Simon Bozwell started his career as a guitarist but now finds himself engineering 12 inch remixes for Nik Kershaw and writing film music.

I first started musical activities in Cambridge at which time I played the guitar in rather a Gordon Giltrap style. While I was there, a friend of mine with a Revox recorded some of the material for fun, and he suggested that I take the tapes around to the record companies and on the strength of that I was offered a deal doing a couple of tracks for a sampler album. Before leaving Cambridge, I made a solo album called The Mind Parasites, and after that I formed a group that made a record for EMI. It wasn't until after that that I started to get into production work.

Did you become interested in the mechanics of recording before or after you got into production?

That came afterwards. I started producing more from the musical and arranging side rather than the technical side. Anything technical I've picked up along the way. I've spent the last ten years in studios either as an artist or as a producer, but not actually engineering. It's only in the last three years that I've actually come to terms with the technical side.

Home Recording

When did you decide to set up a studio at home? Was that a recent acquisition?

Yes. Actually, the management people who run Nik Kershaw's production company helped a lot. It was really intended for demoing and to develop ideas so that we could go into the studio better prepared.

How does that physically work? Who comes here and how far do you go towards recording an idea?

Well, at the moment I'm working with two songwriters, Gary and Steve. They don't have a name yet as such but they have already demo'd stuff at home on 4-track and we're now trying to get as near as we can to making a master. Sometimes we'll almost finish a song then rip it apart and start again if necessary to get something very positive instead of having to go into a 24-track studio and be put on the spot. That is something that has happened to me many times when I've been making records with bands who aren't fully prepared in advance for recording.

So what type of artists have you been working with?

There's been an incredible variety. I grew up with the traditional concepts of producing such as miking up drum kits, and when I started producing it was usually bands like Nine Below Zero, Live Wire; very much R&B type rock bands. Then I produced a lot of dance stuff such as Amie Stewart before spending some time living in Italy and producing Italian superstars. That was a very strange experience but it was good because I was given a virtually unlimited budget to use on orchestration.

How do the Italian studios compare in terms of facilities and attitudes to studios here?

The facilities are very good in terms of the new gear, but they don't know how to use it, and are almost scared to do so. They seem to be very much in awe of English and American producers, artists and musicians. I found that Italian producers have good ears and are perfect at equalising sounds, but are very unadventurous with effects and techniques.

Does that also go for equipment like drum machines and sequencers?

It did at that time, which was about three years ago. They were very reticent to use them. In Italy, there's the great vocal tradition. The voice is really important, and the backing tracks more or less irrelevant.

So you changed that a little.

I did to some extent, but not always with great success, because the voice still reigns supreme in Italy.

More recently I've become involved in doing 12" remixes, which is really the area in which I've had most success. I've done nearly all of Nik's 12" and a lot for Aztec Camera. Most of the 12" stuff has been done in big Solid State studios.

Similar techniques seem to apply wherever you are, provided you can get enough gear to do the job. As you have proved, you can do a fairly substantial job at home.

That's right. The only difficulty is that it isn't practical to record real drums at home and that is something I miss. It's largely a matter of the room and the building rather than the equipment, because with a set of decent mics this gear would record good drum sounds. Of course there are good sampled drums, and I'm constantly using those. It's not the same but it's alright for dance music.

I've recently made some records on 16-track in a studio up in Scotland, and I think you can do it on 16-track if it's dance music, but I'd be a little dubious about doing a full scale drum production on 16-track now. I was working with Nik's band recently in a studio called Swan Yard. You really can hear the difference simply due to the width of the tape. The sound is much richer.

Also important I think is the fact that bigger studios can afford good drum mics too, whereas not many people working at home can afford to spend £500 on a good mic; they work with a £50 mic and the difference shows. You can get good drum sounds onto a Fostex B16 with a bit of care.

"I've found electronic editing on digitals to be not as easy or as quick as analogue tape editing."

The 12"

If you're doing a 12" single mix with only four or five minutes of multitrack tape, how do you approach it?

There are different things that record companies or artists are after in 12" mixes. Sometimes all that's needed is simply an extended version of the original and that all boils down to editing really. You're using bits of the original track without vocals which is not really very interesting. The thing I really like to do in a 12" is to make something completely different out of it by adding new material. I like to have the licence to actually put new parts on the multitrack; instrumental lines, voices or bits from films and to turn it into a completely different track.

How do you start on the job? Once you've got your original piece of tape, do you just copy that onto another multitrack several times and splice up the 2" tape?

