Carcass HEartwork: the recording process by Keith andrews

kaomao

kaomao

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Taken from this forum:
http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/26148/0/16/0/
Part 1:


Carcass Revisited.

In the years after first encountering Carcass, I’d begun to see them featured somewhat regularly in things like “Kerranng” (British rock/metal newsstand magazine) and also from time to time on MTV Europe’s “Headbanger’s Ball” TV program. They were being taken quite seriously, and I’d become ‘secretly’ quite proud of them, what with them being a local band and everything.

Just to ice the cake, I think that all the band are vegetarian, -in fact last thing I knew, all but one were actually Vegan, which made some of the titles and subject matter even more ironic to me.

They turned out an album fairly soon after I first worked with them, and followed with another album a year later. By 1991, I had risen to post of chief Engineer at Amazon, coming back full-time, which curtailed my doing any projects at any other studios for a while (and I particularly missed working overseas), but the MAIN reason why I took the post was that it allowed me to relocate the entire facility to a brand new facility in the city center. We were moving all three existing studios and adding a fourth. The house tech and I were doing all of the wiring and installation, Roger Quested had actually done the room layout and acoustic plan for the two main control rooms, and I did the studio areas for the two main rooms and the whole layout and acoustic design for the two smaller rooms upstairs. The studios were going to be H-U-G-E; -The two downstairs control rooms were each 550 square feet, with natural light, and the studio areas were 2,000 square feet (studio 1- SSL) and 2500 square feet (studio 2-Neve V3).

During this period (which spread from 1991 to 1992) I was spending time in both locations, and doing occasional sessions in the old facility in between the inevitable on-site jobs and visits, but nothing too lengthy. –It was during this period that the band Once more booked in to record an album. –About this time I really was longing to do a “proper” job for them, having still only done their first track a few years ago... but sadly I really couldn’t do it, because of all the other stuff going on, so Keith Hartley (another “Keith”!) engineered that Album. –I think that by then I had a drawing office set up at the new building downtown, and was probably there most of the time, although I do remember that I was up at the old place a few times doing shorter sessions, and when I was there, I always chatted with the band in the games room or whatever, and dropped in to hear how it was going. –They always seemed pretty happy for me to drop by, and I’d certainly characterize our relationship as particularly friendly by then.

When they finished the 1991 album (”Necroticism Descanting the Insalubrious”) I remember thinking that it was OK, but I really wished that I’d have got to work on it… -there was a sort of tonal “strength” which I really wished for, that the band still hadn’t really accomplished. –Oh well.

The band line-up on that album was the original three, plus mike Amott, who might not have ‘fully’ joined the band yet, but was definitely bringing something new to the table. The Producer was the irrepressible Colin Richardson, and I remember that the ‘second engineer’ was half Dave Buchanan and half Ian ‘Skinnie’ McFarlane. –There was some kind of scheduling reason why they couldn’t work with a single assistant for the entire project, but I don’t recall the details now. –I think that Ian Skinnie started the project off and Dave finished it, -I don’t think that Dave particularly enjoyed most rock sessions, but by the end he was definitely enjoying the personalities on that particular session, and found plenty of humor in the music. –I made a mental note; -I’d never seen Dave truly enjoy that kind of session so much before.

So when the band booked back in for a month to record another album in1993, we’d replaced the V3 in studio 2 with a brand new, slightly larger Neve VR60. The studio was pretty well sorted out by then, and so I’d gone back to engineering longer projects. –I really wanted to do this album. –I think that Keith Hartley also had his eye on it, and I hope I didn’t make an enemy, but I really wanted to try my hand with a Carcass album.

The rest of the line-up was pretty much unchanged from the preceding album. Mike Amott had by now settled into the band, Colin Richardson was again producing, Dave Buchanan was assisting, the studio had PLENTY of flexibility in terms of sonic options, and if anything in the room wasn’t exactly how I wanted it… then I only had myself to blame. (I’d essentially built the place, after all!)

