Pop Shield

I’m telling you, if the infrastructure at Maid Of Orleans studios doesn’t get sorted out in the near future, it may face a harsh obsolescence. The radio networks who have traditionally been very supportive of the place are currently busy chasing – and catching – the Twaddle/MeView generation in the new shiny colourful digital visual mothership.

And when that fateful day comes, in future years, someone will have the idea to make a documentary about the place. And a film crew will head to the nearest home for senile audio professionals in the home counties. And there, they will wheel out Ian or Jamie or whoever, long since retired from their vision-mixing and social media jobs. And they shall ask: “In the heyday of live music sessions at the corporation, what WERE your secrets? Tell me about the equipment that you used to create the magic” And everybody will wax lyrical about the golden combination of the Real Estate J-series channel strip with the Omnipresent 1176 Classic Compressor Limiter, and reminisce about the Alan Clever C2 and parallel drum compression techniques and the wonders of the WordBook 480 Music Club reverb preset and the perfect unison of the Technisch DN780 Alive! setting with the punch of the snare drum and go dewy-eyed about the warmth and musicality and the polite british bottom end of the Henderson Classic 4038 ribbon microphone.

And then I shall say my piece:

“In my opinion the one item of equipment that helped to shape and influence the classic sound of more Maid Of Orleans sessions than any other is ROGER ANDREWS’ EMERGENCY DRUM KIT. It has been used by more musicians who have forgotten their backline or snare drum or pedals or bust a skin or are not happy with the kit that has been delivered than I’ve had surprise baby picked onions in the canteen. The entire success of Maid of Orleans can be attributed entirely to Roger Andrews and his wonderful Yamaha drums.

And Mate will reminisce about the ten-piece reggae band who arrived without any backline whatsoever one fine summer day back in 2013. When out came the Roger Andrews emergency kit and the Hi-Watt amplifier of relief, and the hammond, and the fender rhodes, and we DI’d the phat bass and then Roger Andrews magicked up some stash of glock shop keyboard madness and we had an absolutely blistering session which truly sounded mammoth.

And then the young researcher will ask me to tell that story again. The one about the time when Mate and I were testing out the ten-piece-reggae-band-with-no-backline’s mix for mono-compatibility on the Fostex check speaker and the bass frequencies caused it to melt in a quite spectacular way. And I shall tell them about how tar poured out the front of the grille and how I sheepishly explained the cause of the fault to the in-house but long-since-outsourced engineers (‘too much reggae’). Or perhaps not.