PRODUCER: Wally Badarou
BAND: Level42
TRACK: Lessons In Love

As a keyboard player, Wally Badarou has added texture and colour to many great recordings including albums from Foreigner, Grace Jones, Joe Cocker, Mick Jagger, Talking Heads and Level 42. Although he has production credits for some of the soundtrack of 'The Kiss Of The Spider Woman' and for part of the Jamaican film classic, 'Countryman', the recent Level 42 single, Lessons In Love, is one of his first major Pop/Rock production assignments. In the studio Wally is more intuitive than technical about the recording process, and so we spoke to both him and the engineers of the single, Nick Froome (recording) and Julian Mendelsohn (mixing), about how the track went together.

The Producer's View

Wally: "I've been working with the band for many years now and although I never go on tour with them or anything, I really feel like an actual member. In the early days we were all interested in playing Jazz and Jazz Funk, but it was mainly instrumental stuff. It was really only with this last album that we started to get confident about producing ourselves and about doing commercial songs. I'm very happy with what we're doing.

"With the Lessons In Love session, by the time we got to the studio we'd had a couple of days' rehearsal and so we knew what we wanted to do. I used the Synclavier a lot with both the sampled sounds and the FM synthesis. With the new package you can combine them to make a composite sound which is how I work most of the time. Before the new software came along it wasn't possible to combine samples with synthesised sounds and I was really reluctant to base my work on just samples, and so the Prophet 5 had been my major workhorse over the years and still is a very important instrument for me. But the new Synclavier facilities are excellent.

"The bass sounds are a combination of the Synclavier and Mark on bass. He actually played the part twice to get that effect, but his playing is so tight that some people think it's all sequenced. The brass sounds are also a combination of real and synthesised sounds. Gary Barnacle, who's been playing on the band's recordings for some time, used a rack of Roland pitch-to-voltage converters which he drives from his sax so that he has about eight analogue synths playing with him; he does that live and in the studio. He's also tried driving a number of expanders from the synths but there were a few problems with MIDI delay. As far as the recording goes, I like to concentrate on how things are sounding and I leave the technical side to the engineer. You'd be better speaking to Nick and Julian about that."

The Recording Engineer's View

Nick: "We recorded the track in Studio 2 of Maison Rouge. Level 42 were great to work with inasmuch as they've had enough recording experience together with Wally to have their ways of working well mapped out. They generally knew exactly what they wanted to create and how.

"They'd been rehearsing for a few days before at John Henry's and so when they came to the studio they basically just set up and played through as a band, recapturing the feel and allowing me to get the right sounds in the control room. The drum sound is a combination of the real kit and samples triggered from the Linn 9000. Initially we just recorded the kit straight and then worked out what else we wanted to add afterwards and triggered it from tape. Studio 2 at Maison Rouge is an Eastlake design and very dead and so that's why we ended up using a number of different sources to build the final sound. I ended up with two or three mikes on each part of the kit, playing around with different combinations in the control room to get what we wanted. In the end I think we used an AKG D12 on the bass drum, a Shure SM58 on snare — I also tried a KMH416 shotgun mike high up pointing down at the snare to give some space, but we didn't use it in the end. Sennheiser 421s were on the toms and an AKG 451 on the hi hat. With some bands the final sound is very much down to what you do with the mixing desk and processing equipment but with Level 42 it's really just down to the way they play. They got the sounds in the studio and my job was mostly just getting them down faithfully on tape. The acoustic kit sound was very much like that.

The 25th Track

"As we got towards the end of the session we were starting to run out of tracks, and for reasons of time we decided against going 48-track. So we used the Synclavier as a kind of track 25, in that it had enough memory to be able to operate as a single track recorder. Wally's been using it for some years and seems to know it as well as anyone I've ever worked with. It's very impressive to watch him with it. It provides incredible flexibility, because you can record something, then put it into the Synclavier and play around with it endlessly until the right sound is arrived at. Apart from the Synclavier we used a Prophet 5, a Prophet 600, a Yamaha DX-7, an Emulator II and a Yamaha TX816 which is basically eight DX-7s in a rack. All these were MIDI'd together via a Korg routing box and so we'd just put everything up on the desk and listen to what each instrument had to offer for the sound we were looking for. There's quite a lot of sequencing for which we used the Linn's MIDI sequencer and also the Roland MSQ-700. I don't think the sounds on the record are particularly digital sounding, and that's down to the skill of the programmers — mainly Mike and Wally.

"The vocals were very straightforward. We used a Neumann U87 mike through a UREI 1176 compressor and a Klein and Hummel UE-800 parametric eq. It's an SSL console at Maison Rouge which I do like, especially in terms of ergonomics, but to keep the signal as clean as possible I put the mike through the desk's mike amp, came out at its insert point (pre eq), through the UREI and Klein and Hummel if necessary, and then straight into the tape machine. In this way I avoided the mix amp and output stage of the desk. We compiled Mark's lead vocal from one main take plus a few bits and pieces from others; it went down very quickly, as did Mike's backing vocals.

"Mark has a radio link for his bass and so he played everything from the control room with his Trace Elliot stack out in the studio. I gave him a combination of DI and the miked up amp. Mark has good strong views about what he wants with everything, especially his bass, and he's so in control of his playing that it isn't really necessary to give him much compression or even eq, because he gets the sound he wants from his guitar and stack. I think we did compress the DI a little but left the amp straight and worked with a combination of the two.

"Many of the effects were recorded straight to multitrack, including most of the long reverb sounds using mostly the Yamaha REV7 and the Lexicon 224. There's a short flanged sequencer part at the end of Lessons In Love that was actually a straight synth part keyed from a rim shot on the kit through a Kepex gate, then put through a Marshall Time Modulator and recorded directly to multitrack tape. So what sounds like a complicated part was originally just a straight synth pad."

The Mixer's View

Julian: "Nick made an excellent job of the recording and for me it was a simple matter of coming in and mixing it. I tend to just throw all the faders up and have a listen to what's there, I don't usually start with eqing the bass drum, then the snare drum, etc. The balance is the most important thing and I like to hear what I've got and then eq things if they need it within the mix as a whole. There weren't an awful lot of effects used for the mix; the AMS RMX16 non-linear reverb programme is about my favourite, and I used that on the snare sound. Then there's the AMS DDL and the Lexicon 224 that's about all there was on that track. We did the seven inch and 12" mix in about eight hours. The 12" was almost an afterthought and as we were already all set up for the shorter mix, it only took us a couple of hours. It's not an 'epic' 12", it's more of a cruising mix — get the groove going and just add a couple of exciting bits here and there, but really just let it cruise along. One effect I was pleased with on Mark's vocal was the combination of the Roland Dimension D and some delayed non-linear reverb from the RMS16; it really suited his voice. Apart from that, though, there was nothing very special; it was all in the recording; I just had to mix it."