I've been very fortunate in that a lot of the mixes I've already done have been on 48-track, and not all of the tracks have been used, so I've actually had tracks to play with. On other occasions I will physically spin in things from tape or from AMS machines for selective sections. I basically do everything by editing, and I usually approach a 12" practically bar by bar. I might get down the first ten seconds and then think about the next bit and chop it. If things won't edit together I'll construct drum breaks out of solo bits of drums or sounds and actually construct rhythms and put them together. However, if I'm working at home recording my own ideas I'd sing another chorus rather than try to spin one in because that's easier.

Do you think that when people are recording they really ought to consider the 12" at the planning stage and put more backing down for you to play with?

Not really. I think they should concentrate on making their three minute single, and let me or someone else worry about turning it into something else. I try to approach the topic creatively. In a way I'm almost becoming an artist in doing that. I know some people will probably hate me doing that to their record but I prefer to have the challenge of making something new out of it.

What sort of production techniques would you use to make sure that the interest builds, because it's quite a long piece to sustain the listener's interest?

Usually I'll start with a very complicated piece of editing, which is I suppose a trademark or a fanfare to announce that there are some more tricks to follow. Half of it is in stripping a track down to it's basic components, which I think is quite interesting. If you've heard a single on the radio, you can then buy the 12" and actually hear sections without the vocals and sections without other instruments.

You can learn quite a lot about how people constructed their songs, though I'm not saying this is the purpose of the exercise. It's difficult to generalise. There's no set plan; I'll just do whatever comes to mind. You can tell when something needs to happen. There's a Raymond Chandler quote that I quite like. Whenever he got stuck with the plot in one of his books, he said 'let's have a guy walk through the door with a gun in his hand' and I take the same sort of approach; if after 15 seconds nothing much is happening just do something dramatic.

But at the same time you've still got to build up the dynamics as the track runs through to the some extent.

You have to do dramatic things in context but it's very difficult to be theoretical about this because every track is different. All you can do is examine the things you've tried that have worked.

Getting the Gear

What about the equipment in your home studio? Why did you chose it?

I chose the B16 simply because it's the cheapest and best budget 16-track available. I think it's probably the only one in that price range. The Allen & Heath System 8 desk was recommended by several different people as working well with the B16 and it too was in the right price range. I chose the 24-track version so I could use the spare channels as extra effect returns.

Do you find the lack of sends a problem, there are only three on that desk?

I do, because I'm used to having a lot more, but you can get around it, and when I'm working at home I generally try to record as many effects onto tape as I can. I think that you have to, you've got to make decisions on the spot, as in a home situation you don't usually have more than one reverb unit, for example.

How about the EQ? Some people have complained that the mid-range doesn't go down quite far enough to get to that awkward spot where bass drums go boxy.

I would agree with that. I think it's adequate, but it's not as good as it could be. To be fair a lot of mixers with a 3-band EQ system have the same problem in the mid-range; they just can't get it low enough. On my shopping list is a nice pair of equalisers that I'll be able to use when I put material down to tape.

"It's quite important when you're using an off the shelf drum machine to add a few of your own sounds to take away the identity of the thing..."

The speakers are Yamaha NS10s which I chose simply because they are now the standard small monitor in studios and I know what they sound like. I really like them. Obviously they're no good for judging bass, but you can get a feel for that.

Outboard gear?

Outboard gear is still in the early stages and I'm going to buy a lot more. I have Drawmer gates because they're the most effective ones I've used, and I'm going to get another three or four pairs of them so I can use a lot on mixdown. The Drawmer compressor is adequate but it's nothing really special.

Don't you find that no two brands of compressor ever sound quite the same, even though they might have similar technical specifications?

Yes. The Drawmer's a reasonable all-purpose compressor; they don't really give you fantastic hard compression which I like to use on snare drums sometimes but they're quite adequate for most jobs.

The REV7 is the most brilliant new reverb. I've just bought this one and I really like it. They are simply wonderful, and I would quite like to get another one. Every studio I've been in recently is ordering them by the crate and I think they far exceed the AMS reverb in subjective quality for a quarter of the price.

I've also heard the Roland SRV2000 which is also good, but in a different way. Actually I think that if I were considering a second reverb I might well get a Roland for the different quality of the reverb. In that way I could layer things more successfully.

Apart from the reverb, are there any other effects on the REV7 that you particularly like?

Although I've been toying with the flanger setting and listening to it a lot, I haven't actually recorded anything with it yet. Nevertheless it sounds quite nice. It's fairly similar to tape phasing in a way, producing a nice hard thin sort of sound. I've only had it about ten days, so I have yet to explore all it's possibilities. I haven't even looked to see if you can adjust the feedback on the delays.

How about the Bel DDL? Why did you choose that?

