APE與FLAC的播放、轉換、刻錄方法一樣

①什麼是無損音頻？
無損音頻的主要格式有APE、FLAC。與MP3這類有損壓縮方式不同，APE是一種無損壓縮音頻技術，也就是說從音頻CD上讀取的音頻數據文件壓縮成APE格式後，再將APE格式的文件還原，而還原後的音頻文件與壓縮前的一模一樣，沒有任何損失。APE的文件大小大概為CD的一半，APE可以節約大量的資源。

②無損音頻裡的CUE文件是什麼？
CUE文件就是記錄專輯的時間、音軌等信息。

③無損音頻用什麼播放？
本產品為無損音頻格式的DVD數據盤，家用DVD機，CD機，汽車音響是不能播放的，你可以把這些歌曲拷到電腦或者MP3播放器（如果支持APE、FLAC格式）播放，推薦千千靜聽、FOOBAR2000播放器。然後添加專輯中的CUE文件，這樣就可以在播放器裡選曲了。

④APE如何轉換MP3格式？
用千千靜聽播放器，相當於③問題裡的播放方法（添加專輯中的CUE文件），然後在播放器列表裡就有專輯的歌曲名，然後鼠標右鍵，選“轉換格式”，再選輸出格式為MP3，再點“配置”，這個可以選要轉換成192K或320K的MP3，（MP3的最高質量是320K）。然後點“立即轉換”就可以了。大概2分鐘不到，一張專輯的歌曲都轉成MP3格式的了，很快吧。

⑤APE如何刻成CD？
第一種方法：先要推薦的是Burrrn刻錄軟件，就可以直接將APE、FLAC刻錄成CD。運行Burrrn，點擊“設置”進行必要的配置，在“一般設定”中選擇默認的刻錄機並切換到中文界面。配置完畢，刻錄過程就非常簡單，將CUE文件直接拖到Burrrn程序界面上，設定好合適的刻錄速度，最後按“Burrn”鍵開始刻錄，片刻後完美原聲CD就還原完畢了。

第二種方法：需要對應的插件來讓NERO支持APE和FLAC格式，然後才能刻錄。對應的插件分別是nxMyAPE.dll和nxMyFLA.dll。
解壓出來插件plug-in文件，根據NERO不同版本將插件放置在不同位置。
Nero6、7，將以上兩個文件直接拷入：C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\AudioPlugins文件夾下；
Nero8，將以上兩個文件直接拷入：C:\Program Files\Common Files\Nero\AudioPlugins；
Nero9，將以上兩個文件直接拷入：C:\Program Files\Nero\Nero 9\Nero Express\AudioPluginMgr；

接著運行Nero，默認為Express模式，為了保證刻錄成功，這裡要選擇“映像、項目、復制”，然後選擇CUE文件就可以開始刻錄了。

如果你使用的Nero默認采用Burring Rom模式，則點擊菜單欄上的“刻錄器”—選擇“刻錄映像文件”，接著在彈出的窗口中選擇CUE文件並開始刻錄。

挪威Kirkelig Kulturverksted唱片公司

by 樂音唱片行 製作

　北歐的挪威，大多數人應該都很陌生，可能還會認為挪威是個海盜王國呢！其實，北歐的這些海島國家，因地理環境的限制，自古以來就是將海洋視為兵家必爭之地，難免會讓人有先入為主的看法。但現在的挪威已非古早時代的海盜國家，相反地，已成為北歐眾多國家之中經濟、文化皆首屈一指的國家，甚至是全世界文化消費能力最強的國家。

　單從它三百多萬人口，卻有三萬多份報紙發行的數量看來，即可明白這個號稱全球文化消費能力最強的國家，並非浪得虛名。

　由響韻唱片公司所代理的Kirkelig Kultur verksted唱片公司，是挪威境內非常具有特色、風格獨具的一家唱片公司。此公司名稱大致翻譯為「教堂文化工作者」，在台灣多數發燒友簡稱它為KI KU，或者KKV(以下皆以KI KU稱之)。 KIKU由詩人兼製作人Erik Hillstad成立於1975年，其創立的宗旨為集合各個領域最頂尖的藝術家和挪威最有天份的歌手及音樂家，以最優質的藝術封面設計，融合各國不同文化的跨界(Crossover Culture)音樂，創作出全新不同風貌的音樂及高超水準的錄音。

