Divine 10 year compilation Northern Soul/ Funk/Beats

New wave ambient demo

https://youtu.be/QzsvZHRBz14

Campfire Headphase Production Techniques Part 2

This is part 2  on The Campfire Headphase Production Techniques.

This one is going to concentrate on Dayvan Cowboy, a track which i think is closer in spirit to My Bloody Valentine than anything BoC have done before or since.

I hinted in my last post at the influence MBV have had on BoC and BoC have also revealed them as an influence on their work.

In recent interviews last year,BoC also stated that they don't really listen to electronic music for inspiration but are more inclined to listen to a wide range of genres far away from the genre that they themselves operate in.

Here are a couple of quotes from BoC on their influences

Apart from these soundtracks, you also name drop Joni Mitchell and the Incredible String Band when it comes to instrumentation. What was so special about their musical aproach?

"Much of the music we like is not electronic, although we've probably been influenced by Devo. We love acoustic music on old recordings because they tend to have natural qualities such as tape compression and distortion. But I think Joni Mitchell's voice is so beautiful it almost sounds synthesised, so maybe there's the connection. The Incredible String Band still sound unusual today, because they changed the arrangement for every song, and their own influences were far and wide apart, and they always wrote emotional melodies which were a bit unusual, you know, with melodies which took unexpected twists. A unique band."

What else do you consider important musical influences, past and present?

"Devo, Walter/Wendy Carlos, DAF, television themes, corporate jingles from TV and film, Jeff Wayne, Julian Cope,My Bloody Valentine, 80's pop music."

For Dayvan Cowboy, The guitar part is the signature of the whole song and holds everything together.This shows that BoC were focusing on more traditional ideas such as traditional song arrangement.

The opening part of the track is typical BoC.The atmosphere is a hazy half heard half imagined melody,suggesting the more definitive melody that kicks in when the main guitar part kicks in.

The sounds in the intro are heavy on the reverb and sound really distant.The Equalisation on this part is interesting as most of the low end is filtered out as is the high end.All the sound is concentrated in the mid frequencies,similar to the telephone effect.The way BoC use reverb and EQ is also interesting.

When most producers use EQ ,they search for the resonant frequency and then cut it.From what i can hear in this intro,BoC tend to find the resonant frequency(usually stands out like a sore thumb,ie whistling type sounds) and then mush the sound using reverb.

This brings out the resonant tones and uses them to enhance the sound creating notes ,tones and drones within the patchwork of the music.It all adds to a wall of sound effect where the sounds start to become indistinct from each other but BoC do it so well that the sounds don't end up being a mush.

The track really kicks in when the guitar part come in. The part is simple but in typical BoC fashion it has been played by them into the sampler.The guitar part may be in a drop D tuning which is ideal for extra drones and character.

There seems to be 2 guitar parts going on.The main part is a simple 4 chord progression ( try A C G D), which tends to pop up in different forms in other BoC tracks, Alpha Omega being an example.

The other guitar part stays on the one chord and is a clear sample but adds to the feel of the track by creating an obvious sample to a backdrop of a fairly conventional chord progression.

The beauty of the guitar sounds is in the way that BoC degrade the sound instead of the boring way in which most producers treat acoustic instruments(as if acoustic instruments are holy and must be preserved in all their natural beauty or else).

Here's a quote from one of the BoC guys on their philosophy behind this.

   Mike: We're not huge fans of electronica specifically. Technology has made it so easy for anyone to get into producing music, especially electronic music, that the whole electronica scene has been diluted. It's allowing a lot of mediocre music to be released.'

 "On this album it's interesting," says Sandison, "because we are really overtly playing riffs on guitars, and although we've aged it and made it more like it's been recorded 25 years ago or something, with each track that we've used the guitars on, we've put things in it which are impossible on a 1970s record. Sometimes we'll construct an entire song out of samples that we'll make, so we'll maybe take instruments and play parts or play notes and we'll make entire spans of notes out of sounds we really like, and then play them in ways that the original instrument couldn't have played. You could take a span of lots of notes on the guitar, and then you would play chords on t"hat guitar by hitting them all at once, in a way that a real guitar could never be played. And then of course we would do a lot of other things to the guitar to really tweak it and make it sound very, very gnarly and damaged.

This way of degrading acoustic instruments and creating a new type of sound from them is inspiring and inventive.

I think the way they treat the guitars on Dayvan Cowboy is very similar to how they may have done it on Chromakey Dreamcoat (check my previous post for this).

 

In my next post, i'll take a look at how BoC create some of their beats.It's a part of their sound that often gets overlooked but they really install great character into their beats so i'll do that.

Cheers for now Papas St Germain

sampledelicsounds.com

Campfire Headphase Boards Of Canada   Production Techniques     By Papas St Germain

This latest post concentrates on some of the production techniques used by Boards of Canada on the Campfire Headphase.The sounds on this record are a massive influence on all my sample packs released under the Papas St Germain moniker.

I'll take a look at some of the individual sounds on the album and dissect them.I'm going to do this over a few posts.

Overall, this album seeems to divide opinion amongst BoC fans.