Day one, and we started setting up. The drums and probably the bass were the things which I think we really wanted to keep from the backing tracks; the guitars we might probably re-do. The drums were set up directly in front of the control room window, a short distance in front of the glass, with the drummer’s back to the window. That way he was facing outward into the studio area, for clear line-of-sight with the other players.

Talking of line-of-sight, the studio area (studio 2) was laid out quite specifically. –The main recording area was quite large. It was about 1,800 square feet (180sq.m)and the ceiling height inside varied from 18~25 feet (5.5m~8m). In addition to the main room, there were three smaller rooms along the far wall, opposite to and facing the control room window. The rooms (from right-to-left) were treated with very different acoustic surfaces; Yorkshire stone in the largest room to the right (which also had a convex curved wall) all wood (Ash) on the walls in the middle room. Both rooms had hard floors (unfinished tile in the stone room, and the wooden room's floor had in fact been ‘reclaimed’ from the chapel at Walton Prison when it was demolished while we were building the studio, so it already had its own history!) and the third room, –all the way to the left– was padded, carpeted walls. Each of the three rooms had the lowest eight feet on the front as a glass wall, with a swing-open double door in the glass area. In addition, We’d mounted pairs of PZM microphones high on the walls in each room, and they all normalled to the mic inputs on the console patchbay on channels 49-upwards, so the last bucket of modules on the Neve had ‘listen mics’ or ‘crash-bang-wallop mics’ and all you had to do was push up a fader.

The drums were a double-kick kit, and I remember noticing Ken’s Velcro leg-weights for the first time. –Basically, drumming non-stop for several days is one thing, but double-kick drum work at that frantic pace is enough to wear ANYONE out, so Ken uses leg-weights (which are like ankle-bands with slabs of lead in them, attached and removed by means of a Velcro fastening strip) of various weights, and he used to change different weights if we were doing a lot of different tempos. Being able to ‘control’ the resistance did indeed help with steadying the tempo somewhat. We (Colin, the band and I) talked about kick drums and whether or not to use triggered kicks. –We all felt that (while it is an easy way to get ‘consistency’ in terms of strike velocity, and even just a single ‘half-hit’ kick will usually make a double-kick “blast” sound ‘stumbled’) we should at least try to use the real kicks. –I was particularly wanting to try and keep them “real”, because I wanted to use room as much ambience as I could get away with, and I didn’t want too much of a disconnect between the trigger kick sound and the room ambience.

While fast kick drums in music of that type had already started to sound like clicky “typewriter slapping” for many bands, we were determined to try and retain as much ‘strength’ and ‘depth’ as we possibly could. We tried using click-pads on the kick drum skins, but it really was TOO much. –It put so much hard “click” on the impact that it overwhelmed the “note” of the drum, and the click was so loud that it mad the kick drum ambience almost as loud-sounding as the snare ambience… -all wrong. –Mind you, peeling off the click pad and using the beater direct onto the head was not ‘distinct’ enough, so we tried a couple of different click pads, and eventually settled on an Ampex 2” reel collar, cut down to 2” x 2” square, with the corners chamfered to make it into an octagon, and with the cut edges ‘filed’ down to round them off, so that there were no sharp edges to cut into the drum head. –We liked the sound of this, and I recall there being a small square of toilet paper folded up behind it, sandwiched between the tape collar pad and the drum skin, when it was taped on (with a circle of duct tape of course!)

The kick drums had second kicks in front of them, and the whole kick setup was ‘tented’ slightly to manage the room ambience volume, but we did like the tone of the drum in the room quite a lot. We noticed that Ampex reel collar plastic tends to split a couple of times a day, so I had Dave Buchanan “pre-build” a bunch of ‘carcass-ized’ click pads so that we could swap them quickly, without ”losing” too much magic, if they failed while the band was hot-to-trot. –I think Dave also took it upon himself to add the job of replacing the click pads each morning, along with cleaning the heads, checking the tape cal and all the other jobs which he did for me, including making the tea, -usually served with a smile and a terrible joke!

