I have been working on an engineering solution to a serious problem. A lot of bands wander the corridors of Maid Of Orleans Studios hoping capture the essence of famous bands who have previously recorded there. Like The Bugs, many of these came from the Liverpool area. Artists like Functioning Bicycle, Missing Teacups – and […]
“Loving your band name” says The Mixmaster General to the lead singer of The Gospel Sausages.
“Thanks.” replies the lead singer of The Gospel Sausages. “My previous band was voted into the Top 10 of a Worst Band Names Ever poll.”
“Oh really? What was it called?”
“It was spelt “Crappy” and pronounced “Rubbish” explains the lead singer of The Gospel Sausages, bafflingly. “So basically, the guy on stage would go “Ladies and gentlemen! Please welcome Crappy!” And then we’d come on and say “No, no, no, we’re Rubbish!” I think it just left everybody very confused indeed. Not good.“
And these my friends, are the crown jewels.
Are you ready? I mean are you really ready? Those of you with less robust constitutions may need to turn away now. I mean, I have a feeling that Roger Andrews was even a bit scared of this situation down at Maid Of Orleans one day. And as we know, he’s got nerves of steel.
Yes, this is the stuff that engineers’ nightmares are made of.
All I can say in our defence is the following.
There was no input list prior to the band arriving for the session. There was no confirmed band line-up prior to the session. The input list turned out to be 96 channels. The line-up turned out to be two drum kits, electric drums, bass, three guitars, acoustic guitar, two violins – each of which absolutely must be taken in stereo, two percussionists, brass, eleven vocals, vocal effects, electric piano, seven synthesisers. Oh, and please could we set up the Steinway…
Now, there are only 56 channels on the house desk which is called a house desk because it is in fact THE SIZE OF A HOUSE. Ten to twelve of these channels are usually designated for effects, parallel compression and so on. Two sub mixers had to be brought in and rigged. The internal patch was a bit head-scratchy. The main patch from splits, once the input list had been amended and transcribed, had to be achieved via flails on the floor in the corner by the monitor desk that kept getting pushed out of the way. The numbering on the barrels and the strings of the flails did not correspond. ’Split 2’ was listed as being numbers 1-48 on the band’s input list but their two stage looms were numbered 1-50 and 51-100. A miscommunication resulted in inputs 49-96 ending up being two numbers out, followed by an agonising three person unpick repatch whilst everyone complained. The desk talkback was faulty. There were two connectors numbered 76 neither of which turned out to be number 76. The band were in a hurry as they had to catch a plane. During the session musicians were required to have interviews for other shows in other studios that required one of us to go and set up. One of the two lead vocalists sang each song from a completely different mic and since neither the monitor engineer nor the mix engineer were prepared to re-patch in their worlds, this had to be done in a hurry via the tangle of flails. Oh, and one final thing. THE BAND WERE ONLY ABLE TO WORK IN THE DARK.
It has taken me six weeks to pluck up the courage, but now that I’ve got my disclaimer in.
Oh the shame.
Matthew: “Yes get nice and close to the mic because Little Sister like a nice, compressed sound. Nigel.”
Richard: “Lovely”
Nigel: “Yes, I’m hearing you. Are you hearing me ok?”
Matthew: “Yes, Reg. Reg. Reg!! REG!!!! Can you talk into your microphone?”
Nigel: “Talk – into – your – microphone.”
Reg: “Can you hear me now?”
Everyone: “YES!”
Matthew: “Can you hear yourself?”
Reg: “I’m talking, I’m talking, hello, hello. Hello.”
Malcolm: “He’s saving up for a deaf aid.”
Nigel: “Reg. Can you hear us?”
Mick: “Can you hear Nigel talking?”
Silence from Reg.
Malcolm: “No he can’t”
Matthew: “Reg. Reg!! REG!!!! Can you hear us as well?”
Mick: “He hasn’t got his channel faded up. It’s on 13 or 14.”
Matthew: “No. He’s not on our system. Can you hear us Reg, when we talk? Can you hear us Reg? Can you hear us in your cans, Reg?
Reg: “Sorry?”
Matthew: “Can – you – hear – us – in – your – cans – Reg.”
Reg: “No”
Matthew: “Oh right. Reg can’t hear us in his cans.”