　其作品中對於歌詞的表現一律以詩文創作完全沒有白話文，呈現出全方位的精緻完藝術品，同時也是挪威境內唯一足以與國際五大相抗衡的唱片公司，而且在全世界銷售的成績更是出奇的好。

　KI KU每張唱片均由創辦人也就是KI KU的老闆--ERIK HILLESTAD親身製作，對品質嚴格把關，力求每張唱片不管是內容或者是外在的包裝皆能成為一件可以聆賞也可以觀賞的藝術珍品。這是由於ERIK HILLESTAD在唱片事業之外，也是一位非常知名的藝術家及造型設計師，KI KU所有唱片包裝材料、設計都出自他的手筆。他為了要求品質，連唱片封面的印刷在技術舉世第一的荷蘭印製，CD則在瑞典生產製造再進口至挪威包裝完成。

　這一切一切的艱辛及特別高昂的成本支出，只為了其當時成立的初衷--生產世界上最完美的有聲產品。　KI KU唱片早期大部份的製作比較偏向宗教文化的詩歌、合唱曲或者演奏曲等等，近年來他更將製作唱片的方向大大的擴展，不再侷限於宗教文化之內，舉凡搖滾、藍調、拉丁、NEW AGE、爵士甚至電子舞曲，皆成為他所發揮的題材，近年來他們再擴充他們的音樂領域，所以近年來KI KU的作品中，有著KI KU遠赴世界各國，或者邀請藝人來到挪威所作的跨界文化作品，所邀請的藝人有來自日本、蘇俄、美國、愛爾蘭、法國、厄瓜多爾、南非、瑞典、印度......等。

　全世界各地頂尖的發燒友及愛樂者，為什麼會一一拜倒於KIKU之下？原因在於KIKU雅俗共賞的音樂內容、感動人心的音樂旋律、高超的錄音技術、舉世最有品味的唱片包裝都可以說是原因之一。　國外更有愛樂者自行成立專門收藏及研究KI KU的俱樂部(台灣以前也有KIKU俱樂部的網站，現在好像沒有了)。目前KI KU的音樂產品已行銷世界各國，而KI KU也把觸角延伸到音樂活動、舞蹈、劇場、表演各種藝術中，呈現出的不只是音樂範圍內的作品，更入了視覺、文化、歷史、環保等具有世界觀的領域，這股由遠在北歐的挪威刮起來的風潮，令人不由得對這挪威這個國家刮目相看。

　我個人從事有關音樂銷售的行業十餘年，只有KI KU這一家唱片公司可以令我如此喜愛與狂熱(購買全套的KIKU CD以資証明，這可要賣至少2000張KIKU的CD才可以打平成本，還沒有賺錢呢)，KI KU的唱片，接收到的不只是悅耳的音符，更能感受到音樂帶給聆聽者心靈上的平靜， 相信KI KU高品味但不流於曲高和寡的音樂風格，一定能讓您也同樣感受到我和全世界很多KI KU愛好者同樣的喜愛與狂熱的，歡迎您進入KI KU多彩多姿的音樂世界。

【音響室最具美感的音樂軟體收藏】：KI KU全套CD提供全省樂友預約

　KI KU全套CD已自挪威引進(2008年/04/10 樂音小林按：差不多是212張左右)，請死忠的KIKU迷直接向本站預約。

　有一些音響發燒友們購買數十萬的音響器材、線材可能眉頭都不皺一下，可是裝潢價值百萬元的音響室內的CD收藏可能才十幾張而已。這有時並不代表您是不喜歡聽音樂，這時如果有音樂性不會太枯燥聽不下去，音響性要平均夠好，CD封面對府上精心設計的裝潢更增氣質之效，而且您不覺得二百餘張的CD價格造成您的負擔.....。

　如果您對上述的條件都能夠接受的話，來自全球文化水準最高地區之一的挪威，也被我們業界譽為「音樂內容及包裝設計被譽為當世第一的唱片品牌--KIKU，就是培養您音樂品味以及美術美感最佳的投資之一。

【挪威簡介】：(摘自台北市自助旅

Classic Tracks: Blondie 'Hanging On The Telephone'

Producer: Mike Chapman • Engineer: Peter Coleman
Published in SOS June 2008


The partnership between Blondie and producer Mike Chapman created a perfect pop record - and catapulted the group from the underground to mainstream chart success.

