EQ Magazine - September 2008 - (Page 26)

BANG THE DRUM At a certain point, I was happy to get away from tape. I made the transition to ADAT, because it eliminated the noise factor. As a side note, I always preferred dbx noise reduction. Dolby B tended to screw everything up. We couldn’t afford Dolby SR at Secret Sound. In some cases, the combination of compression and high frequency enhancement in the Dolby system could make a track sound great if you just turned the Dolby off once you recorded it. That was a trick we used to use on John Lennon’s voice. The problem was whether or not you can switch the encoder and decoder on separately. It became a monitoring issue. You were happy to switch to digital? Well, I went to using ADATs because of something I gleaned from [Mark Lewisohn’s book] The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. The truth is that many of the songs we are familiar with are alternate versions that they had backed up. They would go off in one direction and then would decide that the previous week’s version was better. EMI was very anal. They had every pre-bounced version backed up. They would never record over previous takes. Everything was saved, logged, and filed away. I thought the ADAT was a perfect match to that way of working. Each one was an 8-track machine. You could bounce back and forth between the machines, but you also had the advantage of the media being much more affordable than $200 tape reels. You could just stack up those [S-VHS video] cassettes, with every phase of the recording process in them, for fairly cheap. Weren’t you initially put off by the sound? I had a couple of records that I did exclusively with ADATs and I had a pretty good experience on them. Then the “silver face” 20-bit versions came out and I used them on a project in the mid-’90s. We cut the basics on a regular old analog multitrack and then we started doing vocals on ADAT and it was just terrible. You had to clean the heads on every other pass of the tape. I don’t know what they changed. The black ones were temperamental, but the silver ones were a nightmare. Sometimes they wouldn’t sync up together. So when I got through that process I said, “I’m not going back to JAY BLAKESBERG/RETNA LTD. Todd Rundgren in San Francisco communing with computers. clear top, so I’m careful not to boost anything up around 1 or 2kHz because that’s the honky part of my voice. The U87 has plenty of 1kHz. It’s got plenty of it. I just go for some crystalline clarity on the top, usually putting a small boost at around 60 and 100Hz and cutting everything after that. What about compression? I always use an [Urei] 1176. I can make it sound invisible or really present. Is there a specific method you use to get your vocal sound? Some people think that each subsequent layering of the vocal tracks gives a perceptible qualitative difference, but I usually double up and then stop there. I remember working with the Rubinoos on Party of Two, and they insisted that any backup vocal had to be layered at least five times. I’ve approached those situations in a number of ways. One is to have everyone sing the same part and then just layer them, but that makes for a homogenous sound. It gives the part more character, in my opinion, if you assign everyone a slightly different part and then double them up. For my personal records, I’ll sing every part twice. If that’s not enough, I’ll do one more track, but never more than three total. Frequencies seem to pile up, and that redundancy makes the song cloudy. You were talking about playing with tape speed when you were a kid. I noticed on a lot of your records you seem to play with the VSO quite a bit. You have to have the VSO for the flanging. You have to be able to control the capstan speed. Or the old fashioned way, where you push on the reel to slow it down. At I.D. Sound I had a Stephens machine, which essentially had no controls on it. It had a tape guide spindle and due to the way the motors were tensioned, you couldn’t touch the reels or else the sensors in [the machine] would make it pull harder. You really had to control the capstan speed with a VSO. I had that machine available and used it on occasion to get those Hendrix-styled tape flanging effects. For as long as I was using analog tape I was working with Stephens and 3M machines, with the same kind of transport, so pushing on the reel never really worked for me. It’s hard to get people to use tape these days. 26 EQ SEPTEMBER 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

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

EQ Magazine - September 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Freak Folk Todd Rundgren Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Sony Acid 6 Ableton Live 7 Portable Recorder Showdown Gadgets and Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - September 2008

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