From engh9401@abacus.hgs.se Wed Dec 28 09:08:17 1994 From: Anders Wahlbom Subject: Rupert interview #1 HIFI & MUSIK #12 1982 (translated from Swedish) RUPERT HINE: I like the exceptional "There are conventional *and* exceptional ways of working with music. And I'm interested in the exceptional!" Rupert Hine, who has produced lots of records for other artists, tells Jonas Frick about his two latest solo albums. Two albums where he has used synths, glass bottles, cutlery and above all the facilities of the modern recording studio to create exciting backgrounds. Here you get to know how he does it. Rupert also tells us of his university lectures on record production and synthesizer playing. He encourages us to get a cheap synthesizer, a drum machine and a sequencer - all this doesn't cost many thousand SEK today. "Those who really have ideas and want to express something can do it for much less money than they think." ** On the back of your first solo album, "Immunity", you thank Kjell Alinge for playing the record on "Eldorado". "Well... The thing about all this business is that I had an album that didn't have any obvious single tracks, and in England you can't sell an album without singles. It's impossible, unless you play live 3-4 times a week. So my record company is urging me to maybe record a separate single that's not on the album, just so we'll have something to release. Right in the middle of one of our discussions a guy comes in and says: 'Did you know that "Immunity" is on the chart in Sweden?' It had only been out for four weeks then and had hardly begun selling here. "Kjell had started playing the album a great deal on 'Eldorado', which meant Sweden was the first country where 'Immunity' was a success. It then spread to Norway, Denmark and Finland and finally to Northen West Germany, thanks to the Swedish success and to people telling each other of the album, which is the best kind of publicity you can get. "I think 'Eldorado' is a very good show. Above all, it has a good mix of music, and I see that they're going to expand and broadcast eight hours a week. If they manage to make four-hour shows with the quality they've had so far, there won't be any show in England that's as good. Here we have shows like John Peel's show, which is on two hours every night and where he plays a lot of demo tapes and totally unknown bands, which can be fun to listen to sometimes but also very tiring. It's not exactly what you want to hear all the time. "Sweden is in fact one of the most interesting record markets. There's so much variety on your charts. Compare that to the USA - they have 52% of the world's record sales and there's less variety on their charts than in a country like Sweden. OK, England has always been a good country for variety too, we've had very good bands as well as lots of crap, speculation singles made just for quick profit, but at least you don't have *just* Styx, Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, Boston... But that's all they have." ** Both your latest solo albums are rather complicated in terms of arrangements and recording techniques. How long did it take to record them? "It's not that it would take many days to record them, but rather that I do it over such a long period of time. I worked on 'Immunity' now and then over about nine months, never more than four or five days at a time. That's just about what I can handle when I work on my own, along with just Stephen Tayler, my engineer. Then I try to do something dif- ferent for a couple of weeks, work with some other artist or just take those days off. When I get back I can listen to the work of the previ- ous five days with new ears, maybe lose some details or improve on others. All in all 'Immunity' didn't take more than about six weeks, studio time. 'Waving Not Drowning' about as much. But then, if I had done it continually it would of course have taken much longer." ** Your songs are often built upon many layers of sounds and effects. Does the basic idea usually work the way you thought it would or does it happen a lot that you have to start again with the overdubs because you got something wrong? "The difference between the way I work and the way others work is that most of the time, when you're working with a multi-track machine, you fill all the tracks up with stuff you think sound good and can be useful, and then wait until the mixing with making your mind up about which instruments to keep, and how you want to decorate and change their sound with effects and echoes and the like. I don't record that way. Every overdub I do has all mixing effects on it, in most cases also echo and sustain, so with the next overdub I have to take not only the earlier musical parts into consideration, but also the sound that's already on the tape. "People say that this limits your choices, and that's exactly the point. Because when you work with more experimental music, such as mine, there are 101 ways of doing every little detail, and no way is right or wrong. Possibly there is one conventional way and a number of exceptional ways, and then I'm always more interested in the exceptional ways, as I said. And when you get into that area you can get lost so quickly, unless you make a sound by listening to it, say 'this feels good, tape it', and do that. Irrevocably. "I try to get myself into a mood where I don't hesitate about deci- sions. And then it helps to record the idea when it's at its freshest and most spontaneous. So if a sound feels right, I don't work on it. I don't keep