BEHIND THE LINES Compiled by MICHAEL SMITH
JOHNNY RABB, ALLANS AND V-DRUMS Johnny Rabb, the world’s fastest drummer, and his duo alter ego, BioDiesel, host an instore at Allans Music + Billy Hyde, Whitehorse Rd, Blackburn, at 7pm on Monday 19 September. They’ll be taking you through a range of the latest Roland gear, performing and explaining how they use Roland V-Drums, electronic percussion, the V-Bass and GAIA. Rabb has also launched his own range of drumsticks, of which he is bound to talk. Inevitably there are space considerations so best you call the store on 9894 2910 or log onto the website to ensure a place.
SOUND ADVICE GEAR REVIEWS WITH JIM POWER EGNATER REBEL 30 In the seemingly never-ending search for the perfect live guitar amp, I accidentally stumbled upon the Egnater Rebel 30. Similar to most guitarists with a penchant for vintage tones and modern reliability, I was after an affordable amp with a unique, versatile and warm tone. Little did I know I’d just found the perfect answer to stage and studio tone.
APRA ROADSHOW
The Egnater Rebel 30, despite only being a 30-watt head, provides more than enough punch than will ever be required on stage or in the studio. The tubes are a pair of 6v6s and a pair of EL84s, with the very cool feature of a tube mix knob, allowing you to lean more heavily to one tone or the other or perfectly blend the American and British tones that are so highly sought after these days. The front panel of the head is again a perfect blend of old school simplicity and modern possibility. The clean channel has a three-band EQ along with the signature Egnater ‘tight’ and ‘bright’
Ormond Hall on St Kilda Road hosts The APRA Roadshow on Monday 26 September. It’s a chance to chat to the experts, develop your songwriting skills and connect with others in the wider music community. Running over five hours from 3.30pm and free to APRA members, the main topics to be covered are the art of co-writing and the relevance of contemporary radio. Speakers on the day are yet to be announced but if you’re interested, APRA member or not, get in touch with the guys at the APRA office in Richmond on 9426 5200, and get the details.
WHY DO THEY ‘BAKE’ OLD TAPES? Much of Don Bartley’s remastering work of late at his Benchmark Mastering facility in Sydney has been from quarter-inch tape, and as he explained to me recently, “they do require a lot of TLC to get them to work. Some need to baked because they absorb a lot of water, which makes them sticky, so we put them in a dehydrator and pull water out of them before we can play them properly. That’s common, unless it’s a really old tape, because the older tapes, made before 1972, they actually used whale oil as a lubricant for the tape, and it’s a perfect lubricant, but of course there was an international agreement in the early ‘70s to stop using whale products. So they then started producing synthetic lubricants, which evaporate, and when they evaporate out of the tape, water replaces it in the oxides and it goes gluey. So you just need to dry them out before you can play them.”
SOUND BYTES The as-yet-untitled second album from Florence & The Machine was recorded over five weeks in Studio 3 of Abbey Road Studios in London, after which Florence and producer Paul Epworth decamped to his own London studio to add the finishing touches. Ashes & Fire, the new album from Ryan Adams, was recorded at Sunset Sound in Hollywood with producer Glyn Johns (The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Clash), whose son Ethan Johns produced previous Adams albums Heartbreaker, Gold and 29. Sal Kimber & The Rollin’ Wheel called on fellow Melburnian Shane O’Mara to record and produce their new album at his Yikesville Studios. It’s due out in October. Little Scout recorded their debut album, Take Your Light, in Jonathan Boulet’s Sydney garage with producer Scott Bromiley. The album was then mastered by Adam Dempsey. Sydney trio Step-Panther called in Simon Berkfinger of Philadelphia Grand Jury to produce their self-titled debut album, recording in Lonely Mountain Studios and mixing it at Berkfinger’s personal studio in Berlin, Spree Sound. Sydney melodic metal four-piece Darker Half recorded their second album, Desensitized, at Def Wolf Studios in inner Sydney suburb Redfern, with their long-time live sound engineer Tom Marks co-producing as well as mixing. The album was then mastered at Q Studios by Beau Sherard. Brisbane four-piece Black Mustang recorded their second album, Loaded Gun, with fellow Brisbanite and regular engineer/coproducer Jeff Lovejoy (Powderfinger, Tex Perkins, 6ftHick, Resin Dogs) at hometown facilities Black Box Studios, Wavelength Studios and Applewood Studios, Lovejoy mixing the album before sending it down to Don Bartley in Sydney to master it at Benchmark. Currently in the studio recording their second album, Melbourne five-piece Deserters have released a first single, Stars Burn, which they sent New York-based expat Australian Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, The Panics) to mix. Ballarat five-piece Gold Fields hauled themselves up the Hume to Surry Hills in order to record their eponymous self-produced debut EP, mixed by Scott Horscroft, at Big Jesus Burger Studios in Surry Hills, but for their debut album, they undertook an even longer journey – to Los Angeles to record with producer Mickey Petralia (Beck, Ladytron, Peaches).
