Guest Lecture – John Williams – Record Producer

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As well as highly successful careers in A&R and songwriting John Williams has produced records by The Housemartins, The Proclaimers, Petula Clark and Michael Nyman and Radio 1 sessions by The Cure and Killing Joke to name but a few. This week he came to Lincoln and talked to our Audio Production students about his latest production; Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott’s What Have We Become album.

John’s fascinating and insightful talk took us through the entire process of making the record – from budgets, to arranging rehearsals, to booking the studio, to tracking and overdubs, through to the mixing and mastering stage. Full of excellent advice and suggestions, John demystified the whole process, stressing the importance of keeping things simple and always focussing on the song and the performance. Rehearsal time is absolutely key to this along with not getting too caught up in the technology of recording and unnecessary audio processing.

For our budding record producers, this was a hugely valuable lecture which gave some great insights, not only into the technical and organisational aspects of recording an album but also highlighted the people skills needed to manage groups of musicians and performers whose (often fragile) egos of can at times be a bit of a handful!

Listen to John speaking about the role of A&R on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 programme here (20/01/15):

Steve Bernard – 2013 Alumnus

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I’m Steve Bernard, a BA (Hons) Audio Production alumnus from the Class of ’13. Since I graduated, I’ve been employed at Cooz’s Recording Studio, in Oxford. My relationship with the studio actually began almost three years ago, after my first summer at the University of Lincoln, when I did a week long work experience there to enhance my CV. This led to an internship which I maintained around my degree, and I was offered a job at the studio after I finished my third year.

Working at the studio has been a great experience and I’ve recently found the most success as a Hip Hop producer – we were fortunate to have a break with a South African rapper called Rowan Groom, and his contacts and reputation in the emerging local Hip Hop scene has meant that business in this genre has skyrocketed. In the last 6 months, I’ve worked with a wide array of talent, producing mixtapes and EPs local rappers and singers such as Apt Ochiela, Carby, Manny O, Ellie Robbins and Rifle.

Getting business for my work relies heavily on word of mouth and networking. Whilst I have had success in building my reputation in the Hip Hop genre, Oxford’s music scene is much better known for the rock outfits it has produced over the years – most notably bands like Radiohead and Supergrass, and more recently Foals and Stornoway – who all had humble beginnings in the live music circuit around the city. Because of this, I started an initiative at the studio called Cooz’s Live, which offers bands the opportunity to have their live shows around the city recorded with our mobile rig. We’ve built up strong working relationships with a number of venues and promoters in the city, and eventually led to us working at the o2 Academy, recording touring bands such as My Life Story and Stiff Little Fingers.

Working at the studio has placed me right at the heart of the Oxford music scene, and allowed me to network closely with a number of bands and artists. On top of working on their recent recordings, I am now the live sound engineer for two up and coming Oxford bands, One Wing Left and Fracture, and I’ve started putting on my own gigs to support the continued success of local artists. I’ve also given workshops and lectures on music production at Oxford Cherwell Valley College.

Outside of music, I continue to work in sound for other media; I mixed the sound for two documentaries recently, one of which was picked up by the BBC. The Lincoln School of Media prepared me exceptionally well for life after university. As a student, you get a broad range of in depth training in a variety of media, from experts who have been out and done it themselves, on industry standard equipment. Studying there was such a rewarding experience, but it’s only the beginning and I’m very excited by what I’ve been able to do since then!

Picture – Steve with the director Kevin Cousineau mixing the Bad Company documentary.

All You Need Is Lab: How Technology Inspired Innovation in Music

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Musician and songwriter Midge Ure looks at the many ways scientific and technological innovation have stimulated creativity in pop music.

From the invention of the steel guitar string, through the tape recorder and the synthesiser, to the drum machine and Autotune, musicians have always embraced the latest ideas and adapted or distorted them to produce new sounds.

Musicians Anne Dudley (Art of Noise) and Thomas Dolby join music journalist David Hepworth and blues researcher Tom Attah, exploring how the laboratory has informed and inspired the studio.

Midge demonstrates what you can achieve with just a laptop these days – but laments the passing of an age of invention in popular music.

Featured music includes The Beatles, Chopin, Thomas Dolby, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Charlie Christian, Les Paul and Mary Ford, The Tornados, The Small Faces, Queen, The Sweet, Stevie Wonder, Band Aid, Art of Noise, Donna Summer, Fat Boy Slim, Cher, Daft Punk and Nick Clegg.

