Paul White boldly braved the Willesdon weather to visit Zomba's Battery Studios where he managed to prise Pete 'Q' Harris from his Fairlight Series 3 long enough to instigate an interview.

Zomba is going to take over the world. Who? Zomba is the umbrella company which shelters Jive Records, Zomba Music Publishing and the four Battery Studios. They've also set up the Dreamhire company that specialises in recording/musical equipment hire and acquired Bruton Music, a substantial library music company. On top of this, they run a management company for producers called Zomba Management and have recently made inroads into film and broadcast work with Jingle Zone and Zomba Screen Music (heavily involved in producing the music soundtrack for 'Jewel of the Nile', the sequel to the award winning 'Romancing the Stone').

Though they have tended to keep a low profile in the past, Jive's recent success with Samantha Fox has naturally changed all that and now it is debatable whether they should be considered as a 'large independent' or a 'small big-time' label. The secret of Zomba's success can be attributed to a winning blend of astute management and close team work which should ensure the Zomba empire a prominent position in the world of music for some time to come.

Jive tends to act as a vehicle for the company's in-house writers and Battery studios were originally intended to cater solely for their needs, though now they are full scale commercial studios. However, there are programming suites within the Battery complex set aside for in-house work.

After a quick tour of the premises, I discovered Pete Harris in his programming room. Deciding that air conditioning was necessary, we moved to the adjoining studio.

A Programmer's Art

After an academic training in music, much gigging and many sessions, Pete joined the company and has remained there for five years. As you might have gathered, his speciality is programming.

I got into it via the early Linn machines and Jive's first hit using that was with the band Tight Fit: The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The newer Linn 9000 with the disk drive which we have now is, from the musical and operational point of view, an almost ideal tool for sequencing. The main concern for me is its facility to compile patterns into songs. When you get a number of patterns together, you can write that into the machine and then play it in edit mode before transferring it into another pattern location. Now when you do that, you eat into a lot of memory. It has certain operational advantages but the memory isn't big enough, and on a 3-or 4-minute pop song, it can get tricky.

After the first Linn we bought a Fairlight Series 2 and I got further into programming and sequencing. Although programming is now my specialised area I don't indulge in it to the exclusion of all else. I also write and produce. As a producer I like to sequence as much as possible in the early stages because it's an efficient way to work and doesn't have to involve too many other people. It's afterwards, when I go into the studio with it, that the other musicians and singers get involved.

Do you tend to work in real-time or step-time where sequencing is concerned?

I only use step-time very rarely, possibly for dance tracks... I would normally use the sequencer as a real-time recorder. However, I don't often leave a performance unquantised. In any event, both the Linn and the Fairlight quantise to some extent automatically. Even the Fairlight Series 3 with the quantisation switched off still quantises to 192 segments per quarter note.

Sampled Guitar

Guitar parts are a different ball game. It's very difficult to sequence guitars effectively. Everyone's been trying to do it for a long time but it's impossible. Basically, there are just too many parameters that need interactive control. Rather than sampling a guitar sound, we're now getting to the hybrid situation where you can sample the entire guitar part into the Fairlight and then fire it off as a long sample within a sequence. You may ask what advantage there is in that, but this method does enable you to move the whole project out of the studio and into a programming suite. You can sample up to around two and a half minutes into the Fairlight, so you can write looped choruses or a guitar part if it isn't too long. It's the digital equivalent to spinning something in off tape: the sort of thing you might do with a Publison or an AMS. You can hear a bigger picture than you normally could outside a studio, you can hear things earlier on in the recording process and it gives you a vibe for the track. Eventually, I would like to see every studio with a Fairlight Series 3 as standard, much in the same way as SSL is the standard desk, because it's a very powerful tool for sequencing. I think it's more musical and quicker to use than a Synclavier and with tight budgets, it's important to be able to get on with the job efficiently.

What method do you use to sync your sequencing system to tape?

We use the Roland SBX-80 and SRC Friendchips which have been updated quite extensively recently. They have various cue points you can set and you can drop sections in with them, but I do tend to write as much as possible into my sequencers rather than leaving it until we're in the studio. This would typically be chordal parts, high end parts, a bass part, percussion parts and guide drum tracks. The arrangement would be firmed up and the tempo settled before I go in.

