Top Music Producers reveal the Secrets of their Hits

On Thursday 15th March from 7-9 PM at the London College of Music, Thames Valley University in Ealing, a panel of top record producers and engineers was to be found discussing, playing back and deconstructing their favourite and most successful recordings.

Mike Howlett (known for his work with OMD, Gang of Four, Flock Of Seagulls and Joan Armatrading) chaired the panel, which included Jerry Boys (REM, Buena Vista Social Club, Ry Cooder, and Steeleye Span), Mick Glossop (Van Morrison, Frank Zappa, The Waterboys, The Wonder Stuff, Public Image & The Ruts) and Robin Millar (Sade, Everything But The Girl, Black, and Fine Young Cannibals).

The audience of students and professionals from TVU's London College of Music, Guitar X, VocalTech, BassTech and DrumTech, along with invited guests from the MPG and Art of Record Production organizations were given valuable insight into the production methods and secrets of the illustrious panel.

Mike Collins attended the event and subsequently prepared the following report for the Music Producers Guild:


Mick Glossop

Mick Glossop described working on a Water Boys record in the late 1980's. Mick stressed that this recording was very unusual for The Waterboys, who are a very live-oriented guitar-based band. "The Whole Of The Moon" has no guitars, and, in fact, not even a bass guitar. The bass is played on a synthesizer and the musical ideas on the track were also very influenced by Prince, via the bands then keyboard-player, Karl Wallinger, who later went on to great popularity with his band, World Party.

As Mick explained, there are several Prince-influenced ideas on the track such as a synthesizer bass line. It also has a chordal synth part that comes in at the end of the first verse and continues throughout and a programmed off beat hi-hat motif which appears from time to time. A clue to this influence is the lyric reference to "The Ladder" which is the title of the second-to-last track on Prince's album "Around The World In A Day."

Mick mentioned that the instruments were recorded one at a time, unlike most other Waterboys tracks, which were recorded collectively as a band. Also, all the instruments were recorded to a programmed drum pattern, which was only replaced by a real drummer, Chris Whitten, at the last minute - when band-member Mike Scott decided that the feel of the track was too rigid and needed more of a human feel.

Recording to 24-track analogue tape has the obvious limitation of the relatively small number of tracks available compared with todays mega Pro Tools sessions with vast numbers of tracks. This meant that compromises were inevitable, as Mick pointed out: At that stage, there were only four free tracks on the
24-track tape, so I had to record the drums as kick, snare on two tracks, and everything else on the remaining two tracks - just like the old days of 16-track recording!

In common with many recordings from that period, electronic reverb was used to enhance the recorded sound of the drumkit. The drums were recorded in a small booth at Amazon Studios (located just outside Liverpool) and the live sound of the snare was achieved mainly by the use of a modified version of the "Non-Lin" preset in the AMS digital reverb.


Jerry Boys

Jerry Boys started out by playing three tracks that he had recorded and asking the audience to guess what the linking factor was between these. The first track was from the Buena Vista Social Club album, the second was an Australian rock band and the third was another Cuban band. They all had a clearly definable sound - which turned out (surprise, surprise) to be the sound of the studio room at Egrem Studios in Cuba. Having made the point very effectively i.e. that the sound of the room in which a band is recorded can impart a very desirable character to a recording - Jerry then went on to explain how he had used a pair of Neuman TLM 170 Mics to capture the room sound at Egrem studios in Cuba.

Jerry told us that Producer Ry Cooder was sitting out in the studio surrounded by all the musicians, working out the arrangements with them and balancing the relative levels of the acoustic instruments by ear in the room until he was satisfied that they were ready to record. He told Jerry that he wanted to hear the same sound coming back from the recording as he was hearing in the room.

At first, Jerry explained, it just didn't sound very close to this at all, so he (Jerry) was not at all sure how to do this. After some head scratching and a bit of experimentation, Jerry decided to add a pair of ambience mics to try to capture the sound that Ry was hearing. He used a pair of Neumann TLM 170 mics set to omni and positioned these fairly high up above the musicians in the centre of the room. Luckily, this did the trick to Ry Cooder's satisfaction - and, one assumes, to the satisfaction of all those who subsequently rushed out to buy the CD when it was released.

When it came to mixing, Jerry threw some rough mixes together at Egrem for everyone to listen to. No time at all was spent on these mixes and often the guitar solos or other instruments were just faded in and out of the mixes very roughly to give some vague idea of what might be included in the final mixes. The intention was that Ry would mix the tracks properly over in the US. But when he got back home, Ry just could not reproduce the sound of these rough mixes which sounded great so he called Jerry to come out to the US to help. Jerry figured out that a lot of the sound was being created by the combination of the Studer multi-track recorder and the Amek Rembrandt console with Neve modules that were installed at Egrem. So they found a studio with a Studer A80 and an Amek console of similar vintage in the US and remixed the album. These mixes came somewhere closer to the big sound of the rough mixes but still left several tracks sounding less than satisfactory. So Jerry worked on some of the mixes back at Livingston using a similar Amek desk there. Eventually, they ended up using at least one of the original rough mixes, despite guitar solos being missing or whatever, along with various mixes from Livingston and some from the Amek-equipped studio in the US.

