Wayne Hussey is the man with The Mission. Mark Saunders, co-producer of The Mission's latest album, is the man with a large rack of equipment — either that or he was just pleased to see me. So Wayne, let's get metaphysical, and Mark, let's talk technical...

Mark Saunders has worked with Neneh Cherry, Erasure and The Cure, amongst many others, and on Masque he shares production credits with The Mission. The recording was done at Wayne's rented 16th-century barn near the Welsh border using Yamaha's new DMR8 music production system. The DMR8 combines an 8-track digital recorder, a fully automated digital mixing console, and three SPX1000-quality effects units in one integrated package. All signals are handled as 24-bit digital audio (with up to 32-bit processing) and stored on tape at 20-bit resolution, on a proprietary Yamaha cassette format. If you need more tracks, or more recording time, you can sync up a DRU8 rackmount recorder to give 16 tracks, or double the recording time to 40 minutes with eight tracks.

The Mission's setup consisted of a DMR8, DRU8, AD8X 8-channel analogue to digital convertor, and an HA8 8-channel microphone preamplifier.

But enough of these abstract letters and numbers; what's it like in Wayne's World? Improving, it would seem. Last Summer, surrounded by an ecstatic bunch of friends in the garden of the previously mentioned border barn, he married girlfriend Kelly (who, according to a press release, is of Icelandic, Peruvian, Apache, and East LA extraction; sounds like a potent combination.) The lyrics of 'Like A Child Again' on the album would suggest that the marriage was a good move for all concerned.

COMPUTER LOVE

The Mission chose to work with Saunders partly because of their admiration for his work, both with other artists and on a 12" remix of a Mission song from the previous album, and also because of Saunders' experience of working with sequencers; it was Saunders who brought the DMR8 into the picture.

Mark: "Wayne had an Akai 12-track and ended up doing some really good demos on it. We used some of the 12-track stuff on the album; just sampled it and copied it into the Yamaha. He had about half the album worked out, although we changed the arrangements around. He was a bit bored with the idea of just going in to do another studio album — he felt that by just going into a studio he couldn't improve on the last album, and that a new approach to recording would be interesting. I had just seen the Yamaha two days before and thought that it would be great for doing an album at home. It has everything you need, really.

"Wayne got quite excited by the idea. He had originally thought about using a mobile, but the idea of sitting in a truck for months on end wasn't very appealing and the chance to use some new technology was stimulating. We all knew it wouldn't be that easy; I think we had the second one in the country, and it took time to get used to it. Guy from TSC [The Synthesizer Company], who had previously worked for Yamaha, demonstrating it round the country and helping develop it, came out to Wales to help us set it up, and we would frequently ring him up with questions. There were a few bugs with it, but not that many.

"I came away thinking that it was about 80% brilliant and 20% annoying. But considering that it's a brand new product and it does do so much, it's good. There's a new software update coming out for it, and hopefully some of the new stuff will have come from us — we were in contact with Guy and he was sending faxes to Japan. They were quite keen to get our ideas, as we were the first band to use the system. There were some annoying things, like if you were in rewind running stuff live, the SMPTE was playing backwards and Cubase would pick up every few seconds and play these bursts of sound, which would be very distracting if you were trying to do vocals. Some people need the timecode sent out in rewind for films but it just needs an option in the software to disable it.

"The main problem is that you have to get used to looking at just eight faders that control 24 channels. Sometimes you might want to bring something up in the mix and then want to adjust something which is in another bank of eight faders. It made you a lot more regimented and you'd have to concentrate on the levels in one bank and then move on to another set — there wasn't the interaction you get when all 24 channels are available simultaneously."

Ten motorised faders are provided, to control the mixer parameters and visually indicate the changing settings of these parameters. The channel faders perform multiple functions, controlling channel levels to program or monitor busses, and effects send levels 1-3. Multifunction modes are also available, to allow faders to control multiple parameters of a single function. For example, when adjusting the EQ for a single channel, faders 2-10 can function as frequency, gain and Q for each of the three bands, and fader 1 controls the channel volume.

Mark: "If you're EQing something, you can switch the faders to a parametric and also automate it, so you can do some really good effects, like flanging with the EQ, getting some really sweet sounding sweeps.

"You can automate things like the length of a reverb, but only on the first pass through a mix, and that's the last sort of thing you're going to be thinking about at that stage. It's potentially a really useful feature but they've put it in the wrong way round, and sometimes if you did something like one of those EQ sweeps and had lots of other things happening at the same time, it would get stuck. We ended up not mixing on it, partly because of things like that and partly due to lack of memory. If you treated it like an SSL you'd run out of memory really quickly. Also, we weren't in a mixing environment; it was just a spare bedroom with NS10s and Wayne's stereo for monitoring.