The doors to the stone room were about ¾-fully open and we used the ambience mics in there. All of the drums were recorded using the console mic pres (I was never much of a “different preamp for every track” sort of guy… my motto was usually: “if it feels good… feel it again!”) Kick drum mics were most likely either AKG D12s or –possibly– Beyer M380s. Snare was an SM57 on top and I think a C414 on the bottom. Rack toms were Sennheiser MD421’s; overheads… I don’t remember, but I was using Bruel & Kjaer 4006 omni’s on overheads a lot up to about that time.

The Bass was DI’d and miked. The cab was in a little freestanding stone ‘dungeon’ with a super-heavy sealed-door, which we had built from the remaining Yorkshire stone when the studio was first constructed. –It was designed to be used for exactly this purpose; basically completely silencing amplifier caps no matter HOW loud they were! –the guide guitar cab was in the far left ‘dead’ isolation room, and run at a moderate volume.

About this time there were some reservations expressed about the guitar tone. I remember that Bill was complaining about the sound being a little ‘scratchy’ and ‘thin’ sounding. –I wasn’t unduly concerned because it was only a guide, but there didn’t seem to be any benefit in using a bad guide guitar sound, if a GOOD guide guitar sound could be easily had, (after all, it always helps to be able to refer good sounds one-against-the-other) so we played around for a little bit. I didn’t hear the ‘scratchiness’ so much in front of the amplifier, but I did in the control room. –I seem to think now that we tried a second Marshall head… –possibly Mike Amott’s– and the sound changed a little, but still Bill’s brow was furrowed by the guitar sound; -it wasn’t the rich, strong thing which he’d been hoping for. –Little did we know it, but this was a harbinger of some difficulties to come, later on.

Anyhow, we all sensed that there was no real point in getting bogged down over a guitar sound which we had no real intention of keeping, and so we started printing backing tracks. Day two saw the first of the ‘keepers’, and after a week or so, we had all the tracks in the can. Bass fixes were done as we went along. Drums were punched where necessary, but this was of course all done to two-inch tape (24-tracks only, although the room had a pair of Studer A827s, none of us wanted to unleash the “spare track monster”!) so it’s not as if there was a stupendous amount of ‘assembly’ used to make the basic takes. –I think that Jeff (Walker, bassist) may have done one or two bass tracks from the top just to restore a sense of ‘continuity’ after some drum punches, but I have the recollection that there wasn’t much of that done at all.

A note on tape calibration: It was my habit and custom to slightly under-bias the tracks where I used to record my ‘metalwork’ mics. My usual layout was kick, kick, snare (two mics combined during recording) then hat, then rack toms, then overheads then ambience. The Overheads and hi-hat mics would be biased to about a ½dB over-drop at 10kHz at 30ips, and the rest would be biased to 1½dB over-drop. –With heavily-smacked cymbals, or any levels which somehow got away from me, I found that there was much less low-end “muddy-crunch” if I did that. –I’m completely certain that Dave had standing orders to make sure that calibration practice was followed for this session. The studio had Dolby A and Dolby SR for all of the multitracks, but I’m certain that we DIDN’T use it. One thing which I am still very happy about on the album is the ‘clarity’ of the drum metalwork. –Not many people notice it, most folks mention the guitar tone, –speaking of which…

Guitar time.

…Oh wow…

I don’t think I was ready for what happened next, and I fully confess to ‘losing the plot’ a little.

See, about a year earlier the band had been into studio three upstairs –which had been conceived and built as a room for recording demos and small projects. –It had an Allen & Heath ‘Saber’ console in there (one of the early ones) and there was a 1” 24-track and a 1” 16-track machine, to allow bands to work on a budget, and to also allow people to bring projects in from outside rooms who used ‘semi-pro’ tape formats. Anyhow, they’d been in working on a couple of demos -with either Keith Harley or Ken Nelson I think- and they’d just thrown a mic on a guitar cab, lobbed the sound onto tape, and been pretty pleased with it. –It sounded pretty good in fact, and they all still thought so.

