PRODUCER: Mick Glossop
BAND: Furniture
TRACK: Brilliant Mind

Mick Glossop has been in the music recording business for over 15 years and has engineered for many big names including Van Morrison and Frank Zappa. He started as a tape-op at Wessex Studios and after a series of engineering positions landed the much sought-after position of chief engineer at Virgin's famous country mansion, Manor Studio, where he stayed for five years. In the late Seventies Virgin decided to set up the now greatly expanded Townhouse Studios, and Mick returned to London to be Chief Engineer there for a couple of years. It's a policy at Virgin Records to look to The Townhouse for new producer talent and so Mick started to do more and more producing, working with bands like The Ruts and The Skids... Gradually he made the crossover to full time producer and for the last six years he has been freelance, although he still does 95% of his own engineering. Here he tells about the production process involved in the making of the Furniture single Brilliant Mind.

"It was Dave Robinson at Stiff Records who first played me a demo of the band. There were six songs on the tape the first of which was Brilliant Mind, which we both thought was particularly strong. I went to see the band live and was very impressed — I guess they're a Pop band but they play very thoughtful, almost intellectual Pop which I find very appealing. So we had a chat and decided that we'd like to try working together.

"The demo was very good quality and many of the ideas on the single were already there. There was no major reworking, we didn't change the verse/chorus structure or anything. There were just a few enhancements on my part: we modified the drum parts slightly in places and changed the bass line in the middle section to make it build more at the end of the sax solo, to give it more dynamics. In fact that's mainly what my work was in those terms, adding dynamics, making the most of the rise and fall of atmosphere. We agreed from the start that the main task was to get the song well recorded; well produced in the classic sense of the word; to make it sound like a record.

"One thing about Furniture is that they're a band who play together; the feel of what they do is very important. So there was no click track or drum machine involved. We recorded the track at Townhouse Three which is quite a large studio and has separate isolation rooms so you can accommodate the number of musicians playing together and still get good separation. They set up as they would in a rehearsal room with everyone standing in the main studio, except for the guitar and bass amps each, in their own isolation rooms, and Jim Irvin (vocalist), who was boxed-in with screens, so that he could sing along as the track went down. The keyboards were DI'ed. Everything went down live, although we didn't necessarily keep everything; we did replace parts later.

"One of the realty interesting things about the band is the drummer and what he chooses to play, because most of their songs don't have a back beat. The standard single nowadays tends to have a heavy spare back beat going through it, but Hamilton (Lee) doesn't do that, he uses the kit more like a percussion instrument. He plays a fairly small set-up — bass drum, snare, hi hat, two toms, overhead cymbals and an electronic pad that he uses on the track to produce a very short, sharp cymbal sound; you can hear it at the end of the main recurring tom fill, it's just a short splash. For most of the album he's playing with brushes which is one of the reasons it sounds so different. On Brilliant Mind the whole track is basically held together by the bass drum and hi hat and a sprinkling of tom fills and cymbal crashes. The snare is used but very sparingly and as an occasional source of accents, so the basic idea was to get a very firm, solid bass drum to anchor everything. I recorded it with an Electro Voice RE20 and an AKG D12, both inside the drum but different distances from the skin. The RE20 has quite a lot of presence and so I eq'd that to bring out the attack, and the D12 which is basically quite a bassy mike, was used to supply the bottom end. One thing that improved the attack was that Hamilton had a 10p coin gaffered to the outside of the skin so that every time he hit the beater it was actually hitting the coin which then slapped against the skin giving a very fast edge. It's actually quite similar to using a wooden beater, but the coin does work well. The Snare was recorded with an AKG C414 on top and a Beyer M88 underneath basically to pick up the sound of the snares and enhance the top end of the overall sound to produce a fairly thin crack. But the bottom mike was keyed from the top mike, so that it only opened up when the snare was hit. The problem with using the bottom snare mike to gate itself is that whenever you hit the toms the snare tends to rattle a bit and the gate opens. Using the top mike avoids that. For the toms I used a couple of Neumann U87s. They're double headed with quite thin skins tuned fairly resonantly, as a Jazz drummer might tune his kit, and so they rang quite a lot. I don't like to dampen toms too much or you can lose all their character; it's what stops them sounding like thick snares. There was another C414 on the hi hat, a pair of U87s for overheads and I did put an ambient mike up, a U47, but hardly used it in the end.

"Sally (Still) was playing a standard Fender Precision bass through a Trace Elliott 4x10 combo with an 11-band graphic — it's a nice sounding set-up. I used a Neumann U47 on the cabinet and a passive DI box connected straight after the bass; both feeds were individually compressed about 4:1 through a pair of Urei LA4s and recorded on separate tracks.

"The two rhythm guitar tracks were played on an Ibanez Les Paul copy played through a chorus pedal and a Peavey combo. I used a Sennheiser 421 about 6" away and a U87 about 1' away — the chorus was the main character of the sound, there wasn't much ambience. A Tokai Strat was used for the picked guitar part in the second verse, going through a Roland JC120 and using the built-in chorus on that. The loud twangy guitar part in the chorus was played on the Ibanez through the Peavey and I added some slap echo to it to give the Spaghetti Western kind of sound — although it is a good deal thicker than that.

"There's quite a strong minimalist aspect to Furniture's arrangements and the simple organ sound exemplifies that. They used to use a Farfisa electronic organ, but it was a bit old and kept falling apart all the time and so they bought a DX9 for reliability. Then they had to spend three days programming all the Farfisa sounds into the DX9 — it's a kind of new tech version of an old sound. It's not quite the same as the Farfisa but it's very close. I made the sound a little richer with a 12ms delay and a 1.006 pitch shift on an AMS DDL panned left and right in the mix.

"The sax was played by the guitarist's brother, Larry Whelan, who used to be in the band. He already knew the part and so we called him in. I just used a single U47 a couple of feet away with a little dbx160 compression and a little reverb — very straightforward.

"The single clanking sound in the middle section is Tim playing harmonics on the guitar, quite hard, and with a lot of Eq. That was one of the ideas that was already on the demo. In fact it can be quite difficult for a producer to work from a sophisticated demo because it's often very difficult to recreate what was done at home. In such cases it's sometimes just a matter of competently recording what's already there so that it works and often the record company don't feel as if you've done anything unless it sounds radically different in some way. That isn't a problem with Stiff but it can be with other record companies. On the other hand there are quite a few things on the record that weren't on the demo and which enhance the overall sound, such as the pizzicato strings which double the bass line from the third chorus, through the sax section and again at the end. There's also a Hammond organ in places which basically just plays a low glissando effect; and there's a big acoustic piano chord just before the guitar harmonic. These are all just little bits and pieces that add to the overall texture of the record.

"The vocal was done very quickly in two takes using a Schoeps condenser; the idea right from the beginning was to get as much feel as possible, not to mess around — we only did four takes on the backing tracks. The mix was also done very quickly at Sarm East. I think that live feeling is a large part of what makes the track work."

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