asking myself: 'how can I do this better?' but I record it as soon as it sounds good. If I didn't use that method it would take ages to make the kind of records I do. "I think people like Yes and Fleetwood Mac prove I'm on the right track - two years to make an album! And everything they do is putting off decisions, getting so many alternatives that when it's time to mix they don't have a clue as to what's going on. When we mix our songs all effects and level adjustments are already recorded. It's only a question of sliding 24 faders and trying to get some kind of balance. "The entire mixing of 'Immunity' was done in 3 1/2 days, and of that we spent a little more than a day on one song, 'Make A Wish', which was very tricky because it had to be mixed in pieces. No one ever believes me when I say that practically the whole album was mixed in 3 1/2 days, but everything is prepared before I get to the mix, plus I've probably done quite a bit of pre-mixing and level adjusting during the recording. "That way you get a clearer picture all the time of what the final result will sound like, while at the same time mixing is practically reduced to getting all faders to a nice and even line and then make smaller adjustments where it's needed." ** That's a rather unusual way to work. "It is, and it's often hard to convince people of the advantages. But it's coming, and several of the artists I've produced recently have thought it works well. It's the same with percussion. On my own albums I've always tried to record a really ambient drum sound with lots of room timbre from the beginning, but so far none of the other artists I have worked with have dared to do it. We always use at least two channels for the close-range drum sound and two channels with the room timbre, because it's so hard getting someone to decide the right propor- tions. "When you record the background and have the drums on high with a lot of room timbre people always get so shocked. 'You can't hear anything but the drums', they say. 'Oh yeah, right now you can't', I answer, because I know that when the overdubs are there and I pull the drums and the ambi- ence to the same level they're much more happy, because now the drums help it sound large and roomy and good. "When I first started using ambient drum sound four or five years ago people used to get quite upset; at the time it was dry, clean drums that counted and when we recorded it sounded as if someone stood in the middle of a room, which it was. But it's starting to go the other way now, so I guess I'll have to go back to 'dry' drums." ** One of the most distinct features of your albums is that you're trying to get away from normal percussion sounds and normal drumming. "I'm trying to get away from everything normal, I hope. There are always enough people doing normal stuff. It's not a question of being abnormal or something like that, but of trying to find new ways to get different effects. It's so easy to think that just because a song needs 'boom-boom-pah-boom-boom-boom-pah", you have to let a drummer play it. The only thing you have done is to hum two sounds, one lower and one higher, in a certain rhythm. So why not take any sounds and get that effect? "I don't mean that the good old bass and snare drums aren't of use, but if the song sort of begs for something more original, why not try something else? There are lots of different instruments you can play rhythm parts on. "We have built a drum kit for Trevor Morais, who plays in my live band, and it has some conventional drums in it but also lots of other things to hit. It's a combination of acoustic and electric percussion, both Simmons drums and different pads that either trigger a Kepex (noisegate) that lets through a sound from a tape loop, or trigger a sound from a digital memory. "On 'Waving Not Drowning' the drums were largely played by storing real, but ambient and fairly heavily overdubbed drum sounds in a digital echo and then letting them out by pressing a little button. You control- led a really large sound with a really small button, so it was very fun to play with. You can do something similar now with the Linn drum machine, but there you have to use their sounds or send a tape with your own to the USA. It seems a bit complicated if you would suddenly want to change the sound." ** What is the first instrument you usually record? Do you start with some kind of clicktrack or metronome? "Most songs actually started for acoustic piano. In the new album it will be a bit different, I've got a thousand ideas flying through my head right now, but I've mainly built the songs around the piano because it's the only instrument I compose on. "I want a song to have an intrinsic value as a composition, and if I know I can play a thing to Jeanette on that old piano over there in the corner and we both like it, it's a song with a raison d'etre and not something that's going to be dependent on effects and studio overdubs. It's so easy getting on the wrong track when you work with multi-track and think you can build a song in the studio without having decent material. "So the most common base for my songs is in fact piano, a small, simple drum box or a metronome and vocals. The vocals are usually the first part recorded that's going to be used in the finished mix. Both the piano and the drum box will surely be replaced, but I try to keep the vocal track so I can make the overdubs around it. It contains the lyrics and the whole idea of the song, and so it's important to me that the instrumentation