I bought the Buena Vista Social Club album as soon as it came out and it ranks as one of my favourite albums of all time and I particularly rated the mixes. I would never have guessed that any of these were roughs that they had intended to scrap and I really loved the way various instruments seemed to float in and out of some of the mixes! I thought that this was all some master plan devised by Jerry and Ry to keep things interesting!


Robin Millar

Robin Millar deconstructed the recording of Sade's "Sweetest Taboo" a classic soulful pop record that still gets radio play to this day. Robin explained that originally they had used a Yamaha RX5 drum machine pattern as the basis of the musical arrangement. To make the sound more interesting, a drummer came in and replayed the bass drum and snare pattern using real drums and a percussionist added some shakers.

When it came to recording the bass guitar, they settled on using a 4-bar bass pattern for the choruses. Robin decided to sample this into an AMS Digital Delay unit that had a limited sampling capability. The sampling time was only sufficient to hold the first two bars of the 4-bar pattern so the bass player played the first half of the pattern into the sampler. Then this was recorded to tape at all the positions where this pattern was
needed - a procedure sometimes called "flying it in". This involved rolling the tape and dropping into record just before the place where the bass pattern should be, then pressing the replay button on the sampler at just the right moment in time to record it onto the correct section of the tape. This procedure was repeated at every point where this bass pattern was required. Once this was done, they recorded the second half of the bass pattern into the sample and recorded this to tape at all the correct locations. A different pattern was then used for the verses and so forth until the bass guitar recording was completed.

At this point, Robin decided that the bass drum and snare drum that the drummer had played did not have exactly the right sound that he was looking for. To avoid having to bring the drummer back to re-record these, he decided to retrigger the drums using the originally recorded drum sounds. To do this, the recording of the snare drum was fed out into the studio and played through a small Auratone loudspeaker that was placed on top of a different snare drum. To suspend the Auratone speaker just a short distance above the snare drum head, it was placed on top of a pair of drumsticks that were resting on the rim of the snare drum. Each time the original snare sound played back from tape, it would make the new snare drum sound "in sympathy" with the Auratone so that the sound of this new snare drum could be recorded onto another track on the multi-track tape. The bass drum was also replaced using the same method.

The keyboard sounds used on the recording included an electric piano pad that was played using a DX Rhodes patch and a Shakuhachi flute played from an Emulator II keyboard sampler. A three-piece brass section was added to sweeten the song up some more and lots of extra percussion sounds were added to create catchy, hooky sounds to intrigue the listener. Some percussion sounds were played from the Emulator II with Robin and another musician just hitting stuff at random on the keyboard. Then they got some bottles partly filled with water and blew over the open mouths of the bottles to create even more catchy licks. And for the end section they tapped on ashtrays and teacups to make yet more percussion sounds.

Then it was time for Sade to sing and Robin told the audience that Sade worked really hard to get just the right vocals recorded. To finish off, they spent around an hour and a half mixing it, and that was that - a No. 1 hit in 23 countries!

The Discussion Continued...

After the event, I was invited to share a meal and a discussion with the panel of producers - all of whom I have worked with at various times in the past and whom I have known for 10 years or more.

I spent most of the time talking about recording techniques with Jerry Boys. Jerry reminded me of the time we had spent together at my home studio about 10 years ago testing recording equipment - listening carefully to hear what worked best. I asked Jerry to explain some of the technical stuff that he does when he is recording in Cuba or Africa and he gave me lots of useful tips. For example, when I asked for advice about adding reverb to a drumkit recorded in a relatively small room to widen out the sound, he suggested using a Lexicon 300 reverb with a chamber reverb set to a short reverb time of 600 or 700 ms, and using ambience settings that are not too obvious to bring out the sounds of the other instruments. He says he normally uses a Lexicon 480L, EMT 140 plate and so forth. He also told me that he brings most of the stuff back to Wood Green to do overdubs and mixes - and even mastering - at Livingston Studios, which he used to own, but sold to Nick Gold of World Circuit Records some years ago. Then Jerry mentioned that he is personally on a learning curve with Pro Tools at the moment - having finally accepted that this is now a major part of professional recording studio reality!

Mick Glossop joined in the discussion at one point and mentioned the controversy about mixing totally "inside the box" in Pro Tools versus using analogue summing techniques to mix "outside the box". This led onto a discussion about whether the latest signal processing plug-ins could "cut the mustard" compared with their hardware equivalents or not. Mick was of the opinion that many of the plug-ins were getting there at last.

Later, I spoke with Robin Millar who I had first met back in the mid-1990's when I was appointed as a Consultant to Re-Pro: The Guild of Recording Producers, Directors and Engineers - the fore-runner of the Music Producers Guild. I had worked on one project with Robin as his Pro Tools operator in the late 1990s, but I hadn't seen much of him since about 2002. Robin explained some more details about the production techniques he had used with Sade when recording "The Sweetest Taboo". As he pointed out, when all the instruments are recorded as a series of overdubs like this, it can be difficult to create a proper sense that they are all part of the same band, playing at the same time which is usually the desired end-result. One of the most interesting things about Robin's production method was his decision to record everything through just two Neumann U87 microphones. These were placed in the studios live recording room and hardly moved during the sessions. Everything was recorded through these microphones in this room - the idea being to give a sense of place and one-ness to the recording.

As you can imagine - I enjoyed hearing about all this stuff very much and felt honoured that the panel had invited me to join them to share their knowledge!