-So now we were faced with getting an “impressive” guitar sound, because –we all agreed– the sound of the backing tracks was pretty damned pleasing. –I for one was REALLY pleased with how it was sounding, and Colin seemed to be pretty pleased too. –Now all of a sudden, the pressure is on, and we’re worrying about a “fizz” on the guitar sound. –There was this ‘harshness’ in the tone, and Bill wasn’t happy with it. Mike wasn’t happy either, and Colin had dialed-in on it, and was now certain that it had to go. –The band dug out the tape of the little sixteen-track demo which they’d done, and it sounded better. –I’m not going to deny it, the guitar sound was better. –The drum sound couldn’t compete with what we had now, but if we could just get THAT sound with THIS backing track, everyone would be in ‘metal heaven’.

So we spent a whole day on it. the cabinet was being miked from RIGHT in the front of the speakers, mic grilles pushed RIGHT into the cloth, so I didn’t really think that the room would have much to do with it, but we tried it in the main room, we tried it in the dead room, we tried it in the wood room, we tried it in the dungeon, we tried all of the different speakers in the cabinet, and different combinations, we tried a different cabinet.

Nothing worked.
 
PART 2:

We tried different mics, we tried facing a wall, we tried facing away from the wall, we tried blankets to ‘muffle’ it, we tried everything we could think of.

Guitar day one ended with no guitar sound. –Colin called the session over for the day, and I think we maybe felt that we were trying “too hard” and perhaps it’d just slot into place when we came back the next day.

Side notes/Back-stories: Colin’s wife Lora dropped by frequently. –She and Colin were expecting their first baby fairly soon in fact, and of course there were were LOTS of things to do, and no shortage of matters to stress-out over, all of which were considerably more important than guitar sounds. Maybe. Wink I like Lora, -She’s clever, funny and VERY strong.

At the same time, I had recently ended a seven-year relationship with the girl who became known as “the mad woman”. –In addition, I’d also recently met another young girl, and while we weren’t actually “seeing each other” yet, this seemed to be no reason for my stalker-‘ex’ not to start ramping up the ‘psycho-factor’. The ‘new girl’ was 18 or 19 years younger than the mad woman, and was a professional dancer (…no…. –not THAT kind of dancer!) and the combination of these two details conspired to drive the mad woman into a jealous rage, and to the sort of absurd behavior which I would never have thought possible. My father was in hospital with cancer, and had only a few months to live. (In fact in nine days from now it’ll be the fifteenth anniversary of his death, which handily helps date the sessions in my memory; they had been a few months earlier, so right around June 1993) The ‘new girl’ had also lost her own father six months previously, and she was naturally incredibly empathetic, but also would do things like going to visit him in hospital if I couldn’t make it (the hospital was about one mile ‘up the hill’ from the studios where we were recording, so I did visit often, but not EVERY day… looking back of course, if I were to do it all over, I’d have made CERTAIN visited EVERY day, but of course if we were born with hindsight, we’d all have eyeballs in our butts.) Anyhow, we all had our own outside pressures right about this time.

So, day two of Guitar-time, and today… -we’re going to get that guitar sound and nail it to the wall! –Oorah!!!

About day two, we’d rented some more amp heads, including a Soldano (which we taped over some letters, so that it said “SOLD”… then later on, Dave Buchanan wrote “Book him,” on a sheet of paper and taped it over the “SOL” part of the name… I had to have that one explained to me!) and a Peavey 5150, as well as a Mesa Dual-Rectifier. Day two ended with no further progress in terms of sonic joy, and an even more gloomy outlook.

Day three began, and I distinctly remember leaving Colin in the control room in the middle of the day, fiddling with things while I went outside for a smoke, I remember being utterly convinced that there was nothing more that I could come up with, and that I’d been listening for so long now that I’d utterly and completely lost any impartiality. Everything was starting to sound the same to me now, or if I thought I heard a difference, someone else wouldn’t hear it, or if someone else heard a difference, I wouldn’t be able to hear it… not a happy place to be. –In short, I was losing the plot.

