Gareth Jones
Gareth Jones was in on the ground when synthesizers began to dominate pop music. As the mixer of John Foxx’s seminal album Metamatic, he realized that an artist could truly define his sound with electronics. Then, as the co-producer of many of Depeche Mode’s greatest works, he helped to create experimental music with global chart appeal.
In this lecture at the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy, he talks about taking samplers to a scrapyard and a career that confidently bridges the gap between Einstürzende Neubauten and Erasure.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt Now we’re going to listen to some reggae music, I guess. But before we do that
I’d like you to welcome a man who was at the very center of a development that
brought so much noise to that public mainstream airwaves like probably very few
other entities. So, please welcome Mr Gareth Jones. (applause) Gareth Jones Thanks Torsten, thanks everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here and thanks for your time and
attention. Torsten Schmidt Right, let’s start with a bit of reggae here. (music: Prince Buster – “Al Capone”) Torsten Schmidt How good are your David Rodigan impressions? Gareth Jones Not very good. Torsten Schmidt I might be a little bit closer to the old bald dude with glasses, but I’m not going anywhere near it. But this man used to be a bouncer, who became a boxer, then he became an artist, then he became known as an artist called Prince Buster. Then he was immortalized by a British group called Madness. And what does that have to do with you? Gareth Jones My connection to Madness is that a very long time ago, in the late ’70s, when
I started working in studios, I recorded their first single. They came into a
little studio I was working in called Pathway in North London, which was really scummy and really dirty and smelly and tiny and old. They came in with Clive Langer producing and I recorded their first single. That’s the B-side; “The Prince” I think is the
A-side to this single. Torsten Schmidt Let’s give that a spin. (music: Madness – “The Prince” / applause) Gareth Jones Let’s clap the band and their producer. That was the first time I ever saw a
chorus echo, a Space Echo. Clive
came in with a space echo. Up until then we’d been making echoes in the studio
with two-track tape machines, like Revoxes, which were much more
limited. The thing about the Space Echo that was really cool was it had three
heads on it. So, you could get echoes that go “bum-ba-ba-bum,” which is very
hard to do with Revoxes. Because there’s a cool rhythmic relationship between
the three heads on the space echoes. A little technical aside there. But
anyway, that was a big part of the sound Clive is creating on this track, the
space echo. Torsten Schmidt What put you in the position of being actually in this studio up in Stoke
Newington, which was a pretty different neighborhood back then, I suppose? Gareth Jones I was living in Brixton, actually. I wanted to make recordings of bands,
because I loved music and I loved technology from when I was a kid and I had a
little valve tape recorder. Obviously, we heard Matias [Aguayo] talk about his early recording, loads off us have done early
recording. This guy who owned a demo studio, but very nice… somehow it
functioned, a lot of great records were made there. A guy called Mike Finesilver gave me a break. I
wrote a bunch of letters trying to get a job in a studio, and Mike gave me a
break and hired me in this studio. I didn’t really have a clue. I remember the
first time, I’d never recorded a drum kit before I was in this studio. I was
recording the drum kit and the drummer asked me to turn the snare drum up. I
didn’t know which was the snare drum. So, I was kind of, “Er, OK,” so I turned
one of them up. I can’t remember if I got that one right. It was learning by
doing. I was never a punk, I was more like a hippie freak. But what I took from punk
was the do-it-yourself thing. I was very happy to be learning from myself,
teaching myself, and learning from all the great colleagues and musicians I
was with, of course. Torsten Schmidt You had a bit of formal training prior to that, right? Gareth Jones I got a job at the radio station. See, my thing was, I went to college and then I
didn’t know what to do with my life, man. So, I decided I wanted to try
recording music, because I loved music and I was really interested in recording
technology. I didn’t know how to do it. Obviously, there were no laptops. We
had a little four-track tape recorder in the basement of the squat where I was living
in Brixton. Somehow, I managed to get a job at the BBC. In fact, my dad helped
me do that, rest in peace. He actually died a couple of weeks ago so it’s nice
to mention him. When I went in the first little studio I worked at the BBC it
was a real achievement to be able to put sound in one end of the mixing desk
and get it to come out of the speakers. So, it was very, very early days for
me. But what I got from the BBC was a lifelong love of radio – I had that
before even, because as a kid, a teenager, living in Nowheresville in England,
a lot of the really interesting music I got to hear came through the radio. We all
talk about John Peel; John Peel was
an icon for generations of music lovers. And of course, I’m a big classical
music fan as well, a lot of that came through the radio. But, also, they taught
me a little bit about microphones and mixing desks, how it’s supposed to work.
Nothing that useful for rock & roll bands or pop bands, but it gave me an
edge, so this guy Mike, who was a musician and a producer, thought, “OK, I’ll
give the guy a break. Why not? He can probably do something.” And I met him
and had a chat, so that was useful. Torsten Schmidt Talking about your hippie past… obviously tough to imagine that right now. Gareth Jones [Laughs] Thanks a lot, peace man. Torsten Schmidt Hey, I had long hair once myself, actually around the time that another band you
recorded a lot later, Inspiral Carpets, had long hair. But
even that’s millennia ago… There’s this guy, he called you a “Freudian hippie dropout…” Gareth Jones Is that John Foxx? Torsten Schmidt Yeah. Gareth Jones John Foxx was a great electronic musician, he’s done a really cool record
Recently… Interplay, with
John Foxx and The Maths. It’s a really
outstanding piece of modern electronic pop, underground pop. I’m very critical of
some of my old colleagues and I was amazed at John’s new record. So, he meant
that… I don’t know what he meant. That I was a freak, I suppose. I’ve always
been interested in psychology, psychoanalysis, and I’ve had many productive years on the
couch with a wonderful Freudian therapist. That’s perhaps another story for
another conference. Torsten Schmidt Well, we have the couch right here. Gareth Jones We have the couch, but perhaps not the therapist. Torsten Schmidt Gareth, is there something you wanted to share with us? Gareth Jones Well, I had some interesting dreams last night, Torsten [laughter]. Torsten Schmidt How did those dreams make you feel? Gareth Jones They made me feel good. Anyway… Torsten Schmidt Can you recall what was in the center of that dream? Gareth Jones Yes, but it wouldn’t be suitable to share with a web-streaming audience.
Joking aside, I didn’t write my dreams down this morning. I think dreams are a
wonderful source of inspiration for all of us. When I’m on it I try to capture
my dreams and write them down. I highly recommend having a notebook by your
bed, if you can get it together. I get the most wonderful things from dreams, lyrics, musical ideas. I often dream about work, sometimes about solutions to
problems at work, sonic problems or emotional problems. A lot of the work I do is with
bands, so there’s a lot of interactions going on, like a family, I guess.
There’s a lot of connections and cross-interactions, so it’s important to understand
the dynamic of the groups you work with. So, I’ve always been interested in
psychoanalysis and psychology. As a dropout – I had a formal education, which
was very useful for me, because I met loads of wonderful people and it helped me think. But I tried to put it on one side and do something else. So, I didn’t become
the lawyer, the doctor or the schoolteacher that my mother might have wished
me to become. So, in a sense I dropped out of the system. I felt like I had dropped out of the system. Though I didn’t
really, because I’m still using electricity and rail travel and the car and
water that comes out of the tap. But at the time I felt I’d dropped out of the
system a little bit. And I was for many years a big fan of psychedelic drugs,
so that is the hippie dropout Freudian thing. Not that I would recommend
psychedelic drugs to anyone now, for fear of the danger of litigation. Torsten Schmidt [Laughter] On that note, to multi-change the subject, did you see the
Fellini Book of Dreamsthat he wrote a couple of
years, where he wrote down all the dreams and watercolored them? Gareth Jones Did he? How beautiful. It’s a great source of inspiration, the subconscious,
isn’t it? I’m not a songwriter, but a lot of my dear friends are fantastic
songwriters and several of them have said they don’t know where the ideas come
from. Songs in some sense arrive in the songwriter’s space. That’s not to say that
work’s not important, listening to music is not important, developing your skills is not important. But to me
there is a sense that when a song arrives, it comes from somewhere. Maybe it’s
a gift from God. But it certainly comes from somewhere, so I think we need to
pay attention to our unconscious drives. Torsten Schmidt What song does your unconscious remember the most of that Metamatic album? Gareth Jones Yes, John came into this studio at Pathway. He had this idea… does anyone know
John Foxx? Torsten Schmidt We have a couple of examples here that we could play. Gareth Jones He had this idea to make a minimal electronic pop album, and following on from
one of the things Matias said this morning, it was the fourth album he’d
made; he’d done three with a band called
Ultravox, before Midge Ure became the singer. And he worked
with some of the great masters, including Conny Plank, who’s now long dead, but a fantastic German krautrock and electronic producer. Torsten Schmidt What are some of your favorite Conny Plank productions? Gareth Jones I like the work he did with Neu!and Cluster. So, John had this idea to make a minimal electronic pop album, so what
he did was… he’d worked in quite big studios by then, certainly they seemed to
me massive studios, compared to where I’d been working. This was an eight-track
analog studio. The control room was about this big, way more primitive than
the wonderful production rooms Red Bull have built here. So, to make a minimal
record, he decided to have minimal equipment, which is one of the things Matias
was referring to this morning. He didn’t say, “I’m gonna go into a really big
studio with loads of money and have loads of big synthesizers and loads of
microphones and make a minimal record.” He was very much a conceptual fine artist,
John… so he said, “I’m gonna make a minimal record. Therefore, I’m going to have use one
drum machine, one Arp Odyssey,
one Elka string machine and one Arp 16-step analogue sequencer.” I
don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it’s really cool. There’s lot of digital
emulations of that now, Five12 make a wonderful
piece of software called Numerology. If
anyone’s interested in step sequencing, I highly recommend Numerology by
Five12, it’s amazing. It’s really deep, but the Arp is like a tiny version of
that. And eight tracks, and we only had eight tracks. So, that’s how he
approached making a minimal piece of work. And, of course, it turned out very
minimal. I like the whole album, actually. Play something, why don’t you? Torsten Schmidt Let’s start at the beginning then. (music: John Foxx – “Plaza”) (music: John Foxx – “Touch And Go” / applause) Torsten Schmidt So, as far as the minimal record goes, in that sort of format, we’re talking
what, 1980 here? Gareth Jones Yeah, ’79, ’80. Torsten Schmidt This is with a guy who has worked with Ultravox, Brian Eno, Conny Plank, and there you are. You’re straight out of the BBC and a massive track record already. How nervous were you? Gareth Jones Oh, I wasn’t nervous. I was very overconfident as a young guy, which is what a
lot of us need or we don’t get shit done. But when I look back I’m quite
surprised at how overconfident I was. I was a bit arrogant, I’d say. I wasn’t
arrogant with John… or perhaps I was, actually. But I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t
know very much about Ultravox. I discovered Ultravox through John more than the other way around. Of course, I worked as an engineer on this project because I was very much a junior, but it is interesting when I look back. There
were two other musicians on this record, both friends of mine who I brought
into the project. One was Alan Durant, who played bass guitar on
a few tracks, and one was a guy called John Wesley Barker, who played a few
keyboards on some of the tracks. Looking back, that’s a map of how you make
records; there’s an artist and songwriter. But there’s no way I produced
Metamatic, I didn’t even know what record production was in those days. But
when John came in we just started work. I was already a big synthesizer lover.