"The other problem was that I had half the stuff running in the computer rather than down on tape, and they wanted all the sounds on multitrack to enable them to do remixes. One of the big selling points of the DMR8 was that you could do stuff at home and then copy it digitally onto Sony or Mitsubishi. However they'd only ever done it to a Sony and it took us three days to get it onto a Mitsubishi. Eventually we had to do it using a Sony as a convertor. It did sound really good, though; we had a nice compliment from Bob Ludwig, who is one of the top cutting engineers in America. He sent a fax to the record company in England saying the album sounded brilliant, which is unusual for him.

"I think the best part of the Yamaha was that you didn't tend to mess around with things very much. The desk was so clean that once things had gone in they didn't get clouded with the hiss that you get with an SSL. You have digital inserts but, not having loads of analogue to digital convertors, you don't use lots of outboard gear so the original signal doesn't go through half the stuff it does normally. I think that contributed more than the fact that it was 20-bit rather than 16-bit to how good the system sounded.

"It also has the equivalent of three SPX1000 effects units built in. We recorded some things to tape, like chorus on the guitars, and the reverbs sound a lot warmer — you don't have this digital whine to things. The first time we went back into an SSL, I was depressed by the amount of hiss from everything — the Yamaha sounded so fresh, even after being copied onto the Mitsubishi."

The quality of the vocals on the album is particularly notable — there's a real sense of space around them, giving the lyrics the chance to be heard.

Mark: "Tim Palmer, who produced the first three Mission albums, did a mix of one of the tracks and said that it was the best vocal sound he'd heard from Wayne. For the vocals that we did in the barn we just used an AKG C12 valve microphone and the Yamaha mic amps. We didn't EQ any of the vocals, and all the acoustic guitars went straight through. To me, it was more like making records in the old days when they had a lot less stuff to play around with. Actually getting stuff to tape was a lot less complicated, which was why it sounded so good."

"Wayne Hussey: With the making of this record, I don't think of The Mission as having the same parameters any more. I think we've broken down a lot of the self-induced stigmas about what we were and what we were supposed to be."

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Although bass player Craig Adams and drummer Mick Brown's previous roles were usurped by machines, they were actively diving into the pool of creativity offered by the new toys in the box.

Wayne: "It was very collective, and we took decisions on what was best for the song. They were always involved in the programming. Since Simon [Hinkler — ex-guitarist] left, there has been a lot less preciousness about who does what. Also I didn't feel that Simon had to be accommodated in all the songs, which meant that we could do something different with an instrumental passage rather than just blindly shoving in another guitar solo. It was good for me to get back into playing guitar again."

Mark's main 'axe', meanwhile, is Cubase, running on an Apple IIfx. "Cubase is the best. I have Pro Tools and I'm going to get Cubase Audio. I'm not really a keyboard player but I can play well enough to get something into the computer and sort it out in there.

"I did all the drum programming with Mick, and Craig was involved with the basslines. I put the drums in roughly on the keyboard and then tidied them up on the key edit page — I don't use the drum edit page at all. We used a keyboard player who plays with Jethro Tull for that real player feel and compiled the best of what he did. The band and I did the rest of the keyboards.

"I'd just finished the Ian McCullough album and was initially reluctant to launch straight away into another 3-month project, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. We thought that having our own gear to work with would mean a much less pressurised situation but we had to be quite disciplined to get it done. Nevertheless, we didn't end up feeling as fed up as one can do at the end of doing an album in a commercial studio. If something wasn't working, at least we hadn't wasted £1,000 for a day. Everybody was experimenting. They hadn't done an album like this before. A lot of the time was spent learning the DMR8."

And having learnt all about it, what features of the machine particularly appealed?

"It has some really great facilities for compiling a vocal. You can do cross fade drop-ins, which allow you to do things you wouldn't normally be able to get away with. If something doesn't quite switch properly you can set a 500 millisecond fade. It's great for guitar solos as well, where you might have four different takes. Where a straight cut won't work, you can do some really creative crossfades where things sound like they're coming in backwards, sliding two tracks together. I would like to use it again, but would prefer to work with a new version of the software. The ability to have a movable studio is great. Say you want a really good acoustic piano — you just take two mics, pre-amps, and A-to-D convertors, and go into a studio where they have a good piano.

