Analogue in a digital world
As a lover of both analogue hardware and digital software, James is keen to discuss the pros and cons of gear vs plugins…
cm: Where are the limitations of software emulations, in your opinion? JW: “I’d say EQ and compression. It’s getting there, but with compression particularly, there’s nothing that quite beats an analogue compressor. From what I know of DSP coding, frequency-dependent processing is easier, but time-domain processing is still quite hard. And also distortion: driving hardware hard can give you ‘tones’. But the main hardware thing is that you grab it and touch it. My brain is in a completely different mode when I’m in front of a plugin compared to when I’m in front of a piece of hardware. When you twist something, you’re ‘painting’ with it; making adjustments in real time. Add that up incrementally across a piece of music, and that makes a difference.
“Say you had a piece of music all written on hardware synths, and you had a verse and chorus, and you copied the chorus three times: if you’re just duplicating identical audio information, your brain will subconsciously hear that cyclic nature. If you had three choruses set up with MIDI notes, and you record passes from hardware synths, that piece would sound completely free – slightly more ‘human’. That’s so much easier to do in hardware land, as you can tweak stuff with two hands as you’re printing it down. I think that’s why we’ve seen such a rise in modular and Eurorack – that brilliant wish to get hands on and start twisting.”
cm: Does that mean you’re tempted by the world of modular synthesis and Eurorack? JW: “I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work for me – it’s too fiddly. It’s a great excuse to not write any tunes! Writing music is hard work!”
cm: How does your love of hardware relate to what you’re doing with F9 Audio? JW: “With my F9 releases, I’m trying to bring the sound of this equipment to everyone. I’m very lucky to have all this stuff, but it’s complicated to maintain and deal with on a long-term basis. And it does deteriorate. So it’s all a bit of cataloguing, and bringing sounds that people can’t get in software. As we’ve seen, once you’ve got raw waveforms, you can get great results. My view is, what’s the point of having all this stuff if you can’t share it? If I can do that and make a living, then great. What I also love is that I get to speak directly to musicians, and help get their music better. I worked in pretty much every studio in London as a programmer and a remixer, so I’ve done my time. I think the mixture of old-school engineering and studio knowledge is starting to get lost, so I enjoy giving people real advice. There are a lot of universal problems producers are dealing with, due to a lot of bad information out there.”
cm: What are some of those myths? JW: “For example, I’ve never understood the ‘keying’ of kick drums. This concept has been overhyped so much, without looking at basic physics. Apparently we should all be worrying
“With my F9 releases, I’m trying to bring the sound of this equipment to everyone”
what the key of our kick drum is, with the ‘science’ being that if your kick’s fundamental goes down to the root note of your bassline, they’re gonna bolster each other up and sound good. The problem is that if your bass tone is out of phase with your kick, at exactly the same frequency, it’ll cancel out! That’s dangerous. What you really want is your kick nowhere near the frequency of your bassline!”
“In digital, we have no target… The master fader is at -20dB and every channel is lit up like a Christmas tree!”
cm: How about common processing myths?
JW: “Another one I like to get evangelical about: when it comes to bus compression on mixes, every project I see contains incredibly complex busing systems. All of your drums are grouped and heavily compressed with a slow attack, then other things are bused and compressed, then more master bus compression, plus compression on the individual sounds.
“If you have a compressor on your source sound, then that goes into two more stages of compression, that’s three or more things you’ve got to control. If you’re a seasoned engineer, you can understand these dynamic relationships, but if you’re not 100% sure what you’re doing with compression, it’s one of the most dangerous things you can do. You’ve got various compressors imparting different attack phases, all intermodulating and distorting the final sound. You’d be far better removing the drum bus completely, focusing on getting the core sounds right, then firing them into master bus compression and limiting – it’ll sound better.”
cm: You’ve learned this the hard way?
JW: “I went down this road for years and years, but it was a brilliant [stem mastering] engineer called Kevin Grainger at Wired Masters. We were firing a session back and forth, and he refused to stem master the track with my drum bus processing, and made me take it off. I thought I knew best, so I called up his session and spent hours mucking around with different drum bus processing, before I finally gave up – there was nothing I could do that beat the sound of it all simply firing into the two-bus processing.
“The reason this has become such a popular point of conversation is that multitrack recordings of acoustic drum kits need tons of compression and limiting, both on individual elements and the bus. Drum bus compression is vital in that world. Remember, with electronic productions, we can sit and work on our core sounds, but an engineer with a badly-recorded acoustic kick can’t as much. It seems like a load of interviews have filtered down from the big ‘analogue’ mix engineers, then people have taken the info as gospel and tried those techniques on electronic drums.”
CM: Yet many people prefer to avoid master bus processing…
JW: “It’s fine if you know what you’re doing. You need compressors and limiters to bring the mix together. Mixing things into a compressor, particularly vocals, can be important. You can leave it to the mastering engineer, but if you’re mixing your own stuff, you want a degree of control over how the elements gel.
“Limiting is a completely different subject. The way I mix, I use limiters, but only in the final stages; it’s important to understand how it’ll sound once a mastering engineer gets their hands on it. Listen with a limiter on to see what’s gonna happen – particularly with drum transients. But one thing you shouldn’t do is mix with a limiter on for the start, as the moment you take it off, you may have squashed it far more than a mastering pro would. Use it as a reference point, but don’t shove into limiting from the start! If your mix is heavily dependent on the limiting, and you’ve made a whole series of adjustments that isn’t artistically right, you can’t guarantee whether the mastering engineer has the same limiter, or what he/she will want to do. It’s a difficult balancing act between knowing what it’ll sound like when pushed, but not damaging your material by doing so.”
cm: Do you think life was easier when everything was analogue?
JW: “Yes! When mixing in analogue, we had a f**king target! 0dB. We knew that was where every device was operating at its peak. You’d get a vocal up, then make sure it was averaging aroud 0dB. If we wanted to make the creative decision to distort the gear, we knew we could overgain stuff out of the desk into equipment. It was easier to push things – but that was a decision that we could make.
“In digital, we have no target. Producers that only know the digital world will shoot for 0dB. The master fader is at -20dB, and every channel is lit up like a Christmas tree!
“We don’t have a standardisation of gain control within digital systems; what we should be aiming for is -12dB to -14dB per channel. But only Pro Tools’ meters work like that. A -14dB signal in Logic, without a preference turned on, is only one or two tiny bars on the meter. Start a mix quieter, then build everything up – you don’t get any noise floor! But it’s hard to retrain yourself. And plugins don’t help – run through softsynth presets, and they’re all hitting at the endstops of a digital meter. The sounds you’re starting with are already +14dB too hot!”
cm: What’s your gain staging strategy in the digital realm?
JW: “Building a track is like building a house: start with solid foundations by getting your kicks right. Have kicks that you know work, and fit your given genre. By all means experiment and make new ones, but always have a pool of good kicks you know are great. If they’re great, they’ll work with your bass. Tune the kick a little to fit with the bass, but don’t go for this ‘keyed kick’ nonsense. Use your ears, use the meters to see what’s happening, then make sure they interact perfectly. Once the kick and bass work, and they’re at decent levels, you’ll naturally build everything else up to that level.”
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