One of my mates had got a
Wasp synthesizer, which was
cheap, had a touch-sensitive keyboard, very cheap. Late ’70s, early ’80s, much
cheaper than a Moog, unreliable really,
didn’t work very well. But also, in the ’60s, my tiny mind was blown by
hearing Walter Carlos, he did – or she later became Wendy Carlos – and he/she did an
incredible record called Switched On Bach, which is Johann Sebastian Bach’s music played on Moog modular
synths. I’d heard this in the ’60s when I was about 15. I knew some of the
music of Bach, because I’d been to church, and my father was a big classical
music lover. When I talked about dropping out, I said I felt I’d rebelled
against everything I was brought up and educated to do. Many years later, I
realized my father’s main hobby was listening to records and enjoying
listening to music. So, after having thought that I’d really stepped aside from my
upbringing and programming, it turned out that actually I was just trying to
please my dad all along by making records and fucking around with hi-fis… an
interesting psychological aside. But I knew the music of Bach, like loads of people do, the hits from Bach on
Switched on Bach. So, to hear it played almost robotically on sequencers and
Moog synths set something off in my head. It was super-interesting. So, when
John came into the studio wanting to make the first entirely electronic record
I’d ever made, I connected to that straight away. For me, in the beginning in
pop music, synths were thought of as almost not viable, not real instruments. They
were for people who couldn’t play or didn’t have proper musical ideas. It’s
not like that any more; synthesizers and samplers have been totally
incorporated into popular music culture. When it started, it wasn’t like that,
but I was really able and willing and happy to embrace it. So, I was
very open to what John was trying to do. By the way, the drum machine on
Metamatic, the CR-78, I don’t
know if anyone knows what that is. A square box with lots of pre-programmed
rhythms on it. That’s the drum machine you just heard on Metamatic. Torsten Schmidt Did you try and program it yourself as well? Gareth Jones I think you can, but I don’t think we were very good at that. You might be able to do some beat programming on the CR-78. Can you do that? Have you got a CR-78? Torsten Schmidt Theoretically you can, yeah. Gareth Jones We might have managed to do something on it, I don’t remember. But I do
remember using lots of different presets, different tempos and working round the presets. Maybe
there was some original programming; I’ve got a vague memory that it was
possible to program. Torsten Schmidt I’d like to play you a little something and you just blurt out whatever comes
to mind. (music: The Normal – “Warm Leatherette” / applause) Gareth Jones Absolutely. I’m not involved in the making of this track in any way, but it’s
a seminal track in my life. It’s the legendary “Warm Leatherette,” written and
performed by The Normal, which is Daniel Miller, who is
obviously now boss – I don’t now what his title is – of Mute Records, and he is one
of the really important mentors in my life. I’ve learned, and I do still learn a
great deal from Daniel. The first time I heard it, John Foxx brought it into
Pathway and said, “You have got to listen to this now.” It was very important
for a lot of us. It was the first track ever released on Mute Records. Daniel
founded Mute in order to make this track. He went to the cutting room, he
recorded it at home on a four-track, quarter-inch tape recorder. The drums
sound like sequenced drums but they’re not; he’s actually playing the drums,
playing synth drums as if sequenced, because he couldn’t get the sequencer
working at that point. He didn’t quite know how to work a sequencer or sync it
up. He went to the cutting room with this record and the engineer said, “Don’t
give up the day job, mate.” That’s all I can say about that. We’re talking
about Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records, mogul, genius producer, genius
businessman, phenomenally successful and wealthy, dare we say it, since it is a
job after all… So, that’s something to bear in mind very much, isn’t it? Don’t listen to the so-
called experts. If you believe it, just do it. Because that’s a typical example
of a so-called expert. “You’re not going anywhere with this, mate, you might
as well give up, go back to minicab driving.” Torsten Schmidt Is that what he was doing? Gareth Jones Daniel was a minicab driver, yeah. I think he was an assistant film editor as
well, but by the time he made this record he needed the space that minicab
driving gave him to be creative. Torsten Schmidt What do you know about that Silicon Teens record? Gareth Jones Not very much. Torsten Schmidt He was somehow involved in that. Gareth Jones Yeah, super-involved. I think the publisher,
Ron Buckle of Sonet Music at the
time, had an idea that what they needed to do was a cover version. This was a
record company thing. [Affects voice] “It’s all very well having original
material, but do a good cover version you’ll have a hit.” I suspect that might
have been the publisher’s idea, but the publisher’s not earning much money
because most of the songs are published elsewhere. Daniel’s very involved in it
and Fad Gadget, another esteemed
dead colleague, is singing on it too. Torsten Schmidt They all go under different names. Gareth Jones But obviously Silicon Teens is all right, but it’s just a bit of fun, it
doesn’t compare. When “Warm Leatherette” came out, it was like punk
electronica. Totally do-it-yourself ethic, raw; doesn’t sound that raw now obviously, in
the same way the Sex Pistols don’t – it sounds like tuneful pop if you listen
now. I don’t know if you’ve listened recently but it’s amazing, like perfect
little pop songs. But at the time, it sounds really raw shit, man. Like
Nirvana, even Nirvana doesn’t sound raw anymore. Obviously, great songwriting
and wonderful musicianship, incredibly important music. But that raw edge… same
with “Warm Leatherette” actually, it fits, still sounds contemporary. But at
the time it was like a flag, saying, “Hey, look what we can do with
synthesizers.” Torsten Schmidt I guess the most interesting thing about that Silicon Teens record is that
certain parts resurfaced later, on other records and are used more or less one-
on-one. Certain sequences, that kind of stuff. Gareth Jones Same musical sequences, lifted? Torsten Schmidt Yeah, but reused by the same people. Gareth Jones Part of what we were trying to do with Mute Records, well, what I was trying
to do, was to do experimental pop. We were trying to recreate new every time. That’s one of
the things I enjoyed about Matias this morning was that he was talking about
how much he enjoyed singing through. I bet he doesn’t use presets. I don’t
find that creative or helpful to take pre-made stuff and reuse it. Certainly, with Mute Records I always felt we were trying to go to our boundaries and make new stuff. Torsten Schmidt When did you actually get involved? The step from someone bringing a record
into the studio in Stoke Newington to actually getting involved with the people that
did it and actually working for them? Gareth Jones Well, John got Metamatic off the ground. Can I just talk about his business
model? Torsten Schmidt Absolutely. Gareth Jones He was very clever. Because he’d made three albums, he’d seen where the money
goes. You get an advance as an artist and it just gets burnt up in studio
bills, A&R, taxis, lunch dates,
flights. Suddenly it’s all gone. He seemed to make Metamatic the other way
around. He signed a publishing deal with a guy at Island Music called Richard Griffiths – also a bit of a
legendary music exec – and he used some of his publishing deal to make the
record. He was then able to sell the record for an album advance. So, even
though it wasn’t hugely successful in commercial terms, he was able to get ahead. He was a clever northerner. There’s a joke in Britain that northerners are a bit tight with
money. But he was clever with his money. He got ahead somehow; a lot of
artists in the ’80s just ended up owing the record company loads of money,
which is OK in the short term, can be fun, but in the long term isn’t the
greatest situation. He got ahead and decided to build a studio called the Garden, which is part of the Miloco Studio group in London now. It’s
in Shoreditch, and we went to Shoreditch in the really early ’80s when it was
really scummy, before it was remotely fashionable. The thing about it was it
was empty and cheap. John built a studio there in the basement. It was very
much his concept, and I, as his engineer at the time, gave him lots of advice
about what equipment we should buy. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and
this is an example of one of the great mistakes I’ve made with equipment. One of the
most important things for us is to listen, OK? It’s very easy to bring lots of
pride and lots of prejudice to the table when there’s music being made. To me, that
gets in the way. It’s very important to listen. At this time in the early
’80s there was this attitude going around – I don’t know where I got it from;
in the mags, amongst the equipment dealers – this is a bit nerdy but the studio
people might get it – it’s that transformers were not a good thing. The way a transformer worked was to take the edge off the front of the beat. A kick or a
snare beat or a triangle has got a very steep edge at the front. Transformers
were considered to be softening this all down. So, there was this idea we
should have transformerless studios and that’s the studio we built in the
Garden. The initial version was an MCI JH-24, which was a
transformerless multi-track tape machine, and an AMEK 2520 console,
no transformers. Later, as I learned to listen more, it became clear that a
lot of the vintage gear we all love – any Tape Op reader knows this – it’s
about the sound of the transformer. The transformer imparts a wonderful
quality to sound, especially in the rock & roll world. So, this was a
prejudice – I brought a prejudice to the table. For some reason, I was
prejudiced against transformers because I wasn’t listening enough. Obviously,
the studio did loads of work and we made lots of hits. The studio itself made
lots of hits and I made some great records in there too. But still, that’s an
example of prejudice. Like the other thing – I’ve got lots of terrible, terrible examples
of pride in my life as well. One of them was when I was beginning as an
engineer and thought I knew everything. That’s ridiculous. In the medieval
times, pride is considered to be the worst of the seven deadly sins, because pride is a head
sin. Sins like lust and gluttony are not considered to be bad sins, because
that’s just the body taking over. We’ve all got bodies, what are we gonna do?