doesn't get in the way or, if it does, that it's conscious, to get a certain effect." ** Are the arrangements ready when you go into the studio? "Lots of people ask me that, but it's hard to give a precise answer. It's about 50/50. The lyrics are always ready before I start recording, and so I have the main idea for the song and the mood I want to create. Usually I also have 50% of how I'm going to set about it to get what I want thought out. But I wouldn't want to be more prepared than that. I would think I limited my choices and removed the spontaneous ideas that come from daily inspiration, which will hopefully come. "Often I come to the studio in the morning, listen to what I did the night before and discover that that sounded a lot better than I thought last night, so why don't I try this and that... So it's a question of knowing what results you want to have, but not tying yourself up too hard but letting the mood in the studio contribute something as well." ** How much of your daily inspiration comes from your engineer? "I have a fantastic relationship with Stephen Tayler, he is really invaluable to me. Of course he has lots of own, good ideas, but the best thing by far about him is that he thinks in the same way as me, only more practically. "When we're working in the studio I often sit and think out loud until I've come up with the best idea. So I sit and mumble 'maybe you should connect this thing to that and then that to this box, or, after all...' and Stephen listens and starts fiddling with the buttons. After five minutes I've come up with a solution and tell him 'I think I know', and then he's already drawn the same conclusion - and hooked everything up so it works! Half of him listens to me, while the other half thinks 'yes, that's good, but what he forgets is that...', and then he builds on those ideas. "When I'm recording with some other engineer and am standing on the studio floor I'm always running into the control booth to listen, but with Steve it's gone so far I don't care about that. I leave recording the sounds entirely to him, and I know he'll make it sound not only the way I though, but probably even better, because he doesn't just care about the sound itself but he also understands why I want a special sound. "And then he's always calm, he doesn't get a brain hemorrhage if you suddenly say you want to record a solo with the sound of a crying baby. He just gets to it, connecting all the machines and making sure it works, no matter how crazy the ideas are." ** Precisely this, using natural sounds and taming them, is typically Rupert Hine, I think. Like that solo with the crying baby or the musical thunderstorm behind "Dark Windows". You call it "processed sound", but how does it work? "'Processed sound' is a rather vague description but I can't think of anything better to call it. It's something we're seeing a lot more of now than when I started using it on 'Immunity' two years ago. At that time there wasn't a lot of people who knew how to control natural sounds, except for a couple of people who were really actively resear- ching this area. One of them was Peter Gabriel, who was working with the Fairlight, another was Larry Fast, who works with Peter. Then there were some people who worked for Emu Systems in the USA. And I who was constructing my own system in my studio. "It consisted of three harmonizers, two of which were really high- class AMS digital echoes with harmonizer cards and 20 kHz bandwidth, and one of the new Eventide models. Then we had a keyboard which didn't produce any sound in itself, but just produced control voltages that could control our harmonizers. You stored a sound in the digital memory of the harmoniz- er and then you could recall it with whatever pitch you wanted by play- ing on the keyboard. "In the AMS delays you could sound as long as 1.6 seconds, but if you wanted longer tones you could put a loop somewhere in the sound and let that section of the sound repeat again and again as long as you kept the key down. A year ago there came an instrument which does all this with- out all this fuss with a lot of different boxes and connections - the Emulator. And I do in fact have an Emulator now. "It's very easy to work with and not hard to understand, so I'm con- vinced that this will spread and become very common. So I guess I'll have to stop being a snob and call it 'processed sound', since it's a technique anyone can use now." ** Another rather characteristic production detail on your albums is that you often dub the vocals with some strange synth part. "Yes, it's one of my little favourite tricks. The main reason is this little habit I have of always writing the melody into the piano part. I never write 'just the comp', so to speak, but the vocal part is somewhere in what I play on the piano. When I later break down the piano part and split it in different sounds, there's always something playing the actual melody along with the vocals. "Besides, when I sing I'm always split between conveying the atmos- phere of the lyric and conveying the melody as clearly as possible, and then I think it's easier if the melody isn't just the responsibil- ity of the vocal. You can feel a bit more free if you know there's a melody part that's behind the vocal all the time." ** On the cover of "Immunity" it says you use a Roland P-V synthesizer. Did you use that too to dub the vocal part? "Well... The thing that interests me the most about P-V synths is that they're unreliable. The little circuits that's in them and