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Tyler Burns
United States
Приєднався 10 жов 2012
Producing Culture Club's COLOUR BY NUMBERS (1983): Interview w/ Steve Levine
A technical interview (w/ Steve Levine) focusing on the studio gear and recording methodology behind this audiophile masterpiece, March, 2022.
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:20 - Welcome
1:41 - How Steve Got Chosen to Work with Culture Club
7:53 - Boy George's Voice
10:43 - Boy George If He'd Started Recording in the Age of Auto-Tune
12:18 - Recording "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" in One Take!
15:30 - Comping on Analog Tape vs. Digital Tape
15:56 - Boy George's Vocal Chain on COLOUR BY NUMBERS
18:14 - Red Bus MCI 500 Series Console
24:38 - "I'm a big DBX Fan."
26:40 - Helen Terry's Vocal Chain
30:48 - Sped-Up Outro of "Karma Chameleon"
33:53 - "Flying-In" Backing Vocals from 1/2" Tape
35:08 - Multi-Tracks
36:00 - Tape Speed, Tape Formula, Tape Calibration, and Noise Reduction Type
36:53 - Printing Mixes Digitally on the Sony F1 (bit.ly/3NSRWyr)
39:08 - Early Digital - Awful?
41:14 - Using Incipient Digital Recorders Today
42:24 - Tyler's Favorite Music Playback Device
42:52 - Keyboards and Synths
43:57 - "Colour by Numbers" the B-Side
44:24 - First Use of DX7 in a Commercial Pop Song
49:14 - Reverbs
52:29 - Tracking "Victims"
53:30 - Mixing Process
55:29 - Recording Synths
56:18 - What Was the Recording Atmosphere?
1:00:05 - Songwriting
1:01:55 - WAKING UP WITH THE HOUSE ON FIRE (1984)
1:02:10 - "Mistake No. 3"
1:03:44 - Outro
Edit/Post by Alec Eagon
aleceagon.com
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:20 - Welcome
1:41 - How Steve Got Chosen to Work with Culture Club
7:53 - Boy George's Voice
10:43 - Boy George If He'd Started Recording in the Age of Auto-Tune
12:18 - Recording "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" in One Take!
15:30 - Comping on Analog Tape vs. Digital Tape
15:56 - Boy George's Vocal Chain on COLOUR BY NUMBERS
18:14 - Red Bus MCI 500 Series Console
24:38 - "I'm a big DBX Fan."
26:40 - Helen Terry's Vocal Chain
30:48 - Sped-Up Outro of "Karma Chameleon"
33:53 - "Flying-In" Backing Vocals from 1/2" Tape
35:08 - Multi-Tracks
36:00 - Tape Speed, Tape Formula, Tape Calibration, and Noise Reduction Type
36:53 - Printing Mixes Digitally on the Sony F1 (bit.ly/3NSRWyr)
39:08 - Early Digital - Awful?
41:14 - Using Incipient Digital Recorders Today
42:24 - Tyler's Favorite Music Playback Device
42:52 - Keyboards and Synths
43:57 - "Colour by Numbers" the B-Side
44:24 - First Use of DX7 in a Commercial Pop Song
49:14 - Reverbs
52:29 - Tracking "Victims"
53:30 - Mixing Process
55:29 - Recording Synths
56:18 - What Was the Recording Atmosphere?
1:00:05 - Songwriting
1:01:55 - WAKING UP WITH THE HOUSE ON FIRE (1984)
1:02:10 - "Mistake No. 3"
1:03:44 - Outro
Edit/Post by Alec Eagon
aleceagon.com
Переглядів: 2 668
Відео
Engineering Steely Dan's GAUCHO (1980): Interview w/ Elliot Scheiner
Переглядів 96 тис.3 роки тому
A technical interview focusing on the studio gear and recording methodology behind this audiophile masterpiece, May 4th, 2021. tyler-burns.com Edit/Subs/Post by Alec Eagon How many analog multitrack recorders were being used upon mixdown, one or two? One. Were you using a slave machine? No. What type of multitracks were being used? Studer A800 (mk I) 24-track at A&R, and at Soundtrack a 24-trac...
I wonder when all the clowns are going to figure out "the mix bus" question is asked only by morons? None of the real guys used compressors or eq's on the mix bus, its a gearslutz creation
Interesting, though the (ever increasing) technology options are simply tools, like brushes to a painter. It's always the creative input to the artform that ultimately touches and connects with people. Lets not get lost in the technology...