Pride is a mental state and, as such, is a very dangerous sin. [Stands up,
claps hands together] Thank you brethren [laughter]. Torsten Schmidt So, we deviated a little bit from you telling us about his business model. Gareth Jones Shall we pray? Sorry, Torsten. Torsten Schmidt We deviated a little from the business model. Gareth Jones Oh yeah, the Mute story. Torsten Schmidt No, no. Before we get to Mute, you wanted to enlighten us about John Foxx’s
business model. Gareth Jones That’s it, that’s the clever thing. Instead of getting behind and paying
someone else to rent a studio, we made a record called The Garden, which was
the name of the studio, still. So, John’s idea was to go, “OK, I want to go a
bit bigger now. I’ve done my minimal record, I need more tracks.” Rather than
spend the money renting a studio, we’ll build his studio – it was his money,
he hired me to help him do it. So, he built his studio, it was something a lot
of us do now. Obviously, we’ve all got our studios in our iPhones or laptops,
it’s kind of a normal model now. But at the time John took control – not to
use too political a term – of the means of production. He said, “OK, I need to
own the means of production, so I can creatively do what I need to do.”
Which is something a lot of you do anyway, I’m sure. So that was his business model and
it worked for him, I think. Seemed to be very clever at the time. Torsten Schmidt So obviously this guy, bringing in a physical record of something someone else
had taken, took care of his own means of production, like Daniel. Obviously,
something fitted there quite nicely. Gareth Jones Yeah, maybe that was part of the inspiration. When we made Metamatic, John
was renting a studio to make it in. But of course, “Warm Leatherette” is
blowing us away and that’s just made at home. That’s a bedroom record basically. One
of the first bedroom records, I would say. Torsten Schmidt Can you recall your first physical meeting with Daniel? Gareth Jones I do, because I had another prejudice. I’m going to talk about prejudice some
more. Depeche [Mode] were trying to make album number three.
Vince left after album one, which
was Speak and Spell. Then they
made the second album, which was Broken Frame, and then they got Alan Wilder involved and thought, “OK,
we need a new studio to work in.” John Foxx being an electronic musician, they
thought, “Let’s go and work in John Foxx’s studio,” because they didn’t like
rock & roll, it was electro-pop that Depeche were trying to make; were
making, defining… So ,they went to John Foxx’s studio. Now the thing about
Depeche Mode was they were on the radio. I didn’t think that was a very good place
to be, on the radio. They were a pop band and you could hear their stuff on
the radio. I didn’t think that was very cool, I was more interested in stuff
that wasn’t on the radio that much. I just thought, “It’s a pop band, I don’t
want to be involved.” So, they came to check out the studio and I said to John,
“I’m not doing the session, it’s a pop band, it’s not my thing, there’s no
point, I don’t get it, blah, blah, blah.” He said, “You’re making a mistake,
Gareth, it’s something you need to be involved in.” “Oh, fuck off, don’t boss
me about. I’m not doing it, basically.” So, they came to check the studio out for the weekend with another engineer who was there.
Because this has been one of my great creative and musical relationships with
Mute, they liked the studio, but they didn’t like the engineer that much. So, the
universe kindly gave me a second chance. They said to John, “We like the
studio, but we don’t really like that engineer. Do you know any other
engineers?” So, John came back to me and said, “Gareth, I’m
telling you, go over there and fucking meet them and see what happens.” So, I was, “Oh all right,
John, if I have to.” So, I went over to this tiny little office, Mute Records
at that time, and met – I’d been in Morocco for a month, on no budget, hanging out, smoking pot. I had on this Moroccan jacket and black nail
varnish and went over on this bicycle and I met this band and Daniel Miller in
the office of the record company. Torsten Schmidt They were on Top of the Pops already at this point, right? Gareth Jones Oh, yeah, even off Speak and Spell, “Just Can’t Get Enough” was a big hit. I suppose
that’s one of the things I didn’t like. Now I revere “Just Can’t Get Enough,” because it’s a classic piece of early electro-pop. But, at the time, it was just too
poppy for me. So, I met them, and funnily enough they seemed to be like normal
human beings, they seemed all right. They obviously thought I was all right,
because we decided… or they hired me, I suppose. “We decided” plays my role up
a bit too much really. But I thought, “Oh they’re all right, actually. They
might be doing pop music, but it’s not too bad. They seem all right and they're quite
nice. Daniel seems a bit weird,” I thought. “But there you go.” They probably
thought the same about me – “He seems a bit weird, but he’s all right.” So, we
started working together and we made Construction Time Again. Torsten Schmidt Which was recorded where? Gareth Jones In John’s studio, the Garden, which was the plan. It was recorded in
Shoreditch and mixed in Hansa Studios in
Berlin, where we were recently with Red Bull. Torsten Schmidt But before we get over to Hansa, I think this is the time to get the record
straight on a track you actually played in Hansa, on the actual desk where you
said it was recorded. But rumor has it a lot of the loops and stuff were
recorded in Shoreditch. Gareth Jones No, it was mixed on that desk, that was the story. Are you talking about
“Pipeline”? Torsten Schmidt Maybe it’s time to give you a bit of a breather and play a bit… Gareth Jones You want to play “Pipeline,” give them a break from my blabbing? (music: Depeche Mode – “Pipeline” / applause) Torsten Schmidt So, what are the synths that we’re not hearing on there? Gareth Jones This is early ’80s, sampling’s just been invented. Probably everyone here is a
bit young to know, but there was a time when samplers didn’t exist [laughter]. Torsten Schmidt There’s a reason why I cut off all this grey hair this morning. Gareth Jones That’s hard for you lot to understand, I know that. But there’s a
Mellotron in that
studio, that was the closest we got. Almost no one made their own Mellotron
tape loops, because you had to be incredibly wealthy. Keith Emerson did it, I think. But when samplers were invented, that was mind-blowing, because you could take sounds
like that [knocks glasses on water jug] and put them in the machine and play
beats and melodies with them. I know this is totally obvious, but I’m trying
to give you some idea of what that was like for us. That was incredible. Incredible! Suddenly everything changed. With tape, you could never get that
kind of response. It was very hard to change the key even if you changed the
tape. You could put stuff on tape before and hit “play” and the sound would
play. But it wasn’t like a sampler where you could change the note and make
complicated beats. So, this track is made all with samples. It’s quite well
documented this track, so I’ll make it brief. We went out into a scrapyard in
Shoreditch… disused railway lines. We went out with two tape recorders and
microphones, I had a beautiful analog reel-to-reel tape recorder,
Stellavox, beautiful
Swiss thing. We went all round this scrapyard for a couple of hours and
sampled all these sounds. Close mics and distant mics. You hear it on this
wonderful stereo [touches speaker] that Red Bull have set up for us. You can
hear the ambient sound and the close sound at the same time. Then we got back
to the studio with these sounds, and I realized I hadn’t got the tape recorder
switched on right, which was a bit embarrassing, so they all sounded shit. So
we had to go out again and do it all again. But we were very motivated by this
idea of constructing a track by using found sound. It’s readymade, it’s
Marcel Duchamp in sound. There you go, every sound, we found it, and then we’ve used it to play beats and
melodies. We were lucky with the scrapyard. There’s this really interesting
article out now with Matthew Herbert in Tape Op or Sound on Sound
about how he made a record from a pig. He sampled the pig. All the sounds are
from the pig, from the moment of its birth right up to the moment of being
eaten. I haven’t heard the record but the concept is wonderful. He said one of
the things he finds quite hard with found sound is getting any sense of pitch.
Funnily enough, when I was using samplers then we found lots of sounds with pitch. [Knocks
on table] There’s pitch. [Knocks on speaker] There’s even pitch in the
speakers – there shouldn’t be really. In a scrapyard, there’s lots of sounds
with pitch, bell sounds, metal sounds. So, after I’d admitted my mistake and
apologized, we went back out and sampled everything again. We came back and we mixed the close
and distant sound into these very primitive early samplers that we had that would play
only one sound at a time. Most of the time we couldn’t store the sounds
either, so it would be played, recorded onto tape, then the sampler would be
emptied, then we’d put a new sound in. The whole track is made with sampled
sounds. Incidentally, with no EQ or reverb. When we got to Berlin and mixed
this track, we’d spent so much work on the other mixes and compression and EQ
and everything that I was just totally burnt out. We put this one up on the
faders and it just sounded great. So, I suggested as a concept we mixed it
without any reverb or compression or EQ, and we did, and that’s the track. So,
found sound in its natural state. Torsten Schmidt I guess we’re gonna talk about found sounds more in a bit, but you mentioned
Berlin and you were there already on a couple of other jobs in different
functions. (music: DÖF – “Codo”) Torsten Schmidt We’ll spare you the chorus, but if you were anywhere in Central Europe around 1983 and
in the second grade, that was the joint. There was no bumper car without that.
That went multi-platinum, right? Gareth Jones I mixed this record. It was co-written and produced by a friend of mine. Is my
mic still on? There’s a couple of things I want to say about that. It sounds a
bit boomy, doesn’t it? I mixed it, so sorry about that. Still, it was six
weeks at No 1 in Germany, totally multi-platinum. I have an interesting
relationship with a lot of the stuff I mix. A lot of the time, even now, I struggle, like I
suppose we all do, but it sounds really shit to me, a lot of the stuff I mix.
I do it and do the best I can and think, “Oh God, it doesn’t sound very good.”
And then I come back to it in a couple of weeks – and this is not an example,
this doesn’t sound that great, I admit – and then it’s OK. Torsten Schmidt It sounded a lot better and bigger on the bumper car than anything else that
was out at the time. Gareth Jones It sounds great on small speakers, yeah. A lot of the time I was working on
NS-10s and
tiny little speakers because radio was massively important. But I just wanted
to throw that in as a bit of an insight. I’ve noticed it again recently, I’m
working on three records at the moment, so I’m going in between them. I went
back to a record that’s just been mastered at Air, it’s just been delivered to
me. I was delivering the masters to Air and I thought, “Oh, this record sounds
all right, I’ve done all right, I haven’t done such a bad job after all.” Up
until then I thought I was failing. I guess I’m a bit hypercritical of myself,
which means without a deadline I’d never get anything finished. Deadlines
really help me. Because I’m not confident in my own work, without a deadline
I still would never deliver anything. I’d still be working on Metamatic. Torsten Schmidt So, Friday two o’clock, that’s for you lot. Gareth Jones When I was younger, I was scared of deadlines, I used to experience them as a
lot of stress. It was, “God, we’ve got to get it finished by Friday at two,
what a nightmare.” But now I really love the deadlines, because I know that
without I wouldn’t get it finished. So, anyway, do you want to go back
chronologically on this? Torsten Schmidt A little bit, but on that one, I’m surprised the whole hook-up was through
Klaus Schulze’s camp and there was
a line there, which looking back is really interesting. Gareth Jones With... [points to laptop] Torsten Schmidt With Döf. Gareth Jones No, there’s no Klaus Schulze connection, unless you know better than I do. Torsten Schmidt I was just going by the file. Gareth Jones A bit of prejudice again. I was hired to co-produce a record for a Neue Deutsche Welle band called
Ideal, who were big.
