Pop Shield

One of the many billion things I love about my job is that I get to work with some of the loveliest, funniest, cleverest and most creative people around.  Once a year now the music recording studio doors are cast open to a selection of aspiring songwriters, musicians and producers so that they can share in the joy and pick up some tips and it’s all streamed on the internet for the general public.

I have had a few hours of downtime today, so I looked into some of these videos.  And I must say they are an interesting sideways glance at how my esteemed senior colleagues view the art of recording digested for a lay perspective. Here are some of my favourite bits:-

“The 1176 is God’s own compressor…it was invented by God, to make his own voice louder.”

“Drums don’t scare me. They’re just drums.  Hit them.  Don’t worry about them.”

“You really have to try and understand where your artist is coming from. You’ve got to try and listen to the voices in their head. Because they’re musicians, they can’t articulate themselves with words, that’s why they play something. You’ve got to try and work out whether they’re hearing a purple guitar in their head and what shade of purple that should be.  Insanity doesn’t come into it.”

“Singing drummers.  Nightmare.”

“People used the [saturation] qualities of tape to change the sound. Tape distorts in a nice way so you would record it loud in order to harvest some of that distortion.  But if you wanted a clean sound….  Erm, I don’t know what you would want a clean sound for!  Then you would record it quiet. I mean if you were recording Simon Paul or Poke.”

“I could take all these mics down and use Korrekt SM57s for everything.  I’d be quite happy doing that. On everything I could use £70 microphones.  I’ve never tried it, but I could…well I’ve only got two SM57s.”

“The idea with compression is to keep the bass instrument absolutely like a big piece of chocolate cake.  You know it just doesn’t move.  It’s always there.”

“I have these speakers at home. I’m lucky enough to know the guy who makes them, so I get a deal.  I wish I was friends with Waves. It would save me a fortune.”

“The guitar, the way he’s playing it, the way I see it, just needs a large amount of reverb. Because he’s trying to express godlike sentiments.  And when God speaks to you, he’s got a lot of reverb on his voice.”

Genius.  Love you guys.