Richard Buskin

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Photo: GEMS/Redferns

If Blondie's Parallel Lines album was the New York erstwhile-punk band's finest hour (all 38 minutes of it) and a perfect encapsulation of top-drawer, high-tech 1978 pop-rock, then it also marked the career apex of its producer, Mike Chapman, a man who had already established himself with a form of music that has come to define its era.

In popular music terms, the 1970s was a decade that swung wildly from glam, reggae, progressive and AOR to metal, disco, corporate, punk, new wave, neo-mod and pure pop. And there, at both the start and end, was composer/producer Chapman, crafting glam rock — with writing partner Nicky Chinn — by way of acts like the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud, and then classic power pop on his own with Blondie, Pat Benatar and the Knack.

'Co-Co', 'Poppa Joe', 'Little Willy', 'Wig-Wam Bam', 'Block Buster' and 'Ballroom Blitz' by the Sweet; Suzi Quatro's 'Can The Can' and 'Devil Gate Drive'; Mud's 'Dyna-Mite' and 'Tiger Feet' — all are synonymous with the visual excesses of glittery jackets, flared trousers and platform shoes as much as they are with the glam music that melded pop melodies with crunching, fuzzy guitars and heavy drums, bathed in a sound that was a throwback to Sun Records in the mid-'50s. Featuring catchy songs often performed by talented musicians, the 'Chinnichap' formula certainly worked during the halcyon period of 1973-74, when it accounted for 19 Top 40 UK singles, including five chart toppers. And when glam's sparkle had faded, Chapman then caught a second wave with his aforementioned solo productions. Not that the partnership with Chinn had ever really been about songwriting once the hits began rolling in.
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From The Club To The Charts

"I first met Nicky in late 1969 when I was working as a waiter in the discotheque of a London club called Tramp," recalls Chapman, a native Australian who had relocated to the UK in June 1967, at the height of flower power. "That was the last real job I ever had. I was in a struggling band named Tangerine Peel and needed to do something to pay the rent. I'd been writing pop songs for a couple of years — all of which was second nature to me, having grown up listening to 'Peggy Sue', 'That'll Be The Day', 'Wake Up Little Susie', 'Blue Suede Shoes' and so on — and by 1969 I felt like I was on the right track. At the same time, Nicky was a regular customer at Tramp; a rich English kid with nothing better to do than go out every night and dance very badly. After he told me he'd heard I was in a band and that he, too, was a songwriter, I took my guitar to his apartment in Mayfair and we set about trying to write together.
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"Over the next two weeks we knocked out four little pop songs, but I quickly discovered that Nicky's musical taste was completely different from mine, and that would cause us a lot of problems as the years went on. He was into James Taylor, Carole King and Joni Mitchell — all of the things that I couldn't stand. I appreciate them now, but at that point, never having been much of an album buyer, I was more into great pop songs like the Archies' 'Sugar, Sugar' and all of the Creedence Clearwater material; anything with a big old hook, guitars and a great beat. The minute I saw him, David Bowie also influenced me, as did Marc Bolan in about 1970, but Nicky Chinn didn't understand any of that. I had to explain to him what it was all about while he'd sit there with a blank look on his face and ask me, 'Have you heard the new Joni Mitchell album?'

"One night, after I'd quit the job at Tramp to concentrate on my songwriting, we were sitting in Nicky's apartment and he said, 'Why don't we call Mickie Most?' I'd been talking about how great Mickie was, and so we looked in the phone book and there he was. I said, 'I'm not calling him. You call him,' so Nicky called, Mickie answered the phone, and he said, 'Sure, come in tomorrow and play me your songs.' The next day we went to his office — a huge, square room on Oxford Street, with a desk in each corner facing toward the middle. Mickie was sitting at one desk, blasting out music; Peter Grant, who was managing Led Zeppelin, was at another, making deals and cursing people in all four corners of the world; and then there was Ronnie Madison, who was trying to do the accounts; and Dave Most, Mickie's brother, who was a promo man, screaming at radio guys. I'd never seen anything like it."

