Track: Things Could Be Beautiful
Artist: The Colourfield
Label: Chrysalis
Producer: Ian Broudie
Engineer: Ian Capell/Gil Norton
Studio: Farmyard/Amazon/R.G. Jones

Ian Broudie is very much a musicians' producer. His approach is that a song should be excellent in itself, rather than just a technically perfect, studio product.

He started his career as a composer, guitar and keyboard player in Liverpool in the seventies. His involvement with various bands soon led him to the producer's chair.

Broudie's first solo venture as producer was Echo And The Bunnymen's Porcupine album. Since then he has worked with Bourgie Bourgie, The Pale Fountains, The Red Guitars, The Beaudines and Care.

More recently, he has helped put The Colourfield back into the charts with Things Could Be Beautiful. His work on this single and its follow-up, Heart Of America, typifies his approach to production. He wanted the song to sound like a group, with its own character, not merely a big production number.

'The demo for Things Could Be Beautiful had Terry la-la-ing a vague melody over the top of things, with a bass and drum pattern and one clicking guitar that didn't really have a part but was mainly just following the chords.'

'In the rehearsals before we got to the studio, we tried to widen the arrangement whilst still leaving it quite open as to which way it might go.

'We recorded some codes and clicks first, and a guide bass and rhythm guitar. Once we had laid this down, things just progressed from there. I think the important thing about keeping a live feel isn't necessarily playing it live in the studio, but being aware of other things, such as getting performances rather than spending too long going through everything clinically.

'I prefer to get a few takes down and then pick one of them rather than making the musicians paranoid.

'We substituted real drums and, in the course of that, changed the drum pattern. I like to alter things as I go along. The room in Farmyard was good — very controllable — but its wasn't great for recording drums as it lacks a little bit of wildness in the ambience. So we close miked the kit and spent some time tuning it — it was quite a high room — and used a usual mixture of faraway ambient mics and also some in the corridor outside the room, with some PZMs to back up the ambients.

'Then we laid down the bass line, recording it through the drums and spending some time getting it to feel pretty good, and then we put on a rhythm guitar.

'Colourfield were quite open to trying different guitar ideas, parts and sounds, so I played a little bit on the track myself which was nice as we got a good crossover between us and the kit. It helped having two guitarists instead of one, as it was a difficult song to discover where to go with.

'It just had a great melody and a really bare-boned structure. We were trying to keep it live without orchestrating it too much, so we were very much treading a line in between. So we put down the backbone rhythm guitar — using a Gretsch with a couple of amps and a Rockman to double it. Since the melody was the most defined thing, I wanted to record the vocals fairly early on. So we spent a lot of time on the Guild guitar, the main arpeggio guitars and the guide strings, trying to get the parts right for all of these things. There was a lot of writing going on during the recording.

'Then we got a cello in and decided to use just one cellist rather than get into an orchestration. We spent quite a lot of time working out the cello parts before laying them down onto tape — we tracked them up quite a lot and then bounced them.

'Straight after that we did the vocals. These were done facing the glass of the Farmyard studio control room using 47s — I like to use valve mics or 47s if possible for the vocals. Facing the glass is nice because you can see the person who is singing and it also allows some of the sound to come back. With vocals, a lot of it comes from the throat and as long as the room is open and not too stuffy sounding then the voice itself is what really counts.

'We hired in a whole selection of old valve mics to try out on the vocals, but they kept setting themselves on fire because they were really old and all the mains boxes were going up in smoke.

'We moved from Farmyard into Amazon mainly because all of the members of the band, as well as myself, live close by.

'I like to be able to record the track and then have a couple of days if possible to think about it. I find it really helpful to listen to something in a different situation as the studio definitely makes it difficult to be objective after a while.

'There have been plenty of times when I've been really happy with things in the studio, and then I've had a couple of days back at home and realised that the results were, in fact, really diluted, maybe due to having been too clever and too subtle. I try to keep things straight down the middle. Once this seems to be generating enough excitement and has been sorted out I will add some things in the back that are a little bit 'clever'. Then I can overdub and put some of the final touches on before mixing.

'We recorded the keyboards and doubled a lot of the cello parts with the EMU II. We put some other strings that sounded good with the real cellos, and then we re-vocalled it and did some backing vocals.

'We decided to change some of the main melody into what had been harmony because it gave it more of a lift, and then replace the harmonies with what was the main vocal. This meant that the performance was centred on the harmonies and this, in the end, changed the melody.

'We then put some soft brass on the fade and taped some of the some of the stuff that we had sequenced. We moved to R.G. Jones and spent a couple of days mixing it.

'I mastered and mixed on SSL, but I find that there is a difference between different SSL desks, even though the idea is that they are supposed to be the same from one studio to the next. At Amazon they had the EQ on their SSL based on that of their Amek desk, so it is much wider and more severe.

'I also like the Harrison desk — especially as I often work with bands with a lot of live instruments and there is less triggering and sampling involved. A lot of money is spent nowadays on the control room, and I think just getting a really good room with a few different aspects and a few different sounds to it is a much overlooked factor.

'The B-side — Frosty Mornings — was a riff that the guitarist and Terry had been messing about with, and we decided to go into Amazon without any particular plan. Neither the bass player or the drummer had heard the song, and we rehearsed for four or five hours through headphones. Then we just went for it and did it really quickly.

'It was all guitars and keyboards and it turned out with a great feeling, a countryish type of song. That was really good, a relief I think. There's a real difference between when the artists are relaxed because they are doing a B-side and being tense because they're working on the A-side. If you could get a combination of those two things on each of track!

'I place a lot of importance on the rehearsal stages of a recording. It's a lot easier for bands to work out an idea in a rehearsal room than when they're in a studio faced with headphones and a lot of pressure.

'Once they've got the song I can use everything at my disposal in the studio to enhance it, rather than use the song to enhance the electronics.'