01 — Freddie Fourtrack & the TEAC 8 Channel
Following the open-air concert Steve Chowne, the lead member of Blue Powder approached me with the idea of doing a ‘studio’ type album. I was excited by the idea but had little knowledge of recording and mixing a band and even less equipment. After some thinking I worked out we could probably come up with a solution using the radio station second studio if we had access to a four track recorder.
We kicked the project off in the autumn of 1988, taking over Studio 2 of URB — University Radio Bath — for one evening each week. The studio must have been barely 10ft wide and maybe 20ft long, one of the longer walls was packed top to bottom with shelving rammed full of vinyl LPs scrounged from music promoters. One end had a desk with a recessed mixer and the prized Revox B77 along with a patching panel. Microphone stands, headphones and assorted leads adorned most of the remaining space.
Our equipment was limited — the open reel Revox B77 tape machine, a second-hand Fostex four-track which Steve had acquired, an 8 channel TEAC studio mixer and an array of dodgy microphones more suited to presenters than musicians.
Sitting at home today behind a dual screen 4K 32-inch monitor set-up looking at a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with almost unlimited tracks and a myriad of plugins for any type of effect, a library of high-quality soft synths and the ability to record at 96kHz with 32 bit resolution, it is hard to comprehend the limitations we had back in 1988 and the creativity we used to get the results we did.
Multi-trackers of the era were typically built to use a standard domestic analogue compact cassette tape to keep the price down for budding musicians. To make this work three neat ideas were used.
A standard compact cassette tape is 2-channel stereo but has an unusual feature in that you could turn it over, so a C60 tape actually gave 2 x 60 minutes of playing time. So on the tape itself there are four tracks but only two could be played at a time. The first smart solution was to use a record/playback head which could play/record all four tracks simultaneously making the tape single sided whilst still using a standard tape and mechanism.
The second problem with the compact cassette design is tape hiss, the standard compact cassette tape is only 3.81mm wide and runs at 4.75cm per second with very noticeable hiss caused by the magnetic particles on the tape as they pass over the playback head. The frequency of the hiss is directly related to tape speed so the ingenious solution on multitrackers was to run the tape at twice the normal speed which moved the frequency of the majority of the hiss outside of human audible range, the trade-off being a C60 cassette would only last 30 minutes in a multitracker.
Sadly the one problem that wasn’t resolved in an affordable multitracker was that of wow and flutter — the slight variations in the speed of the tape as it moved across the heads. Doubling the tape speed may have reduced it but the audio impact of the tape speed varying are probably the most grating when you listen to old recordings.
Four tracks were better than two but when trying to produce a stereo album it is still highly restricting so one more trick was used. ‘Track bouncing’ involved playing back one or more tracks, possibly with additional live input and mixing down onto one or more of the other tracks. This process required a record/playback head that could do both simultaneously, something not present in standard compact cassette recorders.
Track bouncing allowed you to layer up a composition but it had two big drawbacks, firstly it is a one-way process so you cannot unpick the tracks again later and secondly every bounce reduces the audio quality so it had to be used very sparingly. Modern DAWs still use the term ‘bounce’ but these days in the digital domain there is no audio quality loss.
Over the dark winter months of 1988 and into 1989 we spent many hours squeezed into URB Studio 2, each session starting with a complete re-patching of the mixer to facilitate our recording with Freddie and to provide some form of monitor output for the live recordings. We got access to the studio at 8 pm, spent 20 minutes doing the patching and setting up, recorded for about an hour and a half before breaking for some beers from Norwood Bar (the student bar conveniently located just down the corridor) and then carried on until around midnight or 1 am depending on how we were feeling.
Steve and Tush had laid a lot of base material onto Freddie, which we then layered more onto with much of the final output recorded live through Freddie, the TEAC and out onto the Revox B77 as the master. It meant many retakes as ‘punching in and out’ on the final recording was not possible as it was a live mix onto a two-track master. The overall result worked well but it did mean there was only a two-track master as the four-track only had the non-live components.
On some evenings we would have nearly an entire band set up in the studio — drums, lead guitar, bass, lead and backing vocals. When visiting the studio many years later I still could not work out how we managed to squeeze everything in. We had mike stands, microphones and headphones for everyone creating a web of cables across the room. Once we had started recording that was it, you couldn’t leave the room until the final take had been completed!
Alongside the instrument set-up came the trickery to create effects. It was still early days for effects racks and those that did exist were way outside our budget so we had to take a far more creative approach.
On the track Plastic Surgery there is a line ‘Into the image of God’ where the God vocal echoes away. To create this we used a tape loop on the Revox B77 which takes advantage of the simultaneous playback and record heads, so by feeding the playback back to the record head you get a delay which depends on the tape speed — the faster the speed the shorter the delay. Combine that with riding the mixer fader to lower the volume each time and the sound echoes off diminishing on each repeat. The final piece was then to ride the pan control at the same time so the ‘God’ echo slowly moves from right to left. All of this was done in real time and overlaid onto the existing track.
Direct tape splicing was also used in various places, particularly on the voice over pieces such as at the end of the track Plastic Surgery. It was a fiddly process, moving the tape backwards and forwards over the heads to find the right splice point and then sticking bits back together with the special white editing tape. The same approach was also used where a track needed a sharp transition into another section. It was always a nervous moment when you made the splice as it was very much a one-way process.
As the sessions continued we grew fond of our makeshift studio, Freddie held it together, minus one or two buttons and each week we found a new way of stretching the capabilities of the equipment we had.
The last track on the album, Making Paper Planes was taken from the live recording at the open air concert which formed the earlier EP. I always wanted to do a studio version of the track as it was one of my favourites but for various reasons which I can no longer remember we couldn’t do this. Instead we took the live recording and added some very fraudulent crowd noise to the beginning and over dubbed some of the vocals. It could in no way fix the distortion and saturation but it made for a raw and energetic end to the album.
By the late spring of 1989 we were happy with the results and released Plastic Surgery onto an unsuspecting student market. The tape got a pretty good review in Spike, the student magazine, and we sold a reasonable number of copies through the Union Shop, each one run off manually on a tape-to-tape recorder and packaged with carefully photocopied, cut and folded sleeve notes.
We digitised the original master in the mid-1990s in a small studio in Ladbroke Grove, however, other than some basic EQ tweaking it was just a direct transfer so in 2018 I revisited the master and reworked it with a few more modern tools. Yes there is hiss, some wow and flutter from the original tape and many audio limitations given what we were using but it amazed me how much detail was retained and the feel the tracks have. It was unashamed student music of the time and I’m proud of the result which, for me at least, stands up as a memento of the carefree student days of 1989.
A new 2024 digital remastered version is available on Spotify and most other streaming platforms.
Originally published at https://bluepowder.uk.