It's the BD80. I really wanted a reasonable quality delay and something that I could if needed, pop a snare drum or a bass drum into and then trigger. It's really as simple as that. It will expand up to eight seconds, but I haven't used it for triggering yet. Usually if I'm doing things like that, I do them on my Greengate sampling system. I'm hoping to do a bit of sampling and triggering with it at some stage though. I was toying with the idea of triggering bass drums on the Greengate and having the snare sound in the Bel synced to a drum machine, but I haven't yet done it due to the pressure of work.

Do you use the Greengate a lot?

Yes. I'm getting a bit frustrated with the amount of noise you get when sampling though.

They're doing some software updates though. Would that help?

It would if you go with the system. I'm a Greengate fan and have been for a long time, though everyone is bringing out similar systems so now I'd have to think pretty hard about what to buy. What I enjoy about it is the facility to be able to distort sounds on disk, and it's very easy to use once you've sat down with it fora week.

Do you use it for percussive sounds or all kinds of sounds?

I use it for drums, any short sounds and for weird effects. The Greengate seems to have a habit of really compressing the sound as it goes in which can be really good, but not terribly useful when you want to use vocals and things like that. It's pretty noisy.

What are you mastering on for home use, is it the Revox?

Well, here I haven't got as far as mastering as such yet; the Revox is just there for playing back tapes and for sampling things on. I would like to get a Sony F1 digital system for mastering but I wouldn't mind a decent ¼" or ½" machine simply because I enjoy cutting tape. That's one thing you can't do with digital. I've found electronic editing on digitals to be not as easy or as quick as analogue tape editing. I know that there are a lot of people who will argue with me on this but I think that if you know what you're doing, cutting tape is quicker.

"Take Linn drums. They are now very much out of fashion because they're recognisable. The fashion now is to get back to more tacky sounding drum machines..."

Digitally, you have a chance to preview your edit before you're committed. Don't you think that that is an advantage?

Yes, but I know what I'm doing. I don't think I really need to do that.

I suppose that if you're playing back on compact disc, the quality of the edit becomes more important because you actually hear them.

It depends. My view of edits is that if I do good subtle edits you don't hear them but in a lot of cases I do want people to hear them. That's the purpose of doing it. It's just to shift something. You cut the tape, you're cutting the reverbs and you're shifting things around the stereo very, very harshly and sometimes I like to do that.

Which keyboards do you tend to use at home?

These are completely arbitrary and just happen to be left over from the band I'm working with. Perhaps it would be a DX21 or a DX7. We use them MIDI'd up a lot. I'm going to get a MIDI capability fitted for the Greengate, which will be very useful, although it can only drive into the Greengate not out of it.

If I'm working on something of my own: some film music, or an ad, I'd probably put the drum track together on the Greengate from sampled sounds. Otherwise I will use whatever system the band or songwriter has. In the case of Gary and Steve, they've got a Yamaha RX11. I'd use combinations of that and triggering some other sounds.

Do you have any use for the MIDI facilities that seem to be creeping into effects units at the moment?

Not on outboard gear. I obviously use MIDI with keyboards. I'm sure MIDI is useful for live work and the capability of being able to change effects patches via MIDI would really help there. I'm not sure that I'd use it in a recording situation though.

Now that the likes of Fostex are coming up with budget SMPTE to MIDI converters and synchronizers, you can actually lock on to events on tape. Does this form of automated effects control interest you?

I suppose that could be interesting, though I wouldn't get all that involved with it at home. When I'm working here, I'm more concerned with musical arrangements.

Music and Technology

Do you feel then that technology is getting in the way of music in some cases rather than making things easier?

It certainly is from my point of view, with regard to what I'm doing at home. It's a full-time occupation to concentrate on the song, the sound and the overall concept. I prefer to work with an engineer I trust in a studio so that I can try and give an objective view.

That's an interesting point of view. Many producers I've talked to get frustrated having to ask the engineer to do something. Usually they could normally walk over and press a button, but this way they have to wait for the engineer to find it.

There's a certain amount you can do yourself and if it's something obvious I'd just do it, but I'm not talking about walking into a studio cold with an engineer you don't know. There are various engineers I've worked with regularly and they know what's got to be done to a given sound.

The drums we're getting on records now seem to have got into a very deep rut both in the rhythm patterns played and the sounds. Do you see any way out of that?

I think that there's a sort of snobbery developing, where bands are going back to having real drums on the records. All the drum machine bands like Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran seem to be going that way. To be honest I am getting tired of drum machines.

"Sampling is obviously the next craze, but a lot of people are getting bored with it already. You have to use it in a different way to everybody else..."

