PRODUCER: David Motion/Chris Hughes
BAND: Red Box
TRACK: Lean On Me

The aptly named David Motion has been very much a man on the move since leaving The Royal Academy of Music at the end of 1979. He had been studying composition and piano but owing to increasingly apparent, and largely obligatory, differences in musical taste he stepped away from those hallowed halls of classical form at the end of the second year to immerse himself in the modern multitrack process and an eight-track coal bunker in Kingston.

Here and there he learned his trade, spending a few months as a tape-op at Air London, but quickly returning to the free world of freelance engineering/producing. During 1984 he engineered and produced the Strawberry Switchblade album for WEA and the Simon F album from Interferon for Chrysalis, finally deciding to drop the engineering to concentrate on producing. WEA approached Motion towards the end of '84 to do a single with Red Box.

Pre-production

David Motion: "I'd already met Red Box and liked their previous singles on the Cherry Red label and so it went very easily from there. I went round to Simon's flat in Chiswick and listened to a whole pile of demo's that they'd recorded on their Fostex eight-track setup, looking for a track that we could all agree on for the single, which turned out to be Lean On Me.

"One thing about Red Box is that they do have very good, strong melodies with all their tracks, including Lean On Me, and so my input was really to cut it up a bit, and condense it to give more the form of a single. I like to listen to a tape and then plan around with ideas on my own piano, and then take them to the band to work on them together. That gives me a lot more clarity, because I generally find that the first ideas that come into your head are the most important ones; they're unclouded and direct. The more you think about a song and what you can do with it, the more it is likely to become cluttered and overproduced.

"The other main aspect of my contribution at the initial stage was a slightly more adventurous harmonic structure. Neither Simon nor Julian are really keyboard orientated and so I worked to add a little harmonic spice and stop the chord progressions being too obvious, which is what often happens when a song is written on guitar. They're actually really keen to learn more about music theory and harmony, etc, but in fact I tend to discourage them because it's my experience that a lot of really good ideas come from a fresh, unsophisticated approach, and there is a danger of losing that. In the same vein I encourage bands to give me the tackiest demo they can, maybe even just guitar and vocals, because if too much is done before you go into the studio, all the spontaneity is lost and the master suffers for it.

"Over that period we went through three or four versions of the middle eight which I think is a vital ingredient in a Pop song. It gives you a chance to change the mood, so that with a fast, up-tempo song it's good to have a lyrical pastoral section in the middle of it, it can make it sound a little more spacious. And also it's the old thing of 'if you take it away then you can re-introduce it', and it's like a new start; although in the case of the Red Box single it turned out to be more of an implied middle eight.

Console Preferences

"We started the backing tracks at Tapestry Studio in Mortlake, which has a Harrison MR3 console and a Studer A800 III 24-track. I actually like to mix exclusively on SSL (Solid State Logic consoles), not because they sound any better than other high quality desks, but simply because the computer is so comprehensive and easy to use with the screen and the disk storage; it's become an almost integral part of my technique. At the point where most people might start mixing to tape — once most of the details of the mix are sorted out — I tend to mix to disk. I'm forever running out of disk space and can do as many as 50 passes with a complicated track. But with the computer you can easily flip back to any previous mix, several hours before, and instantly see how things were sounding then. The problem is that studios with SSL's are generally very expensive, and I prefer to go with a slightly less costly studio for putting the tracks down so that we can afford to spend more time playing around.

"With the Red Box single, the first thing we did was to put down the time code onto track 24 using the SRC (SMPTE Reading Clock). This obviates the need for countless tracks of different types of code for things like Linns, Fairlights, desk computers and syncing up with other multitracks if necessary, because the SRC will refer to the SMPTE and put out virtually any kind of standard code to drive anything else.

"Then we put down a guide Linn track to measure the machines (sequencers) against. I only prefer a Linn against other drum machines because it's so easy to programme and is so reliable. In terms of sounds I think it's more or less as boring as all the others, and in fact there's hardly ever any Linn left on the final mix. I prefer to get a drummer in with a kit or use the machine to trigger samples of a real kit from an AMS.

"I don't like to commit the arrangement too much before going into the studio, because ideally everything should be a spontaneous response to what you're hearing, so that an arrangement develops. In this case the next thing we did was to put down a few odd samples fired from the Linn to create a rhythmic texture of flavour that we could react to. For instance there's a sound that you can hear just as the drums are coming in which is a brush on a tom-tom, pitch-shifted down an octave to give a kind of Salvation Army 'boof, boof'.

Sequences

"Then we put down the sequence keyboard bits with Gary Hutchins using a micro computer MIDI sequencer package, a DX-7, a Prophet and a MIDI Oscar which is a particular favourite of ours. Something I like to do is to track sequenced parts manually later on in the session. In that way you have the tightness of the machine plus the human aspect, so you end up with something somewhere in between. For instance, we brought in a bass player who used an octave-divider, and we had him track the bass sequence. Then we put down a 'harmonic carpet' of simple synth and acoustic guitar chords to fill in a few of the gaps so that we could see where things were going and have some structure to put other parts against. Generally, by the final mix most of this carpet is generally lost, although in this case several parts of it were used.

"We brought a percussionist, Alison Lee, in to put on some bits like tambourine, marimba and vibraphone etc, including the metallic bell sound which was a xylophone played with a metal rod, plus flanging and gated reverb. The percussion made a big contribution to the feel of the track.

"The main vocal was next and we spent a little time here to try and get it right rather than just starting with a guide vocal. This involved what is called 'The Battle of the Mikes' which is where the tape-op puts out maybe half-a-dozen pairs of microphones and we go through testing them 'blind'. It's incredible how often a Shure SM57 or a Beyer 201 wins out over all the high quality condensers; and in this case we did use an SM57 with a little 2:1 compression from a Valley People's 610.

"For the backing vocals and real drums we moved to Eel Pie Studio in Broadwick St. The backing vocals involved 10 vocalists, four women and six men, in the live room at Eel Pie with a crossed pair of AKG 451s. Shakey's drummer, Chris Wyles, came in to do the drums, and once we'd taken his cymbals away and told him that it didn't matter where the fills went, it went very well, and we got the odd syncopation we wanted. I just used a Beyer 201 on the bass drum, an SM57 on the snare and a couple of heavily compressed 414's for ambience. Then we went back to Tapestry to finish some overdubs of flute and piano.

"Chris Hughes took over as producer at the mix stage and in fact replaced the drums with Fairlight samples, though keeping the same rhythmic ideas. He actually went 48-track at the Wool Hall in Bath, so that he had plenty of space to try new things.

"The big piano sound, which you can hear especially on its own at the end of the 12" mix, was achieved with a Lexicon 224 including a degree of chorus. It was well into the early hours of the final morning of recording, and we just have let the pianist play on after the track had finished, as he felt. It sounded very good and I'm glad it was kept for the 12" mix.