Producer: Trevor Dann
A Trevor Dann production for BBC Radio 4

Producing The C-FaB Album

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Blog post by level 1 AP student Rory Hunter.

Recently, myself and a team of Audio Production students at the University of Lincoln, recorded some tracks for the upcoming C-FaB Festival’s compilation album. As the music is country, folk and blues, the brief for the album was for it to sound as live as possible.

My first idea of capturing a ‘live sound’ in the studio was getting the artist/band to come in and rather than record the separate parts of the song, record a full complete performance of the song. This method brought a variety of advantages to recording along with some pitfalls to carefully think about.

The main advantage that came from this method of recording was how natural the recordings sounded. They flowed better, had more feeling in them and felt more of a real representation of the artist and their music. Performance are rarely perfect, it was the small imperfections in these performances that made it work.

The recordings came out well due to how comfortable the artists felt when performing. A studio environment can be quite alienating to some musicians, especially when they are more used to playing live. So when asked to just perform a song as they would at a gig, it felt a lot more familiar and comfortable for them. This is certainly beneficial for bands as they are more used to performing with each other rather than separately.

Inevitably the pitfalls we had to be aware of were technical ones. The first thing was microphone placement. Although this is important in all studio situations, there were more things to consider than usual. Avoiding spill between microphones was something we were always checking and thinking about. We knew it would be impossible to completely eliminate this from happening but we tried our best to reduce it. This was obviously easier to do with the solo artists, (although the acoustic guitars had a tendency to pop up on the vocal mic). However, with bands, we had to think about where each instrument would be in the live room and how we could isolate it. We used methods such as foam boards and grouping certain instruments together and giving them their own place in the room.

Our main incentive for making sure we did a good job on microphone placement was to make the tracks easier to mix. It was in the mixing stage we would truly find out how good a job we had done with our microphone placement. For example, there was one track that needed the vocal level increasing and the acoustic guitar level decreasing. However, due to the acoustic guitar spilling in to the vocal mic, a relatively simple task became more complex and required some clever mixing.

Sticking to our brief of recreating a ‘live sound’, we avoided as much we could in altering the sound with any plug-ins as such. It felt more like polishing a performance rather than mixing individual performances in to one track. However, panning was hugely important to the mixing of the tracks. Particularly with the tracks with more parts, it was key to making the tracks feel fuller and richer and give each instrument its own place in the mix.

Overall, I feel that going for a ‘live sound’ was extremely beneficial to the album. It really suits the genre of music and represents the festival well – an event that is all about live music. Although it wouldn’t be suited to every genre of music, I would definitely experiment with this recording style again as I feel it has a lot of potential benefits.

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C-Fab album tracks recorded and mixed by Rory Hunter, Vashti Hayes, Anthony Belcher, Matt Jones, Adrian Rayworth, Jack Martin and Gaz Bailey.

David Attenborough: My Life in Sound

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03lnzxh

MONDAY 16th December 2013 at 11.00am on BBC Radio 4

In an exclusive interview for Radio 4 David Attenborough talks to Chris Watson about his life in sound.

One of Sir David’s first jobs in natural history film making was as a wildlife sound recordist. Recorded in Qatar, David Attenborough is with wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson, there to make a film about a group of birds he is passionate about, The Bird of Paradise. It is in Qatar where the worlds largest captive breeding population is and it is in this setting Chris Watson takes Sir David back to the 1950’s and his early recording escapades, right through to today where David Attenborough narrates a series of Tweet of the Day’s on Radio 4 across the Christmas and New Year period

Grant Bridgeman is on location with The Falling

Our visiting lecturer Grant Bridgeman is currently shooting a feature film called The Falling, directed by Carol Morley.

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Set for release in 2014 in cinemas, THE FALLING tells the story of Lydia, the troubled girl at the centre of a mysterious fainting epidemic, who is determined to discover the cause of the malady spreading through her British all-girl school in 1969, a year when the whole world seems poised on the brink of change.  Following her films BAFTA-nominated The Alcohol Years, Edge, and the critically acclaimed Dreams of a Life, writer/director Carol Morley presents her skewed and dream-like coming of age story THE FALLING, with director of photography Agnès Godard (Sister, Beau Travail).

THE FALLING is a BBC Films, BFI production in association with Lipsync, a Cannon and Morley/Independent production in association with Boudica Red, a Carol Morley film.