Bill throughout this period kept going back to “maybe we should record the guitars upstairs?” (‘upstairs’ meaning studio three, with the small semi-dead recording area and the Allen & Heath console) but I didn’t think that would be the answer, and I don’t think Colin was ready to think that way either.

I remember that I myself had focusing on perhaps the problem wasn’t really with the top end ‘brightness’ as such, so much as a lack of ‘depth’ to the tone, and I’d been trying to ‘fill out’ the sound. With a kick drum which has no “boom” to it, you can of course always put a resonator in front of it, (or just cheat and use a 40Hz oscillator! Wink ) and eventually I suggested to Colin that maybe the cab needed more volume in order to ‘thunder’ a little bit more. –Colin was definitely guarded at first, but we HAD two guitar cabs here, and so I popped the back off of both of them, then took all four speakers out of the ‘straight’ cab, leaving the speakers in the ‘angled’ cab. We tried the angled cab with the back open, but it just didn’t sound ‘right’ at all. I took some barstool tops and used corrugated cardboard as a sort of a firm ‘gasket’ to make the whole front panel fairly airtight, then we put the two cabs back to back, put some weather stripping between them, and sealed them as tightly as we possibly could with Gaffa tape.

The result was actually pretty impressive! –It sounded deeper, and rather ‘bigger’ in the room, so we went to have a listen. The mics also heard a different sound, and I rather liked it. Colin liked it too, but by now it might have been slap-happy delirium for all I know! –It sounded interesting, but STILL there was this ‘scratchiness’ in the sound which Bill wasn’t digging at all.

Once again, Bill kept saying to “maybe we should record the guitars upstairs?” but I STILL didn’t think that would be the answer, –We did however notice that Studio 1 (another huge studio area, with more acoustic options, and a 64-channel SSL E/G console) was open for a morning, so we trundled the guitar rig (including “frankencab!”) over there on day three, to see what happened.

Same story. –We’d now tried a different console, different monitors, different guitars, different mics, different cables, different cabinets, different amp heads… and I was beginning to get pretty miserable.

Day four. Not happy. –by now I’m trying anything that anyone says, but I’m not enjoying life. Nossir.

Day five. After a couple of hours, we decided to humor Bill (after all, nothing ELSE has been getting us any nearer to guitar-sound bliss!) and we rolled ‘Frankencab’ and the 5150 upstairs. I dug out a couple of mics and we ran it into the Allen & Heath board in studio 3. We didn’t do ANYTHING special, just plugged it into the console preamps.

And it sounded better.

Immediately.

I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but the scratchy ‘buzz’ was gone, finished. –Nowhere.

Colin and I were in a state of semi-disbelief, so we printed something to DAT just to have a listen to on the downstairs monitors, just to make sure it wasn’t a monitoring issue, but the “test came back positive” and we knew right then and there what we had to do.

I spoke to Paul (the studio manager) and that room had a few sessions booked in for the coming days. –I had Paul call the bands (mainly local bands doing demos) and ask them if they’d be happy with a free first-class-upgrade to work on the Neve in studio 2. Everybody except one client agreed, the sticking point being about the increased tape costs for recording on two-inch tape instead of one-inch, so I offered to install the 1” sixteen-track machine in the Neve room for them… they changed their mind after thinking about it for a while, and so we had our room. –All of the rooms at Parr Street were laid out and wired so that the machines could swap from room to room fairly easily, so all we had to do was to wheel one of the Studers into the elevator and roll it into studio three and we were tracking.

The guitars were recorded almost entirely with the 5150, though I recall “book him Dano!” being used, perhaps for one track. There were four tracks of rhythm guitars on each tune: two of Bill and two of Mike, panned in pairs, with the two Bill tracks together and the two Mike tracks together. We decided that we wanted to ‘treat’ the guitar sounds slightly different to help differentiate them from one another in the mix, and so we ‘borrowed’ one piece of gear from the big room which we’d just vacated downstairs: a 2-channel GML equalizer. The two channels were wired in ‘cascade’ so that the signal went through the left channel first and then back through the right channel. We bypassed the right channel and used the left channel for Bill, then bypassed the left channel and set up the right channel for Mike.

