Downbeat - PRO SESSION - The Studio As

Compositional Tool
music.hyperreal.org

From Downbeat, probably 1979. Kindly typed & supplied by David Bass.

Brian Eno delivered the following lecture during New Music New York,
the first New Music America Festival sponsored in 1979 by the Kitchen.
His remarks were amplified by demonstrations from his own
recordings; here we've attempted to excerpt the general sense of his
more specific points.
The first thing about recording is that it makes repeatable what was otherwise
transient and ephemeral. Music, until about 1900, was an event that was perceived
in a particular situation, and that disappeared when it was finished. There was no
way of actually hearing that piece again, identically, and there was no way of
knowing whether your perception was telling you it was different or whether it was
different the second time you heard it. The piece disappeared when it was finished,
so it was something that only existed in time.
The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in
the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you're in a position of being able to
listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most
certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that
weren't intended by the composer or the musicians.
The effect of this on the composer is that he can think in terms of supplying
material that would actually be too subtle for a first listening. Around about the
1920s - or maybe that's too early, perhaps around the '30s - composers started
thinking that their work was recordable, and they started making use of the special
liberty of being recorded.

I think the first place this had a real effect was in jazz. Jazz is an improvised form,
primarily, and the interesting thing about improvisations is that they become more
interesting as you listen to them more times. What seemed like an almost arbitrary
collision of events comes to seem very meaningful on relistening. Actually, almost
any arbitrary collision of events listened to enough times comes to seem very
meaningful. (There's an interesting and useful bit of information for a composer, I
can tell you.) I think recording created the jazz idiom, in a sense; jazz was, from
1925 onwards, a recorded medium, and from'35 onwards I guess - I'm not a jazz
expert by any means - it was a medium that most people received via records. So
they were listening to things that were once only improvisations for many hundreds
of times, and they were hearing these details as being compositionally significant.
Now, let's talk about another aspect of recording, which I call the detachable aspect.
As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a
record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and
it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady
singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas
City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about
what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present.
So not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record,
but the whole global musical culture is also available. That means that a composer is
really in the position, if he listens to records a lot, of having a culture unbounded,
both temporally and geographically, and therefore it's not at all surprising that
composers should have ceased writing in a European classical tradition, and have
branched out into all sorts of other experiments. Of course, that's not the only
reason that they did, either.
So, to tape recording: till about the late '40s, recording was simply regarded as a
device for transmitting a performance to an unknown audience, and the whole
accent of recording technique was on making what was called a "more faithful"
transmission of that experience. It began very simply, because the only control over
the relative levels of sounds that went onto the machine was how far they were from
the microphone - like device. The accent was on the performance, and the recording
was a more or less perfect transmitter of that, through the cylinder and wax disc

recording stages, until tape became the medium by which people were recording
things.
The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something's on tape, it
becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in
ways that discs aren't. It's hard to do anything very interesting with a disc - all you
can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can't actually cut a groove out
and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial
dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.
Initially tape recording was a single track, all the information contained and already
mixed together on that one track. Then in the mid-'50s experiments were starting
with stereo, which was not significantly different. The only difference was that you
had two microphones pointing to your ensemble, and you had some impression of a
real acousticsound came to you from two different sources as you listened. Then
came threetrack recording; it allowed the option of adding another voice or putting
a string section on, or something like that. Now this is a significant step, I think; it's
the first time it was acknowledged that the performance isn't the finished item, and
that the work can be added to in the control room, or in the studio itself. For the
first time composers - almost always pop composers, as very few classical
composers were thinking in this form - were thinking, "Well, this is the music. What
can I do with it? I've got this extra facility of one track." Tricky things start getting
added. Then it went to four-track after that, and the usual layout for recording a
band on four track at that time.
You should remember that everything, including the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band, was done on four-track until 1968. Normally engineers would do
something like this: the drums on one track, the voices spread on two tracks with
the guitars and the piano, say, on one of those tracks, and then the strings and
additional effects on the fourth track. This was because they were thinking in terms
of mono output; eventually, it would be mixed down to one signal again, to be
played on radio or whatever. When stereo came in big, it gave them a problem.
When they converted to stereo, things were put in either the middle, or dramatically
to one side, or you'd hear some very idiosyncratic panning.

