Engineer Stephen Tayler gives us an in-depth look the production and recording techniques used in the recording of 'By My Side', from the Chris De Burgh LP, The Power Of Ten. Richard Buskin reports.

Having graduated from London's Royal College of Music in 1974, Stephen Tayler began his professional life as a 21-year-old tea boy at the legendary — but now defunct — Trident Studios, where during the next five years he rose to the positions of tape-op and then engineer. Working mainly with producers Dennis Mackay and Robin Lumley, he became involved in the tail end of jazz rock, in addition to projects with Phil Collins' part-time band Brand X, Bill Bruford and Peter Gabriel, whose eponymously-titled second album, produced by Robert Fripp, he helped mix.

After a six-month hiatus in the USA, Tayler then hooked up with Genesis' management company, Hit And Run Music, in 1980, and it was by way of sharing the same manager with Rupert Hine that the two men first teamed up, recording a Hine solo album entitled Immunity. The partnership worked, and the result was that during the past 12 years Stephen has worked with Rupert on all of his production assignments, taking in around 40 albums. Over half of these were undertaken during an eight-year spell at Farmyard Studios, of which Hine was a director, and included recordings by Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner, Howard Jones, The Fixx, The Thompson Twins and Hine himself.

Since then, the Hine-Tayler team has been less confined geographically, working both at home and abroad on projects by the likes of Rush, Bob Geldof, and the international multi-star production One World, One Voice, in addition to Chris De Burgh's latest album, The Power Of Ten. This was the third occasion on which the three men had worked together, two of De Burgh's previous albums having been produced at Farmyard during the early '80s. This time around, pre-production took place at a private house in Dublin in October of 1991, Ireland, before recording proper began at London's Metropolis Studios in October of last year, lasting until February 1992.

Pre-Producing To Tape

The Irish location was close to De Burgh's own home, and this was a fairly large property in which Hine and Tayler were able to arrange the musicians and run things through the former's keyboard rig — basically comprised of the programming setup which Hine has in his home studio, based around an Akai Linn MPC60 drum machine with a Korg Wavestation, Roland D50, Prophet VS, Prophet T8, Emulator II sampling keyboard, Yamaha DX7 MkII, Emu Proformance piano module and Emu Proteus 2 orchestral module, all monitored through an Amek Angela console.

"Chris had actually rehearsed the songs with his live band," explains Tayler. "It's a curious situation, because this band has been with him for about 15 years, and while they're fine live players, he has never really used them all that much in the past on his studio records. In the main, he's tended to use a core of session musicians again and again, and so this time around Chris had written the songs, routined them with the band at a Dublin rehearsal studio and recorded them to DAT, and this is what Rupert was then presented with in order to pick and choose the songs that obviously worked, work on the formats, and look at how to change some of the elements. From that point, Rupert based his programming on these initial tapes, and he took some of the songs in a completely different direction, while on others he stuck pretty closely to what the band had been doing."

Work then moved on to Metropolis' Studio B, Tayler recording and mixing the album 32-track, utilising a 56-channel SSL G-Series board together with a Mitsubishi digital tape machine. "I always like to try to use just one multitrack, and 32 is the perfect number for me," he says. "Then, if we wanted to try out some extra vocal performances or a lot of guitar solos, we'd use a slave reel.

"We spent the first month in the studio really putting the basic versions as programmed down onto tape, with guide vocals, guide acoustic guitar parts and guide piano from Chris where necessary. A case, therefore, of still really pre-producing and tweaking the songs, so that we had the framework on tape. I always like to keep things on tape rather than having live programs running all the time — I feel more secure and efficient being able to put up the tape with all the latest versions of the programs. Rupert doesn't like to have program changes and everything set in the sequencer; he just has a working piano sound, a working bass sound, a working string sound, and that suits the songwriting aspect of the programming. So we'd get as much as we could on tape, and then on a day-to-day basis Chris would try a vocal with a track to see if it was in the right key, the right tempo and so on, and if necessary we'd make alterations and update the tape."

Recording The Album Piecemeal

"The first outside musician who came in was the bass guitarist, John Giblin, and he worked quite extensively on three of the tracks and then tried a couple of really quick run-throughs on other songs. He was with us for a couple of days before we did some more general tweaking of the keyboard parts, and on the songs where the bass had been recorded in a hurry but was still really very close, I then attempted to reconstruct the parts by just moving elements around on tape, using the Akai DD1000 [optical disk recorder].

By My Side

"The song started as a basic program by Rupert," Tayler explains. "Drums from the MPC60, piano, strings, a keyboard pad and a melody, and some of these elements have actually remained. The first real replacement part that went on was John Giblin's bass, and this was recorded with DI, fed into a Focusrite preamp EQ and out of that into a Tube Tech compressor, then straight to tape — a clean signal path. John's basses always sound fairly accurate, if a little middly to begin with, so I used a little bit of EQ and some middle was removed.

