Ibiza or Bust | Nightmares on Wax
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
FOR THE LATEST CHAPTER IN THE ONGOING SAGA OF NIGHTMARE ON WAX, GEORGE EVELYN AND FRIENDS OPTED TO PACK UP THEIR GEAR AND GO MOBILE
“I picked out some really '80s-sounding snares and kicks,” he says. “It was a reference — just a basic beat to get started — and then I got Shovell to lay his shakers and percussion on it. Later on I messed around a lot with the mix, and at one point I had even mastered the track, but I still wasn't happy with it, and that was because I realized that this basic '80s-sounding beat, which was recorded really badly and not treated with anything, actually sounded good. It was capturing something. Shovell's movement was giving it a live feel, but in the end it was a case of me coming back around to something simple.”
The same idea held for recording vocals. In keeping with the raw, unfiltered computer dub sound of “195lbs,” Ricky Ranking tracked his full-throated toasts on a thoroughly battered Shure SM58 as the van rolled down the highway to Cádiz. “The only thing I did was to cut out a little low end on his voice,” Evelyn says, “and then I added some overdrive using a Logic plug-in. I was going for that high-mid dub-clash vibe because in my experience of working with sound systems, everything is always about the bass and the top, with the high-mids always cutting through on the vocal.”
For opening track “Da Feelin,” the wah effect on Chris Dawkins' bass turns out to be the pivot that guides the song's sweat-fueled party vibe, although it also helps to have a roomful of people at a Spanish finca (country house) in Segovia chanting and clapping along with the band, as well as singer Chyna Brown soulfully peppering the mix with diva-like couplets. Almost a year would go by before Evelyn actually got into the mix in Ibiza [see sidebar, “Wax On Studios: Make Mine Analog”], but he knew that the uncut multitracks had the seeds of what he wanted.
“It was really straight on the money,” he recalls. “Even the video footage we have is the actual take that ended up on the album. Chris has some Bootsy Collins shit going, and there's a loop of a Rose Royce song [“Do Your Dance”] in there, and Shovell is playing percussion, so the groove is so strong that I felt I needed to find a happy medium between all the elements. I think that's probably the track that I went back and mixed the most, just to try and get the balance right. The beats and the bass need to be solid, but neither one should run the show.”
UNIFIED FRONT
There's also a quiet and meditative quality to Evelyn's current work that harks back in some ways to the stoned reveries of Smokers Delight, but with a far more nuanced and subtle delivery that suggests the evolution of a producer who's fully at peace with his inner adult, although the child still rules the roost from time to time. Evelyn has said it himself: This is Nightmares On Wax coming full circle, marking a return to a sound that's more basic and direct. Whether or not it flogs the club crowd into submission or soars up the charts is of little concern.
“I don't believe that we base anything that we do on a traditional song structure,” Evelyn clarifies. “Again, I like finding the adventure and the journey in a track, so you can go with where the groove is taking you. It's never set in stone. And then the mixing itself is another art form, which I love, especially if you're in a total zone and you're mixing on a level where you're not producing anymore. I have to snap myself out of that sometimes [laughs], but that's what I'd tell anyone who worries about getting all this gear and working a track to death: Sometimes you just need to leave it alone and get it finished.”
Two years removed from his musical odyssey, Evelyn still marvels at how many chances he took just to make the album, but insists that he never had any doubts about how he and his core of N.O.W. compatriots would respond. “This trip was always about more than just the music,” he says. “It was gonna be an experience. We found ourselves in a situation that we realized none of us had ever been in, and I think that made us more unified. Technically, there was nobody to ask how to do it because nobody had ever done anything like this. When I reflect on it now, yeah, it's like, ‘Wow, this is crazy!’ And that was the whole point of calling the album Thought So…, because it came from the power of thought, and this is the result.”
WAX ON STUDIOS: MAKE MINE ANALOG
Since he first started making records in the early '90s, George Evelyn was immediately drawn to the tactile aspects of analog mixing and stuck to it even after a lot of UK producers he knew were going all-digital. Beginning with Smokers Delight in 1995, every Nightmares On Wax album went through an Allen & Heath GS3000 until the desk started to hit the skids around 2006 with In a Space Outta Sound. Evelyn decided to pony up for a new TL Audio console, and he couldn't be happier.
“I love digital but I'm an analog man through and through,” he says, “and the thing I love about this desk is that you can find the pocket where something works in a mix. To make things sound fat, you don't actually need to make them that way. You just need to be able to hear them, and the fatness will come within everything. This is probably obvious to a lot of engineers, but to me the whole thing is an adventure. You just sit back and let the snares be snappy instead of pushing the kick, and the kick actually sounds fatter. Then you go back and listen to Quincy Jones, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown and all that, and you're like, fucking hell, that's how it's always been. [Laughs.]”
Thought So… also marks the first time that Evelyn mixed down to an Alesis MasterLink unit. “I used to route my stereo mixes back to Logic and re-record them,” he explains, “and I realized later on that it's incredible how much you lose. You don't notice it unless you A and B it, and I was going back and checking the audio on the Logic mix — it's almost like it's so busy processing what it puts out, that when it's bringing it back in, it can't represent what's there. The great thing about the MasterLink is it's just like a tape machine, really, and that works fine for me.”
ALL ABOARD THE CAMPER VAN
Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Alesis Masterlink ML-9600
Apogee Big Ben master digital clock
Apple MacBook Pro and Mac Mini hard drive running Logic Pro 7
MOTU 896HD interface
Tascam HD-P2 portable stereo recorder
Console
TL Audio M4 24-channel valve console
Mics, preamps, EQs, compressors, effects
Avalon Vt-747sp compressor/EQ
Buzz Audio Elixir preamp
Empirical Labs EL8 Distressors (2) and EL7 Fatso Jr
Neumann M 149 mic
Shure SM58 mic
Synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, turntable
Akai S950, S1000, S3000, S3200XL, MPC1000 and MPC2000XL sampling workstations
Apple Logic ES1, ES2, EVP88 (soft synths/piano) and EXS24 (soft sampler)
E-mu Vintage Keys, Mo' Phatt modules
Korg M1 synth
Native Instruments Kontakt soft sampler
Roland Juno-60 synth
Technics SL-1210 turntable
Yamaha DX7 MKII (as MIDI controller) and DX21 synth
Monitors
Dynaudio Air 20 active system
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
