Recording - November 2020 - 32

(Just Like) Starting Over

REMIXING JOHN LENNON
Paul Hicks, Simon Hilton and Sam Gannon

Was that printed, or did you
have to recreate it? 

Sometimes it's printed, but most of
the time, it's recreated. We used a real
2-track analog tape machine at Henson.

On average, how many tracks
of drums were there?

Paul:  You rarely get more than kick,
snare and a stereo overhead on the later
sessions, and on most of the first disc, you'll
have only mono or stereo drums. On 'Instant
Karma' the drums are mono. A lot of Plastic
Ono Band is stereo drums, as is Imagine.

What song was the hardest to
mix? 

Paul: 'Stand By Me' and 'Angel Baby'
were probably the toughest. Those were
harsh, edgy recordings and tough to get
the sonics right. Whereas something like
'Beautiful Boy', we put that up, did some

simple EQ work, and it just sounded beautiful. 'Woman' came together quite nicely
as well. That one we worked to get a bit
more clarity out of because there's like
four pad keyboards, all playing exactly
the same thing. It was kind of like a synthesizer version of the Phil Spector sound.
Simon: Ah, the 80s.
Paul: Exactly. 'Steel and Glass' was
fun to work on. On the strings, I used a
plugin by Brainworx called the bx_panEQ. It affects frequency and panning, so
you can zero in and add more top end
to the cellos on just the right, for example. It can get really precise, and it was
an amazing discovery for me.

Games onwards, that's when John began
discovering Eventide and the vocals started going stereo. That was when the early
Eventide Phasers and stuff came out. I did
a load of research, going through photos
and looking at every list of studio equipment, trying to figure out, when did that
piece of gear come out? Those specifics
aren't on the track sheets. On the intro
of 'Out The Blue', that is a very specific
phaser sound. The only thing it could have
been was the Eventide Instant Phaser, so
we tried to replicate that as close as possible with the Eventide plugin.

I did a side-by-side of an
original Eventide Instant Phaser
and the plugin, and it's
essentially the same code. It
now just lives in a computer.

'Steel and Glass' has always
been one of my favorite John
Lennon songs. The whole Walls
and Bridges  album has
always had a New York, Paul
Simon,  One Trick Pony vibe-
Rhodes piano and atmosphere.
Was that on tape, or did you
recreate all that?

Paul: It's got a weird bump in the phase;
I tried to replicate that in the new mix. My
OCD was to make that bump happen at
exactly the right place. One of the things
that surprised me about the original Rock
'n' Roll mix is that it's very sort of mono,
and yet you've got John's stereo vocal on
top. I want to change my answer-'Mind

Paul: Those were the plate reverbs at
Henson. When you start getting to Mind

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Recording - November 2020

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