They used more traditional instrumentation on this album but the sounds are infused with the same character as their previous releases.Personally, i think it's their most fully realised record with the most interesting sounds,song structures and melodies.This album marries digital and analogue technology very effectively.

Chromeakey Dreamcoat

One of the main parts to this track, is the repeating guitar line which seems to be sourced from an acoustic guitar sample played by BoC.

The part has been put into a sampler and judging by a recent interview with BoC it is likely to be an old hardware Akai S series sampler.Below is an excerpt from a question asked by fellow producer Jon Hopkins.

http://www.twoism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11104

This the link to the blog at BoC pages where lots of other artists ask BoC questions.The paragraph below shows the answer to the Jon Hopkins question.


JON HOPKINS
Is there an instrument that has always given you inspiration and what is your relationship with it?

MS : Good question. Probably the Akai sampler. I keep going back to my old Akai. We use them more like synthesizers than samplers we record our own instrumental parts on it and then manipulate them. It’s not really an instrument in the sense that it doesn’t have it’s own sound, it's just a tool. I love the old stuff, the memories they hold and the efforts of memory they require. Also, they look like stuff in Soviet hospitals, which encourages us to do depressing music.

These samplers do have a unique quality and in the earlier samplers the 8 bit setting could be used and often had to be used to free up memory.This creates a pleasing  degraded quality to the sound.

If you listen carefully to each pass of the riff, there is a degradation in sound from the previous riff.
This happens 3 times and then repeats itself,starting from fairly high fidelity to lo fi by the 3rd repeat.

There are various ways which this may have been done

• Reducing the bit rate on the sampler for each loop and then putting them in sequence
• Using some tape processing techniques where the sounds are re recorded a number of times to tape to degrade the sound,you can hear a slight tape warble in the sound by the 3rd pass
• Using EQ and filters to take more high end frequencies out of the sound each time ,lessening the clarity and creating a muddy sound

The interesting part of this way of production is that although BoC are using real instruments,they aren't trying to preserve the quality of the recording or playing.Quite the opposite.

They are creating a specific looped,degraded quality deliberately and the sound is totally unique to them.

This opens up the possibilities of what can be achieved with samplers in general.

Compare a lot of BoC's work on this album with some of the philosophies that MBV had embraced when they recorded Loveless.

LINKS

http://ambientguitarsvol3.blogspot.co.uk/

sampledelicsounds.com

Only Shallow Part 2      My Bloody Valentine Production Techniques 

by Papas St Germain

MBV had started to get interested in some of the processes more associated with Hip-Hop and dance music productions namely sampling.

 MBV, however, were more interested in sampling their own sounds and textures and putting these sounds back into the mix. This is apparent on the start of the track, Only Shallow, where the sound has been compared to” an air-raid siren”.

 This sound that is achieved is integral to the whole track and could even be looked on as a hook in the track so it is important to understand how this was achieved.

 Again, as with the other guitars, the original recorded signal is important but the processes used to further enhance and shape the sound into what it becomes on record are equally important. Sampling an already recorded sound is an important part of the process.

The following is a quote from Kevin Shields explaining how this sound was achieved

.” We chose organic sounds, that’s why people didn’t immediately go ,that’s a keyboard, even though it is."

 Shields continues.

 “ There are multi-layered parts to some songs like the opening of only shallow, with me playing the same thing 3 or 4 times. It was the usual rock and roll bending the strings type of thing, but I had two amps facing each other with two different tremelo’s on them.”

This explanation shows how a basic guitar sound was achieved but Kevin Shields goes on to explain how this sound is sampled and added to the mix to create the unique sound on record.

” I then sampled it and put it an octave higher on the sampler. ” For us, where the sampler had a great value was that instead of having the option to play things on a keyboard based on some sounds you could find anywhere, we’d sample our own feedback,which instead of just being one tone , could be a tone having bends and quirks in it.”

This way of working,was unique for a guitar band at this time and probably still is but it shows some of the ideas that shaped MBV’S philosophy behind making records and the track only shallow in particular.

 The basic guitar recordings have a distinct sound due to the techniques used in the guitar playing and this allied to the sampling of guitar and putting this in the mix creates a totally unique and distinctive sound.

The vocals on the track are unusual on this track in the way that they are placed in the mix. Instead of being pushed to the fore front of the mix, they are submerged in the mix and are really slightly lower than the level of the guitars.

 It is also quite obvious that the vocals are multitracked and although this is standard in a lot of productions, in the case of MBV there are several tracks of the same vocals with maybe a couple pushed up on the desk to give a bit of clarity to the vocals.

This technique creates a big vocal sound but also an overall ambience to the whole sound which adds to the wall of sound effect.

 Kevin Shields explains the technique.

” We’d take one vocal track that I liked and ever so slightly edge it forward so that the articulation’s coming from that. But then the sound and the whole thickness of it’s coming from ten or fifteen vocals “.

This is a deliberate ploy by Kevin Shields who had a clear idea of how the vocals should sit within the overall sound with the vocals sitting within the track as part of an overall cohesive sound.