Annette Humpe went on from this
band to become one of Germany’s top producers. She still is, she does this
band Ich + Ich, if anyone’s into
Germany’s pop scene. She’s very talented anyway, massive. And we went to
Vienna to record this band Ideal, their third album. I wanted to go back to
the Garden Studio in London and mix it because I was insecure. The manager
said, “Can we go and have a look at this studio in Berlin? Maybe it’ll be a
cool place to mix for you.” Obviously, it suited him, but I was like, “I’ll have a
look, but I really want to go back to London to somewhere I know.” He took me to
Hansa Studios’ penthouse mixing suite in the ’80s – it was incredible, like a state-
of-the-art mixing room with a Solid State Logic console in it. At that time
I’d never worked on a Solid State Logic
Console, and it was bit of a dream for all the young engineers and producers.
It was like the thing. It’s not so important now, I don’t think, because
we all know it’s all about the music not the technology. But he showed me this
and I mixed the record there and then, we mixed this record [points to laptop] there
as well. When I was mixing this record there, Daniel Miller was there with
the Birthday Party,
it’s a big multi-studio complex, Hansa in Berlin. He was with the Birthday
Party downstairs and I said, “Hey man, come and look at this mixer. Maybe we
can do Depeche Mode here.” He looked at it and liked the vibe as well, so
that’s how we finished up doing these three Berlin-period Depeche Mode albums,
all mixed in Hansa Studios in Berlin. Torsten Schmidt Before we go to the studio as a space – and I guess we should hear an example
of what it sounds like beforehand – you were such a young engineer and now
you’re being called in to mix a band who’ve had hits, are multi-platinum like
Ideal, “Monotonie” and “Blaue Augen.” I think the only one that
did all right off the album you did was “Meine Heimat.” Gareth Jones Yeah, when I did the Bi Nuu album, the band were essentially splitting up. They split
up afterwards. There was a lot of internal tension in the band. A lot of bands
don’t realize how good they are together, so then you get these power
struggles. I don’t know if that happened in Ideal, maybe it did. So, they were
splitting up, and that’s perhaps reflected in the lack of success of the album. Torsten Schmidt What did you learn from these processes? Obviously, you’re there pouring your heart
into it while these guys are off to Dschungel and other clubs partying it out while you’re
there trying to make some sense of the session you did all day. Gareth Jones What, with Ideal? Torsten Schmidt Oh no, just in general. There’s the band and there’s your job. You’re putting
in at least the same amount of effort and long hours, but you can only work
with what you get off the band. Gareth Jones It depends on what kind of producer you are, doesn’t it? Some producers are
great songwriters. I’m not a great songwriter. This is a whole day’s
discussion anyway – what is a producer’s job? They’re all so different. I know
some producers, like Paul Epworth, this wonderful young London producer, is a
great songwriter himself and he co-writes with the artist. So, he does more
than take what the band offer. Annette Humpe is a great songwriter as well. So
these people write with the bands. You don’t work with them if you’re not
prepared to co-write. They figure that when they co-write, they raise the level of
the band. But when I worked with Depeche Mode, with Martin Gore largely
songwriting, there was no need for extra songwriting input anyway. So, it was a
good match because Martin’s a wonderful songwriter. Torsten Schmidt The next record is what you’d call a game-changer. You were quoted at the time
about understanding how a pop song works. You were quoted saying, “If I’d been
a more experienced engineer, I would’ve paid more attention to the little ear-
opening monitor system and also paid more attention to the big monitors, because the
boundaries of the sound are, well… crude. Still, having said that, the tracks
have incredible energy and, coming out of a radio or a little television set, it
was like the radio was going to explode. That’s why it was a massive hit all
over Europe. So, overall I’m incredibly pleased and proud of that work.” There
you go… (music: wrong track) (music: Depeche Mode – “People Are People” / applause) Gareth Jones I’m clapping as well, because it’s all about the artist in my work as a mixing
engineer. If an artist comes to you with a great song and a great idea, you’ve
got to be a real dick to fuck it up, basically [laughter]. And I’ve been
lucky that I’ve worked with some super-talented artists, and if you’re really
careful it turns out great. So, that’s why I’m clapping along with you guys. I
hope I survive this week. It’s a bit like having your life flash before your
eyes, this little chat with Torsten. It’s like one thing after the other from
the past. Torsten Schmidt Can you share a couple of images that are just flashing before your eyes right
now before we go into specifics? Gareth Jones No, not really. Torsten Schmidt I always wonder what these 5.1 mixes are about, like who really needs them?
But in the 5.1 edition of this one, there’s a really great documentary that
shows a lot of really insightful things. Gareth Jones Yeah, yeah. Torsten Schmidt Different hairstyles. Gareth Jones Different clothes, different hairstyles. But because I was in love with
classical music before I discovered other music, the sense of space that music
takes place in has always been important to me. The fact that a musical experience that
exists in an acoustic space has always been really important to me. With this
record, and other records I made in the ’80s, it was lucky because it fits in
with the fashion, the taste of the time. It was OK to put lots of reverb on
vocals, that’s what I’m saying. But in this work there’s loads of acoustic
space on all the synthesizers and, in that sense, part of what we were doing
seemed to be groundbreaking, because, up until then, synthesizers were all
plugged into a mixing desk directly and recorded onto tape, and then only a bit
of reverb added later in the mix. But what we were doing with Depeche and
others in the ’80s was putting synthesizers through guitar amps or big PAs,
mic-ing up the sound of the room, mic-ing the amp up close, mic-ing the amp up a
long way away, and in that sense it ties into the acoustic spaces on
“Pipeline,” the sample piece we played before. It’s always been a great
fascination for me and that’s why it’s been a pleasure and a privilege and I
had so much fun working with this band because our interests went along in
parallel very comfortably for a few albums. Torsten Schmidt To a certain degree, that’s what everyone who uses Logic or Pro Tools would say
as well. But you were doing the actual physical action right there at Hansa. Could you
take us along a virtual walk-through of the building, how you used the
different levels of the building to record this stuff? Gareth Jones A lot of the sound of this song is put together in the mix. There’s still a
lot of it on tape. Torsten Schmidt It started on Walkman to start with, that’s the rumor. Gareth Jones This choir thing, the “help me understand” bit in the bridge, you hear a
little choir. It’s like an ambient noise off a plane. It started… Martin got a gift
from God and wrote the song, basically that’s where it started. But one of the things he
did on the demo was record some airplane cabin noise, which I’m obviously not
allowed to say which airplane it was, otherwise there’ll be terrible struggles
among the lawyers. Rumor has it, allegedly. But we tried to reconstruct that
sample for a long time. This was an early example of learning how magic
samples are, which is obviously something if you guys are using samples to create your
own music, or loops, taken from other records, it’s extremely difficult to
replace a sample. And this was a self-made sample, obviously, but it got
incorporated into the end production. When we mixed it, there’s a huge concert
hall in Hansa, which is a wonderfully atmospheric rock & roll studio. When
we did this, we were mixing upstairs on floor four, and on floor one there’s a
three-story-high, huge room and I put a big PA in there to use the room as an
echo chamber. I had another big tiled room used as an echo chamber as well. So
different elements of the beats and the drums were going around the room; like
you’d put them in three different plug-ins now, then you’d put them in three
different physical spaces. It took us a number of days to mix this, the whole
studio was pumping for days with this huge PA. The kick drum is going into Hansa Two
downstairs, the snare drum is going into another room. Basically, we’re having
a lot of fun with wires and drums and amplifiers and mics. Torsten Schmidt It’s something to really physically imagine, because now it’s a matter of
three clicks on a track pad. But to physically take a drill, make sure the
cable is going three floors down, finding the right amp and just the whole
matter of… how did you talk to your assistant who was mic-ing the amplifier
down there when you were listening? Gareth Jones It’s all about loads of cables going down. I could talk through the PA or
through headphones. It’s normal studio practice; you’ve got two-way feedback. You need to be able to communicate, obviously. It’s just fun building systems.
I’d like to be able do a synthesizer record where it’s kind of written, we’ve
chosen the synth sounds, possibly even recorded them, then have a nice big room like
this [walks around], then put the bass amp here and play the Moog through a
nice big bass amp, then mic it up. Then maybe over here have another couple of
amps with sequencers going through them, over there have drum amps. To
reconstruct the whole sound of the record inside a room and record it all at
once; that’s something that’s done in layers in this period and it’s something
I’ve wanted to do for a long time to create that for real, a bit of fun.
Obviously, I’m a huge Kraftwerk fan and I’d like to have in one room all the
electronics playing at once, to capture the sound of that room. Torsten Schmidt Obviously, that sounds like a humongous amount of fun, but how much of that is
actually audible to the listener in the end? Gareth Jones Like Matias said this morning, having fun is what it’s all about. It is play,
what I do. My mother, she’s 89 years old, she said to me recently, “You don’t
really work, do you dear? You just play about all the time.” You know, guilty!
It is play, and playing needs a sense of fun. Like Matias, Matias works in the
way he does because it’s fun for him. When you’re having fun, you flow more.
When you’re not having fun it’s easy to get stuck. “Oh, it’s difficult, I’m
stuck, I don’t know what to do, I’m fucked.” When you’re having fun, it’s like
scree-running or snowboarding or something, you flow, and that has incredible
knock-on effects into the work. Torsten Schmidt That’s one of the most suave transgressions to the next topic. We’ve been
talking about the drums, the machines, the sequencers, but you have to somehow
marry that voice, the human element, to all the machinery that’s going on.
