MTF Wk 8 (The write up is coming....)

Well, one of this week’s presentations featured a producer who then became a musician (not a terribly famous one but never the less, the musician come producer pattern has been broken at last. In fact, becoming a musician it seemed to me was a symptom of being a sound engineer, interesting, interesting, a first for the books). Who is the man in question? Steven Wilson, creative mind behind Porcupine Tree (yep, I’d never heard of them either). This man is a self taught musician/producer who in his early years did things including exploring scraping mics over guitar strings and inventing a primitive form of multi tracking including much recording of recordings played back through multiple cassette players (reminds me of Stockhausen and his ilk, ahh, Stockhausen you eccentric, There is No Point!) {Curious about this Stockhausen fellow (if you like techno, you ought to be)? Go and check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen or this http://youtube.com/watch?v=v-1Vmr9xjg4 (damn string instruments think they can do anything. This isn’t exactly accurate as the original piece would have consisted of electronic sounds but it gives an idea never the less…. If nothing else, you should check this out, it’s less than a minute http://youtube.com/watch?v=JxuftUJrago&mode=related&search= how ironic that to my 1990’s ears this sounds cliché. } I think I like this producer. A) When he used a real drummer for the first time, he was reluctant to return to using drum machines. Could it be that, like myself, he has not the mind of a composer. Given the choice between having someone else invent a drum part for me and having to write one myself, I can tell you now I would opt for the former. Perhaps like myself, Steve Wilson likes/needs the creative input of others to make new music. B) He is anti surround sound *does little dance of joy *. OK, he likes surround sound I think…but realises that, realistically, you can’t have the entire audience sitting in the sweet spot. I know in forum I have never been privileged enough to sit in the sweet spot. In fact, even in sound engineering live, I have never found this mystical sweet spot. How is one supposed to hear the ‘out of phase’ sound that David Lokan goes on about when one can’t even find the stereo sweet spot? Biased? You better believe I am. Also, I finally found out what the ‘wall of sound’ is courtesy of a talk on suspected murderer and all round nasty guy Phil Spektor. And the Wall of Sound is…..’dense layers that reproduce well on tape players and duke boxes’ (and why not mix for the lowest denominator, that way, everyone can hear your skills, not just owners of 5.1 surround sound systems). Wall of Sound recordings capitalised on double and sometimes even triple tracking for that extra big sound. Although he eventually ate his words, Spektor was against stereo mixing when it first came out. It amused me to hear that distorted vocals in some of Spektor’s productions were simply a consequence of careless disregard of fidelity loss.