ABOVE & BEYOND
Paavo Siljamäki talks ice swimming, recording vocalists and keeping it real
Interviewing people isn’t always a pleasurable experience. There are times when you’re talking to some actor or musician or chef about their latest project, and you can immediately tell that they hate you. In fact, they hate every journalist in the world and would rather be anywhere other than sat in a room with some scruffy Northerner with a digital recorder.
And there are other times where everything just clicks into place. Beautifully.
Getting time with prog-trance trio Above & Beyond ahead of their recent album launch wasn’t easy. was all booked in for an afternoon in the studio with Paavo Siljamäki, Jono Grant and Tony McGuinness, but sadly, some remix work got in the way. Then there was Christmas. Then New Year. Then the band were out of the country.
In the end, we managed to grab a couple of phone hours with Paavo – the trio’s acknowledged tech nerd – and within seconds, it was obvious this was going to be a bit of alright.
“I’m in the studio and I’ve loaded up everything. The album is well and truly finished, but this is going to be a great chance to look back at what we did and actually get into the nitty-gritty of the music. We really appreciate you talking to us.”
A&B have been around for the best part of two decades, but the last few years have seen them seriously nudging into the mainstream. Common
Ground is the first album since 2015’s Grammy-
nominated We Are All We Need, and it’ll be followed by their biggest-ever UK date at Creamfields Steel Yard in London’s Finsbury Park this May.
It’s no surprise that Common Ground is a trance-heavy album, but like previous A&B releases, it reaches far beyond the confines of the dancefloor, adding gorgeous melodies, grown-up vocals and a scintillating, CPU-munching, symphonic production that seems to sweep their songs ever-closer to heaven.
Most of it was put together at A&B central in south London, but a couple of tracks were honed and tweaked in the wilds of Paavo’s home country, Finland. While some of us take a studio break at the local coffee shop, Paavo and vocalist Justine Suissa went ice swimming!
Computer Music: Did it refresh the parts that other beers can’t reach?
Paavo Siljamäki: “Ha ha! It was only minus ten, but it was very refreshing. We literally went out on to the lake, cut a hole in the ice and jumped in. You know that groggy feeling you sometimes get when you’re in the studio for hours at a time? It disappeared within a couple of seconds. When we got back to the session, we felt fantastic!”
: Do you have a full studio in the woods, or is it just a cabin with a couple of laptops?
PS: “We’ve recently upgraded it to something more permanent, but back when we were there last January, we created a studio out of what we could find. We took the laptops, obviously. I bought a mic and we shipped over a couple of keyboards. We ordered a few acoustic panels and made a vocal booth in the corner.
“The results were perfect, and that was a real revelation for us – the idea that you can get to the absolute levels you want without the aid of a full studio. We have worked outside the studio before – during some of the [A&B side-project] OceanLab sessions, we hired a villa in Ibiza – but this was the first time we went right out to the middle of nowhere.
“Although we love being in the studio, there is something very special about looking out over a snow-covered forest. It adds a touch of magic to a vocal.”
: Vocals are an important part of this album. Are A&B always in the room for a take, or are you happy to receive a vocal through the post?
PS: “Over the years, we’ve tended to work with the same vocalists [Justine Suissa, Richard Bedford, Alex Vargas, Marty Longstaff and Zoe Johnston], and we’ve kind of got to know their voices. On this album, the vocals were very collaborative. We were all sitting in the room, so we wrote and polished as we went along. If we had an idea for the vocal, we could try it on-the-fly.
“Mic-wise, again, we’ve worked out what mic fits with what voice, but we also did a lot of recording with two different mics. I often think of vocals as a work in progress – it’s something that grows and changes with the music. It seems rather limiting to just get one setup and say, ‘This is how we do the vocals forever!’ There are new technologies, new mics, so why not try something different? And if you actually record a vocal with two different mics or different settings, you can do a direct A/B comparison. If you try recording different takes with different mics, you never get the proper A/B thing because each take can be so different in terms of energy and emotion.
“The vocal channel is usually an API Channel Strip and a BAE1073, but we also made full use of iZotope RX 6 on this album. It was great for de-clicking and cleaning the vocal. It was the first time we’ve really drilled down into the heart of the vocals, and they sounded awesome!
“One trick we started using on this album is actually getting an almost-finished vocal, then bringing it back out and running it through the channel strips again. It seemed to add more power… brought the vocal forward. I get the feeling we’ll be doing that a lot in the future.”
: You’ve released a couple of acoustic albums, transferring an entire set onto real instruments. Is it all electronics on this album or do you still like keep a few things ‘real’?
PS: “There quite a bit of Rhodes on the album, but with the grand piano, it’s always a difficult choice. There’s a Bösendorfer here in the studio and we have got some incredible recordings from it. The sound of a real piano, with all the little clicks and noises… ah, yes, so much character. But the piano is also an incredibly dynamic instrument and, sometimes, it’s difficult to control those dynamics.
“There are definitely times when I prefer to stick with a virtual piano. One of my favourite sample libraries is the Vienna Symphonic. They’ve included a Bösendorfer Imperial, which is absolutely incredible to play. I think they’ve done 128 velocity levels on every key. And, of course, as it’s a plugin, you can quantize the notes, play with the dynamics and control it in every possible way.
“If you’re incorporating piano into an electronic project, that’s very important because, in the club world, even the quiet bits need to be fairly loud.”