 There doesn’t appear to be much separation between instruments at all.

 The bass guitar in the track follows what the guitars are doing and it’s purpose is to provide another texture in the track but it’s presence adds to the feel of the song rather than being a standout element . The whole track is heavily compressed which means that the volume of the track is fairly constant with very little in the way of dynamics even though there is a loud part to the song.

The guitars in particular are heavily compressed at source sound and thereafter. This compression also helps the different elements blend together to create a cohesive wall of sound.

The purpose of this method of mixing the separate elements ,is to create a wall of sound. This technique was popular in the 60’s with producer Phil Spector and also Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

 Kevin Shields goes on to explain his ideas behind what he was trying to achieve.

” Basically the art of record making is to create something that sounds the same no matter where you hear it. Most people make records so that they sound the same everywhere but to achieve that, you have to work with a limited frequency range. I wanted to make records that sound really different, the tiny speakers off a computer, or hearing it in a club, it’s still basically what I wanted, which is that the guitar is prominent. It was important to always have the guitars louder than the vocals. It’s largely just the fact that the vocals have a place in the music in a frequency sense and they don’t stick out more than some other sounds”.

It is this idea of a cohesive wall of sound  that has it’s individual elements separated by their frequency ranges which makes this track fairly unique in modern record making and mixing. There is very little left and right stereo separation in the track and it is basically in mono. The main guitars on only shallow are in the middle of the stereo image along with the drums vocals and the “air raid siren” guitar sound also.

This is quite unusual for a rock record in modern times as there is usually a lot of left and right stereo separation to create a wide stereo image. In this case however, everything is in mono apart from the rythmn guitars in the main loud part of the track which seem to be slightly panned but not much.

 Any separation in the track is actually achieved through equalisation and also reverb in order to place the various elements in the mix.

Equalisation in particular, is the main way in which Kevin Shields wanted to layer the individual parts within the mix. The intention , is to give each element of the track a frequency range which it sits in so that you know the presence of the part but it doesn’t immediately stand out or become obvious.

As  hinted at before , the vocals are treated as another sound rather than the lead or main focus for the track so they operate at a mid frequency that sits well within the mix and adds to the whole sound.

 Kevin Shields explains his intentions on how he wanted to mix in general and how his ideas relate to his admiration of 60’s producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson.

 “ Everything I did is mostly mono- there’s no set area of separation. The bigness just comes from the depth of perception”, he continues” Pet sounds and Phil Spector’s productions were mono as well- it’s more the balance of frequencies that creates a sense of depth than stereo separation.

The drums on Only Shallow , are fairly submerged in the mix and are really not a priority in the way they are treated on the track. With so much going on in the mix, they really just keep a simple rhythm and hold the tempo which works within the mix.

The drummer plays on only shallow but was unable to play on the rest of Loveless so his parts had to be programmed.

 This shows that drums were fairly low on Shield’s list of priorities in making a great record at this time.” We had lost the Who-type influence and were going for something more simplistic, more pure.”

Overall, there were a lot of different studios and engineers used for the making of the Loveless album of which Only Shallow is the opening track. Kevin Shields insists that of all the engineers credited on the album (18 in all), only 3 or 4 made significant contribution to the final product with the main engineer being Alan Moulder ( whom Shields was full of praise for) and significant help from Guy Fixsen and Anjali Dutt.

            The role of Alan Moulder in his role of mix engineer on this track was to make sure that any effects processing added to individual recorded tracks didn’t adversely affect how that track fitted into the final mix. Moulder would also ensure that there is a fairly equal balance of frequencies within the final mix and that there are no obvious clashes of certain frequencies in the final mix.  As mixing engineer, Alan Moulder would also have ensured that the balance in levels between the recorded elements of the song was such , that no individual elements of the final mix stood out too obviously and that all the individual parts of Only Shallow, blended together as a whole. 

 It seems that most of the work on the record was done when Alan Moulder was engineering, with Shields calling the shots on production. There were numerous studios used for recording and mixing the record but the band encountered various technical glitches in these studios so their time in many of them was unproductive. The bands most productive work , took place at Trident 2, Falconer studios in Chalk farm, The Stone Room for mixing work ,Blackwing studios and Protocol studios in Holloway.


The track Only Shallow is a good example of a conventional guitar band stretching themselves and creating a type of music that hadn’t been done in this way  before. By using a mixture of unusual playing techniques, modern sampling, multi-layering of vocals and feedback and almost completely ignoring the idea of modern stereo separation, MBV  created a very unique sound which has gone on to be very influential on the alternative music scene ever since.

Next post in 2 weeks time will take a look at some of the production techniques used by Boards of Canada on The Campfire Headphase.

Links

sampledelicsounds.com

Ambient Guitars Vol 3 Inspirations and Influence: Only Shallow My Bloody Valentine Productio...

Ambient Guitars Vol 3 Inspirations and Influence: Only Shallow         My Bloody Valentine Productio...: Only Shallow         My Bloody Valentine Production In Depth         PART 1 BAND: My Bloody Valentine Album: Loveless Track: Only Sh...