Interviewer “So there were no digital reverbs?” “They didn’t exist yet” Interviewer: “so what digital effects were used?” “Do you realize what you’re saying?!” Hahaha come on man do your research before your interview someone
Hey Tyler! Where can I get that Bluetooth Podcast Mic!?!? 😜
Good work ☺👏👏🙏🏻
Mr Burns Elliot had just said no digital reverb it waa 1979 and then you asked immediately afterwards what digital effects? Lol!
I was again, impressed with Elliot and him NOT mentioning that 'Hey Nineteen' was based on a story he shared with them! To this day I have a picture Elliot shared with me, as he is standing with President Obama, still on one of my walls in my Control Room! Class act in deed. Tyler, some good questions from a youngblood, about our past methods & means.
Please relase your music again. I didn't acquire it on physical media and now I am saddened that I can no longer listen to it. Please, even if you only sell it. I will buy it just to listen.
I love Gaucho. It was the epitome of a great career. Ultra sophisticated. Hey Nineteen makes me want to crack open the Cuervo Gold and go skating.
It's also the audio capture of the death of a career, via perfectionism. I guess the album has a whole mythos behind it now, but Fagen has said in interviews that their pursuit of sonic perfection made them pretty miserable/anxious as music makers. The whole creation of Gaucho (particularly the Wendel incident, and the destruction of the Second Arrangement) was the pinnacle but also the very bottom. It's a minor miracle it ever got released.
Really interesting interview. I remember at the time how huge Culture Club were. I often think pop music really peaked between '82 and '85. Steve is so informative and enthusiastic. Cheers
Boy George's Voice on Colour By Numbers is Pure Perfection! You can hear Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick in George's vocals on Colour By Numbers. "Changing Everyday" reminded me of Dionne Warwick.
The greatest album of the 1980s. My fave
Katy Lied, Royal Scam, and Aja are the best, no doubt. 💯
lmao @ "do you know what you're saying?"
“Nobody, but me” Chills
Wow. Gotta say. I LOVE the Dan and this interview was so far over my head and yet answered so many of my questions about the sound. Fantastic interview… Great work, keep it up!!
Precious info man thanks. Only, if I may say ma felling : it sounds like a police interrogatory with such a nice, humble and wise man. Do like him : no matter how tech-oriented this is, try the FUN side ! Musically !
This was a great Q&A session. I would have loved to hear Elliot talk about the DTS surround mix he did. That surround mix sounds incredible. There are element flowing around all 6 speakers. The bass and kick are in the pocket on that mix.
21:16 How does one record a Rhodes in stereo? Is it recording with some stereo chorus or something? Edit: TIL there are Fender Rhodes with two outs..
Re Time Out Of Mind, there's certain pressings of the Gaucho album (and it may also exist on the Citizen Steely Dan set), where the tape drop out due to SSD is audible. You can hear it at 1:19 here: ua-cam.com/video/XOuFO8KPnjw/v-deo.html
Wonderful interview! So if the song Colour By Numbers was the first use of DX7, l’m left wondering what they used for the steel drum sound on I’ll Tumble 4 Ya, which I always assumed was DX FM synth. 🤯
this feels like a deposition
I saw an interview with Donald Fagan and he said that Aja was the album that they always wanted to make - it is personally my favorite - it is a masterpiece.
Gaucho is my fav Dan album. Hard to pick one but it is my go to sleep piece
Lost me at the digital questions
Was the title track Machine or Real? Unless I missed that part
🎶TIME IS LIKE A CLOCK IN MY HEART❤️🎵
Riveting. Absolutely riveting. I would love to hear an interview about "Waking up with the house on fire" as well.
Every Steely Dan album is good to great. Gaucho is transcendent.
Interview or interrogation?
@25:00 - what about the title track? Real or machine? Also, on this topic, I've got this method where I get the AI stem, use the beat analysis of Emulator X and measure the length in samples. So for verse 1 of Hey 19, which is done with Wendel, I measure where each snare hit came as a percentage of the way to the next beat. It went like this for the first 8 bars: 53%, 51, 50, 50, 50, 50, 51, 51, 51, 51, 51, 51, 51, 51, 50, 50, 50, 50. So basically, Donald was quantizing but tending to nudge the snare a bit later - sort of a subtle "fatback" effect.
