This involved a lot of critical listening, and there were instances where we dropped a bit of one track onto another. There wasn’t much point in trying to make it all sound unified, because all these things come from different the best-sounding vocal mics I have ever heard.” Chris Neville, DownBeat Magazine “ one of “ Stereo Flamingo captured the entire frequency range of the [drum] kit with amazing clarity and accuracy.” Chris Neville, DownBeat Magazine “5 Stars out of 5!” Mike Lawson, Apple Pro Audio “ Violet Design has a winner on its hands.” Randy Poole, ProSound News “ Wow.” Dana Gumbiner, TapeOp Magazine violetusa.com 28 EQ MARCH 2008 www.eqmag.com http://violetusa.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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