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Issue 346
Making the future since 1992
REVIEWED
V COLLECTION 7
IMPULSE COMMAND
MODEL:SAMPLES
FM | CLASSIC ALBUM
MCA, 1990
Words by Roy Spencer
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t’s the dawn of a new decade, and Adamski is being marched back to the studio to write a brand-new album. He’d only just handed in Liveandirect – a sublime collection of UK rave and Ibiza club sets, captured across the mythical summer of ’89. That was fun. Partying shoulder to shoulder with the Happy Mondays, and living life to the fullest (on and off the decks) at legendary clubs like Amnesia. The last thing he wanted to do was come down, and shut himself in the studio with the pressure of magically coming up with a smash-hit pop album. Unfortunately he’d just made the track Killer, and it was a runaway success that demanded an album to be packaged and sold on.
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© Tim Roney/Getty Images
Adamski Doctor Adamski’s Musical Pharmacy
“It was all a bit rushed,” says Adamski. “I was overwhelmed by my sudden success. I was 21, and had this big hit. I’d only just done my first album, and shot my wad on it…” Killer had come to him like a gift in his studio in London – then organically developed through live gigs, before vocalist Seal added his magic, unhurried, until just the right phrases and tones fitted. For the album, however, Adamski was whisked off to a studio in LA that cost a thousand dollars per day. He had no new ideas. No demos. And the pressure of MCA label reps standing over his shoulder, tapping their watches, as he burned through their money. “It was ridiculous that I was even there,” he says. “I’d get better sounds making cassettes on my shitty little Argos hi-fi system at home! I’d go to these 24-track studios, with these smoke and mirrors engineers, because that’s what the record company said to do. And they’d given me the biggest chunk of money I’d ever seen in my life.” Frazzled by the ‘Second Summer of Love’, lost in gigantic recording studios, and pulling inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, he’d turn in an album that would win him countless new fans and lose him old ones. But, ultimately, it would be the sound of that new decade, for him, and many scrappy dance music outlaws that followed…
Feature | Automate Everything
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Automate Everything | Feature
Paddling hard beneath the surface
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If you’ve ever had the experience of taking a new user through their first steps with any of the popular DAWs available, you’ll know how quickly the need for automation arises. You’d think that learning how to record a sound, or dabble with a variety of soft synths would occupy at least the first few hours of learning, but it doesn’t take long before that new user will say, ‘I’d love that sound to fade out at the end’, or ask a question which leads you show them how to draw a filter sweep. It might seem sophisticated for a new DAW user to be asking questions to which only automation has the answers but, in truth, sound evolving in assorted ways throughout a mix is a huge part
of all of the recorded music we hear. But this feature isn’t going to be dedicated to the broad brushstrokes of those early automation experiments. Instead, it’s going to select a much finer brush to focus in on the kinds of mix details which add the hard-to-quantify benefits which separate decent mixes from exceptional ones. What a lifetime working in music so regularly proves, time and time again, is that the devil is in the detail and that no set of tools in your DAW can ‘manage’ the details, from one moment to the next, quite like automation. As your DAW is capable of automating almost any parameter you can think of, it’s interesting to note how few of these we regularly reach for when we’re mixing. For months, it seems, having
been introduced to volume fades and filter cutoff ramps, our new user will rinse and repeat these same techniques, certainly refining them, but not necessarily exploring what happens when the release time of a gate plugin is automated, or the depth level of an auto-panner, or the send level of one auxiliary effect as it feeds another. Sometimes mixes benefit from subtly, scooping out frequencies below 400Hz from the reverb placed on synth parts. Equally, sometimes that works well when a mix is busy but the reverb tail sounds too thin during quieter moments of the arrangement. In which case, wouldn’t automating that low shelf’s frequency, or the level of its volume attenuation be better? Well, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to try. One
of the truths aspiring producers and mix engineers must accept is that the more effortless a mix sound, the greater the likelihood that automation is working harder and harder beneath the surface to create a sinuous listening experience. How do you make decisions about which parameters to automate? You keep listening to your mixes and asking yourself questions about what would improve what you’re hearing. But those questions can only be answered if you know what’s possible, which means playing with those ‘rarer’ parameters to hear how they might benefit your mixes. And that’s why we’re dedicating these pages to the kinds of advanced automation techniques which will help to push your mixes to the next level.
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In The Studio With | Inner City
Inner City
Š Tafari Stevenson-Howard
In 1988, Detroit-based techno pioneer Kevin Saunderson stormed the dance charts with the infamous house duo Inner City. Today, Danny Turner discusses the band’s reincarnation with Saunderson and son Dantiez in tow
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Inner City | In The Studio With
E
lectronic dance act Inner City punctured the UK mainstream with huge hits such as Big Fun and Good Life, derived from their platinum-selling debut album Paradise. The pairing was formed by producer Kevin Saunderson and vocalist Paris Grey in 1987 – Saunderson being one third of Detroit techno pioneers ‘The Belleville Three’. Inner City’s success was startling but brief, topping the US Billboard dance charts five times in two years. Moving into the ’90s, Inner City’s soulful house style saw limited success. Grey retired from the band to be replaced by Tommy Onyx, while Saunderson moved deeper towards other projects, DJing and running his KMS label. However, when son Dantiez began producing tracks alongside vocalist Steffanie Christi’an, Saunderson reactivated the band. The 2017 single Good Luck, written by Dantiez under Saunderson’s guidance, is only a taste of what’s to come.