Therefore, you need to make that person feel comfortable. What techniques did you
learn to make that fragile person on the other side of the booth feel comfy? Gareth Jones Recording anything is a life’s work. Recording drums is a life’s work, a
drum kit… every time I do it is an amazing little adventure. Recording
vocalists similarly could be a life’s work. I used to make a lot of fuss – I’d
prepare everything, make it really nice, get a bunch of waters, make sure they have water, tidy the carpet, a little stand for their lyrics, a pen, an ashtray, whatever they needed. I did that
for a long time, and it seemed to work quite well. Then I stopped fussing. As I’ve
got older, I just put the mic up. That’s how I record vocals, I put the mic up
and just do it, and that works really well. Torsten Schmidt It’s always great when you see a hip-hop artist in the studio. The sound they
have in the can when they get the playback after they drop their 16 bars or
whatever, if it’s just run through a very simple compressor. They’re in there,
obviously all “the man” when they walk in, they listen to it, concentrate when
they lay down their rhyme, then they hear themselves back and you can see it
on the other side of the window. Like, “I must sound like Biggie right now.” You can
see it, just the little effect a compressor does gives them so much more
confidence that the next take is usually so much better straight away. Are there simple
techniques like that? How do you get the sound for them right? Does it need to
sound different for what you use? Gareth Jones Yeah, of course. To me, when I’m recording artists, I like to do it as quickly and easily as possible. Obviously, I’ve got quite a lot of experience now, so I figure I
can make some things work pretty easily and quickly. But that’s what it’s all about.
Of course, they get compression and two effects, whatever they need. But it’s really
about saying, “OK, you wanna do a vocal? Let’s go.” It’s about being ready for
that. Not, “Let’s go. OK, I need to set this up and set this up and then do
this and just get you a headphone mix.” That’s bollocks to me. When I work
with engineers now, I don’t like that. I want people to be super-fast. When I’m
working with bands often, we hire an engineer, but everything’s got to be super-fast because I get really bored really quickly. I figure if I get bored, the
band’s going to get bored, and everyone gets bored and then you might as well just stop because we’re not
trying to do anything boring. So, it’s all got to happen super-quickly. Everyone has to find their own route. There is no simple thing. Sure, the
headphones need to sound wonderful, but they don’t need to sound wonderful if
you say, “Can we do a vocal?” and then you take half an hour making them
sound wonderful. A lot of the time, it’s great to just do the vocals, like everyone
works in bedroom studios. I like doing them like that, just demo where
everyone’s sitting there. I mixed a record recently, not out yet, for a band
called David’s Liar, a London band, young, debut album. Wonderful record in my
opinion. On the demo of this song, the chorus is sung in half-time. I didn’t know, but when
we got to the mix the artist said, “On the demo, I’m not sure.” So, one of the
managers was very into the music, he said, “Check the demo.” It was half-time
and we hadn’t got it half-time anywhere in the Pro Tools section, so I just
put the mic up and he just sang it in the control room with the speakers on,
just there. And he got it, and it works. It’s on the album and it sounds
fantastic. To me that’s what capturing live performance is about. You
capture it before you know. You don’t make a lot of fuss preparing the magic.
You just go, “Hey, that was magic, we just made magic.” You don’t go, “Watch
this. I’m going to make some magic, OK? I’ll just tidy up first and get a good
headphone mix.” You don’t do it like that. You just do it, bang! Then everyone goes, “What the fuck just
happened?” So, it’s all about flow… it’s flow. Torsten Schmidt At the same time, in the digital realm, we sometimes come across a lot of
multi-tracks and the multi-tracks of classic recordings. Let’s not use your
example, but let’s say a Queen record, a Stevie record or whatever. Let’s say
you’ve got a 16- or 24-track Queen record that you think you know inside out,
and all of a sudden you see it in front of you and it’s like a giant jigsaw
puzzle. “Hang on Brian, there’s a bit of cheating going on here. That riff is
comped from nine different takes,” and all that kind of stuff. Now, I take it
that process was a bit different when you didn’t have all that stuff on one
screen. Gareth Jones I made friends a long time ago – before the internet, actually. I know that’s
hard for you to imagine, there was a time when there was no internet – but we
had a bulletin board system going and I met a guy called Bob Ohlson, who was a mastering engineer at Motown,
just one of the many wonderful things he’s done. And he spoke about when they
made Diana Ross records, they recorded the backing track straight to stereo.
Then Miss Ross comes in and does the vocals afterwards; they would still play the
backing track, and she would have about six goes at the vocal. Each time it would be
recorded onto a new stereo tape, mixed in, sound on sound or whatever you want
to call it. And then the producer and the engineer would sit and choose the
best bits of Miss Ross’s performance and cut it together, comp the vocal, even
before multi-track. People have done comping forever. As soon as we got tape, “Oh look, we can cut tape.” Editing is not something…
DAWs have not given us the ability to edit. Anyone can cut tape with a razor blade. It’s easy and it’s
fun. With multitrack tape, we did lots of comping and you tried to plan the
session so you wouldn’t leave the lead vocal until last, because the tape might
be full then and you can only do one track. So, you’d try to do the lead vocal
when you still had six tracks, so you’d do five for the vocal and then pick
the best bits and mix them down onto the other track. So, on some of my old
multi-tracks, when I look at them, it’s still 24 tracks across the screen. But
of course, everything doesn’t play everywhere. So, some tracks have five
different riffs on them or something. Torsten Schmidt I’m still trying to imagine how you organize such a mixing session in the end.
Let’s say eight vocal takes and you’re trying to turn them into one. Gareth Jones But that’s organized before the mix. Torsten Schmidt Take us through the organization, getting something ready for that. Gareth Jones Obviously, you’ve got the vocal takes and then you choose them shortly after
the vocal’s done usually. I think it’s really good before you do the editing.
I used to put the editing off, because it can be a bit boring, not as much fun
as recording. But I think it’s quite good if you do some recording, then you do the
editing quite quickly after the recording because everyone’s still in the vibe
of what you were trying to achieve. And you commit. Commitment in recording is
really wonderful. It’s one of the big nightmares we’ve got with the
multitracks now on Pro Tools rigs. I get a lot of stuff to mix where the
guitar, say, is recorded on six mics. Six mics is cool, but what you want to
do is mix the mics together to make a guitar sound. Fantastic, you’ve made a
guitar sound, you’ve made a creative commitment. That’s good for you and it’s good
for me when I come to mix it, because I know what you want to do. You know what
you’re trying to do and you know if it works. So many multitracks I get at the
moment… I’m mixing a record at the moment and the vocal is recorded on three
mics. I get three tracks of the same vocal. It’s the same take, but over three tracks, so every song
I’ve got to say, “Does the
Ribbon sound better than the
U-47 or does the U-87 sound better?
Could they be better in this mix or that mix?” It’s a fucking nightmare. But
the clients delivered it like that, I’m not complaining. The clients are very nice people,
I like the music, it’s all cool. But I do much better work when I commit to
things. You must all know this. If you commit to something, then it’s
really good. And if it’s no good later, wipe it off and do it again. That’s
one of the wonderful things about working on tape – I don’t work on tape
any more, I can’t really afford it – but it’s not so much the sonic quality,
it’s the psychology of doing it. If you’re working on tape, and you want to
record a guitar solo and it’s the end of the session, there’s a guitar solo
and it’s on one track. Then the guitarist might say, “This is not good enough,
I want to re-record it.” In order to re-record it,
they’ve got to wipe off the solo they recorded already. That’s unthinkable in
Pro Tools world. None of you would do that, none of you would have the balls,
probably. I don’t think I’ve got the balls, and I know the advantages. Every
one keeps the old take first. I know the take’s being kept, the engineer knows
it’s being kept, the guitarist knows the take has been kept. That’s a
completely different psychology from when the guitarist says, “You know what?
That solo’s no good, wipe it off, I’m going to play a new one.” That’s really different,
that’s like scoring a goal in high-level football. That’s not pussying about
rehearsing. It’s not a practice match. That’s the real deal: Wipe it off, I’m
going to play it again. When someone says that, that’s like, “OK, man,
respect.” Not just, “Could you just mute that one and I’ll have another go?”
Commitment is really important. It’s really hard to do with computers, really, really
hard. Everyone keeps it. I keep it. I know what a great method this is. Even
if I wipe it off in the session, I know I’ve got three back-ups, one in the
cloud and two in the site. It’s never gone. On tape it was gone. That lead
vocal is no good. The tape’s full, 24 tracks, full. “You know what? The lead
vocal’s not very good, is it? I think I’ll do it again.” Whoa! Great, really great.
We may never get back there. We may never get back there. The data is never gone
now, even if you wipe it off. Torsten Schmidt The interesting thing is that you’re talking about a time when that particular band you were recording showed millions of people around the world, that probably aren’t old
enough to know the work of the Tom Moultons and so on, that a track
that they know inside out is never finished and someone else can have a go at
it and do a new mix of it, a remix. As an example, I’d like to follow up with
something from a guy that you worked with as well, and off the same track, just
to give us an idea of how different these things can be. (music: “People Are People (On-U Sound Mix)”) Gareth Jones That’s Adrian Sherwood, it’s “Are People People,” the Science Fiction
Dancehall Classic mix he did. If any of you guys ever get the chance to remix
for record companies, don’t do that because there’s no vocals. You just get it
straight back and they go, “Very cool backing track, but where’s the
vocals?” At the time that wasn’t important, we had extended versions with
vocals, blah, blah, blah. Adrian Sherwood’s a great genius, a great inspiration for me as well. Torsten Schmidt In what sense? Gareth Jones Because he’s so crazy, so out there, so dedicated, self-made, runs his own
label, like Matias does. He’s always been on the edge and he’s totally committed to his
vision and what he does, a real no-sell-out dude. Just a wonderfully charming,
sweet person… can be bitter sometimes, but never with me. Torsten Schmidt All bitter people are failed romantics. Gareth Jones He’s a wonderful guy. I met him in Lodz last year again. So that’s one of his incredible crazy remixes. Torsten Schmidt How many of the bits in there can you actually recognize and identify? Gareth Jones About three. I think it’s been made from the beats. It’s made from the
multitrack without a sampler. Oh no, that’s not true, he’s using an AMS old-
style studio sampler and reconstructing the multitrack on another reel of
tape, probably. But he’s not bringing any new sounds in. It’s an authentic and
honorable remix, because he’s taking all the sounds off the multitrack and
reorganizing them and putting them back on another multitrack. There’s no
outside sound brought on there. But, as we hear, there’s a lot left off, like
the melody and the lead vocal. Torsten Schmidt And you turn around, oh my God! At the time you worked with another seminal
band called Einstürzende Neubauten. If we were to
play “Yu-Gung”, would you go for a Sherwood mix or a live version that’s a
little later? Because it’s not easy to find the actual… Gareth Jones What’s wrong with my mix? Torsten Schmidt It wasn’t out there to find. Gareth Jones Play some of Adrian’s mix. Torsten Schmidt You got it on there or not? Gareth Jones Probably not, play some of Adrian’s mix. (music: Einstürzende Neubauten – “Yu-Gung (Adrian Sherwood mix)”) Torsten Schmidt Can you enlighten us a bit about what was so special about the studio
techniques and especially what FM Einheit applied in the studios? Gareth Jones This is a track called “Yu-Gung.” This is made with an analog sequencer that I
had, a more sophisticated version, in a way, perhaps not quite so user-
friendly… made by Friendship, a Berlin company, for Tangerine Dream. It was more
sophisticated but as not as user-friendly as that wonderful Arp 16-step
sequencer. But this is constructed with a sequencer and a sampler. This is the
first time Neubauten used sequencers and samples, because obviously I was a big
fan of what they were doing. Obviously, very powerful lyrics, the great lunatic genius
Blixa Bargeld on front of it. We
hear clearly sequencers and samplers are being used, which I’m bringing in.
