THE BIG SCORE

Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy

KEEPING IT IN THE ROOM

Much like a movie editor faced with the task of assembling hundreds of live-action and visual-effects shots and then merging them into a cohesive whole, Tobin has clearly gone the extra creative mile with Foley Room. As a testament to the lengths that analog sound sources can be stretched, stitched and stomped on in a digital world, this is one album that can find as much appreciation among the old-school electronic avant-garde — represented by such august organizations as France's Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), who invited Tobin to perform last year at the prestigious Presences Electronique festival — as it can among the hungry young mavericks still clawing their way up through the club scene, where Tobin still DJs on a regular basis.

“The performance at GRM was showcasing Foley Room as a bit of a work in progress at the time,” Tobin explains. “It was played over 47 speakers in the performance space at Radio France, which also houses the GRM Institute. It was particularly relevant for me to play there because the GRM had been home to sampling pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer, as well as Pierre Henri, who played at the same festival.”

Tobin is also quick to point out that this album, perhaps more than any other he's done to date, is strictly a studio affair — and thus impossible to present live. “That's been the trouble all the way through since day one,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I've been fortunate though because I've been received very generously from people with my DJ sets. I mean, I feel like the option is there. I could do the whole thing on Ableton or a couple of laptops, but I think of live shows as something that should be worth seeing at the very least. As much as I can appreciate the way different people work, for me personally, I don't find much enthusiasm for a laptop set. It just seems really boring to me.”

Although his fans may not be seeing him onstage with a live band any time soon, Tobin is certainly keeping busy in the studio. A new collaboration with the Dutch drum 'n' bass trio Noisia is already in the can, while a down-low project with Doubleclick called Two Fingers is expected to jump off at any moment in 2007. And of course, he still has to make the transition to the mind-blowing expanses of Cubase 4.

“I really didn't want to try anything too new and untested when I was making this record,” Tobin confers, “because frankly, I needed things to work. But Cubase 4 sounds pretty wicked, and I can't wait to try it out. If it's anything like what the transition was from VST to SX, then I know it will be inspiring.”

VISIONS OF A BEATSMITH

When Amon Tobin relocated from the UK to Montreal in 2002, his burgeoning Beatsmith Studio was centered on a Mackie D8B digital 8-bus mixer. “Until recently, I'd been using that for a couple of years,” Tobin says, “which was cool and everything. But for this record, I ditched the physical mixer altogether and used a [Chandler] summing mixer instead. I'd use the basic mixer in Cubase to get my levels, but then I'd do all my EQing and compression with outboard stuff, and before it was bounced to a stereo file, I put everything through the Chandler Mini Rack. It just had the right sound that I needed for this album — really classic.”

Tobin has experienced a reawakening, of sorts, to the advantages of analog gear — a conversion that was brought on, in part, by adjusting his ears to the plethora of analog sounds and performances he'd collected on the Nagra tape machine. Once those and other vinyl sources were transferred to Cubase for digital editing and mutating, Tobin felt he had to maintain the “roundness” of the mix by putting an analog-effects chain in place after the music had gone through the digital realm.

“There are some incredible software emulations of compressors and reverbs now,” he concedes, “but I haven't really found any two that can do what the Chandler TG1 and the Manley Massive Passive can do. With the Manley, you can push things without them hurting you in the same way a digital EQ sometimes does. I'm using the digital plug-ins more for extreme EQing or very surgical parametric stuff. For the main EQ that I'd apply very slightly to a whole track — or if I just want to brighten an entire sound — I'd rather use the Manley. I think I've found more faith in analog gear than I had in the past, so really this album ended up being a mixture of analog and digital processing.”

INSIDE THE FOLEY ROOM

Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Apogee Rosetta 200 and DA-16X converters
Apple Mac G5/dual 2 GHz computer
Nagra IV-S portable ¼-inch tape recorder
Steinberg Cubase SX3 software

Mixer, control surface
Chandler Limited 16x2 Mini Rack mixer
JazzMutant Lemur

Samplers, turntables, DJ mixer
Native Instruments Kontakt software sampler
Numark HDX turntables (live)
Rane TTM 56 Performance DJ Mixer
Roland VariOS sampler/synth
Technics SL-1210 turntable (studio)

Synths, software, plug-ins
Audio Ease Altiverb reverb plug-in
Clavia Nord Electro and Nord Lead synths
GRM Tools ST (Spectral Transform) plug-in package (featuring Contrast, Equalize, Freq Warp and Shift)
Native Instruments Reaktor 5 software
Roland V-Synth
Waves IR-1 V2 convolution reverb plug-in
Zebra 2.1 soft synth (designed by Urs Heckmann)

Mics, EQ, compressors, effects
API 2500 discrete 2-channel stereo bus compressor
Chandler Limited TG1 compressor
Earthworks Audio QTC50 high-definition microphones (matched pair)
Manley Labs Massive Passive EQ
Mutronics Mutator stereo filter
TC Electronic FireworX multi-effects processor

Monitors
Klein + Hummel O 500C digital active monitors

Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus

Want to use this article? Click here for options!