Studio Diary, 1990
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Writer's Block
When lecturing on DJing, remixing and production to higher education students, it’s with regularity that my opening gambit usually includes the “How lucky are you to be making music today with such affordable and available technology” statement. Of course it’s true: We are lucky to enjoy the ubiquity and accessibility of these affordable studio recording solutions right here, right now. But these same students do look a tad taken back, nay gobsmacked at the description of gear, workflow and costs in studio days gone by. Let’s take a hypothetical look at a typical studio diary from 20 years ago.
August 10th, 1990: Got into the studio at 10 am. Nipped into the office to check voicemail messages and any faxes that may have come through. Saw one of those new Apple ‘classic’ computers on the secretaries desk. Hmmm… wish they could be used for music, they look quite good with their 4mb memory. Back in the studio and today’s remix is for Warner records for one of their latest ‘hip-house’ releases, fusing rap over house music – like it, could catch on. I’m working in Studio One of a group of three: nice room this. There’s a 32 channel soundtracs mixing desk (I heard it cost about £20K), a Saturn 24-track (about £12K) and some great outboard effects and synths to play with.
As there’s a decent record company budget on this project, I’ve got the luxury of an expert keyboard player today called Steve, but I’m taking care of programming, production, mixing and editing myself. We’ve loaded the 2″ (24 track) tape onto the multitrack, this contains a full copy of all the original parts (vocal, keys, bass, drums etc) and locked any synths and samplers to play along ‘live’ with the SMPTE timecode on track 24 (that was a nuisance because a tape flaw meant it kept dropping out and we had to program in a ‘bridging’ section to carry it on). The two Akai samplers here (each cost around two grand I think) are being sequenced by the Atari 1040 ST computer. I’m using this new software called Emagic Notator having changed up from Steinberg’s ‘Pro16′ program a few months ago. The Atari’s dead stable and reasonably powerful with it’s 512k of RAM.
2pm, and we’ve got some cool drum samples, loops and vocal sections into the Akai S1000 samplers. These are great sounding machines at 16-bit quality and I’ve also done some interesting time-stretching effects too. Steve has already played a bassline on the studio’s Roland JX8P keyboard, a dead ‘hooky’ piano line on the Korg M1 and we’ve also added some ‘world’ percussion samples from the Proteus rack, housed with the effects just above the desk. The drums are sounding great but it really bugs me every time the sequencer trips into a new pattern (after four bars) the Akai’s kinda ‘cut-off’ the loops etc and it sounds a bit glitchy – oh well, what can be done?
5pm: With the multitrack tape outputs feeding into the desk, added to the Akai outs and the synth channels most of which are patched via bantam leads from the large patchbay on the right, it’s time to hook in some effects via the Eventide H3000 harmoniser (expensive item this one, around £3,500 evidently), Lexicon PCM-70 reverb and Yamaha digital delays etc. The effects returns are on the desk’s group return section so we’ve got full control over these with the faders there (some of the outputs of these machines are quite noisy though – best keep them muted until required).
8pm: All the programming is done and we’ve recorded some other synth sections and Akai samples onto the 2″ tape on spare or unrequired tracks (mostly to free some memory from the Akai S1000′s which are getting a little ‘full’!). The record company needs a 12″ extended (seven mins plus) mix from this session, but the original version off multitrack tape runs to just short of four minutes, so we’re going to have to create the other sections by muting certain tracks off the desk and transferring passes (bringing instruments and content in at relevant points), recording them onto the studio’s Otari 1/2″ tape recorder (again, an expensive beasty at about £6K ‘used’). Steve has ‘flattened’ the desk, bringing all faders to zero, as it’s time to remove our programming head and go into mixdown mode. From here, I will rebalance the entire mix (with an occasional look over to Steve to get his feedback periodically), adding eq and compression (patching in a Drawmer compressor into a channel strip that needs it perhaps) and sending any tracks that need ‘fx’ to whichever specific rack unit is necessary (reverb, delay etc). Stereo imaging of the final mix is very important too, so I’m making sure there is sufficient space for everything to breathe both in position and dynamic range.
10pm: With the actual mix balanced and sounding great, Steve has taken control of the desk and I’m sat in front of the 1/2″ tape machine. This is the fun part as we get to ‘construct’ the arrangement for the remix, using different desk ‘passes’ to create a DJ mixing intro and in this case, a full instrumental chorus drop. I stop the tape at a specific point, lock the playback heads to the tape and rock ‘n roll the tape left to right to find my editing point to the next section to come. Out comes my trusty chinagraph pencil, mark the point and release the tape head. After the next section/pass is recorded, I’ll do the same again but this time whip the tape off the playback head, rest it on an editing block and cut the point with a razor blade to join to the previous section with splicing (sticky) tape. I’m sure one day there’ll be an easier way to construct arrangements, maybe without using tape machines – who knows?
11pm: At this point, Steve and I have edited the main body of the track into the final version and done a DJ friendly outro, so we’re pretty much there. A playback from top to bottom and we’re done mostly. Wait a minute, there’s the boring recall sheet bit to do so Steve and I get to work noting desk levels, effects routings, hardware synth and effects settings and channel strip EQ positions etc onto paper, darn, it’s endless – and all because, record companies being record companies, the A&R guy might want a total recall of this exact mix next week (“can you lift the vocal up a bit, lower it, add more reverb” etc) and we might have to set the whole thing up again – oh for a total recall, £150K SSL desk!! Anyway, job done, time for sleep…
Tags: 1990s, studio production