: How did the acoustic projects come about? Was it simply about getting away
“It seems rather limiting to just get one setup and say, ‘ This is how we do the vocals forever!”
from the computer screen and working in a different musical world?
PS: “That was Tony’s baby, to a certain extent. He kept saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do a sort of ‘ MTV Unplugged’. Most of our songs do get written on acoustic instruments, and it seemed like a fun thing to try. Of course, once we started doing it, the project took on a life of its own. It suddenly seemed possible to play these ‘electronic’ songs on acoustic instruments; to play them for a live audience.”
: Did working with real instruments change how you programmed virtual stuff in the studio?
PS: “Yes, it gives you a lot of fresh ideas. You begin to see just how much is possible with these sounds. But it also gave me a renewed hunger for working with plugins and synths. After nine months of listening to the real thing, I was ready to switch on a noisy, buzzing analogue synth. I wanted to play with the filters and start distorting everything. I wanted to make a totally banging club tune!
“Having been through the experience, it’s something I would recommend to everyone. Not just working with acoustic instruments; I’m talking about the idea of getting out of your comfort zone, trying to do things different to how you normally do them. If you make techno, trying writing a drum ’n’ bass tune. If you write ambient music, try writing a festival anthem.
“By stepping outside of your usual world, you can open your mind to ideas you might never have thought of.”
cm : What’s the A&B platform?
PS: “We sort of all met in 1999 and, at that point, we were all working on our own individual setups with lots of outboard and analogue synths. Once we properly started working together, we settled on Logic as our platform – obviously, this was back in the Emagic days.
“At first, we were known as remixers, so we needed something that was going to handle audio. We tried a couple of remixes where the vocals were fired in from samples and… man, that was clunky. With Logic, we had a little bit more freedom.
“And instant recall was another big plus for us. Producers of a certain age will remember how things used to work before we had recall: a total nightmare. I personally think that recall was one of the tools that allowed electronic producers to seriously move into the albums market. Recall gave you the opportunity to work on a much bigger batch of songs; to go back and rework a song so it fitted in with the feel of everything else. You no longer had to stick with what you had on the first mix.
“Working with Logic has obviously had its ups and downs, but we kept faith with it up until the last couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, we still use Logic, and in many ways, it’s still our main platform, but we’ve also messed around with Ableton and we did some of the work for this album on Studio One.”
cm : Any reason for that change of heart?
PS: “Sadly, my faith in Logic was eroded. For a while, it started to look like Apple was
abandoning Logic and that we musicians were being left behind. I started investigating Ableton and Studio One and, wow, they were really making a lot of effort to move the software forward. They were thinking about what we wanted from the software. Logic was lying dormant and the future didn’t look too bright.
“That was when we started thinking, ‘Well, what happens if we have to leave Logic and move to another platform?’ After all those years, it was quite scary to think that we’d have to start from scratch. I bought a PC and started looking at every option that was out there for both Mac and PC. I hadn’t really heard much about Studio One, but the first time I heard it, my mind was absolutely blown.
“In particular, I like the fact that they’re working hard on the latency issue. There were a lot of plugins used on this album – Omnisphere has always been a big one; Dune; the Arturia set; and Kontakt, of course – but we have a studio full of analogue equipment and it’s nice to be able to integrate it into the system.
“Studio One feels like a program that’s looking to the future. I can’t wait to see version 4!” : What do Apple need to do to restore your faith?
PS: “Make the musicians feel important… not just another small cog in the big machine. There are a lot of positives when it comes to working with Apple. I love working on the Linux system, and OS X is a very stable, hassle-free environment. But they need to give us the software that allows us to do what we need to do – give us software that’s going to make full use of the next generation of multi-core processors that will be available to us.
“Innovation and inspiration comes from many different places, and I personally think that producers are beginning to think more and more about the power that’s available to them. If you’re constantly maxed out with UADs and softsynths, it can limit the creative process. That was something that we were very aware of with this album.
“Ha ha! I can’t believe I’m complaining about this. When we first got together, I remember thinking, ‘If we put all our equipment together, we might be able to build a 24-track song’. And now? By the time a track is finished, there’s a lot more stuff on screen and the poor computer is really starting to sweat.
“Maybe I’ll take back what I just said. Ha ha! Maybe we’ve all go too much power and too much equipment.” : Ah, the eternal questions for every modern producer: how do you know when you’ve got enough gear? And do you really need that extra synth or that new sample pack? Of course you do!
PS: “I am guilty of it. ‘Hey, maybe we need some extra kicks or some more hats.’ If you’re not careful, you can drive yourself crazy in that sound design phase of a song. At every point, you have to remember that harmonies, melodies, pattern arrangement and a great song matter far more than your bass sound or how many hi-hats you have to choose from.
“And maybe even more important than all of those is ‘feeling’. How does the music make you feel? As I’m sitting in the studio, I look around and I can see our old analogue Jupiter-8. I look at it and I’m intrigued. If I switch it on, I don’t even know what sound it’s going to make, but I’m excited.
“Make a note of where you get that feeling of excitement and put it into the music. Believe me, it has real value.”
Above & Beyond’s new album, Common Ground, is out now. They play London’s Finsbury Park on May 26.
“If you’re constantly maxed out with UADs and softsynths, it can limit the creative process’”