While all this was going on, Chapman attempted to play five songs that he and Chinn had written, only for Mickie Most to stop him after about eight bars of each of the first four numbers, muttering, 'No, no, no, no.' Feeling dejected, Chapman nevertheless managed to make it all the way through the fifth song, a number titled 'Tom Tom Turnaround', and at the end of his performance Most asserted, "That's a hit." Which it was, after he cut it with an Australian trio named New World.
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The Glam Rock Sound
After Richard Dodd recorded the very first sessions with the Sweet, Peter Coleman was Chapman's full-time engineer all the way through the 1970s, helping him to shape the aforementioned glam rock sound that had been influenced by Tony Visconti's productions of T-Rex, which themselves had been influenced by records of the late-'50s and early-'60s.
"For me, a track like 'Ride A White Swan' was pure magic," Chapman says. "Its groove epitomised what I was trying to accomplish, and then, when I heard 'Hot Love', it was like, 'Oh, my God, that's it.' So Visconti was a big influence on me in terms of the sonic approach, while the grooves all came from the mid-to-late-'50s. On top of that, it was about what could be done with the drums to make them sound a bit different from everybody else, as well as how freaky we could get with the guitars and vocals. There was that kind of slapback echo sound together with very '70s-sounding rock guitars, and it was the combination of those elements that became the blueprint for glam rock, which all came out at once with Gary Glitter. Mike Leander put all of the elements together, as did Slade to a certain extent.
"Still, if you listen to those records side by side, they're all different. They all have the same sort of vibe to them, but none of the drum sounds are alike, none of the guitar sounds are alike, none of the vocal sounds are alike. All of us producers were trying very hard to sound different from one another, even though we were following the same path, and it's pretty hard to do that. When I listen to the emo kids these days, I can't tell the difference between one band and another, and that's because producers aren't trying to be different anymore, they're just trying to do what everybody else is doing. Back in 1973 and 1974, the challenge was 'Let's have a hit, but for God's sake, let's make it sound different to Gary Glitter, T-Rex and Slade.' For my part, I had the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud going all at once, and I had to make all three of them sound different, which they did."
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Hit Factory

"I understood why Mickie liked that song," Chapman says. "It was different to the other four that Nicky and I had written together. Nicky didn't write melodies, he saw himself as a lyricist, and those songs contained a lot of his lyrics. On the other hand, 'Tom Tom Turnaround' marked the beginning of me coming up with titles that would prompt him to look at me and go, 'What's all that about?' You can imagine what he said when I told him I was going to write songs with titles like 'Can The Can', '48 Crash' and 'Ballroom Blitz'.
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Photo: Roberta Bayley
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.
Five sixths of Blondie, with Mike Chapman (centre, in sunglasses) and manager Peter Leeds (far right), in the control room of the Record Plant's Studio A during the recording of Parallel Lines.

From 1970 to 1975, New World, the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud all required three hits a year, and the responsibility for this basically fell to Mike Chapman — an annual total of 12 hits.

"If somebody asked me to do that now I'd run screaming," he says. "I don't know how on earth I managed to do it, but I pulled it off. I was so focused on what I needed to do next, whether it was the next hit for the Sweet, Suzi Quatro or Mud, or whether Mickie needed another song for New World, like 'Living Next Door To Alice' before I cut it with Smokie. I was constantly aware of the requirements and my head was just full of all these bizarre words. They'd pop into my head and suddenly I'd go, 'That's it, that's the song.'

"In the beginning, with the first half-dozen songs that Nicky and I wrote together, I'd compose the melodies because he didn't have any musical knowledge. I'd play guitar, he'd sit there with a pen and paper, and we'd come up with the words together. But then, as the songs became more and more bizarre, it was pretty much me sitting there and writing these tunes while he didn't have a clue what the hell I was doing. It was impossible for me to explain what a title meant when I didn't know the meaning myself. And it's also very difficult to actually write a song with somebody who doesn't know what you're talking about to start with.

