EQ Magazine - September 2008 - (Page 27)

tape.” I adopted Pro Tools, and I’ve not used tape since. You’re clearly not techno-phobic. On the Bad Religion album you produced [The New America—Atlantic], you used [Line 6’s] Amp Farm instead of real amps. On a punk album. In 1999. Yeah, we took the guitars all direct into the console and got all the sounds they liked for tracking [with Amp Farm], and then we had all the latitude in the world afterwards to decide if we wanted to use a different amp with the program. Do you find yourself using amp modelers on your own recordings? Recently, I’ve tended to not use as much guitar in my songs. But I’m going to start a new project that is very guitarbased, and my last recording [Arena— HiFi] had a lot of guitar solos, and we used a lot of [modeling]. I use Line 6 amps live, so I’m using modeling at some point in time no matter what. You’ve done a lot of synth stuff. On a song like “Breathless,” was that material sequenced? It was pre-sequencing, as we now know it. You could get a sequencer back then, but sequencers in those days were way different. You’d have a wall of synths, and the way you would get these instruments sequenced would be by patching everything through a trigger device. You’d have rows of devices that would trigger one synth after the other. It was complex, but this was 1972. There was no MIDI. You could only sequence and record a little chunk of music at a time and then you would have to splice it into the piece. I would have been manually sequencing with an EMS “Putney” [VCS3] with a little keyboard. There’s a strange guitar sound I hear in the beginning of some of your songs, such as “Determination.” What is that? On occasion I’ve used a [Univox] UniVibe for that type of sound, but I think the sound on “Determination” was accidental, maybe from some dirt on the capstan. You could get an effect like that [on a tape machine] by taking a piece of splicing tape and putting it on half the radius on the spindle during an overdub. It would make everything warble. We did that on the second Nazz album [Nazz Nazz—SGC] and I’ve done it on home recordings as well. The readers will kill me if I don’t ask you about [XTC’s] Skylarking [Caroline]. Everybody knows the basic gist of it, which was that Andy Partridge started to bristle at the level of my involvement. It was pretty much because Andy, due to stress, could not play on stage anymore—the only place he would play music was in the studio. He would wear producers down and the records would inevitably get finished by Andy and the engineer. As a result, the albums were getting progressively more difficult for the audience to keep up with. When you spend that much time in a studio, you get bored, and you start tinkering with things that don’t need tinkering. By the time the records came out, they were wall-to-wall with detail. http://www.mil-media.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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