Anyway, after four-track it moved to eight track - this was in '68, I guess - then very
quickly escalated: eight-track till '70, 16-track from'70 to' 74, 24-track to now when
you can easily work on 48-track, for instance, and there are such things as 64-track
machines. The interesting thing is that after 16-track, I would say, the differences
are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Because after you get to 16-track,
you have far more tracks than you need to record a conventional rock band. Even if
you spread the drums across six tracks, have the basson two, have the vocals, have
the guitars, you've still got six tracks left. People started to think, "What shall we do
with those six tracks?"
From that impulse two things happened: you got an additive approach to recording,
the idea that composition is the process of adding more, which was very common in
early '70s rock (this gave rise to the well known and gladly departed orchestral rock
tradition, and it also gave rise to heavy metal music - that sound can't be got on
simpler equipment); it also gave rise to the particular area that I'm involved in: instudio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of
the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the
piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point.
Once you become familiar with studio facilities, or even if you're not, actually, you
can begin to compose in relation to those facilities. You can begin to think in terms
of putting something on, putting something else on, trying this on top of it, and so
on, then taking some of the original things off, or taking a mixture of things off, and
seeing what you're left with - actually constructing a piece in the studio.
In a compositional sense this takes the making of music away from any traditional
way that composers worked, as far as I'm concerned, and one becomes empirical in
a way that the classical composer never was. You're working directly with sound,
and there's no transmission loss between you and the sound - you handle it. It puts
the composer in the identical position of the painter - he's working directly with a
material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to
chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.
Compare that to the transmission intervals in a classical sequence: the composer
writes a piece of music in a language that might not be adequate to his ideas - he has
to say this note or this one, when he might mean this one just in between, or nearly

this one here. He has to specify things in terms of a number of available

instruments. He has to, in fact, use a language that, like all languages, will shape
what he wants to do. Of course, any good composer understands that and works
within that framework of limitations. Finally he has something on the page, and by
a process this arrives at a conductor. The conductor looks at that, and if he isn't in
contact with the composer, his job is to make an interpretation of it on the basis of
what he thinks the composer meant, or whatever it is he'd like to do. There's very
likely another transmission loss here - there won't be an identity between what he
supposes and what the composer supposes. Then the conductor has the job of
getting a group of probably intransigent musicians to follow his instructions, to
realize this image of the music he has. Those of you who work with classical
musicians know what a dreadful task this is, not to be wished on anyone.
So they come up with something. One can see there's not necessarily an identity
between what the composer - or the conductor - thought, and what they did, so
that's three transmission losses. I'd argue there is another one in the performance of
the piece: since you're not making a record, you're not working in terms of a
controlled acoustic, and you're not working in a medium that is quite so predictable
as a record. If I make a record, I assume it's going to be the same every time it's
played. So I think there is a difference in kind between the kind of composition I do
and the kind a classical composer does. This is evidenced by the fact that I can
neither read nor write music, and I can't play any instruments really well, either.
You can't imagine a situation prior to this where anyone like me could have been a
composer. It couldn't have happened. How could I do it without tape and without
technology?
One thing I said about the traditional composer was that he worked with a finite set
of possibilities; that is, he knew what an orchestra was composed of, and what those
things sounded like, within a range. If you carry on the painting analogy, it's like he
was working with a palette, with a number of colors which were and weren't
mixable. Of course, you can mix clarinets and strings to get different sounds, but
you're still dealing with a range that extends from here to here. It's nothing like the
range of sounds that's possible once electronics enter the picture. The composer was
also dealing with a finite set of relationships between sounds; the instruments are
only so loud, and that's what you're dealing with, unless you stick one out in a field

and one up close to your ear. It was out of the question that he could use something,
for example, as the Beach Boys once did - making the sound of someone chewing
celery the loudest thing on a track.
Of course, everyone is constrained in one way or another, and you work within your
constraints. It doesn't mean that suddenly the world is open, and we're going to do
much better music, because we're not constrained in certain ways. We're going to
do different music because we're not constrained in certain ways we operate under
a different set of constraints. I want to explain how multitrack technology works,
not electronically, but how it works in spirit. On a 24-track tape recorder you have
two-inch tape - it's that wide - on two big, heavy reels. You have 24 record heads, 24
playback heads. If you want to record a band, you can put one microphone on the
bass drum, one microphone on the snare drum, one microphone - on the
drummer's knee-joint if you like - you can separate things very carefully. You can
end up with this two-inch piece of tape with 24 distinct signals, and once you're in
this position, you have considerable freedom as to what you can do with each of
these sounds.
You can do what the classical composer couldn't: you can infinitely extend the
timbre of any instrument. You are also in the position of being able to subtract or
add with discrimination: you can put an echo on the bass drum and not on anything
else. The 24-track tape works to separate things off, and keeps them separate until
you feed the whole thing back through a mixing head, and you mix it all in some
manner of your choice. The mixer is really the central part of the studio.
Most people see a large mixer, and they're completely bewildered because there are
something like 800 or 900 knobs on it. Actually it's not so complex as it looks - it's
the same thing repeated many times. Since you're dealing with 24 tracks, everything
has to be multiplied by 24; it's not a very complex system. Each track from the tape
recorder plays back on one channel of the mixer. Each individual channel has a
whole set of controls that duplicate the other channels; that's all.
Each channel on the mixer is a long strip. Generally at the bottom is a level control,
for how loud you want that channel to play back. Next up, normally, there's a pan
control, for where you want the sound object in the stereo/quad image. Next up is

