With a new single – A Crazy Shot In The Dark for The Fizz – and the long-awaited release of Suzette Charles’ 33-years-in-the-making debut album now finally a reality, we recently caught up with Mike Stock of legendary producers Stock Aitken Waterman for a lengthy look back at his career.
During that conversation, we just had to ask him about some of the technology that he’s used down the years…
SAW’s studios were famously always equipped with the very latest gear, and you were the first producers to get the latest sounds on record. So were you ever a ‘gear head’?
“I've been surrounded by people who were more interested in the technicality of the synthesizers and the gear that we were using. Matt [Aitken] was very into that and the engineers definitely were, but I definitely thought it was just a tool.
“I would grab whatever new synthesizer was on the market, like, like the [Yamaha] DX7, and decide, ‘This is the best one for basslines’. Or, ‘It's also got a fairly good Fender Rhodes electric piano sound,’ but most of the others I wouldn't bother using.
“Then I'd get a [Roland] Jupiter and go, ‘This is good for the brass thing that we want,’ and the Emulator II was good for the piano, so we’d end up with so many synths just to cover one instrument.
“And I discovered the AMS [DMX 15-80] back in the days of the Marquee Studios, making Hazel Dean singles. You could sample about 600 milliseconds in there and you could trigger it off a drum, or just press the button, and that was a marvelous moment for me. I thought, ‘You could do all sorts of things with this!’.
“And then later on we got the Publison, the French machine that could sample 30 seconds worth of vocals. So if I got a whole chorus structure recorded on tape I could put a whole chorus into that, and then fly it into the rest of the song just by pressing a key. And then I found I could change the key! And you could change the key without making it go chipmunk-y because it had an algorithm that for every percentage of increase in speed it will reduce the vibrato by the same amount, so it always came up even sounding. Though to be fair if you went beyond more than a tone higher than you recorded, it did sound a bit weird.
“But I played it like a keyboard. I played it on Mel & Kim. We would sample things and use the hi-hat to trigger a gate open and shut to the rhythm. And like with Kylie, on I Should Be So Lucky where we couldn’t work out what to do for the middle eight. Anything for a gimmick, but back in the day that was new.”
Is there a bit of gear that's around today that you wish you had back then? Something that would have made things even faster and better?
“Well, can I say something? Everything that's come – ever since the very first recordings we made – has made things slower, not faster.
“Back in the day, when I started recording, you set up the drums, you set up the bass and that's it. You've done it. You've rehearsed it. You play it all down. And theoretically you’re done. You might spend months worrying about the snare drum, I suppose, but that was a problem that the Linndrum solved instantly! But as soon as you got computers involved that allowed you to edit those… It just takes much, much longer.
“Logic and Pro Tools don't make this situation quicker, it just makes it endlessly editable, and that's what you end up doing. So I come to sessions, and I'm looking at the setup and I’m saying, ‘Why have we got 128 tracks going in? Why are there four hi-hats? Why does it take this many bass drums to make a groove? What's going on?’
“And that's all you did. You get every opportunity to try something else. Let's add another. Let's add another!
“Now I work on the principle of cutting to the basics. What do you need to make this work? One bass, one drum pattern… Get those ingredients, and then hone the ingredients. Don't just add more to it.
“I worked with Paul McCartney, and we discussed how The Beatles used to do it. They recorded their first album in a day. But they were well rehearsed because they'd been to Hamburg. They'd been doing gigs every night, and they were ready to do it. If bands come to a studio fully rehearsed with a song they've learned for years then you can do it very quickly.
I’m thinking you must have been crying out for a bit of Auto-Tune from time to time…
“Well around ‘94 I had an Atari and I actually spoke to Steinberg to ask them if they could make something that could do that. What I was describing was a vocal tuner – and this is a few years before Antares and Auto-Tune. See, in ‘92 and ‘93 I would spend a long time editing a vocal using the pitch adjustment on the AMS. You could raise things up and down or use chorusing effects, just to try and smooth over some cracks. So I suppose if I’d had Auto-Tune back then it would have made things quicker.
Well around ‘94 I had an Atari and I actually spoke to Steinberg to ask them if they could make something that could do that. What I was describing was a vocal tuner – and this is a few years before Antares and Auto-Tune.
“But that is the one criticism I have, mostly of modern recordings, is they are using them to the nth degree. Now, mostly, I've gone back. Most of everything I've got in terms of the outboard gears is analogue, and I still use synths. I don't use virtual instruments, plugins, or the ones that are sort of supposed to emulate ‘the real one’. I don't like all that, because they only get close to it.
“And there is a difference in my recordings. The Fizz single is the first record we've actually done, where we've completely gone, ‘No, we're not going to use anything like that. We're going to go straight via hardware’. And, of course, I still use the Calrec microphone, but there's no vocal tuning, there's a real guitarist, real bass, the drums are programmed, obviously, but we're close to being as analogue as you can before you mix it down… And somebody plays in 16-bit on their earphones, and the work you've done is wasted!
“But if you put that track on big speakers in a big hall, it will boom.”
Great to hear that you’re still using the Calrec Soundfield microphone. Is that the ‘secret sauce’ behind SAW’s vocal sound?
“Believe me, I've tried every single mic under the sun. In fact, we did a double blind ‘placebo test’ in a studio. We got the Sony, we got the Neumanns, we got the Shures – alongside the Calrec – and we got them all up and got someone to sing on them, and we didn't listen or watch which mic they were on… And we picked the Calrec every time.
“For transparency, it's very clean, very full, and doesn't colour the sound. All of the other mics coloured it slightly, but then some people say, ‘I like the way the Neumann colours my voice, so I'll use the Neumann.’ So, I’m not saying don't buy Neumann, but buy it because it colours the sound slightly, you know?
“But we get the best result out of the Calrec because it is the cleanest. I've had about five of them now.
“The Calrec was designed originally for orchestra use; it has four heads and you can directionalise them. It's not to record in quad. So, if you put the mic over the top of an orchestra and you want to try and get a balance – you can't hear enough of the violas – you can point the mic down at the violas and get a bit more of them, and you get a nice spread.
“When I have backing singers in, we get them either side of it, because you can change the orientation of things.”
The perception is that the very tight, double-tracked, slightly phasing sound of Kylie Minogue's voice on her hits is all down to the Calrec microphone.
“No, that wouldn't be the reason for that. It just records whatever she sings. There's not a great deal of double-tracking on Kylie’s vocals. I know there is a bit in the chorus, but not as much as you might think.”
Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.