In this manner, we were able to move smartly from tune to tune, building up the guitars for each tune before moving on to the next, but never having to stop to ‘tweak’ too much. –Plug in Bill, use the left channel, record two tracks, plug in Mike, use the right channel, record two tracks… move on.

Solos were done MOSTLY at the end, but I think we started putting solos on a couple of the earlier tracks before we did the last few rhythm tracks, just so that we didn’t load up the ‘pressure’ on the guys to come up with too many ‘awesome’ solos all together… -break it up for them a little.

So It took four and a half days to get the guitar sound. During that period, I just about lost my mind. My objectivity was shot, my confidence had taken a bit of a hit, but I at least got re-taught the lesson that you need to try EVERYTHING, and not discount someone else’s idea because you don’t think it’s going to be the answer.

So we didn’t put any guitar tracks in record until halfway through day FIVE… but I have to say that if we’d have skipped any stage of the process, the result would have been “good enough” instead of what we actually ended up with.

The vocals were all Jeff. We set up, there was some discussion about Bill recording some vocals, but I remember Bill being reluctant to do so. While I like them both, I can’t now imagine if Jeff hadn’t done all of the vocals. –I even remember Jeff trying to persuade Bill to handle a tune or two, but it was Bill who I remember being quite emphatic that he liked Jeff’s work more than his own, and I think that even Jeff took some convincing.

Right when we got into the vocals, my dad had taken a couple of turns for the worse. They’d started him on Chemotherapy, and the sudden dramatic changes for the worse in his appearance had a sudden, shocking effect on me. –Up until now, we’d been recording ‘tunes’. We’d been working on putting “big sounds” to tape and concentrating on rhythms, timing, tuning and the like. –Now there were words to deal with.

We were using a Neumann M269 for the vocals (similar to a U67, but with a different tube amplifier section) and we were back in studio 2 with the Neve again. –Jeff was in the ‘dead’ room (the one to the far left, Across the main room from the control room) and we got the vocal sound without too much fuss. (what a relief after the guitar sound nightmare!)

We started on the vocals and it was largely just a matter of punching-in to get the right ‘feel’ but I had lyric sheets which Dave would usually annotate for me with penciled-in counter numbers for autolocator reference.

I forget which day, but it was certainly a day when I’d just been to see my dad, -so presumably some point after lunchtime- I was really shocked by how he’d been, and he really was starting to see that it was a question of how long he was going to hand on rather than if he could ‘beat it’, and he was clinging to his faith… it was a very harrowing thing for me to watch; the man who raised me, the man who was always ‘strong’ –suddenly so sick and desperate; so weak and terrified. –Then I came back to look at lyric sheets with medical references, repeated mention of rot, decay, blood, gore, filth…and then the comments about man creating God, God being dead, etc… It was all rather too much for me.

I spoke to my assistant Dave, told him that it was all about punching in, that I probably wouldn’t understand most of the words once they were recorded, that it hopefully wouldn’t bother me by then, but that I couldn’t do this right now. –I spoke to Colin, and Dave sat in the engineer’s chair for the rest of the day, and I think the following day too, just banging tracks into record, and punching in. –He definitely dug it.

I came back better for the rest, and –by way of good cheer– my dad had perversely bucked up a little, so from then on things were definitely much easier on that front for me. –The mad woman was, …well… still quite mad, but really things were a whole lot more bearable.

The album was mixed in studio 1. The SSL I just find easier to work on, since I’m habituated to mixing on them, and that one had the first 48 channel equalizers replaced with ones of my own design. plenty of outboard FX… lots more than we’d need for the project.