an echo control, and echo is really a separate issue, which has to do with something
very unique to recording: briefly, it enables you to locate something in an artifical
acoustic space. There's also equalization - a device by which you can create a
timbral change in an instrument, which in rock music is especially important,
because many different rock records, in my opinion, are predicated not on a
structure, or a melodic line, or a rhythm, but on a sound; this is why studios and
producers keep putting their names on records, because they have a lot to do with
that aspect of the work. Apart from equalization, there are other facilities which are
widely used, such as limiting, compression - which has the effect of altering the
envelope of a note or an instrument, so you can do something I've been interested
in, creating hybrid instruments.
Compression is quite interesting over a whole track; if you're using severe
compression and limiting at the same time, when you push one instrument up, the
track is governed so that the overall level will never change. Pushing one instrument
up effectively pushes the others down, so all you do is alter the ratio between the
instruments where you make a move. I started to use this as a deliberate,
compositional, sound-type device; it's generally been ignored or regarded as a
misuse of the equipment before, but I'll let you judge for yourself. On Helen
Thormdale from the No New York album (Antilles), I put an echo on the guitar
part's click, and used that to trigger the compression on the whole track, so it
sounds like helicopter blades.
Naturally, all of these things are variable throughout the entire course of the music.
These are the kinds of things that you, as a listener, don't generally notice; some of
them operate almost subliminally - they are the ambiance of a track, not the obvious
aspects of the track. Those are very much the things that traditional production is
concerned with. And they allow you to rearrange the priorities of the music in a
large number of ways.
We've spoken of the transition from the '50s concept of music to the contemporary
concept of mixing. If you listen to records from the '50s, you'll find that all the
melodic information is mixed very loud - your first impression of the piece is of
melody - and the rhythmic information is mixed rather quietly. The bass is
indistinct, and the bass is only playing the root note of the chord in most cases,

adding some resonance. As time goes on you'll find this spectrum, which was very
wide, with vocals way up there and the bass drum way down there, beginning to
compress, until at the beginning of funk it is very narrow, indeed. Things are all
about equally loud.
Then, from the time of Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh album, there's a flip over,
where the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly
become the important instruments in the mix. A timbral change also takes place.
The bass becomes a very defined instrument; by the use of amplitude control filters,
the bass actually begins to take on a very vocal attack. The bass drum gains a more
physical sound, and also has a click to it; generally you'll find that bass drums are
equalized very heavily, something like 1000-1500 cycles, to give a real sharp click. It
becomes the loudest instrument in disco - watch the vu meter while a disco track is
playing, and you'll see the needle peak each time the bass drum hits.
Okay. I've been talking about some of the possibilities of multi-track recording,
which is almost completely what I do. I don't really have a musical identity outside
of studios. Now I'm going to discuss some pieces of mine, because I know how they
were made, production-wise, and I can say with confidence how they were built.
Starting with R.A.F, a very obscure B-side of an even more obscure single that came
out in '78 - it's an interesting piece on a lot of levels. It's by me and a band called
Snatch. This piece started off many years ago; it was just a tatty little tape left over
from a mess - around we'd had in the studio which lasted 35 seconds. But that 35
seconds was quite interesting - after that it deteriorated into jamming - but I always
kept in mind that I was going to do something with that piece, sometime. I have
about 700 pieces like that. Judy Nieland of Snatch suggested doing a reportage
piece on the Baader Meinhoff terrorists, and I remembered this piece and pulled it
out.
The first thing I had to do was extend it somehow, so I copied the 24-track onto
another 24-track machine, four or five times, and I pieced them together, so I had
the thing song-length by then. And you'll hear, in a cleverly disguised fashion,
exactly the same parts repeated. Which makes you think that Percy Jones of Brand