"I like the Focusrites. They can give you not only a very nice, smooth, allround EQ, but also a savage EQ if you want it. I like to use them for individual recordings — for vocals, for bass, and for anything which I'm just recording one at a time, in preference to using an SSL channel EQ. This isn't particularly because I'm after a warmer sound from the Focusrites, but to me they're marginally cleaner. I'm probably one of the few people who really likes SSL G-Series EQ, and personally I find it very similar to using an outboard Focusrite. I like a harsh sound, and I'm not always all that keen on 'warmth and smoothness', which I often associate with that warm, squashy American sound — although it suits some recordings, it doesn't have quite enough control or aggression for the majority of things I do. So you won't generally find me working on an old Neve desk, for instance. I have worked on the new Focusrite console at Metropolis, which is fantastic, but on that the EQ is so versatile you can have warmth, aggression, anything you want, and it always sounds great."

"I've actually got this obsession about a drum kit sounding like an instrument rather than a collection of neat sounds, and so I tend to favour using a lot of room sound."

Drum Sound

"Drums were the next thing to go on, and for this Michael Witzel played his Yamaha kit in the live room. The bass drum was miked with a Neumann TLM170, positioned just outside the sound-hole in the back skin, as I never like to get in too close. I don't like that feeling of overload which you get from miking right inside the drum, and I always tend to favour using quite a lot of room sound as well. In this instance, recording with two pairs of room mics, I had a pair of TLM70s relatively close — about five or six feet away on either side of the kit — just to add a fairly natural, roomy sound. For a secondary room sound I was using Sennheiser Black Fire 509s right in the corner of the room, and compressed very severely just to give a really full sound that glues together all of the other elements of the kit. The 509s are very simple dynamic mics that don't have too much harshness, which you can sometimes get on drum ambients, particularly in a live room like that at Metropolis, which is full of wood, plaster and glass, and is very bright as a result.

"I've actually got this obsession about a drum kit sounding like an instrument rather than a collection of neat sounds, and so I tend to favour using a lot of room sound — whether it's an outrageous, cavernous room sound or a close but still fairly live-sounding recording. On some tracks on this album, the ambience as recorded was too rampant because of extensive use of cymbals, and in those cases I was more inclined to use a gate on the bass drum and snare, or even replace their ambience triggered by samples of that particular room's ambience. I don't use library sounds, I don't use other people's sounds, I always record samples for those kinds of instances in the environment in which we are recording, and generally I would be using samples of stereo ambience with the original bass drum or snare, and not replacing the sounds themselves.

"On 'By My Side', however, we kept to a fairly intimate room sound. We weren't trying to make a mega sound out of anything. There are a lot of acoustic guitars, and it sounds like a drummer playing along with them, so in this instance I used the room sound rather than the ambient sound.

Moving With Akai

"If I want to move anything around, I'll do it with the Akai DD1000. Sometimes I'll take an entire track or pair of tracks off the Mitsubishi and feed them into the DD1000, edit the bits of audio I want, and fade out any noise and hiss. The DD1000 is also very handy for bouncing pairs of sounds together, as this can all be done within the digital domain. For overlapping guitar or keyboard parts, for example, it saves having to bounce via channels on the console. It's altogether a much cleaner way of working, and at the same time enables any fine adjustments which need to be done."

Vocals

Chris De Burgh was miked with an AKG 414 for his lead vocal and a Neumann TLM170 for the backing vocals, and his experiments with these were committed to 12 tracks on a slave reel along with his guide vocal. The backing vocals were then mixed down to stereo using overall EQ and compression, recorded back into the DD1000 using a SMPTE reference, and back on to the main master and flown in at various parts of the song. Focusrite EQ and TubeTech compression were the main effects.

Then, at a fairly late stage in the recordings, the sounds emanating from an aircraft were subtly added to the song along with the cockpit mutterings of a certain Captain Rupert Hine — himself a qualified pilot — and the responses of another Hine character in the control tower, all heavily EQ'd and compressed in order to provide the appropriate radio intercom effect.

"I like to mix as quickly as possible," says Stephen Tayler, "and this song was mixed in about three hours. I've been mixing albums since before automation was around, so I like to get the whole mix happening manually before I turn the computer on, and my first mix will be emulating the movements I've been rehearsing in real time. I like to get everything happening quickly. Then once I've put my moves into the computer, I'll walk around and eavesdrop on the mix from the next room. That tells me a great deal about where my balance is going — and besides, I don't like to be permanently glued to the engineer's spot in the middle of the console!"