that's supposed to read the pitch of what you feed into it isn't very precise, and you can use that to get some fun effects. I have made rhythmic backgrounds with it, among other things, by rapping objects against a table, a glass and some other everyday things, and then feeding the sound through the P-V synth. "Some sounds, like the glass, have a fairly fixed pitch and the synth can handle those, but some others make the circuits go bananas and sweep up and down, desperately trying to find some suitable frequency. It gives a very unusual and 'living' effect. On 'Eleven Faces' I fed a little rhythm box through the P-V sytnh and got an interesting rhythmic back- ground, which I could then fill out with digital bass and snare drums." ** Have you used digital synths a lot? "Not very much on 'Immunity'. On 'Waving Not Drowning' I worked with the Synclavier on a song to get a kind of orchestral backing, which it does very well. And the last six months I've been working with a lot with the PPG, which I think is a fantastic synth, especially bearing the price in mind. For 35,000 [SEK, i.e., say, somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000 at the time] you get a fantastic set of opportunities. So I've started to advise everyone who asks me about what synthesizer to buy to get a PPG if they want some good value for their money. And on Chris DeBurgh's new album, which I've produced, there's only PPG and Synclavier. The same with The Fixx' album. "Of course there are digital synths with lots more possibilites than the PPG, but it's dubious if you can use them to the full without spend- ing an incredible lot of time. If I had two years to lock myself in and just toy a record into existence, I would probably buy a Fairlight. But if you don't have a lot of time I don't think you'll get very much out of them. "On the other hand I still love the old Minimoog. If you want a more synthetic sound it's still the softest and the most musical. Everybody says it's the filters that do it, but I think it's the oscil- lators. The basic sound in the Minimoog is the most beautiful. Synth- esizers I'm not very fond of are Korgs, OB-X's and Rolands and all the others that are built to really sound synthetic. I prefer my sounds to have some more life." ** Do you have any special tricks when you record to make the synths sound more alive? "Something I've done often is to play the synth sounds through a speaker in the studio and put a mike in the other end of the room to get some natural room timbre in the sound. It's a great temptation with synths to just plug them into the mixing desk and go, but I think you have to put as much time into creating ambience for the synthesizer sounds as you would when miking up acoustic instruments. "Then I have a little effects box that Roland makes and that's called 'Dimension D'. It's a kind of chorus effect but without floating and it spreads the sound very well in stereo. It's very good for synths and also for grand piano and guitars." ** When you listen to other records you've produced the more unusual ideas from the solo albums aren't very much in evidence. Do you save ideas you can't or don't dare to use with other artists and use them on your own productions? "It's very probable. It's not entirely conscious, but of course you gather ideas that would have been too far out for some other artist or band. The last two years, however, it's happened more and more often that people have asked me to produce their records because they like 'Immunity' and/or 'Waving Not Drowning', and then they have asked if I don't think you can use some of my ideas on their music, even though their styles have often been fundamentally different from what I'm doing." ** Despite the production work on your albums being very adventurous, the songs themselves are always rather conventionally built. Is it a conscious choice to balance the oddities in sounds and arrangements, so to speak? "That's right. Deep inside I think I would rather stop using those conventions too, because there are only about half a dozen forms that a pop song can take, and often my songs would be better off by not having any kind of repetition in them but only be a long, continous story. But then you're entering areas so far used almost exclusively by classical music, and it's easy scaring people off with that, not to mention record companies - I actually think that people in general are prepared to go much further when it comes to listening to strange stuff than what the record companies think. "You put some people off already by not using conventional instru- ments, you put them off by not singing as openly and melodiously as possible, you put some off by the songs having such a dark, heavy atmos- phere... so you're already working against the audience a bit, and the formal convention of a pop song is the one I follow the easiest, because it works and because I like listening to it myself. But sure, it has happened that I have wanted to do something more original but changed my mind and said: 'I guess I shouldn't... I'd better add a chorus after all'." ** How have the record company reacted to your stuff? "They have actually been very good, but it's thanks to us putting a great deal of thought into what record company to approach with a project like this. Since I produced about 45 albums during the 70's, I had a fairly good experience of most record companies, enough to know which ones were right out, and if I say it includes most major companies I don't have to be more concrete than