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