Colin had vacillated a little on the kick drums and whether to use triggers, but by mix time, Dave Buchanan had used an audio-to-MIDI trigger to generate a MIDI event for each kick drum. There were a couple too may false triggers to be able to run triggers live in the mix without false-triggering from spillage, or missing the occasional light stroke, so Dave made a set of Cubase projects -one for each tune- and had manually edited out the false-triggers, and had punched in any missed beats with a higher gain setting. –Over the course of a few evenings, he’d made sure that Colin had a Cubase file for every tune which would afford him the option of easily auditioning triggered kicks if he felt that they would be required.

In the end, triggers were used, with samples coming from an Akai S1100. There were a bunch of options for the kick sound, but in the end we used one with not much ‘boom in it, since the original kicks on tape were pretty ‘strong’ and ‘deep’. –The trigger was only really doing the job of ‘sharpening’ the top end of the sound; the rest was Ken’s drumkit. –I remember that Dave also made a snare trigger track… just because he could, and it would be much easier to say “already done” instead of “okay, that’ll take a while” if Colin ever asked for one!)… but that was never used. The original snare used varies with the tune, but there two Ludwigs I think, one of which was a black beauty, and another snare used was a Noble and Cooley.

Things which I remember contributing to the mix… the reverse reverb ‘sweep’ in ‘Embodiment’, and then suggesting the (real!) tape phasing on top of it. There were a couple of other places where we spliced-in tape phasing, and every time you hear it, it’s real. We used the Studer A810s for the phasing, because I’d wired remote controlled multi-turn locking varispeed pots into the center section of the console, along with the transport command buttons, and a varispeed in/out switch. Any time you hear phasing on the album, it was done after the fact and spliced in.

Dave Buchanan had another session which he REALLY wanted to do, but which overlapped the very end of the ‘Heartwork’ session, so Andrew Wright took over the assistant engineer duties for the last few days in studio 1.

Final mixes were printed to ½” Studer A80RC, 30ips, no NR. Safeties were printed to DAT at the same time… from memory I think that the tape phasing inserts were run from the ‘master’ DAT, through the two A810s, and onto the A80RC, from where it the phase section was spliced back into the ½” master, then another ‘post-flange’ DAT ‘master’ would be copied, just so that we always had some sort of ‘master’ level DAT to make cassettes from, etc.

I still look back upon that project as being one of the most ‘intense’ periods of my life; even moving to America and getting married wasn’t as ‘intense,’ because it ALWAYS felt ‘right’. –For a few days there, with a terminally ill dad, a psycho ‘ex’ (who –just to give you an idea of what she was capable of– came to my dad’s eventual funeral, left early, staged a fake attempted break-in at my house by pulling a ladder out of a neighbor’s yard and leaning it up against a window around the back of my house, just so that she could then interrupt my evening meal with the ‘new girl’ by coming into the restaurant and announcing that my house had been broken into… yeah… That was one thing she did…) all of that madness going on while despairing of EVER getting a guitar sound that anyone can live with… Intense. –Yep, that’s the word.

A year or so after the album came out, I bumped into Bill downtown, shopping on a Saturday afternoon of all things. (what a rock star!!!) I asked how it was going, and how the album had been received, from his point of view. –He said that a couple of people had said that it was a little bit too “polished”, and maybe a little bit too “hi-fi”, but that he personally still liked the album. –The record company were pressing the band to make the next album a little more “raw” sounding, and ‘go back to their roots’ sort of thing….

I also detected something in Bill that I hadn’t really seen before; a slightly jaded edge to his attitude. Previously, -while you’d never really say he was “irrepressibly enthusiastic”-(that description probably fits Colin pretty darned well though!) he was always positive. Reserved, yes, but positive. –Now I’d have said ‘reserved and a little tired’. –They went back into the studio with Colin Richardson again just after I came to live in the USA, this time back with Keith Hartley twisting the knobs. –I heard some of the newer stuff, and I privately preferred the slightly more ‘polished’ Heartwork… But there are no hard feelings, I got to record the album that I really wanted to do, but without the band’s perseverance and Colin’s ministrations, it really wouldn’t have been quite as good. –To my way of thinking, it was a great team.