Even with acoustic drums though, don't you find that people tend to record them and treat them until they sound like drum machines?

That's especially true of the bass drum. They don't actually sound like that in real life. It's interesting the way emphasis shifts from year to year between bass drums and snares. Now it's both of them I suppose. In the mid 70s it was bass drums when the technology first allowed bass drums to emerge. With the disco boom and Saturday Night Fever it was all kick. Then it was Phil Collins and the heavy gated snare thing ruled for a while. Next came David Bowie's 'Let's Dance' and everyone sampling all those sounds. Now it seems to be a little more open. People could afford to be a little bit more experimental.

Do you see more people being adventurous and using sampled sounds, maybe not drums at all, and using those to create an alternative rhythm pattern?

Certainly. I think that is changing, but it needs to be done carefully. At least it allows you to break the mould of the typical bass drum/snare drum rhythm.

It's quite important when you're using an off the shelf drum machine to add a few of your own sounds to take away the identity of the thing, otherwise you recognise them instantly and that's all you listen to for the rest of the song. It's funny with drum machines though. They've been through the period of trying to simulate real drums. Take Linn drums. They are now very much out of fashion because they're recognisable. The fashion now is to get back to more tacky sounding drum machines; I think people would like to know that it's a drum machine as opposed to a machine trying to impersonate real drums. You hear quite a lot of records on which the drums deliberately sound artificial like the very early Roland drum machines.

They have a lot of very thin scratchy sounds which I quite liked. The drum machine is not masquerading as a real drummer but it's being used specifically for the thinness of the sound. Sampling is obviously the next craze, but a lot of people are getting bored with it already. You have to use it in a different way to everybody else, it's like a lot of things. Once it gets thrashed to death everyone starts to rebel. I'm all for using things from other spheres like using bits of films, bits of conversation, just spinning in things that are totally different.

Do you ever spin things in backwards as well?

Oh yes. I really like backward things. I quite like the backward reverb setting on the Yamaha too, that's an interesting effect.

Sound and Vision

What sort of advertising work are you getting involved in? Is it broadcast on FM radio?

It's TV material mainly. I've done the music for a new Vidal Sassoon advert which seems to have gone very well, so I'm being approached about other things. I've done various work for Ford cars and for other prestige products.

Do you enjoy the fact that you can condense a lot of idea in to a short space?

It's highly technical and not as easy as you might think. Most rushes are 29 seconds and synchronising things gets pretty complicated. So far they just send along a VHS copy and I will roughly do the music. But things get changed all the time. They'll then go and redo the voiceover and say 'Well now you've got to shift this bit around there because it interferes with the voice here'. They're constantly changing their minds about what they want where so I'm kept quite busy.

Presumably with the gear you've got here you can master jingle quality quite happily at home, so a SMPTE system might be quite a logical addition.

I need to get a SMPTE system and I think I'll do that because at the moment I have to mix something down, take it into 24-track and bounce it onto the 24-track just to use the SMPTE.

I did a film score early this year for an Italian movie by someone called Dario Argento. He makes pretty nasty, violent movies like these zombie nasties. Strangely he's the most successful Italian film director ever. He's more successful than all the famous names; he produced Zombies - Dawn of the Dead. That was a really interesting experience because I went to a studio in Rome and they have 24-track and 48-track studios and in the studio area next door, they have a movie screen with a projector. They actually give you the clips on a loop and say 'we need these bits 45 seconds long or 46 seconds long', and they show you the clips.

It's remarkably like doing music for a silent film, you actually stand in front of the screen with a synth working things out and the process is exactly the same as when people used to do music to films sitting in the cinema. That was very interesting, but there were a lot of technical problems involved, mainly from working off video as well as working off film.

What connection do you have with Nik Kershaw's production company?

Well this is something that I've been planning for some time with Nik's management. I've obviously been in contact with him a lot for the remixes, and we've just decided to try and retain as much control of what we're doing as we can. We formed a production company, we have two or three artists and we're just sorting out a deal at the moment with a major label. This will basically make us like a label really, and they will put the stuff out.

We've been mastering in a new Solid State studio in Highbury which is very good. We've actually just made a record with Nik Kershaw's band The Krew and we're sorting out a deal for that at the moment.

You're obviously in volved in several different areas at present. Which would you like to do more of in the future if you had the choice?

I think the answer to that must be record production, but I'd like to spend less time actually in the studio. That way it's easier to get an overview and keep the work in perspective. I think that if you build up relationships with good engineers and people that you trust, you can actually contribute more to something by spending less time being close to it.

I'm more interested in the arrangement side of the production than the technical side, although I think you need to keep abreast of both sides to be able to see all the possibilities open to you.