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Bill NelsonArticle from Electronics & Music Maker, November 1982 |
An innovative multi-instrumentalist both in and out of the studio, from Be-Bop Deluxe to 'The Love that Whirls'.
Tony Bacon speaks to Bill following the release of his two-for-the-price-of-one LP, 'The Love That Whirls/Beauty and the Beast'
"I still haven't been able to improve my home studio to the degree that I want to because of lack of money, but I recently updated it and got one of the Fostex 8-tracks, the 350 desk, and the digital delay — a whole package, just under £2000, which is really good. I've got some reasonable speakers now, too, some Tannoy Little Red monitors — before I'd been using old Dynatron hi-fi speakers for 10 years, and one of them was completely blown, you could never tell what you were getting until you mixed it on to 2-track and cassette and had taken it downstairs and put it on the hi-fi! The 'Ritual Echo' album was done on that old system, with the Teac 4-track that at the time only had three tracks working. The first thing I've done with the Fostex was the second soundtrack I've done for the Yorkshire Actors Company, called 'Beauty And The Beast'."
"One disadvantage with the Fostex 8-track is that while it's got varispeed, it can't do halfspeed. It's quite a nice range on it, but it's not enough to be radically different. With 'Ritual Echo', what I'd do was to find a pretty mundane repetitive pattern on a keyboard, record it normal speed, and then turn the tape round, reverse the thing, and play it back at half-speed and dub on to it. Then I'd mix that down and bounce back, put it back to normal speed, and then add things as normal. That way, your initial 'inspiration' to overdub is coming from something that you hadn't conceived in the way that you played it. By doing that you get all kinds of things, in fact you don't actually know how it's going to end up."
"But I wanted the 8-track, and I needed a better desk — I had this old Canary desk that basically had bass, middle, and treble, whereas the Fostex 350's got two mid-band sweeps where you can select frequencies and then boost and cut, plus a fixed very high top and very low bottom. It's a bit weird getting used to the eq, the top and the bottom could do with a bit of variation. It's a matter of getting the right sort of top from it, because you're really just working in the middle frequencies all the time and stressing the extremities of those: if you want bass you're stressing extreme low-mid. It's almost like thinking backwards at times, you have almost to adjust the middle frequencies to get the top and bottom sounding how you want, rather than adjusting the top and bottom and leaving the middle how it is. Once you get used to it, there's quite a variation.
"The only other problem with the mixer is that, as it's only got eight channels, if you're bringing back delay, harmoniser or whatever, and you want to do that up two channels for panning and eq-ing against the main signal, then you're stuck, because you've only got eight channels and there's eight tracks on the machine — and even with the auxiliary buss, it comes up in a fixed position. So a lot of the things I've been doing have been 6-track recordings, keeping two channels spare so I can use some delays and so on in the mixdown. If they put in an extra two channels on the desk I think it would improve it tremendously, I'm sure that it wouldn't put that much on the cost."
"The quality of the eight tracks on ¼-inch tape is unbelievable, although since the edge tracks tend to suffer from dropouts, anything that's going to be noticeable has to go in the centre. The footswitch for dropping in and out is invaluable for a one-man set-up: I've got this set of marimbas at home that I've been using a lot, and the footswitch is great for that — I'm always making mistakes! That's a simple mod that should be available on a lot of machines, I'm surprised no-one's thought of making it standard before."
"The other thing I could do with for it is a patchbay. All the plugging's round the back of the mixer, and when you've got the meter bridge on it's sort of fiddly when you have to repatch different things. It should either be on the front, I think, or you should have a separate patchbay. I mix down on to a Revox B77, and I've still got the Teac 4-track from the old system. I kept that so that, if I want, I can go from 8-track on to two tracks of the 4- track, add two, and then on to the Revox, and so on. I can also use the Teac for the halfspeed stuff, as I said, doing a basic 4-track mix using speed effects and then put it on to two tracks in stereo on the Fostex and dub on to that. I've not done any 8-track on to 2-track and then back on to the 8-track, sort of doing 16-track, I've kept it all in eight tracks; and sometimes, as I said, six."
"For 'Beauty And The Beast' there's no drum or drum machine rhythm tracks, the time's all in the playing, or it's drifting. When I've been doing demos at home I use my old Canary mixer with the Roland TR808, the separate outs to the Canary as a drum machine mixer. I eq all that, and split the toms and everything in stereo along with any panning that's moving about, and use the echo sends and returns on the mixer treat the drums with harmoniser and delay. That goes from the Canary up two channels of the Fostex mixer and then out to two tracks of the 8-track, so that I have a stereo drum split with all the effects and movement on it out of the way."
"Then I'd dub up to six tracks, keeping the two spare for the effects. If there's a guitar or keyboard on there for a basic rhythm part, an essential structure, I put a short delay on it with the harmoniser, slightly detuned, and pan the extremes to give a real spread. That leaves a space in the middle for the detail. Obviously vocals and bass guitar go in the centre, and you can bring lead instruments in slightly too, moving them across if necessary. But it does mean, as I've explained, tying up two channels to do the effects at mixing stage, especially if you want to pan stuff. You can do it across the channels, plugging it in at the back right into the channel, but for that you need an effects unit that has dry signal coming off as well as the delay — the Fostex delay has that, but my harmoniser, for example, doesn't, so if you put that across the channel all you hear is harmoniser and nothing else."
"I've recommended the system to several friends who want an 8-track, I think for the money it's a better buy than any of the Teac or Brenell 8s in that range — I just had a limited amount of money to spend to update from 4 to 8 and the Fostex seemed the best thing. I was toying with getting the Soundcraft, which is ½-inch tape and a lot more expensive by the time you've got a desk to got with it and everything. For under £2000, a mixing desk, delay line, and 8-track is great."
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Interview by Tony Bacon
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