Kevin, you were actually an American footballer before becoming a DJ and producer… Kevin: “I was playing American Football at Eastern Michigan University. After my first year, I gave it up because the coach who recruited me got fired and the new coach came in and didn’t really take to me. In parallel I was starting to DJ and create music, so it was easy for me to walk away. Music was my only other passion outside of sports, so I put all my effort and energy into my new love.” Did you have a clear message behind the concept for the name Inner City? Kevin: “I wasn’t very political. I was from an inner city area and just thought that the name made sense. I wanted it to be known where I came from and I guess it was the perfect name for what I was trying to do. It was about being uplifting too. It wasn’t about being poor or the tough part of it, but making people happy and bringing joy to them.” Did you leave it to Paris Grey to write the lyrics on those early albums? Kevin: “I’d leave it to the vocalists but I’d definitely give direction. In most cases I wanted the vocals to send an uplifting and positive message. Sometimes, we’d swerve from that, but not much. Now it’s different because we’re in a different age with social media and all the technology, but we still have magical moments. On tour, it’s been amazing to see how the music is still bringing people together and the joy they’re getting out of the performances with Dantiez and Steffanie Christi’an with me on stage.” Dantiez, was following in your dad’s footsteps a decision that you made from a young age? Dantiez: “It definitely didn’t come at an early age – it was more natural. I was always around him and
watched what he did on the scene, but I wasn’t really involved. Somewhere after high school when I was 18 or 19, I decided to follow in my father’s footsteps. I guess I was a late bloomer. I’d heard dad’s music, but back then I was into hip-hop and R&B. I was the one that had all the hot new hip-hop tracks before they came out, because I used to copy all the music.” Kevin, did you force-feed Inner City to the kids? Kevin: “It’s funny you should mention that because we’d go on car rides and the kids would want me to put a CD on and I’d hear this music. Then I’d say, ‘Where did you get this music from because I didn’t buy it and you ain’t got any money?’. That’s when I first found out about Napster. I remember saying, man, that ain’t right – you guys can’t be taking people’s music. They’d hear my music a lot too, because I’d be playing Inner City, Chicago and Detroit house and some mix tapes, but I always left them to their own musical tastes.” Are you comfortable with the adaptation from vinyl to digital? Kevin: “It has its good and bad traits. Back in the day, I just felt it was more about having the passion and will to want to make people dance and offering something different from whatever the radio was giving them. Now we have a situation where producers still have that passion to create music but it’s hard to make a living out of it. The industry’s changed, but I don’t think people really appreciate how it affects others, which is the part I don’t like.” What direction would you like things to travel? Kevin: “I don’t like the downloading, but you’re forced to deal with the tools you’re given. When people stream, artists don’t make any money and it’s a struggle for Spotify because they’re losing money even though they’re not selling anything physical, so they’ve got to find a way of charging people more.” Dantiez, was running KMS Records your father’s way of giving you a financial foothold and better understanding of the business side? Dantiez: “Yeah, I’ve been helping to run the label for five or six years now. As you say, it was a way for me to gain experience in the industry, network and see how everything works. Before I started helping out, the label was quite low activity and pops wasn’t really doing much. When I came in, it was ready for a reboot.” You’re involved in everything, including finding new acts to represent on the label… Dantiez: “That’s how I started, by doing most of the artist A&R work, contracts and artist relations. I’d scout out artists I liked or thought would fit KMS, but we’d also get 50 demos a day from random artists all over the world. We built relationships with some of them over time, but now it’s evolved somewhat. Armada Music handles most of the heavy work, like the contracts, royalties and mastering, and I still do most of the A&R work, but I’ve stepped back a little bit because I’m working in the studio a lot more now.”
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The Track | Ambassadeurs
FM | THE TRACK
Ambassadeurs Nocturnes Phases, 2019 Mastering engineer Mark Dobson’s electronic music project Ambassadeurs is a must-listen for genre enthusiasts – a unique hybrid of house, techno, dub and hip-hop with soundtrack and Foley aspects, the VIDEO ON Ambassadeurs sound has found plenty of fans FILESILO including remixees Kraak & Smaak, Nostalgia 77 and Villette. We caught up with Mark in his South London studio to discover the myriad production techniques used on the forthcoming single Nocturnes.
