sequencer. You can actually see what you’re doing! The trigger pads are so tiny you have to play with subtlety and nuance!”
Music and More DRM-1
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The Magnetic Fields | In The Studio With
Poly-800, which is technically a digital synth – although it sounds pretty messy by today’s standards. In order to make the sounds change all the time, even though most of them are samples, I did what you can do with the S-50 that you can’t do with most samplers, which is to send the same note twice at the same time, which makes each note comb filter slightly differently. Because the motherboard can’t actually play them at exactly the same time, it plays them a fraction of a second apart, so that’s one strategy to make digital sounds different from each other.”
You have an amazing studio, but we assume that as a songwriter, the kit doesn’t necessarily lead the writing process as much as the strength of the songs themselves…
“Absolutely, and I don’t think of myself as a good cover artist at all. I haven’t tried in several years because I think that every time I do a cover I don’t do it justice, whereas when I do my own songs, not doing them justice is the whole point. I write pretty conventional songs in a musical way, and then I subvert them in the studio, which I pretty much have to do anyway because my voice is not a pop instrument at all – it’s the same as my speaking voice.”
But it’s a very unique-sounding vocal – you wouldn’t necessarily want to change that by taking singing lessons…
“I have taken singing lessons [laughs]. It’s always called ‘an untrained voice’, but it’s actually not an untrained voice. Usually on Magnetic Fields albums, I have more than one lead vocalist. I’ve had Shirley Simms doing co-lead vocals for the last 11 years, but for this album it didn’t seem appropriate.”
Does the writing process usually begin with acoustic instrumentation?
“No, I never write with instruments. I sit around in bars with a notebook. I write down lyrics, but I expect to remember the music, which is why I write catchy songs – if they’re not catchy, I can’t remember them. I think if I used really complex chording, I would probably need an instrument to hear it on, but because I usually don’t, I go straight from a click track to a bassline and typically have much of the arrangement in my head. Where would you begin writing the arrangement if you didn’t have it in your head?”
It’s hard to compute being able to do that, unless you’re a songwriter of course…
“Yes – but most people can do lots of things that I can’t do. Most people can cook and I can’t cook at all. Last night I made myself pasta and it was horrible!”
You have an AdrenaLinn drum machine.
That was that made by Roger Linn who made the famous Linn Drum...
“It’s a very small contribution to the Linn Drum line. It has Linn Drum sounds on it, but can do thousands of things. It’s completely
counter-“An echo maker where the modulation is the point – as in dub. Makes your piano sound like it’s bobbing in the ocean and your drums sound like a washing machine.”
Snazzy FX Wow and Flutter
you discover its gigantic range of possibilities.” keyboards that might be overrepresented
In The Studio With | The Magnetic Fields
intuitive and can make your guitar sound like a sequencer. It’s sort of a guitar-pedal and a rhythm unit. I also have a Rhythm Ace drum machine, which I believe is actually what turned into Roland’s famous CompuRhythm series, and the Tempest Drum Machine, which is an odd beast because I haven’t actually been able to use it in the ways that I would’ve liked. For some reason, they released the software before it was ready and never updated it,
so it absolutely cannot play in any meter except 4/4… and it can’t even play in swing time! And yet it’s got all these lovely synths on it; you can compress and distort different notes and make the filters wobble, which is fun, but it’s a profoundly flawed instrument.”
What other drum boxes do you like using?
“There’s something called the DRM-1, which has been made under another the name to the one I have, which is Music and More. It’s got eight drum
sounds and no sequencer, but there’s a little button for each drum, and each one has eight parameters including resonance, volume and envelope so you can see what you’re doing. It has no memory, so what you’re looking at is what you’re hearing. It’s a great way of coming up with combinations of drum sounds. It’s got a MIDI input, so you can sequence it if you like, and by today’s standards it’s kind of huge.”
You have some particularly unusual gear, what can you tell us about the Congost Xylomatic?
“It’s Hungarian – a kind of a music box that you can program. It’s got a little rotating wheel with spokes that make you able to play it like a little xylophone mechanically. It’s not very controllable, so you can’t make it sound professional – only toy-like, like a badly played glockenspiel. I’m a pretty bad glockenspiel player myself, but I can’t speed up or slow down like the Congost Xylomatic. You can hear it best on the introduction to the track Eye Contact.”
The Suzuki Omnichord and Casio VL-Tone look like interesting ‘toys’ too
“The Suzuki was designed as a sort of electronic autoharp. It has a little section where you can strum it with a guitar pick. It’s probably plastic, and it’s ribbed so it has some resistance to it. It also has a rhythm unit and a sequencer, but of course it never really sounds like an autoharp and no listener would be fooled.
“Everyone had The Casio VL-Tone in 1983; it was made famous by the German group Trio with their hit single Da Da Da. That song is entirely VL-Tone in the intro, and the snare drum plays along with it.
We were going to use it on tour before we realised it’s about 30 cents sharp – I have no idea how, as digital synthesisers have no business changing their pitch.”
Can you describe the Andes Melodica, a mini keyboard that you blow into?
“Yes – it’s a lot of fun. It’s not what everyone would call a melodica; it’s really a keyboard recorder. It’s actually wooden on the inside rather than metal, so it sounds like a recorder playing, but when you hit a second note it sounds like two… except it suddenly goes flat, so playing it in tune is extremely difficult. Basically, it’s really great at sounding like a group of children playing a recorder.”
And how do you bring it all together on the computer? What’s your DAW of choice?
“I use Pro Tools with some plug-ins. I have the Waves Diamond Collection and a few others – the same ones as Thomas Bartlett so I can hear what he’s hearing. In the ’80s I had Performer, so I naturally moved to Digital Performer when that came out, but my engineer made me switch to Pro Tools because he was familiar with it. It was a really dumb thing to do, and I’ve regretted it ever since, because there’s essentially no sequencing ability in Pro Tools.
“My next studio activity is to get Digital Performer back and run both of them, and if I can’t, I might dig out my previous computer now that it’s been fixed and use them simultaneously. It’s about control – as far as I know, Ableton and Cubase are oriented to particular kinds of music, but Performer is not. But I haven’t actually tried either of them; I’m only judging by who uses them.”
Do you use the software tools mainly for sequencing or the plug-ins to trigger ideas?
“Well I don’t have any digital instruments. If Reason is on my computer, I’m unaware of it. I think I tried them once but they sounded too cheesy for me, and they weren’t controllable and not easy to use with all my outboard gear.”
It has no memory, so what you’re looking at is what you’re hearing. It’s a great way of coming up with drum sounds
want to know more?
50 Song Memoir is out now on Nonesuch Records.
The Magnetic Fields are on tour in the USA from mid-April.
www.nonesuch.com
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The Magnetic Fields | In The Studio With
“Do not even try to mix vocals without a Space Echo. I usually use two passes of it, sometimes three.”
four-band EQ and, , most importantly for home recording, a nice big VU meter with a lightbulb.”
settings, telephone voices, evil dwarves… I wish I had two of them.”
deliciously unrealistic, . more like a box spring than a cave.”
“I also have the VP-330, which is the keyboard version.
But this has 11 bands of formant controls for actual intelligibility.
Awesome on drums.”
Roland Space Echo/Chorus Echo
Avalon VT-737SP
Pultec Filter HLF 3C
Orban Dual Spring Reverb Roland SVC-350 Vocoder