Mufti, Herr Einheit, got that
really quick. Of all of the band he embraced it immediately. He seemed like
almost the most animalistic of the band in certain ways. Mufti saw it and
grabbed it, ran with it. Obviously, everyone uses samplers and sequencers now,
but that was part of the story of how that track was put together. Torsten Schmidt You’d worked with them before this, right? Gareth Jones This was early in my work with them. Halber Mensch is the album I made. But isn’t this made before Halber Mensch? I’m not sure. Torsten Schmidt In a land before time. But at the same time, in that land before time, when
you saw them perform, it wasn’t exactly like a Depeche Mode PA where you had
drumulators and big pads and stuff. Gareth Jones No, I never saw them perform with samplers or sequencers. I saw them perform
as playing metal and found objects and bass and guitar, of course. I saw them
playing it live. As a producer, it’s really important to see bands play live
before you record them, and as a recording engineer, even. I know everyone
here’s got different backgrounds and interests. When I was putting my first
10,000 hours in, trying to learn my skills, I spent a lot of time in the
studio and not enough time at gigs. Actually I didn’t spend enough time in art
galleries, I didn’t spend enough time walking in the mountains, I didn’t spend
enough time doing anything other than sitting in a studio making recordings.
That made it a bit too narrow, so I don’t even know if I saw Neubauten perform
before I worked with them in the studio. Now it would be obvious that I would
see them at least once, twice, three times before I did a recording with them, because you get such a wonderful feel for what a band is about when you see them live. Torsten Schmidt But you got some sort of performance in the studio when they brought in a
whole bunch of beer kegs and all that sort of stuff. Gareth Jones They did the most wonderful art installation in Hansa Studio Two with
incredible sheets of metal and scaffolding, a huge room full of found objects
and springs and boxes. Incredible installation they did when we made Halber
Mensch. Torsten Schmidt So, if you have a bunch of beer kegs… Gareth Jones I don’t remember beer kegs, but anyway… Torsten Schmidt If you have a bunch of construction scaffolding and all that stuff, do you need to mic that differently from your average vintage snare drum? Gareth Jones I don’t know, there’s no rules. Obviously, there’s no rules about making
recordings other than – it’s a cliché – but if it sounds right, it is right. I
had some contact mics at the time. I was using tape-on contact mics as well as
close mics and distant mics. The recording of Neubauten was about capturing
the sound and energy of a live performance and in that sense, maybe it’s not
that different from recording a really vibrant and exciting rock band – bass,
drums, guitar. Torsten Schmidt Now, at exactly this time you recorded one of the most successful records on
the planet. You’re getting calls for different jobs that might sound a little different. (music: Bronski Beat – “Hit That Perfect Beat”) Gareth Jones I didn’t record this, I mixed this, in Hansa. I can’t remember the producer’s
name, I only worked with him on this project. He was a really nice guy and I
guess they came to Hansa and me because of Depeche. That’s that, two weeks in
the Hansa mix room mixing that album. Torsten Schmidt When you’re all of a sudden in demand, how do you choose your projects then? Gareth Jones I didn’t have a plan. For better or worse, I just went with the flow. I had no
plan, I didn’t really have management help. Now, I have managers in Europe and
America who I can talk things through with, decide which projects we want to
do, which we haven’t got time to do, which projects I fit with. I try to do
projects I feel I can contribute something to. Bronski Beat must have been one
of those things. They got in touch, and it seemed like a good fit so we just
went with it. Torsten Schmidt Before all these digital serendipity engines, when you’re trying to find out,
“I like this music, that music, what else is out there?,” you always needed a
good record shop person, or yeah, just to look at credits and realize, “Oh, that
arranger does something I like, maybe other records by the same guy do
something.” And that’s how a lot of people stumbled across this thing here. (music: Nitzer Ebb – “Let Your Body Learn” / applause) Gareth Jones We’re a bit behind in the chronology. It’s nearly five o’clock and it’s only 1987, 20
years ago. Feeling like I’m stuck in the ’80s. Torsten Schmidt We better hurry up. We’re leaving the ’80s in a second, but obviously tracks
like that were totally seminal for an emerging scene in Chicago and Detroit
and they would be playing stuff like that like mad. Gareth Jones Yeah, Nitzer Ebb. I mixed this record with Daniel Miller, very record-company-led. I’d opened a bit of a relationship with Mute Records, it’s a wonderful
powerhouse of experimental pop and a great fit for me. In spite of the fact
they were making very successful pop records, there was enormous creative
freedom, a lot of record sales, and there was budget. So, it was an incredible
privilege and a pleasure to be part of all this. This was one of the records
Daniel wanted to release and he asked me to mix it. The band came over to
Berlin as well and I had a great time meeting them, just a couple of days. We
only did one 12", just a couple of tracks. It was very much led by the
vision, the A&R strengths and personality which is Daniel Miller. Torsten Schmidt How much of the club experience would go into the production and mixing? Gareth Jones I’ve never been a big clubber. Not from me, not much at all. Obviously, from the band, I guess, and I like working with people. I do some mixing now where I’m just alone in a
room. That’s OK, I like the work and I’ve done some very satisfying mixes for
me and the client like that. But, obviously, it’s really good fun. A lot of
people start making music because they like being in a room with a bunch of
people making a noise and I’ve always enjoyed that in studios as well. In a record
like that, obviously the band are there and if it’s not hard enough
[laughs]... With them, if it’s too soft you hear about it really quickly.
“That’s no good. The bass drum needs to be much harder.” Torsten Schmidt Was that the language being used? Gareth Jones I don’t know, but I imagine that was also being led by the vision of the
artist who’s there. Although Daniel has a clear vision, too. Torsten Schmidt The interesting thing is a lot of people getting into that were coming from
heavy metal. They were getting bored with the way metal was going. They
gravitated towards that because there was a certain aggressiveness, but also, in
a bizarre way, a certain funkiness as well. Only much later, when you see
footage of sweaty clubs with loads of big men and large bottles of poppers,
[you realize] that there’s a very non-heavy metal energy going on there. How
conscious were they of appealing to different clienteles? Gareth Jones My experience of those times – and bear in mind I was a studio animal and very
focused on that world – was that this was artists expressing themselves and
finding their audience. None of the work I did with Mute was aimed at a
specific target audience. This is not corporate pop, this is not X Factor,
it’s not, “Hey, if we get a black girl, a white girl and a Chinese girl and put
them together with a heavy metal guitarist...” Torsten Schmidt “…we’ve got all bases covered.” Gareth Jones Obviously, it’s not like that, it doesn’t feel like that. It wasn’t made like
that at the time. There was of course a real push and a wish – Depeche Mode and
Erasure wanted to be successful electronic pop bands. There was a real sense
in which they were making music for the world. But, I guess, as bands develop
they find out what their audience is. But a lot of bands, as they grow, they
lose their audience, don’t they? I’ve had that in my work as a producer and you
guys must have had it as musicians. You start off, you make some music and
you’ve got three mates who like what you do. Then you make a new track and then
maybe 56 mates like it, but then the three original mates think you’ve already
sold out. So, the three mates who were there at the beginning go, “The early
music by you, that was good, back in the day…” That happens all the way down. I’ve seen that happen with artists who’ve grown. The art of being a hugely
successful band, like U2 or Coldplay, is to keep respect. I have a huge
respect for the fans of the music that I’ve worked with because the fans are
what keep it going. The fans buy the music, they support the acts and without
them we’re all back to the bedrooms playing cassettes to each other. One other
thing about that, I realized recently again, every record I’ve ever made is
someone’s favorite record. Not just the successful records. Every piece you
put out there is probably someone’s favorite piece ever. I find that helpful
because it gives you enormous respect for the work. Even if it’s not your
favorite piece ever, it probably will be someone’s favorite piece of music ever. It’ll be a piece of music that accompanies them through life experience, a marriage, a death, a birth, a love affair, a broken love affair, something where it’ll be really, really, really,
really important to them. And that makes every piece of music really important
because to someone it’s the most important piece ever. Just thought
I’d throw that in. Torsten Schmidt Using Depeche Mode as an example, you felt the other side of that here: The
incredible burden when you work with them. You work with them on Construction Time Again, on Some Great Reward, on Black Celebration and then a
couple of years later on Ultra and Exciter. Obviously,
they’ve been through about five different periods in that time and you’ve got
this mass of dedicated fanatics around the world that are just crushing these four people
with their expectations. What did you learn from the process of trying to deal
with that? Gareth Jones I don’t know if the fans crush the artists. It’s difficult, being mega-successful. Not me, obviously, I’m just some backroom dude. But for the stars
at the front, it’s obviously difficult, especially when you’re young. Young guys,
loads of money, loads of success can be a total disaster. Football, you see it
all the time; rock music, you see it all the time. Growing up in public is
difficult. Torsten Schmidt You could be working in the mines. Gareth Jones It beats working in the jam factory. In my experience Depeche felt a big
responsibility for the fans. I don’t think they felt crushed by them, perhaps
they did. No one has the same feeling for a long time, for 25 years. Torsten Schmidt When you’re in a session and you need to make it work, you need to facilitate
that somehow. Gareth Jones We all feel we’ve got a responsibility for the fans, we all feel that. But we’ve also got a responsibility to ourselves to do something that is somehow worthwhile and original. Torsten Schmidt But you are, to a certain degree, in a more comfortable position. When you go
down to the milkman and go buy your yogurt, no one’s going to say, “Oh no, Gareth fell off.” People wouldn’t even recognize you; still it’s your job to make them look good. Gareth Jones It’s my job to help. It’s Anton Corbijn’s job to make them look
good. It’s my job to help. I see myself as one of many supportive elements
around a band. It’s not as big as a movie, making a record. But a successful
record is a huge team of people, clearly. I’m not making it happen, I’m helping a bit from my corner. Torsten Schmidt So if we consider this team-player effort, if I just look at the year after
Black Celebration. I just
picked highlights of that year: it’s Nick Cave, House of Love, Erasure, The Rainbirds. That’s four very different
projects in one year, four very different teams. That’s like going from
Arsenal to Kaiserslautern to Perugia to Barcelona in one season. Gareth Jones You know your football, I don’t. Torsten Schmidt I don’t go there, but it’s very different approaches in the same time. Gareth Jones But not nearly as broad as the music I enjoy listening to. There’s no string
quartets in there, no be-bop, no solo piano. There’s loads of music. It’s kind
of broad in a way, but it’s a small angle. Torsten Schmidt Still you’re recording piano pieces for Irmin Schmidt who came from a very
different background as well. And you’re doing film stuff with Wim Wenders. All that stuff, totally
different work. Gareth Jones Yeah, that’s different, but super fun. Like Matias said this morning, he
listens to loads of music. I listen to loads of different kinds of music all the time. A lot of
music you listen to, I probably don’t know and I’m sure I’m going to get loads
out of this week by hearing some of what you guys are making and listening to,
always, because music’s so huge. But I listen to lots of beats and melodies.
