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From the Top Down, Pt. 1
On a clear, cool late night’s drive home from a performance in Temecula,
fellow singer-songwriter Peter Bolland and I have just begun listening to
the latest Bonnie Raitt record, “Souls Alike”. Peter asks an interesting
question: “So Sven, out of all the music that’s available out there, what
was it that made you choose this CD?” I said “Well, ever since her “comeback
album” (1989’s ‘Nick of Time’) she has made an unbroken string of albums as
good or better than the one before. Each time, she seems to have improved
her singing and playing. Some have had more of her originals than others,
but the songwriting bar has never lowered. The production and recording
quality especially, is always amazing.”
As if on cue, the second song “God Was in the Water” begins, and I turn it
up. A ‘Leslie’d’ guitar line accompanied by a blurry, monotone, flapping
bass and a sparse, not-quite-reggae-not-quite-funk tribal drum beat set a
shadowy, ambiguous mood. Soon, a wah-wah’d guitar joins in as Bonnie sings
the opening line, and the whole thing seems to have evolved into dark,
mysterious…water. In less than five measures, we’ve been unwittingly
transported to someplace else.
Although the album credits clearly state that this record was produced by
Bonnie Raitt, the likely culprit of this sonic hijacking would be engineer
and co-producer Tchad Blake. As I am a big fan (okay, disciple) of his work,
I know (through reading interviews with him and his longtime creative
partner, producer Mitchell Froom) that he likes to create a sonic landscape
that puts the listener someplace new. Someplace that maybe doesn’t exist in
nature, but nonetheless exists as an ideal environment for the song at hand.
Blake and Froom have done entire albums filled with these strange but
wonderful, undiscovered worlds. Great examples can be found in the Los Lobos
albums “Kiko” & “Colossal Head”, as well as Blake & Froom’s side project
with members of that band, Latin Playboys.
The first two Soul Coughing albums that Blake produced are also great
examples of this, and the evolution of this approach is wonderfully
chronicled on the first three Crowded House albums. To see where it all
started, one need only pick up Tom Waits’ watershed recording, “Swordfishtrombones”.
And if you really love what you hear in any of these recordings, you have to
check out the two Froom/Blake recordings for Suzanne Vega, “99.9F” and “Nine
Objects of Desire”. These last two probably represent the production duo at
their collective creative peak.
The previous paragraph may seem like another tangential digression, but it
actually brings us full circle. It is my belief that regardless of the
ingeniousness of Tchad Blake’s radical approach to recording and mixing,
without a great song and the skilled and empathetic playing of the musicians
involved, all of it would amount to so much muffled racket in the halls of
musical history.
In fact, a cursory glance down the Froom/Blake discography reveals perhaps
the biggest secret to their collective successes: Randy Newman, Elvis
Costello, Neil Finn and Peter Case, along with Waits & Vega will almost
certainly have their names added near the top of the list of the Pop
Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. This suggests two things: One is that the
previously described radial sonic approach is done is service of the song
and its performance. The other is that it better be a damn good song and
performance if it’s going to bear the kind of weight that these eccentric
treatments bring.
One might also infer that these productions are built from the top down,
rather than from the bottom up. In other words, they weren’t started with
beats and textures (a typical approach of modern pop and R&B records), but
treated *after* the song’s basic tracks were laid down. This is the key
element to insuring inorganic elements work in material where they would be
seemingly out of context. You’re building off of the vibe and emotional
context that’s been dictated by the song’s performance.
So how can the fledgling producer/engineer experiment with these approaches,
in the absence of great song performances?
I found a great (if unlikely) resource in the form of Big Fish Audio’s Jazz
Quartet traditional jazz construction loops ($99.95). There are 3.1 gigs of
material here, in the form of 83 “construction kits”. Three formats are
provided, 24 bit WAV files, 24 bit REX files (for use with programs like
Recycler) and 16-bit Apple loops.
The “kits” are made from loops that are broken down as bass, drums, guitar
and piano, along with an additional combo version. They are logically
organized into general folders with names like “052 Cmin”, the first number
representing the tempo and the second obviously referring to the key. Within
each such folder there are between 3 -11 different sub folders (named 01 52
Cmin, 02 52 Cmin, etc.) which hold different variations that can be utilized
for ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ sections, etc. The performances are no joke, with some
pretty damn fine playing and rock solid time keeping, in addition to the
excellent recording quality.
In use, the “loops” (I use the term loosely, as they are often 16 bars long)
fit together seamlessly and one can quickly piece together a sketch of a
jazz piece within a minute or two. Once you’ve done this using the combo
loops, you can then go about the business of replacing these with the
similarly named individual instrument loops. This is the point where I began
to have some difficulties, because as these are live jazz combo
performances, there is some leakage between the instruments, particularly
with the piano and drums. This is a “real world” issue though, and I think
makes great practice for when you’ll undoubtedly run into this situation
with your own recordings.
Going through and doing strange things to the resulting drum, piano and
guitar tracks yield such fun and informative results, I just had to
recommend this approach. Try it and see what you think.
Sven-Erik Seaholm is an award-winning independent producer with well over
200 recording credits, as well as a
singer and
songwriter. |
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