Once in the studio, I usually fill up a 2" reel with my sequenced parts and then we slave up another machine to handle the vocals, and manually played instruments. It's getting to the point where I don't want to put my synth parts onto tape at all and we'll soon be doing a lot more productions using the sequencer locked to tape during the mix. I guess the reason we don't do that already is that it's just an old habit dying hard.

We have Mitsubishi digital multitrack recorders here and we master onto Mitsubishi X80 or Sony 1610 digital 2-track machines so you don't lose a lot. If you use analogue machines such as A80s and to a lesser extent A800s or Otaris though, you can hear the degradation.

"There's a definite shift these days to make the music in films more obtrusive and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing..."

Record or Sequence?

Don't you find it limiting going to tape, purely because it's not as easy to change sounds or tweak synth patches during or prior to the mix?

Well, we do run 25-frame SMPTE so we can redo or repair a synth part if necessary but no, it isn't as easy. You have to plumb in bits of gear and lock it all up to the SSL. Also, when we do move onto sequencing the parts during the mix, we won't be frustrated due to lack of keyboards because we can borrow what we need from our own hire company stock. We could muster perhaps 12 DX7s, a couple of TX816 racks and we have two Fairlight Series 2s. We built up an interesting library of sounds doing a Hugh Masakela album on location in Africa and we also have the new Series 3 Fairlight which gets a lot of use.

Of the non-sampling keyboards that you work with, which do you get on with best?

I like the Roland MKS-80 (the rack version of the Jupiter 8) because I do like to have knobs to twiddle rather than having to push keys and punch in algorithms. I can programme a DX7 but I find the machine/human interface annoying. You have to think very carefully and on sessions, you need to be able to concentrate on the music and the production. I think that knobs will make a comeback. I know that buttons are good from a cost point of view but I think you need to be able to reach out and tweak something. Also it's nice to alter two things at once to see how they interact.

Solid State

How do you find the SSL desks in comparison to other desks you've worked with?

The SSL's a very versatile desk. For example you can get gating or compression on a sound very quickly without having to patch it. You can go too far of course, and try to gate or compress everything and then you're in danger of ending up with very flat sounding records with no dynamic range. That's a danger on any desk, but having a compressor and a gate right there on every channel is quite a temptation. My only reservation is the feel of the EQ. It's a good EQ, a very sharp EQ, but you only have to move the knob a fraction to get a substantial aural effect. Also the built-in gates are OK for general clean-up work but they're not as adaptable as the Drawmers that we use. I enjoy working on SSLs but my comments are really from an producer's point of view rather than an engineer's.

When you're producing a session that has a lot of sequenced synth parts, do you have any particular approach that you take to build up a perspective within the mix and to get things to sit right?

I don't think I work that much differently to anyone else but I do think you need to keep a basic simplicity in the music. It's easy to use all the facilities at your disposal to go over the top adding too many tracks or effects and obviously it's important to have a good demo to work from in the first place. If you get the track sounding OK as an 8-track demo, then you can clean it up and put the finishing touches to it when you record it for real.

Analogue synth sounds are prone to a cluttered sort of sound when you add tracks together, and this is where DX sounds really come into their own because they can really cut through. It's horses for courses and you have to do whatever the track needs. Sometimes, however, you need a really overdone section and some of Prince's work is a good example of this style of production. He'll move from a section which only has two or three sounds to another that has lots of layers with very rich textures.

In any event, the arrangement is paramount. I don't think the actual sound of the instrument, within limits, is the most important thing. It's the same as the old adage about the song. If it isn't good, then no amount of messing about will help it.

Effects

I like to experiment with effects and it's nice to work with an engineer who plugs in different things to see how they work out. It's time consuming but I think it's worth it in the end because you can radically change the feel of a track at that stage if you need to. And it's inevitable that by the time you finish recording, your view of it will be altered. It similar to an artist painting a picture; his view changes as you near the end and you don't always know exactly what direction it's going to take. It's foolhardy to expect what is on tape to be the best that can be achieved.

I love using Harmonisers and phasing, and you can do some interesting things with AMS DDLs. I'd normally use Harmonisers for detuning rather than large pitch shifts - down at one side and up the other with a bit of delay added.