"So, pretty much what happened from that point was Nicky would go out and hustle the records, calling the record companies and chasing the promo guys. He was really, really good at that, and I couldn't have done it. His role in the partnership was never really to write songs with me or produce the records. It was to take care of the business side of things. That was his forté. And from 'Can The Can' onwards his contributions to the songs became less and less. He'd be out and about all day, I'd be sitting in his apartment with the guitar, and when he'd come back and ask, 'What have you got?' I'd generally have most of the song written. Then, once I had a first verse and chorus, he'd understand where I was going and he would sit down and try to help me with the words... There's a wonderful photo of us in the studio with Suzi, where I'm sitting at the console and he's in a corner reading the Financial Times."
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New Beginnings

As his relationships soured with both Nicky Chinn, with whom he didn't see eye to eye, and the Sweet, who appreciated neither his pop sensibilities nor his autocratic work methods, Mike Chapman determined to "get the hell out of England," and in 1975 he relocated to Los Angeles. There, while still churning out the hits for Smokie and Suzi Quatro, he could focus on a US market that hadn't afforded him much success, and it was in 1977 that Terry Ellis asked for Chapman's feedback on Blondie, who he was thinking of signing. Chapman subsequently saw the band play on three successive nights at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. After his rave review prompted the Chrysalis boss to purchase Blondie's contract from Private Stock Records, reissue their eponymous 1976 debut album and release the 1977 follow-up, Plastic Letters, Chapman was hired to produce the third LP.

By then, working with Mud, Suzi Quatro and Smokie, he had already produced albums containing others' material. Parallel Lines, on the other hand, was the first such project on which he contributed none of the songs. Instead, he was assigned by Terry Ellis to ensure that what Blondie brought to the summer 1978 sessions evolved into hit material, and ensure this he did. Following its release in September of that year, the album would hit number one in the UK chart, peak at number six in the US, and yield chart-topping singles in the form of 'Heart Of Glass' in the US and UK and 'Sunday Girl' in the UK, where 'Picture This' reached number 12 and 'Hanging On The Telephone' peaked at number five.

"I wasn't being used as a songwriter, but as a song manipulator and song construction consultant/technician," Chapman says. "There was a lot of stuff that needed to be put together, because as loose as the band were, their songs were even looser. Of course, being that I'd started out as someone who wasn't really into albums but into writing singles, I had done a complete turnaround, and I was loving every minute of it. You see, by then the only writing responsibilities I had were to come up with a hit or two each year for both Suzi Quatro and Smokie, and those were easy gigs because they were nice people to work with. There was no suffering on those sessions. Blondie, on the other hand, was all about suffering."
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Mud, Sweet & Suzi Quatro
It was through Nicky Chinn's own efforts that he and Mike Chapman became involved with the Sweet. This was after Chapman followed Chinn's advice to have a proper band demo their songs in the studio rather than record them himself on a small Revox multitrack tape machine. One of those songs was titled 'Funny Funny', and although not intended for the Sweet, it subsequently became the group's first hit after Mickie Most made a rare slip by allowing them to sign with RCA.
"Here was a Deep Purple-type rock band with a song called 'Funny Funny', but it was on the charts and that's all I cared about," Chapman remarks. "Then again, Phil Wainman was the producer, and it was difficult for me when we were cutting it in the studio. The song was in my head, I'd be trying to tell him what to do, and he ended up telling me to go sit in the back of the control room or leave the control room altogether. 'I'm the producer,' he'd say. 'Go away, you're getting on my nerves.' 'OK, sorry,' I'd reply. 'It's just that the song's in my head and I'd like to help you.'
"As the hits went on I slowly but surely inched my way closer to the console, and I started producing full-on in 1972 when Mickie Most called and asked me to work with Suzi Quatro. He had cut a few things with her but just couldn't find the right style, and to my surprise he called me at home one night and asked me to write a song for her and produce it. This was his big new artist that he'd found, and he handed me the opportunity on a plate. I was so excited. Within two days I came up with 'Can The Can', and a week or two later I was producing Suzi in the studio. Then, having decided we needed another band, Mud came along right after that, and so now I was producing Mud and Suzi Quatro, and also having a lot more to do with the Sweet's production as we got into tracks like 'Wig-Wam Bam' and 'Ballroom Blitz'."
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Meet The Band

"The Blondies were tough in the studio, real tough. None of them liked each other, except Chris and Debbie, and there was so much animosity. They were really, really juvenile in their approach to life — a classic New York underground rock band — and they didn't give a f*ck about anything. They just wanted to have fun and didn't want to work too hard getting it."