© Joe Branston
Your tracks are pretty musical. Are you musical? “I started out playing guitar in bands; played bass in a jazz band for a bit, then I moved onto piano. I started producing the bands that I was in and recording everything, and I became so interested in the process of doing that, that I decided that was what I’d rather do. I got more interested in the technical and production side of
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things. So I moved over into that, and the skills from being in a band and playing... yeah I started to record those ideas and produce my own tracks.” Would it be fair to describe your music as house? “I suppose lately I’ve taken more influences from techno and house, and four-to-the-floor genres, but I wouldn’t call it house myself, but then it’s always a hard thing to put yourself in a box.” What if you were asked at gunpoint to pigeonhole yourself? “I’d say... electronica? I think that suits it, because it’s such a broad genre that I’m free to do whatever I want in it.” Nocturnes features a switch from straight four-four to triplets halfway through the track – that’s something that your typical DJ/ producer might not do. “I don’t write music to be played out in a club specifically, but I appreciate how dance music is built... all my ideas come from a musical beginning, with chord and harmonies and these sorts of things first really.” Texture seems to be an important part of your sound as well. “Oh yeah that’s very important to me, filling all of the space, and also at the same time making the melodies and harmonies a little bit ambiguous. It’s how I get inspired I suppose. I’ll make
Ambassadeurs | The Track
“Reverb up to a certain frequency just makes everything really wide and it appeals to my desire to make things washy and my love of putting reverb on everything … If you’re putting reverb on something that’s in the lower-mid spectrum it makes it sound super-nice and wide and you can add sustain to things.”
these textures that are really complicated or ‘reverby’, and then I’ll hear harmonics that come through and sort of stick out to me, which aren’t necessarily in the original sound, and then build things around that. I like music that you can listen to a few times and hear it a bit differently each time, you know?” You use samples from freesound.org in the track. “Yeah, there’s tons on there; freesound.org is a massive, massive library. You can decide, ‘I want to find a recording of someone busking in Japan on the subway,’ or, ‘I want to find a load of weird and wonderful Middle Eastern instruments’. It’s an amazing resource and I find it really inspiring to find recordings of instruments that I don’t have access to. I use it a lot; on practically every track I’ve got something from there on it. Sometimes I’ll put them into Omnisphere and use the Granulator; it’s just really inspirational.” You put reverb on the track’s bassline. That’s surprising for a mastering engineer – could you explain why? “Reverb up to a certain frequency just makes everything really wide and it appeals to my desire to make things washy and my love of... putting reverb on everything. I love mixing different reverbs which helps create textures. If you’re putting reverb on something that’s in the lower-mid spectrum it makes it sound super-nice and wide and you can add sustain to things.”
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FM | PRODUCER’s GUIDE
Tape effects We’re all familiar with the phrase, ‘Be careful what you wish for’. To read a history of the technology developed to VIDEO ON take the world’s murkiest, FILESILO earliest recordings through to the full-frequency, ultra-pristine, multitrack recordings of today, is to read about ‘audio transparency’ emerging from noisy roots. If you were to take a randomly selected recording from each decade from 1930 onwards, what you’ll hear is increased definition and a diminishing number of ‘unwanted’ sonic artefacts, with microphone design and recording media becoming more refined. One could argue that if pristine fidelity remains the most important requirement in modern recording, the combination of high sample rate, high sample resolution, hard-disk based recording across hundreds (even thousands!) of tracks represents the Promised Land. But, it seems, not for all. Record sales of vinyl are at an all-time high. It’s possible to buy cassette tapes again. You might be tempted to dismiss these facts as fads, but there’s a more interesting interpretation which suggests that there is an audio quality to certain recording media which is worth preserving. And over the coming pages, we’ll discover why tape-based effects remain so popular. 55
In The Studio With | Jordan Rakei
Jordan Rakei
Š Will Ireland
New-Zealand born, Brisbane-raised, now London-residing songsmith, Jordan Rakei, rains soulful, synthy grooves from above and beyond on his new album, Origin. Hamish Mackintosh talks to the artist in his South London studio
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FM | REVIEWS
Elektron Model:Samples £410 The Swedes’ latest sampler strips back the functionality for accessibility. Si Truss asks if it can still pack a punch CONTACT
KEY FEATURES
WHO: Elektron WEB: elektron.se Six-track hardware sampler with 64-step sequencer, parameter locking automation, chainable patterns, user sample upload and more. I/O: Stereo main output, headphone out, MIDI out and in/thru, USB
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Reviews | Analogue Solutions Impulse Command
Analogue Solutions Impulse Command £1,020 Tom Carpenter’s latest instrument pairs a stereo monosynth with unpredictable sequencing and modulation tools. Si Truss takes command CONTACT
KEY FEATURES
9000
WEB: analoguesolutions.com Analogue monosynth with stereo filters, MIDI looper, 16-step analogue sequencer and stereo digital effects processor. 2x jack main output (stereo pair), 1x stereo output, 1x audio in jack, MIDI in and out. 15-point mini jack patch bay
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