72
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
switches. The distortion channel also offers these switches along with a three-band EQ, but with the addition of a drive pot. The back panel has just as many cool features, with an easy access design tailored to the live player. On the back there are two pots controlling the reverb for each channel, which is a truly outstanding tube reverb, a perfect blend of warmth and clarity. There is also an option for you to control how much wattage comes through, with two attenuators ranging from one to 30 allowing even more tone control, which seems to be the main idea behind this amp. The Egnater Rebel 30 is the best amplifier I have ever played out of; it sounds great on the clean tones, devastating, aggressive and vintage on the distortion channel and provides a huge choice of tone control features. This is the perfectly sized, perfectly priced X factor you’re missing. For a list of Egnater stockists, see cmcmusic. com.au/dealers/egnaterdealers
DAVE’S HUES Recording his first album in 13 years at Blackbird Studios in Nashville was a very different process to producing Stevie Nicks’ latest in her LA mansion, former Eurythmic DAVE STEWART tells MICHAEL SMITH. Conduct a Google search for Blackbird Studios, the Nashville recording facility owned and operated by John McBride, in which Australian artists as diverse as Boy & Bear, Catherine Britt and Nicole Kidman have recorded, click on the section for Studio C and you’ll see the most extraordinary sight – a console room with an SSL 908XL K desk and all the analogue outboard gear you could want, and walls made out of 2500 pieces of wood of varying length, all sticking out into the room like some giant collection of porcupine rugs. “It was the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever seen,” says Dave Stewart, on the line from his Los Angeles office, his Northern England accent still strong. “That room was designed by the same chap who designed the graphic equaliser and John, he did this sort of design on the computer of how he thought the room should be and built it out of wood, thousands of sticks all cut to specific lengths so that if you were to look at a 3D computer version of the room, you’d take that and make it out of wood. I mean, when you shut the doors of that room, it’s as if somebody’s shut a door inside your head and when the music comes on it’s just so crystal clear.” Setting up in the adjacent Grand Room, the spacious Studio D, Stewart, his co-producer Mike Bradford and McBride – who recorded and mixed the album Stewart recorded there, The Blackbird Sessions, over five days – “frontloaded the recording” as analogue as possible, ensuring the sounds were tube valve and transformer-heavy. Recording was done at the highest digital resolution, 96K, to Pro Tools through the SSL. “A lot of it’s due to the fact that we’re all playing through vintage amps, so it’s been down to the equipment. Even the microphones were from the ‘40s, going through valve amps and limiters. Then putting it back to tape and just every possible thing that you could do to make you not have to EQ anything… so getting the sounds right by the right microphones, moving them in the right position, going for the nice warm valve amps and things and then going through the board with the EQs all set to zero. Because I didn’t want to do this thing of, like, you record stuff, do as many tracks as you want and then we can sort it out with the EQ, and you’re kind of taking huge chunks out of the waveforms and fucking up the sound and then making it fit together in a kind of mix that isn’t dynamic, it’s more like a parallel music coming at you in long line. “What happens when you’re using all this gear is the natural dynamic of the band comes out and the natural positioning of the microphones allows some kind of air loss in it, and so everybody can hear that when we’re playing and know what they’re playing is actually getting put down onto the tape the way it sounds. You know that awful thing when you used to go and play in a room and when you came back in it didn’t sound anything like what you heard? Well every time we went back in to hear what we did, it sounded exactly like what we were playing, which was a great relief.” Stewart was joined in the studio by Nashville session players – guitarist Tom Bukovac, steel guitarist Dan Dugmore, bass player Michael Rhodes and drummer Chad Cromwell – McBride setting up just one RCA BK5B ribbon mic running through an RCA BA11A mic preamp to pick up all three guitars, again the aim being to capture the interaction in performance. Stewart played a ’56 Strat, a ’55 Telecaster, a 1949 Gibson SJ200 acoustic and a 1937 Martin D28 acoustic guitar. The result is
an album with just two or three instrument overdubs. McBride’s country artist wife Martina was a natural choice as guest vocalist and features on the track All Messed Up, while two young sisters, Laura and Lydia Rogers, AKA The Secret Sisters, were recording their eponymous debut album in Blackbird so were invited in to add their voices to two tracks. Then there’s the song Cheaper Than Free, co-written with and featuring Stevie Nicks, whose latest album, In Your Dreams, Stewart produced. The recording of that album was a very different affair to the usual studio experience. “I set up a studio in her house [in LA], in the hallway where the spiral staircase was. We had, like, a vocal mic stood there and some baffles around, but they [mics] were up above her head too, if you wanted to and you could move them up or down, and we had guitar amps in the dining room – the house was all wired up – and we were in the living room where the fire was with a little mixing desk. We did some stuff in the studio but most of it was done in the house over a period of about a year. She’s an amazing artist actually to work with, how focused and intense she is about what she’s doing and wanting to get it exactly right.” Of course, if there’s one thing Dave Stewart knows, it’s recording the female voice, having worked for years with Annie Lennox in Eurythmics, as well as his former wife Siobhan Fahey. He also produced and co-wrote the latest album from Joss Stone, LP1, recorded, as it happens, in Blackbird Studios. “Joss Stone is a completely different approach,” Stewart explains, in comparison to Stevie Nicks. “She’s all raw nerve endings and ‘let me at it’! She’s 24 and raring to go and will sing ‘til she’s got no voice left, firing on
twitter.com/inpressmag
all cylinders all of the time and very acutely aware of the musicians, what they’re playing, and as intense as Stevie on getting it right but in different ways.” The Blackbird Sessions is out now through Roadshow Music.