that. Just name all the known companies and think for yourself. "The only major I could imagine working with was A&M, so it was a choice between them and some of the smaller, independent English compa- nies. In the end I chose A&M, because they have the same resources as the larger combines, while being more like a family business and working in a completely different and much more intimate way. There they don't have all these hundreds of strictly dressed directors sitting at a long table and making completely moronic decisions without any feelings for what they're doing. "A&M don't have a lot of artists, but I like or can respect all of them because they're all good at what they're doing, be it Police, Squeeze, Supertramp... even Elkie Brooks. And they really work with all their artists in a very long-term way." ** It's your wife Jeanette who writes all lyrics. Do you have any plan for your solo albums, some kind of clear thread you try to follow? "We don't have any grand plan, but of course there are a lot of connections between the albums. I see 'Waving Not Drowning' much as part two in a series of ideas we couldn't fit onto one album. For me it was practically like releasing a double album with two parts. The second part was not radically different from the first, but rather a continuation. "'Immunity' described a number of situations and conditions in the world that we weren't happy with, while 'Waving Not Drowning' was more personal in a way that became almost claustrophobic for many who heard it. The third album, for which we have just started writing the mater- ial, will be much more positive. "It's a logical continuation of the first two, but the tone will be rather exultant and happy. It's about recognising the problems of the world, not resigning but getting up and dealing with them. It's so easy to say 'What can I do alone? The problems are too great, there's noth- ing to do'. "But there's one thing you can always do, and that's to take control of yourself and make you a better man both to yourself and to others. It's the classical hippy philosophy if you like, that the solution must come from within every man and grow outwards. And this album will point at different ways of rising above apathy and starting to act, accomplish- ing things, and that gives a very positive fundamental feeling. I think many people will get a big kick out of listening to it, even if some who have learnt to appreciate the darker, more melancholy moods on the ear- lier albums might be disappointed..." ** Is there anything special you'd like to say to those who are inter- ested in starting to experiment with synthesizers and modern recording technology? "I have actually given a series of lectures to English university students about record production and digital synthesizers and all that, and something that's become very important for me to say is this: It's so easy to get scared off by all the new technology we have now - digital recording, digital synthesizers where 50,000 SEK [about $10,000 in 1982?] is considered cheap for an instrument, a million different ways of let- ting a computer control your equipment... and the beginner who maybe likes some aspect of electronic music is held back, because he thinks he must have a lot of money and know a lot about electronics to be able to make that kind of music. But it's not that way at all. "On the contrary, thanks to modern technology, you can get a simple equipment for 3-4-5,000 SEK that you can get lots from. Get a simple drum box, a simple little sequencer and a small, cheap synthesizer; that's all you need. You don't have to be able to play well, the se- quencer gives you the opportunity of bringing out the ideas you have in your head anyway. Then you have all possibilites to start to exper- iment with a cassette recorder, or better still, if you can afford it, with a Porta studio or something like that, and actually make record- ings that sound good and in many cases can be released as a record. "The important thing, you see, is not technology, neither equipment nor playing technique, but the ideas you have. People scowl at rhythm boxes and sequencers and say that anyone can sit there and push buttons and it still sounds like they can play, and I answer 'That's great!' For the interesting part is not how you convey your ideas, I'm not int- erested in whether or not you're a good keyboard player. "On the other hand I would like to ask everyone who wants to start playing what they want to express, what ideas they have to convery. If they reply that they don't know yet, they just want to play, I say 'Forget it!' But if there is someone who really wants to say something, who's sitting at home and really wants to communicate; that's someone I'm interested in, someone I want to help. And those are the people who now have the opportunity to start making the music they want to hear for a lot less money than they think." ***** - "Eldorado" was a very long-lived radio show in Sweden. It started in the late 70's and wasn't put to sleep until 1993. The host, Kjell Alinge, has another show now, but I don't remember its name. I never listened to "Eldorado" either. I'm sorry if I don't know the English equivalent of all technical terms that appear in this interview - if I've translated anything wrong, I apologize. I have used the term "room timbre" to translate "rumsklang", i.e. the sound of the room around the instrument, the echo of the walls and such. The kind of sound you can get digitally nowadays with some toy for your stereo.