I run into the room and turn up the speech channel on Reg’s headphone mixer.
Matthew: “Oh! He can? Now try. Can you hear us in your cans? Have you got the right ear on?”
Reg: “Yes I can hear you.”
Matthew: “Oh good. Jolly good. Excellent. He’s a sound engineer you know.”
Reg: “Yeah. It was alright right leaving me guys.”
Mick: “Sam’s in tears look.”
Nigel (theatrical commentary): “Matthew can hear Malcolm. Malcolm can hear Nigel, but Nigel can’t hear Mick. Mick can hear Reg, but Reg can’t hear anything.”
Matthew: “Nigel chooses not to hear anything at all.”
Little Sister programme appears in the headphones.
Eusabio: “You should be able to hear the programme now.”
Nigel: “Are we in communication?”
Malcolm: “Yes with one another.”
Nigel: “This is the blind leading the deaf.”
Michelle (on talkback, 200 miles away): “Hello chaps, can you hear me?”
Matthew: “I can hear you and I can hear me.”
Michelle: “Hello? Can anybody hear me?”
Reg: “This is called wireless.”
Malcolm: “What did you have for breakfast?”
Michelle: “Hello Hello! Can you hear me?”
Everybody: “Hello!”
Matthew: “Can you hear us?”
Reg: “I’ve always wanted to work in communications.”
Malcolm: “This is the Bionic Glock Shop calling Earth.”
Michelle: “Hello, Maid Of Orleans. Is that the Bionic Glock Shop? This is Michelle up north. Hello. Can you hear me?”
Matthew: “Yes I can.”
Michelle: “Ah, I can hear you now! Can you hear me?”
Nigel: “We could always hear you.”
Malcolm: “It would be nice to hear you a bit louder but I’m not sure if that’s your end or our end.”
Michelle: “Sorry I couldn’t hear you. We had a little speaker turned down. Now, Reg, seeing as you are the most senior member of the group, would you like to be spokesperson during the interview?”
Reg: “Of course.”
Michelle: “Fantastic, we’ll be with you in two records time.”
Nigel: “That’s great, that’s all fine.”
Michelle: “Thanks very much.”
Matthew: “Very cool.”
It’s Day Three in the Little Sister Festival / Maid Of Orleans Household. It’s the big one. Sir Pete McCarthy. It’s such a scoop, but the power of his camp to say no has been testing the nerves of the management and production staff. Who’s proverbials are made of steel? Probably the machine’s itself, rather than either party. There is a last-minute kerfuffle over Pete doing live telly. As a result TV have pulled out of the morning show and all the live radio studio cameras are turned off. The studio is radio scruffy before you can say Mrs Robinson.
The Macarcopter arrives late, meaning that Pete misses his studio interview, if there was ever the intention of one. It doesn’t really matter to anyone (except possibly me and my mum) since Laurel La Hardy does a great job of it in the big room, parked on the piano stool with him in chatting in front of the audience.
From a technical point of view, it’s probably for the best. For such a fortunate and seemingly sunny man Pete just seems to have a bad glitchy hitchy karma that orbits like the rings of Saturn around his puppy dog head.
As it turns out, today is actually no exception to this rule. Should have seen it coming but circumstances are such that I can’t see the wood for the trees.
Tony and I arrive at 5.30am to get Maso Mercury’s one-off Maid Of Orleans show on air. I’ve been in training on the Orleans Continuity job, and I have been up until late the night before writing up notes on how the whole system works. By 6.30am we are all set. I’ve got my final questions answered and I feel bouncy.
We have been successfully on air for a short time when suddenly we hear a deafening one-stage alarm sounding in the studio. Alongside the plummy announcement “Attention please. Attention please. Please leave the building immediately.” Oh, goodness gracious, great balls of fire.
Tony sprints to reception to check the situation and nearly gets evicted. I line up an hour’s worth of segued emergency material and instruct Maso and Paul to crossfade to it. “Shall I say something first?” says Maso. “No, definitely not, just put it on.”
“Everybody leave now!” commands Tony. We run out of the building where we meet Mike arriving ready to mix McCarthy. He joins the throng. The Paddington firefighters arrive within an impeccable five minutes. I look for my chirpy chimney sweep, but I don’t see him.