It’s a long history. We’ve got 25,000 years of human endeavor. Torsten Schmidt As Gareth says, he’s going to be here all week, and will share time in the
studios and he’s also willing to help you mix and follow through with some of
the stuff you’re creating here. I understand he’s also brought some multitracks
for which we can probably find a nice little room at some stage and go through various bits and dissect them a little bit. Obviously, there are tons and tons of stories
to be shared, from Interpol to
Palais Schaumberg,
all the individual projects of the Palais Schaumberg guys, like the
Hillers, Fehlmann’s and so on. But
before we hand it over to the questions there’s another album that people tend
to like a bit, which you got called on as well, and I’d like to play some of
that. (music: Mogwai – “Batcat”) Torsten Schmidt As our man from Scotland would be saying, “Regards, thank you very much.” Now,
when you go over and listen to those recordings you’ve done, sometimes three,
sometimes 25 years ago, what do you actually listen for? Gareth Jones When I go over there? [Points forwards to other part of the room] It’s just a bit muffled over here, so over there I get a bit more of the vibe of the whole thing. Just enjoying
most of them, you can hear it better. Torsten Schmidt That’s good, if you’re still enjoying most of them. Gareth Jones That was a great pleasure working with
Mogwai. It happened through a couple of
contacts. I met Guy through Mark Bell of LFO, when
he was producing Exciter. I met Sean, who was working with Mogwai at the
time… they needed someone to mix their record and he thought I might be able
to do a good job. So, I said, “Great!” I like Mogwai, I like the noise and the
power. I find them really hard live. If you ever go live to see Mogwai, be
prepared to be sick. It’s so loud, it’s ridiculous. You need double-strength
earplugs or something, it’s really loud. But they’re great guys and it’s a wonderful
experience for me. It was refreshing. I love working with singers and vocalists, the human
voice, but obviously it’s instrumentals so that’s amazing too. Torsten Schmidt I suppose there might be a question or two, if we can get a mic. Gareth Jones I will answer questions, as long as you guys don’t get bored. Audience member You said it’s music before technology, but what do you think about mixing in
the box exclusively? Gareth Jones I’ve done both. It’s all about our ears, isn’t it? It’s all about musical sensibility and people can do
outstanding mixes in the box. I’ve done some wonderful mixes in the box and I
enjoy it very much. But obviously, it’s all about having fun and if you’ve got
the money it’s a lot of fun to do it old style with a console. Because you get
different tones I guess, a bit. It’s a different working process. This
David’s Liar record I
talked about, we mixed that on a console. But now, whenever I mix in a studio,
which is not that often because I don’t get the budget to do it, I always
record the stems in the studio, because everything gets recorded separately and
then I put it back in the computer. Still, a week later, it’s wonderful to put
it back in the box and adjust it. Spike Stent has gone over to mixing in the
box massively. He’s a huge British mix engineer in LA. I like mixing in the
box, but my personal rig, I’ve just come out of mixing in the box a year ago
with a little valve something mixer, which I used to mix another Scottish band
called Sons and Daughters, a
Glasgow band. It was such fun that I had to buy it afterwards. I rented this valve
mixer thing. It was so great, I had such fun with it that I bought it afterwards.
It’s maybe harder to get good results in the box, but the great thing
is that you save and then you come back a week later and tweak it. So, even when I’m in
the studio, I still record everything individually on stems and put it back on
the computer, so the David’s Liar record, we finished it in my music room at
home, which is just like a front room with a sofa and a table in it. The artist
came around and we made little adjustments there on the computer to a couple
of the songs because we weren’t quite happy with where we’d got to. Audience member You said you used to use NS-10s. What do you use now? Gareth Jones At home I’ve got some PMC’s, TB2SA’s I
think they’re called. I bought them when I was working in a different space.
They don’t sound that great in my music room at home. I use headphones a lot
and I use little Genelecs. I use the big speakers to check the vibe and the bottom end and the scale. But then I spend a lot of
time mixing on small speakers. I’ve got a little stereo radio thing I use a
lot and the headphones and the little Genelecs. If I just turn it up, I get
too excited. Everything sounds great when you turn it up. So, I use a mixture
of speakers. Audience member With all the advances of modern technology, with anybody able to record an
album at home, engineer it themselves, where do you see the longevity of being an engineer being a career? With companies wanting to cut every cost under the sun, if the
act can produce their own record, it’s a major plus. They don’t want to rent
out studio spaces, everything has to be a little bit more cut down. I always
figured the producer is always needed, but it’s as much the engineering side as well. Gareth Jones Recording at home is a bit like monkeys with the typewriter. If you give 10
billion monkeys 10 billion typewriters in 10 billion years they’ll write the
works of Shakespeare, kind of thing. Just giving people the access to
technology doesn’t mean shit. I know the recording technology’s cheap now, and that’s
great. There’s loads of wonderful music being made by very talented people.
Quite a lot of my business model, if a hippie freak dropout can have a
business model, is based on people sending me files, which I then mix and send
back as two-track mixes. Because a lot of people seem to find they can get the
core of their musical idea down really well at home, in a rehearsal studio,
somewhere. But, maybe, at the mix stage they need a bit more help to have
someone with a bit of experience help them finish the record. Audience member Playing devil’s advocate here, you get those jobs through your 30 years of
reputation in the game. Obviously, your experience is much more valuable than
a 28-year-old who’s been doing engineering for five years. Presumably, there’s
a few of us here that if it’s not production we want to go down, we might want
to go down the engineering road. This kind of thing. Gareth Jones And it’s a crossover anyway. A mate of mine called James, who was an assistant
and then did some engineering for me, he’s done pretty much the same thing. He
does a lot of mixing in the spare room of his flat. I’ve not been to his new
flat, but all it is is a computer and some little speakers, some acoustic
treatment in the room. He grabbed my business model, if you like, and he’s doing pretty
good. He’s very passionate about doing it, and if you’re passionate about it, you’ve
got no choice. You’ve got to just do it anyway. That’s what he’s doing. He’s
started a little label for himself with a couple of mates. But he’s not just
mixing for that label, he’s doing work for other people because he’s focused on
developing that skill set. Obviously, there are some genius electronic
musicians, artists, producers who do everything. They write, they record all their
own shit, they mix it. That is the piece of work. But there are a lot of people who
do the writing and the recording and the performance side, and maybe they just
don’t dedicate that much time to the mixing. James has found that niche there
and he’s a much younger guy. So who knows? The industry is broken… not broken,
but it’s very different. We, the industry, had a great idea in the ’80s. We went,
“I know what we’ll do, we’ll sell the master tape to the public.” Which we
never used to do; we used to sell vinyl, which was a copy of the mythical
master tape. But then somebody had this great idea that we might as well sell
the public the master tape. And then the internet came along and everyone got
PCs, so everyone could clone the master tape really easily. The industry made
quite a lot of money from selling the master tape to us, the public, in the
’80s. But now we’re paying the price for that. People don’t bother to buy the
original in the way they did when I was young. We copied the vinyl on
cassettes, give it to a mate and said, “Check this out,” and if the mate liked it
they’d go and buy the original vinyl, because the cassette sounded so shit
compared to the vinyl. But now nobody does that, they just download a WAV. I
like vinyl anyway. My choice is to listen to vinyl at home if I like it. I
check it on Spotify, if I like it I buy the vinyl because I enjoy it. I’ve got
a nice record player. I’ll take more questions. I’m anxious to satisfy
everyone. Audience member Some of the early tracks you played use heavy panning and I’m quite sad that
panning isn’t used so much any more, putting one thing all the way to one side
and then it’s whizzed over to the other. It’s not really used that much
any more. What are your opinions on that? Do you like to use it? Gareth Jones Yeah, if I can get away with it, of course. It makes it a bit more Cinemascope, doesn’t it? And you really notice it on something like this, it’s really nice. You’re in a
good technical position, you lot here. So it’s a great way to listen to music
and I try to do that at home. But in my living room the speakers aren’t that
far apart because my wife won’t allow it. It seriously impacted my listening
space when I got married and moved in with my wife. Everything changed;
instead of dedicating the whole room to the soundsystem, it wasn’t like that
any more. But still it just seems obvious. It’s like using everything from black to
white in a photograph; why not use the whole range? It is wonderful when we’re
able to listen to loud music with the speakers spread out a bit and just the
right distance back. In this month’s Sound on Sound, one of these mix rescue
things, someone’s talking about how people who are not very good at mixing
don’t spend enough time on panning. If you’ve just got the little speakers
either side of your computer screen you almost don’t bother. If the speakers
are only this far apart, basically everything’s in the middle. That’s one of
the wonderful things if you’re able to go into a big studio – this is an
incredible soundsystem – but if you’ve got the opportunity, the speakers are a
long way apart. Suddenly, you’ve got this huge screen. So anyway, panning.