I don't really have a favourite combination of effects as such but I think EQ is very important. I sometimes like to alter vocal sounds dramatically by applying radical EQ. You can make it thin or bassy or even like a telephone.

"Eventually, I would like to see every studio with a Fairlight Series 3 as standard..."

Repeat echoes are nice in combination and I often use two running at the same time. I got a very useful algorithm readout from Tangerine Dream when I was working with them. They made up this whole sequence of algorithm-based delays which are musically interesting and quite dissimilar to absolute delays. These may be combined with a beats-per-minute related delay and work well in the context of dance tracks. I know that Mark Shreeve has done that in some of his music. You have to think up off-beat approaches that offer something a little bit different. It's a very fast moving business these days.

Treating the Signal

Do you find that with all the hi-tech processors currently available, you're still tempted to stick a couple of mics and speakers in the outside loo just to get something a bit different?

It's true that it's hard to get a really natural effect from digital units though I think you can get close to that sort of room ambience with Publisons, and I tend to add it as I record so I don't have to leave too many things to the mix.

You can also do interesting things to acoustic instruments using Aphex Aural Exciters. I tried the Type B but found it a little severe on vocals; if I wanted a radical voice treatment I might reach for that. My experience of Aphex processors goes back a long way and I find that they work wonderfully on acoustic instruments. I recorded a piano once at CTS Studios, in stereo through an old Aphex, and it was marvellous. It was a Yamaha grand and it really did give the most wonderful piano sound ever. Classical guitars sound good through them as well, but I'm not sure as to whether they're the thing to use on voice.

How do you view the future of analogue and digital recording?

I think that analogue magnetic tape in general is an outdated medium and we'll have to dispense with it as soon as possible. You have to move onto the next digital generation and, even though it's expensive, a bit unreliable and somewhat sci-fi to most people, you have to get in there and adopt it. You can't sit on the fence for too long and the more digital-equipped studios we get, the better the result for everyone. The difference in quality is enormous and I'm really committed to the CD format for home use.

Once the digital multitrack format is fixed, the price will fall and spin-offs will get into the consumer and home recording field like the Sony F1s did. We use F1s here though we'll more commonly use Sony 1610s and 1630s, and my favourite is the Mitsubishi X80 which has a particularly natural sound. I don't think using an F1 recording onto Betamax is really reliable enough for serious mastering, so I'd tend to put it on U-matic.

In the Movies

The company is now moving more heavily into film and video work which from my point of view is perfect as this is the kind of work I intend to do in the long term. I want to do pop music in smaller doses, I find a lot of satisfaction in writing good film music.

Studio One is specifically geared up for film work, the SSL6000 has three stereo busses rather than one so you can do separate mixes and you have eight channels of stereo returns. Also you have an effects synchroniser but it's similar in most respects to the 4000.

My special interest is sci-fi films and of course I would like most to work on big budget features. I particularly like the work Vangelis did on Blade Runner. Writing music for film is good for developing a broad musical approach. A video clip or film rush can inspire a completely new style. Sequencers are particularly adaptable to film work with SMPTE and EBU methods of synchronisation.

If you were writing a sequencer-based soundtrack, how would you approach the editing? Would you attempt to programme the entire piece or would you assemble it in parts?

I think that you have to work in parts, as a film might have two or three hundred insertions. Furthermore, you wouldn't just copy parts from one section of the score to another, you'd want to change them in certain ways, although you have to have identifiable musical motifs which surface at the relevant points in the story - like the Jaws riff and the string stabs in Psycho.

For film music to get to its next stage, the actual method of recording sound onto film needs to be updated. The present system is rather antiquated.

There's a definite shift these days to make the music in films more obtrusive and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing, although it does seem inevitable. I'm a bit cynical about the way the product is put out and there's a tendency to cut corners, artistically speaking, so that the director can come up with his idea of what he thinks the majority of the public will want. In Miami Vice for example, the music is very predominant and I think it's a bit of a cop out really. A film should not be confused with a music video promo after all.

It will be in teresting to see just how many of Pete's predictions will prove correct. Will each studio have a Fairlight Series 3? Will we see more knobs incorporated on synthesisers? Will the methods used in recording film soundtracks be updated? And to make one final prediction, bearing in mind Pete's combination of skills and Zomba's good business sense, both he and the company for which he works seem set for a bright and interesting future.