Tony calls the Broadcast Manager, I phone Control. We are in network for a marathon six hours sandwiched between two Manchester shows. As such, it’s a pain to unpick the situation, We are all agreed that we should just ride it out and hope that we are back in the building soon. As it turns out we are. We are back on air within about twelve minutes.
And the reason for the fire alert? Steam from McCarthy’s early morning wardrobe crew’s irons activating the sensitive smoke heads.
Maso is great, and extracts lots of funny material from the incident. Cold from the autumn morning air he is sat wearing a judge’s cloak from the drama props cupboard, intended for the missing visual element. Broadcasting in his laconic drole style with a surreal pseudo-gravity.
Later on in the show, the technical gremlins rear their ugly other-worldly heads once again. They, or the distractions of the whole hoo-ha infiltrate the mechanism of the mock radio drama. Resulting in the somewhat distorted and reverb-soaked voice of an apocalyptic actor going live to air.
One thing not infected is the McCarthy session itself. Mike does his traditional bright and exciting spacious mix with Martin Giles by his side. Who I am informed is ‘with him’ funny not ‘at him’ funny like his dad. Or is that just me?
Anyroad. All’s swell that ends swell. Order!
Are you feeling a little hoarse?
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.
Something different today. I’m going to be working with five electronicore (post-hardcore + metalcore + electronica) musicians from Osaka, Japan.
Now that I’ve got my head round the fact that their surnames are first names, they all look pronounceable in a motorbikey kind of way. Except for one which looks as easy as sushi. I’m definitely going to have a stab at it anyway.
I’m also looking forward to working with my mate Mate today. Mate’s signature approach is to call everyone ‘mate’. It’s failsafe. Business as usual then!
Throughout February and March, I spent a couple of months down at Maid Of Orleans spending lots of time with my brothers Eusabio, Mike, The Mixmaster General, Mate and Nick mixing bands day in and day out.
Eusabio likes to get the mood going with an Italian lava lamp. However, this is quarantined with corporation hazard tape before you can blink. ”MOO4 lava lamp incident ref:IN007279” reads the official report, accompanied by the attached photo and a reprimanding email from one of the maintenance engineers. ”A lava lamp that was used during a recent event has found its way into MOO4. It was plugged into a 3pin mains socket, the lamp only has a 2pin socket and would have arched or worse given someone an electric shock. I don’t know who owns it or which bloody numpty plugged it in, but can you make sure the owner takes it away before I put it in a bin.”
The bloody numpty in question of course just goes and borrows a US-UK converter from the maintenance engineers and plugs it straight back in. Vibes are back.
Meanwhile Mate tries in vain to improve the performance of New York’s worst ever band by introducing them to marmite.
We see a lot of American punk bands coming through with names like Ravaged Hell and Glory Temple and Alleged Delerium all with their unique group dynamic ranging from collectivism to despotism. This throws me into the company of almost 100% males and a lot of sore throats.
One band in particular give me and Eu a run for our money. It starts badly from the moment they arrive, broken from the offset, with their grumpy disenfranchised unhelpful roadies. As they set up their conversation focusses on the two preferred subjects of bodily functions and chicks. I can feel my soul shrinking. To be fair, Eu doesn’t fare much better with them. “Would you like to give me some time on the kick, snare and hat,” he asks politely. “Not really.” says the drum tech. Ouch. Then some headphone teething troubles start, and I run back into the studio to talk to the guitarist. I become aware that I am speaking in an accent via a set of speech frequencies that he cannot understand. I can see him filing my words under ‘background noise’ in his mind. He then ignores everything I have said and proceeds to turn all the controls on the box randomly and complain. I look down at his customised pedal board and notice to my horror that each pedal has a different anatomical photo on it, all female. I run away and hide in the cubicle.
Eusabio then nurses the lead singer through a fifty-take patch on the screaming lead vocal. No wonder the guy’s lost his voice. We get through the session. Afterwards Eusabio and I chat. ”I was a bit scared of them.” I admit. ”So was I.” he says. “Did you SEE that pedal board with all the lady bits on it!” I exclaim. “Oh, it’s just a bit of fun.” he says. “Fun? FUN? They were STAMPING on those switches!” I reply.
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