Producer: Chris Kimsey
Band: Marillion
Track: Kayleigh

Few bands have enjoyed such a rapid and sure rise to fame as have Marillion. Until recently, however, their impressive list of credits had been sadly missing that all-important hit single. Chris Kimsey, known amongst other things for his production of The Stones (Rolling) over the past five or six years, has proven once again why he gets that little bit extra in the old pay packet at the end of the week, and has produced the current album, Misplaced Child, from which the unequivocally hit single Kayleigh has been plucked. He tells us something of the production process that took place at Berlin's Hansa Studios.

"Misplaced Child is a concept album, and musically it ends up as one continuous piece, rather than as a number of different songs. So initially we went over to Hansa Studios in Berlin and spent about 10 days reviewing all the material, making sure that each section flowed effectively into the next, because although the music is continuous on record, each section was actually written separately. So we had to make sure that when it came to the editing stage, everything would fit together as a whole.

"I've been working at Hansa for the past seven months doing a number of projects. Studio Two, which is where we recorded the tracks, is very big. It's like a small hall; you can put about 150 musicians in there, and being so large it's great because you can set up a proper PA and everybody can see and hear each other very well. That's really how I like to record, I don't like screening everybody off, I prefer it if everyone feels almost as if they're playing live. I usually want to get as much down as possible in the initial take, rather than just going in and putting down a drum track and then layering everything on top. That way you get more of a performance down on tape."

The Set Up

"The studio is like a small hall with very little acoustic treatment and hence it can produce a really big sound. Down one end is a stage which is where we put the drums. We didn't use any baffling there at all, it was all completely open and live. The bass went against one wall and was baffled off, but Pete (Trewavas) was in full view of everyone. The keyboards were Di'd and we also put a small amp in a booth with a mike on it. Steve was in the main studio, but we had his guitar amp out front in a foyer area which has a big staircase sweeping up to the entrance of the hall; it gave a lot of ambience. For the guide vocals, Fish was in the middle of the hall surrounded by glass screens so that everybody could see him. The only spillage was from the bottom end of the bass and a little of the guide vocals into the drum mikes, but it was nothing to worry about.

"Although it was all very open, everyone wore headphones. I always spend a lot of time getting headphone mixes right, because from my own experience as a musician I know that that is a very important part of recording.

"Studio Two is very unsophisticated. I always record basic tracks with very few effects, except maybe a little plate echo. I don't like to flatter the sound when I'm recording, I like to really hear what's going on. If it sounds good with nothing on it, you know it will sound 10 times better when it comes to mixing. For a while I could see that the band were a bit worried about the rough-and-ready style of the studio, it's really very basic. But they just had to trust me, and when we got to mixing in Studio One, which is completely the opposite with full acoustic treatment, an SSL desk and Urei Time-Aligned monitors, they were very impressed."

Drums

"It's very important to get the drums themselves sounding good before you start processing them. We'd spend about two hours everyday making sure the kit's tuning was just right. It was one of the biggest kits I've ever worked with. He had double bass drums, and for those we used Neumann U47s. As he only played the second one now and again, and we were recording both of them on the same track, we gated it to tape to avoid unnecessary noise. We had a Sennheiser 441 on the snare and an AKG 451 on the hi hat. There were about eight toms altogether, all double skinned, so we used Sennheiser 421s close-miked overhead to get the attack on the six rack toms and Neumann U67s about a couple of feet away on the two floor toms. For overall sound and ambience of the kit we had a pressure zone mike about 20' in front of the bass drum plus a stereo Neumann mike about 20-30' above the kit — it's a really high ceiling. I used to always gate the snare and bass drum on record but, especially with Ian's playing, you wouldn't hear what was going on, you'd miss a lot of the delicate detail. I prefer to make that decision in the mix, now. I do do a lot of Eq on the bass drum, snare and toms at the record stage, just to try and make the sound as big as possible. One thing we did was to take the kit out into the live foyer, record the snare onto digital, pick out a good sounding hit and dump in into the AMS digital memory. Then in the mix we triggered it from the normal snare and added it in to the overall sound to give a bigger ambience."

Bass

"Pete uses Moog bass pedals as well as a Fender bass with Boss Chorus and Phaser effects units. The Moog pedals went on to a separate track DI, and we had both a DI and a U47 on a Peavey amp for the bass, with a little Urei 1176 compression mixed to a single track. The pedals are very low and round sounding, so they don't really get in the way of the bass guitar sound too much, and in fact Peter can actually play the bass and pedals at the same time!"

Keyboards

"I think he used about a dozen keyboards all together, and at certain points in the song you might have three or four changes taking place. Because we were trying to keep everything live, it meant actually working out at the pre-production stage a map of how and when we were going to record all the parts. It meant Mark (Kelly) had to give almost a live performance at times, going around a whole stack of keyboards as we recorded them. In the end we used, I think, half-a-dozen tracks for all the keyboards, but it could have been a lot more. I'm not too keen on working 46-track, it tends to slow things down quite a lot and it gives you too much possibility for trying things out that don't really need to be tried out. If you get the basic things right in the beginning it should sound really good, it's only if you're not sure what you're doing at the start that you need lots more tracks to try things out.

Generally, the keyboards were all Di'd, but for the string sounds on the Jupiter 8, we also used a Roland Stereo Chorus amp with a pair of Neumanns. There was also a PPG and a DX-7 at different points in the song. For recording we used a Yamaha CP70 electric grand, and then we replaced it with a specially hired 12' Bosendorfer which was the best piano I've ever used. It's the biggest one they make, but it wasn't just the depth of the sound, it was the balance between one end of the keyboard and the other that made it so good to play. We used the Neumann stereo valve mike about two-thirds down the piano, looking at the strings with the lid open, plus a valve U67 in various positions as an ambient mike."

Guitars

"We mostly used a Roland Stereo Jazz Chorus with a pair of Neumann U67s, one on each of the two speakers to get the stereo effect. We did use a Marshall 100w stack now and then for different sounds, but the guitar solo on Kayleigh was done using the overdrive control on the Roland, and actually it was played live".

Vocals

"When we were recording. Fish sang along with the band. That was a very important factor, firstly so that everyone knew where they were (laughs) and also to make sure that the tempos were right. Fish has a naturally very sibilant voice and so a lot of time was spent positioning mikes to avoid that. We used both a U67 and a valve U47 with a dbx 160 or Urei 1176 compressor, plus a nylon stocking stretched over a drum rim as a sibilants filter — it worked very well, but we also used a dbx de-esser at mix down.

Mixdown

"I don't use a great deal of effects at mixdown, except delays and reverb units to create spaces. I think it's more important to get the sounds and the song from the start, so that you're not searching for things to make it sound right at the end. For instance, the beginning of Kayleigh stays very simple for a long time to give the vocals space; I think it's important with a song that the instruments are simply an accompaniment to the vocal, and although we tried putting other things in, in the end we all agreed that it really didn't need it. It was right just as it was."

And who can argue with a hit?