Okay, so Elliot says Hey 19 is machine and Time Out of Mind is real. Both, conveniently, have Rick Marotta and have similar tempos and drum patterns. Hey 19 is 119 bpm and uses what I call the Ringo beat (K S KK SK - actually first played by Marvin Gaye in 1962) on a Stevie Wonder record as best as I can tell. Time Out of Mind is a bit faster at 125 bpm and uses the basic K S K S rock beat. So, when I did the same measurements for the snare, again starting where the vocal comes in, Time out of Mind was all 50%. So ironically, the real Rick Marotta (albeit probably playing with a click) was more "quantized" than the Rick Marotta whose drum sounds were body snatched by Wendel. Now ... having done a ton of these with Ringo beats, I find that even if a drummer stays consistently at 49% or 51%, if I do a blindfold test, I can't really hear it. It has to be 2% or 3% difference for me to hear a gradation in the swing (with 8ths and 16ths) or the "fatbackness" (with snare backbeats). I'm assuming that these guys have such great muscle memory and reflexes that they can stay consistently (relatively speaking) around 49%, 50% or 51%, and obviously Wendel can do it precisely. So all I can conclude from this experiment - and this is a guess at best - is that Donald likes to hear the snare a little late, or "fat" and that's why he nudged it on Hey 19. But what do people think, comparing the grooves of those two songs? Can you hear that Hey 19 is Wendel and Time Out of Mind is Rick? Can you hear a difference in the feel of the snare backbeat on the first verse of each? Does anybody have any links to more info on any of this? The main thing I could point to is the book Dilla Time which goes into a fair amount (but less that is really needed) of detail on how Dilla nudged his snares (he moved them earlier - there are a lot of confusing things involved into trying to measure them and Dilla changed his approach drastically over the years so it's very hard to really figure out conclusively what's going on. Maybe D'Angelo's Voodoo would be a good one to try next. It's not Dilla but presumably is trying to emulate Dilla and generally more consistently done. Ugh ... this stuff could seriously make one lose one's mind.
Title track is all real- just a ton of different takes edited.
Incredibly eye opening. Glad to know that they decided to go with the sound from the console and leave any comp up to the mastering. Also just the amount of "No's" returned from Elliot shows how conservative the whole process was from start to finish. You did an excellent job on this and I really appreciate how you conducted the interview.
OMG. No compression on vocals, no EQ and compression in mix down. The art of sound engineering is lost. We are dooooomed.
merci
Sounds like a police interrogation, who is this guy??
We can see an ethos of simplicity in the recording chain. No unnecessary gizmos. Just careful positioning of microphones, highly skilled mixing and final mastering.
Back in the day I had a Fostex A-8 8-track reel to reel and a Teac 2340SX 4-track reel to reel. Even though cleaning, demagnetizing, and aligning them both was such a pain in the ass, recording using straightforward tools like them and my Studiomixer console was so much more fun and rewarding than using a computer is now--and made it much more difficult for the millions of talentless nobodies like the ones that pollute Spotify nowadays to ever get their crap recorded, much less heard.
lol, just lol,,,,the whole conversation
Began engineering in the early 70s. Probably when Elliot started though I was a NY guy and part of that whole scene. Just want to say, a) I had a couple M79s and they were no friend of 456. b) you asked pretty much every question I would have asked myself. Thx
Ugh.... this interviewer
At 22:00 - the stereo device he is referencing, I'll bet it was the Aphex Aural Exciter which was brand new in those days. Possibly a Harmonizer with some delay L/R
More likely a Roland Dimension-D.
Dude, how is this channel minuscule? I think Google/yt has you in the box. If they let you out, you're going to blow up.
How do you have 833 subscribers? You interviewed Elliot Scheiner!
Amazing interview. It’s funny though… every question the interviewer asks, he sounds disappointed no matter the response 😂. Kind of like how I would picture it if Fagan did the interview.
Amazing interview!
Great interview. It would have been interesting to hear how he experienced the disaster with The Second Arrangement, though.
Thanks Tyler, fantastic interview with Elliot. The knowledge, the experience and the stories he's shared with us is immeasurable, so very generous of him and so smart of you to have him on. Bravo!
Freaking amazing! I didn’t even understand half of the technical stuff they were talking about, but the absolute LOVE AND RESPECT for the subject matter and THE MUSIC was there throughout the interview. Well done! 👍🏼🎸🎼🥂❤️😎
the fender rhodes box would have been a chorus box. Every Rhodes player had one..
holy crap this is freaking amazing!!!! thank you so much :)