-And as time goes inevitably by, the more people that I meet the more people tell me that ‘Heartwork’ in particular has been a seminal influence on them.

Colin is STILL the man, and if anyone EVER wants anything in that genre mixed, they could do a LOT worse than to contact Lora (who is still his manager). Bill, Jeff, Ken and Mike are –from what I’m told– still Lords of metal, and still not eating meat. Long may they reign. Dave Buchanan unfortunately was involved in a car accident driving home from a session about ten years ago, and is no longer with us.

About 2½ years ago a producer who lives close to me (about 1½ miles from my house) decided to put an SSL mix room in his house, to go with the Amek tracking room at the far end of his yard. –Colin had just mixed his last project, and he was by now doing LOTS of this kind of music, and wanted to start mixing it as well. –While I was putting the SSL in for him, and commissioning it, he was working with Trivium in the other room, then Chimera, and they found out that I’d engineered Heartwork. –The guitarists were all over me with questions about the guitar sound, and how those guys were to work with… It seems that the ‘effect’ of that project has actually ‘increased’ over time. –I liked it then, and I certainly believe that it stands up VERY well today, over 15 years after we did it… -but the number of people who tell me how important they think it was…never fails to astonish me.

Oh yeah... Lora now manages my near-neighbor also!

Before I left Liverpool for good (1995) I was clearing up some stuff and getting rid of some gear. –I had a couple of experimental bass cabinets which I’d built about ten years earlier, which had a total of four basically unused Celestion G12M speakers inside them. I figured that the band could probably use them, so I agreed to sell them to the band, and chucked out the experimental cabinets that they were in. –In the end, I never got around to collecting any money for the speakers… and I really don’t care about that. They’ve given me plenty of great memories, and an album that I can be proud of... -It was probably the very least I could do.

Keith
 
I remember reading this a long time ago. Awesome read for sure, lot's of detailed info that we love.

It's funny how the same story repeats with all bands: "the next album has to be raw", and that always fails. When will they ever learn that rawness is something naturally achieved? ...
 
I have this saved on my comp from long ago lol. Great read. The whole guitar cab thing is neat, but that would be a bitch to lug around. I swear I read that they also used a marshall mini stack for one of the rhythm layers somewhere.
 
I do remember reading the Carcass interview in the guitar mag years ago. It made me look everywhere for the Guv Nor pedal. I was never able to find it though, until about 2 years ago.
It's a cool pedal. It makes my 5150 sound very marshally but I never had the patience or time to fully test it out. Guess I'll have to in the future now.
Regarding the Marshall mini stack, I do remember reading that as well. Supposedly they used it to kinda layer and add flavour/colour to the sound but it's strange that it wasn't mentioned by Keith. Also strange he didn't mention the Marshall Anniversary head.
Also, iirc it was Mike Hickey who brought up the Guv Nor pedal in the interview. He complained about stage divers stepping on them and stopped using them so that makes me question whether they were really used in the recording process. Might've just been something they experimented with Live.
 
Keithy-poo is indeed Jasons neighbor, as well providing most major electronics fixes and horrible, dry, british humor whenever we feel we need it at audiohammer. The man is priceless. He is the head tech at fullsail, and one of the most respected techs in the biz. Period. Along with Niels Kastor we have two of the best within minutes of us. Niels and keith have both built myself and jason some amazing pieces of gear and bailed our asses out of the hole at last minutes notice when gear goes down.
 
Great read...I remember seeing the article years ago but never gave it a full read until now.

The article inspired me to pull out that album since I haven't listened to it in years..and I forgot how much I dug the production on this. It's rare to hear drums that un edited anymore(timing wise) and overheads being that loud in the mix(the stereo image is great from them..hi hat tucked away nice on one side as well as the ride on the other).
 
Yup it's very rare to hear cymbals so clearly as on Heartwork these days. Now it's all about the most processed and quantized samples with the overheads hidden in the background so they can crank the compressors and limiters for a pseudo hi end production value that by todays standards is considered "great." :zzz:
 
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