Yeah, let’s pan! [Clenches fist in the air / laughter] Audience member You said you learned on the job at the BBC thing. I was just wondering about
your engineering schools. Good luck with that, by the way. Gareth Jones Has anyone been to an engineering school? Quite a few. So, there you go, it’s a
way in. I did it one way and the other great way, which some of my colleagues –
whose work I marvel at, and I think are absolutely wonderful – is people who
got into a studio system which is rapidly dismantling anyway and learned as an
assistant at the feet of great masters. It’s obviously a wonderful way to
work. I can’t go backwards in my life, but I’d love to have had that
experience as well. But I don’t think I had the right personality when I was
young. I was mouthy, I thought I knew it all. I don’t think I would have made a
very good junior assistant, because I’d have been going up to Quincy Jones and saying,
“Look Quincy, man, I think we ought to pan it over to the left a bit more.
What do you think?” And obviously, as a junior assistant you’re just supposed
to keep your mouth shut and make the tea and just be there. So engineering
schools, it’s hard to answer, because some people have spent a lot of their own
money going to these schools. Hey, maybe it’s OK, it’s something. It’s like me
going to the BBC, maybe. I didn’t learn shit, but I learned more than I knew
before, which is probably what you can do at engineering schools as well. It
depends on your motivation. I’ve got a young colleague called Neil Quinlan who was at Alchemy in
London and he’s made it. He’s made it through the school, into the system,
he’s made it through the school into an assistant at Mute Records’ studio and
he’s now working, establishing himself a bit, doing remixes and everything.
But he was really dedicated. If you want to go to engineering school, you want to take
advantage of the equipment there and use it as much as possible, which he did.
Some people go to engineering school because they’ve got rich parents or they
smoke a lot of pot and their parents figure, “He smokes pot, he’s into music, we
might as well pay for him to go to engineering school.” [Laughter] That’s
not really going to get that much done or move you forward in life. Some
people go, “Wow, I can get my mates in, we can record.” It depends on the person. Some people get a lot out of it. Maybe the people here who went to engineering
school got a lot out of it or they wouldn’t have got here either. But loads of people don’t
and just waste their money. Audience member Do you think you missed out on anything, any formal information you could’ve
learned more quickly by going to an institution like that? Gareth Jones Not a formal institution, no. What I’m looking at is that other classic
route of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, where I could’ve got a job as a
teaboy, maybe, in a big studio, and watched the wonderful producers and
engineers make records. That would’ve been amazing. I missed out on that, sure, but I don’t think I missed
anything by not going the other way. Audience member If you start in a new control room to mix a record, do you have a selection of
two or three records you always use to test the system? Gareth Jones No, I should have. I think to do it. I know some people who do it. One reason
I don’t do that is if I go to a new space, quite often I’ve got the band there
straight away and I don’t like to play general music when I’m on a session
with a bunch of musicians. We’re making their record. I don’t want to come in
and play this Kraftwerk record, that Michael Jackson record, whatever the
references might be, this Pink Floyd track. It’s disrespectful, for me. If
I’ve got the budget where I can go in the day before and we’re setting up, that might be
a good thing to do. Big speakers take me ages to learn anyway. I found out
quite quickly that it took me ages to learn how big speakers sounded. Now I just
go. I get into a new space and start making music as quickly as possible.
That’s what I like to do in studios. I’ve spent a lot of time in studios not
making music; chatting, arguing, witnessing bands argue. That’s a great thing
to do by the way, when you’re making music, especially with a bunch of people.
If there’s a lot of ideas, it’s good to just do the ideas really quickly. Rather than – especially guys, because guys are a bit testosteroned up sometimes – “It’s my
idea, my idea, my idea!” Actually, it’s good to do both ideas really quick.
Most musical people, you listen back and in an hour you’ve sketched out all
these three different possibilities and then usually everyone agrees which is
the best way forwards. I don’t know why I’m talking about that in connection
with you. I’m talking about getting shit done in studios. That’s fun and now I
try to work like that. In the past, when I didn’t have this experience, I’d
spend time sitting around watching people argue or try to judge or help people
get through their arguments. Whereas now when I get together with music people I
just want to make music, because that’s really fun. Audience member In a sonic way, do you have a favorite-sounding record? Gareth Jones No, I like lots of different records. Audience member I’m just a bit curious, have you worked with Throbbing Gristle or Coil at all? Gareth Jones No, I never did. I missed that scene. Audience member But you worked with a lot of quite colorful characters. Do you find that
challenging or do you just enjoy it? Gareth Jones Yeah, I like colorful characters. One of my problems is that I’ve been a bit
mental myself. I’ve had to rein in my own… I’ve had to say, “Hang on a minute. It’s enough that the artist is
mental, I need to chill out.” That’s important to me and I’ve managed to do
that. Certainly, a long time ago I went through huge emotional rollercoasters
with the artists, because they’re going through this huge drama or not, then
I’m going through a huge drama or not, and I found out it’s not good for me.
But a lot of artists are larger-than-life personalities. They have to be and I
enjoy that. Audience member Thanks a lot and I was just wondering, you’ve come across a lot of equipment
in the last few decades. Is there a single piece of equipment you can think of
that revolutionized your way of working? Gareth Jones [Points at his ears] Audience member [Laughs] They’ve been there from
the beginning. Gareth Jones I know, but I didn’t know how to use them. Learning to listen has been my big
thing. You fall in love with old equipment again, you rediscover it. But I
can’t go there, it’s not about equipment, it’s about ideas. All of us are
capable of doing wonderful work if we can follow our heart and flow with it,
and do the right thing. I don’t like this equipment shit – no offense to you at all, I
understand the question, because obviously I’m a geek as well. I’ve got lots of
equipment myself, I’ve tuned it and sold everything and started again. Someone
was talking about it… Oh, Matias lost loads of stuff. I sold loads of stuff
and went totally digital and reinvented how I work, and that was really creative and
fun for me. But it’s not about equipment, I don’t think. And all the modern
equipment is amazing. Even the cheap modern equipment is so amazing compared
to the cheap old equipment. The computer was a pretty big one. That’s what I’d
say if I had to choose one. When we could put audio into computers, that
changed everything. That was pretty good. Audience member You mentioned learning to listen. So, over these decades, all this time, your
perceptions of sound must have changed. You’ve listened to lots of music, but how
can you pinpoint things about frequencies, how to separate them out so your
instruments are sounding different, you know, clear and in their own space? Gareth Jones A lot of that is practice. There’s this idea that if we spend 10,000
hours doing anything we’ll probably be quite good. Another thing I’ve found
about equipment as well is that on a lot of them, the knobs go all the way
around. It’s worth experimenting with what happens when you turn the knobs as
far as they can go and everything in between. It’s one of the arts of making a
cool-sounding record, making everything big and powerful, like the Mogwai
record. It’s like everything has to sound massive, but everything has to be clear, not
just a wall of noise. It’s experimenting with finding out frequencies that
don’t belong in that sound. I don’t do it in solo, we don’t solo individual
things. We have everything going most of the time and only occasionally do we hit
solo. So, it’s all about context. I’ve heard – I don’t know if this is true, I
wasn’t there – but apparently there was a time in Brian Eno’s production life when, as an
engineer, you were not allowed to hit solo when Brian was in the room. If you
hit the solo button, you lost the job. I’ve never met him, but obviously he’s a wonderful,
thoughtful, super-creative, talented person and he has some wonderful ideas
for all of us. I really recommend his interview in Tape Op – everything he
writes is well worth reading. But he’s very good at context and focus,
especially for mixing. No one cares what the bass drum, for example, sounds like in solo,
because no one’s ever going to hear it in solo. What counts is the whole
picture. I find quite often I can get to where I need to be quicker if I’ve
got everything on. Occasionally, I hit solo and think, “Oh, there’s lots of
subsonic, lots of low frequencies.” In digital recording, it’s more difficult
even than analog, because you capture everything. It’s quite easy to get a
recording of a high instrument, but there’s loads of sub-frequencies in there
that you don’t need. And that’s really important, just at a simple level, just
to filter out all the low frequencies you don’t need, just leave room for the
bass and the kick. Audience member You were talking about dream analysis and being Freudian, and maybe even some
substances. Keep the substances apart, but just about opening your mind,
trying to understand your mind, does that open up your perceptions or your
hearing even better? Gareth Jones Yes, and learning to listen to is learning to listen without pride and
prejudice. I’m trying to put my ego away and be open to the vision of the artist,
try to build that into something that’s good for the artist and good for the
song. Ego has not helped me in my life. It’s something I need to put away when
I work. It’s not really about me, it’s about the work. Audience member I have a very simple question. Usually, when I talk to someone who’s older
than I am – and we also have these lecturers here talking the same thing –
when I ask about the current scene and what’s going on and young musicians
doing stuff, usually it’s, “Young musicians, me no like.” What did you think about this music being made now? Audience member Who did you speak to? Audience member No, it is like this. A lot of the time this happens. Gareth Jones One of the things I really enjoy doing is working with younger bands. I really
enjoy that, because I can help move things forward, because I’ve got such a
different perspective. Obviously, I can’t work with all young people because
some young people don’t want to work with an old guy. They want to work with
their contemporaries. One of my old guy friends of mine from college the other day
said, “How come you’re still working? Don’t all the young people want to work with young people? Why do they want to work with an old guy?” It depends on
the people. That’s not everyone. The people who don’t want to work with an old
guy I never meet, but I find it super – I’ve just made a record with a young
woman called Emmy the Great. It
was her second record, but to me these people are young, in their mid-20s.
That’s fantastic because I really feel I can help them move forward. I’m so in awe of
musical talent. Some people have incredible musical talent, which I admire
enormously. So to me that’s not a problem. Am I answering your question? Audience member Yes, you are. Thank you and thank you for a brilliant lecture [applause]. Torsten Schmidt You already said it there but we thank you. I’d still like to close out with
some music. I figured with the whole ego thing to go out doing what you do
best and paying credit to the artists you work with. Before we go to “Fly On The Windscreen” as a closing
song, can you enlighten us on the role of Alan Wilder in a certain band? He
looks a little bit religious right now… not sure I’m comfortable with that. Gareth Jones Not everyone is a Depeche Mode fan and, obviously, Mode fans are fascinated by
the politics of the band. Alan’s obviously a great creative genius and it was
a wonderful pleasure and a privilege to work with him in the period when I
did. I don’t think his role is overlooked. I can’t stay there too long but a wonderful talent and great
creative contribution. A real studio dude, Alan was and is, if anyone’s seen
them on the Recoil tour recently. Torsten Schmidt OK, boring details over and over to the music, but not without a massive
amount of applause, Mr Gareth Jones, everybody. [Applause]