"I'm sure they'll get the mixing side of things a lot better, in which case we might be encouraged to mix on it. We remixed one of the tracks, 'Breathe', on it; we were using a DMP11 mixer, which I had before the start of the album, and I'd been told that I could digitally cascade it into the DMR8 — but they weren't compatible. So we ended up using the analogue connections, which was a bit more noisy but pretty quiet on the whole.

"We mixed the album at Comforts Place, and also recorded a few extra vocals there, which took about six weeks. We did the mix of 'Breathe' at the Barn, which was great because you did things in a different way than you would normally. Just the configuration of things meant that the ways in which we were putting delays on things produced all this weird feedback, which we wouldn't have got using a normal desk. If we'd had good acoustics I would have been up for doing the mixes there. The band are talking about doing remixes for all the tracks, and if we do that, we will do them purely on the DMR8, partly to keep the cost down."

BRING THE NOISE

I think it must be time for the 'Which circuit makes what noise' questions. Heave on those anoraks kids, and let's all remember our notebooks.

Wayne: "Some of the songs originated on guitar, others on C-Lab Notator and a Roland W30 workstation. It's a great machine for the money, and I've got the library of samples as well. I was amazed that I could actually do it. I was one of the old school of musicians who could sit down with an acoustic guitar and play the song."

I observe that in my opinion the best 'new school' musicians are the ones who have graduated from the old school.

Wayne: "I'm not sure what the capabilities of the technology are and that makes it exciting. It's a chance to experiment, which was crucial in the making of this album. In the past I've written songs on my own and demo'd them to the group, then demo'd them as a band, then worked with a producer and demo'd them again. By the time you come to master them, quite often you've lost the original spontaneity. It's a real luxury to have the equipment to master directly onto, and with sequencers you can obviously change things as you're going along. A lot of the writing of the album developed during the recording of it."

OK Mark, it's time for your train numbers...

"The Oberheim Matrix 6R and the Roland MKS50 were favourites - MKS for bass - and we had an Akai S1000 for drum samples. Wayne had a Roland R8, so a lot of the drum samples were from that. Also, if you have too many sounds running on the Akai, the timing goes adrift. I bought an R8M, and I've got six cards for it including the new Dance card, which has TR909 sounds on it and is great. Wayne's Roland W30 had a lot of really good sounds, which were kept for the final versions. Some D50 was used, but not much.

"Mark Saunders: I was initially reluctant to take on another 3-month project, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. We thought that having our own gear would mean a much less pressurised situation, but we had to be quite disciplined to get it done."

"I've got Samplecell [Digidesign's sample playback board] inside the Mac, which I think is far superior to the S1000 — we used that a lot for real instrument sounds like strings. But trying to get the Mac, Samplecell, and the DMR8 to work together was a nightmare. I went through a lot of learning on the Mac. Having such a powerful computer means you can do things that you couldn't possibly do on an Atari, but there's a lack of compatibility between the program writers, which affected things that it wouldn't occur to you were connected. You can spend hours trying to track down a problem. Digidesign seem to be concentrating on Pro Tools, which has left Samplecell in a rather unrefined state. But it's much easier to map things out than on the S1000 and it has a brilliant library on CD-ROM, although it could be better edited and looped. It sounds like it's all been a bit hurriedly put together. I need another hard drive to copy all the things I want from the CD-ROM and store the edited versions of them. I have an optical drive but it's very slow loading and deleting. If someone's hanging around waiting for you to find a sound, a hard drive is better."

GARAGE MUSIC

Rejecting a studio in favour of home to record Masque was clearly a successful experiment. "There was something of the pioneering spirit about using a bedroom as a vocal booth," observes Wayne. "We had mattresses on the walls and ceiling, and I had a duvet over my head."

Wayne has now bought a house in the same area as the barn, and his garage has been converted into a studio where the band have just been working on a track for an NME compilation album. Garage records usually have a nice rough edge to them. Whether it be the sound of Iggy and The Stooges rehearsing, or New York's Sound Factory at 7am, from a funky Detroit basement through the Paradise Garage, the tenuous thread of passion and good time fun continues. So where to now, Wayne?

"With the making of this record, I don't think of The Mission as having the same parameters any more. I think we've broken down a lot of the self-induced stigmas about what we were and what we were supposed to be."

Any last words?

"Yes. There have been a couple of reports that Mark and I didn't get on with each other but that's not true. There were times when we fought with each other but it was a very creative kind of tension. He pushed me into doing things that I wouldn't have thought of doing, and it worked the other way too. Mark sometimes has a tendency to put too many sequences in, and I think I helped to pick out the essentials. I think he cared about the making of the album as much as we did rather than being one of those producers that just wants to get a job done. I'd be happy to work with him again."