X is an incredible bass player, because he does every complex, idiosyncratic thing

three our four times in a row. That's a trick I like using.
We had a recording Judy made in Germany of the telephone announcement you
could call, where a lady would say, "Good evening, blah blah blah, we're trying to
apprehend the Baader Meinhoff terrorists, this is a recording of one of their voices,"
and then the terrorist's voice would come on, which had been recorded off another
telephone when they were making ransom demands. The scenario of this piece was
interesting, production-wise, because some of the record is set outside, on the
streets, then it suddenly cuts to an airplane which is being hijacked. I wanted to get
the effect of going from a very hectic, open space into a very tight, air-conditioned
airplane. What I did to achieve that was take all the echo off of everything, and put a
very peculiar, tunnel-type echo on things. To me, it works: I get this sense of a
contraction of space, and the soft voices working over it. After that it'goes back
outside, into the wide world again.
There are two pieces of mine, Skysaw from Another Green World, and A Major
Groove from Music For Films (both Editions EG), which are exactly the same track,
mixed differently, slowed down, and fiddled about with a bit. I also gave it to
Ultravox for one of the songs on their first album. It's been a long way, this backing
track. Listen to all three, and you hear what kind of range of difference usage is
possible. M386 on Music For Films is another one that's had four different lives.
This is actually quite similar to what reggae producers have been doing for a while.
Once you're on tape, there are so many variations you can make that you don't
really.need to spend all that money hiring musicians; you can do a great deal with
one piece of work. So when you buy a reggae record, there's a 90 percent chance the
drummer is Sly Dunbar. You get the impression that Sly Dunbar is chained to a
studio seat somewhere in Jamaica, but in fact what happens is that his drum tracks
are so interesting, they get used again and again.
This takes us to reggae, which is a very interesting music in that it's the first that
didn't base itself around the standard approach of making work by addition. Earlier
I said the contemporary studio composer is like a painter who puts things on, puts
things together, tries things out, and erases them. The condition of the reggae
composer is like that of the sculptor, I think. Five or six musicians play; they're well

isolated from one another. Then the thing they played, which you can regard as a
kind of cube of music, is hacked away at - things are taken out, for long periods.
A guitar will appear for two strums, then never appear again; the bass will suddenly
drop out, and an interesting space is created. Reggae composers have created a
sense of dimension in the music, by very clever, unconventional use of echo, by
leaving out instruments, and by the very open rhythmic structure of the music.
Then, too, someone like Lee Perry, a producer who's always been very intelligent as
far as using the constraints of the situation goes, might find there's hiss building up
on tracks he's used over and over. A Western engineer might get frightened by this,
and use all sorts of noise reduction and filtration. Perry says, "Okay, that's part of
the sound, so we'll just add something else to it and use it' " This adds an ambiance
of weirdness behind what was straightforward reggae.
Which puts me in mind of the first piece on Music For Airports (Editions EG). I had
four musicians in the studio, and we were doing some improvising exercises that I'd
suggested. I couldn't hear the musicians very well at the time, and I'm sure they
couldn't hear each other, but listening back, later, I found this very short section of
tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that
interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part
out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half
speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very
slow. I didn't want the bass and guitar - they weren't necessary for the piece - but
there was a bit of Fred Frith's guitar breaking through the acoustic piano mic, a
kind of scrape I couldn't get rid of. Usually I like Fred's scrapes a lot, but this wasn't
in keeping, so I had to find a way of dealing with that scrape, and I had the idea of
putting in variable orchestration each time the loop repeated. You only hear Fred's
scrape the first time the loop goes around.
There are other examples of things I do with loops and editing based on fairly
simple material, to get singular, very rare events I couldn't have forseen. But
perhaps I should mention that you only have control of your studio composition to
the pressing plant - then the reproduction is completely arbitrary. So when I mix a
record, I mix on at least two speaker systems - and often more than two - so I'm not
mixing just for optimum conditions. Most of my records don't sound good in

optimum conditions, where there are very large speakers which are extremely well
balanced and have lots of high and low frequencies. I mix, really, for what I imagine
most people have medium-priced hi-fi - and for radio a bit as well. It's the very
naive producer who works only on optimum systems.