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The film was developed with the BFI Film Fund. Written and directed by Carol Morley, Produced by Cairo Cannon and Luc Roeg, Line Producer Donall Mccusker, Executive Producers Lizzie Francke, Christine Langan, Philip Herd, Andrew Orr, Norman Merry, Peter Hampden, Rebecca Long and Ian Davies.

Find out more here

You can keep up with the film’s Twitter feed here @TheFalling_Film

Grant Bridgeman’s Blog is here – and he is also on twitter @Grantsound

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The Most Significant Beat

A comparative study of changes in bass drum sounds from 70s disco to electronic dance music of the 1980s and 1990s.

This Paper was presented at the Art of Record Production conference at the University of Edinburgh, September 8th -10th 2006

The title for this paper; The Most Significant Beat, refers to the beat fulfilled as a bass drum sound. The material in focus contains the so-called four-to-the-floor bass drum pattern,where the author believes the bass drum is functionally crucial in initiating kinetic patterns amongst its receivers.

Guest Lecture – Ken Blair

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Today’s level 3 project guest lecture was given by recording engineer Ken Blair. Ken is a freelance sound recordist who’s company BMP Recording specialise in classical, jazz and acoustic music.

Ken came to talk about his typical week of recording, editing, mixing and filling in tax returns! He described a typical orchestral recording session and how it can differ from a pop/rock recording session, in that a lot of these sessions are still recorded straight to stereo – especially if its a live event recording. This means a lot of time is spent positioning microphones and balancing levels into the recording device. This also means there’s no room for error, both in terms of the musicians’ performance and in terms of the recording levels and mix balance. Nerve wracking stuff!

Ken also talked about how his background and recording experience led him to the place he’s at now. After leaving school in Scotland, Ken studied the Tonmeister course at the University of Surrey and spent a year on work placement at Air studios in Montserrat. He also gave our students some great advice regarding building their portfolios and creating a skills based CV.

Many of our students will go on to be freelance workers across the very broad range of audio production careers. Ken’s lecture was a great insight into the day to day activities of just one of these fields. Really useful stuff!

David Bowie – “Where are we now”

NEW RELEASE FROM DAVID BOWIE

In a remarkable low key way, on his 66th birthday, David Bowie has released a song taken from a new album (to be released in March 2013) to be called ‘The Next Day’

On iso/Columbia Records, available on iTunes in 119 Countries simultaneously
He also has relaunched his website www.davidbowie.com

The Next Day will be his 30th Studio Album

No interviews or statements were forthcoming from Bowie, though Tony Visconti has said that Bowie is happy and healthy, and has been spending the last two years making this album.

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The Guardian today states:

A spokesman added that Bowie was the sort of artist who “writes and performs what he wants when he wants”.A second representative subsequently told the Guardian there were no plans for interviews or live dates.

 

 

His first release for about a decade, new audio work by Bowie is rare these days following his withdrawal from performing due to a heart condition.
Bowie is a major figure in the development of music in the late 20th Century and is renowned for constantly re-inventing himself, and always surprising people.

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Here’s how BBC Radio Four  announced it on air

Produced by long term collaborator Tony Visconti, ‘Where Are We Now?’ was written by David Bowie, and was recorded in New York.

 

This unusual video was directed by Tony Oursler and harks back to David’s time in Berlin. Apparently he appears with Bjork (a friend) projected onto dummy heads.

He is seen looking in on footage of the auto repair shop beneath the apartment he lived in along with stark images of the city at the time and a lyric constantly raising the question “Where Are We Now?”

you can also see the video on Bowie’s newly changed website here

 

Here is an interview with Tony Visconti on BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20953094

INDEPENDENT 8/1/2013

Unsurprisingly, 10 years since he was last heard, Bowie’s voice sounds older and more world-weary. The melancholic song sees him reviewing his time in Berlin – where he created some of his most groundbreaking music in the 1970s – as he lists some of his haunts with the repeated line “just walking the dead”.

And in the video directed by Tony Oursler, with the musician’s pensive face projected on to a puppet, he appears to be almost biting back tears as he looks back on his life.

Where Are We Now? was written by Bowie and recorded in New York. It was produced by long-term collaborator Tony Visconti, who has worked on many of his most famous albums, beginning with 1969’s Space Oddity.

A follow-up album called The Next Day is set to be released in March.

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