For Parallel Lines, the group's line-up comprised lead singer Debbie Harry, Clem Burke on drums, guitarists Chris Stein and Frank Infante, English bassist Nigel Harrison and keyboard player Jimmy Destri. Yet, even though Chapman loved Blondie's first two albums and was enamored with the group members' offbeat sense of humour, he doesn't mince his words with regard to what he describes as "musically the worst band I ever worked with."

"The only great musician among them was Frankie Infante," he asserts. "He's an amazing guitarist. The rest of them were all over the bloody place. Jimmy Destri was a pretty good songwriter, but he wasn't a great keyboard player. What he did, he did well, and I didn't ever try to push him beyond that because I knew there wasn't anything beyond that. Chris Stein was always so stoned, and although Clem Burke had all the right ideas, he had no sense of timing. I mean, he had a lot of ability, but I always felt he was trying too hard, and that's what I used to tell him.
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Mike Chapman with Debbie Harry and Ronnie Spector, who was visiting the session, and whose presence apparently made Debbie very nervous when doing vocal takes for 'Fade Away And Radiate'.
Mike Chapman with Debbie Harry and Ronnie Spector, who was visiting the session, and whose presence apparently made Debbie very nervous when doing vocal takes for 'Fade Away And Radiate'.

"If you're going to use the Keith Moon approach, you'd better be able to pull it off, because if you don't it's just going to be a shambles. Sure, there were some timing discrepancies on some of those Who records, but Keith Moon had the ability to do all that manic stuff and keep the groove solid at the same time. Clem hadn't learned how to do that yet — he would later on — and so although Nigel was a very competent bass player the rhythm section was totally out of whack.

"Nigel actually brought a lot to the table. He brought terrific songwriting, a sense of humour, and the fact that he was English added another dimension to the band. He got along great with Debbie and OK with Chris, whereas Chris never wanted Frankie in the band. The fact was, Frankie made Chris look like a terrible guitar player. Then again, I loved Chris, and I worked very, very hard with him for years and years because I felt he deserved my time. He, to me, was a wonderful, wonderful songwriter, a great songwriter, and he was always so concerned about his playing ability. I'd say to him, 'Why would you even worry about that when you're such a great songwriter? You can't be everything. Let Frankie play those solos.'

"He didn't like that idea, and so I'd send everybody else out of the studio and I would sit with Chris for hours and hours; just me recording and him playing to get all his parts right. I wanted him to get his parts right because I knew that was important to him. To this day, when he listens to those records, he knows the work that was put in and he's proud of it. And thank God we did that. I think a lot of other producers would have said, 'No, you're not playing that part right. I'll bring in a studio player.' But that was never an option with Blondie.

"Debbie is a great singer and a great vocal stylist, with a beautifully identifiable voice. However, she's also very moody. I love Debbie and I learned a lot from her about the psychology of recording vocals. Up until her I had been pretty barbaric in my approach to vocalists, like 'Get out there and sing!' Once I encountered Debbie, I learned how to soft-shoe it a little more. The vocals I got out of her I really had to fight for psychologically, and when I listen to them now I remember those sessions very clearly. They were tough times, with a lot of tears, a lot of disappearing into the bathroom for hours. She's a very emotional person and those songs meant a lot to her. When she was on — bang, it all happened really quickly. She'd never had to work hard in the recording studio prior to meeting me. She'd go in and do one pass and that was it. I'd have her out there, singing over and over again, until I felt that she had lost the plot, at which point I'd say, 'OK, that's it for today, let's try it again tomorrow.'

"Things like that didn't sit too well with her in the beginning, but it worked in the end. Musically, Blondie were hopelessly horrible when we first began rehearsing for Parallel Lines, and in terms of my attitude they didn't know what had hit them. I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, 'You are going to make a great record, and that means you're going to start playing better.'"
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Blonde Ambition

"On Parallel Lines, I was given the responsibility by Terry Ellis to put this band at the top of the charts. He knew they could achieve that and I knew it, too, but I also knew that, given how they were when I began working with them, it might never happen. Terry said, 'Can you do it, Mike?' and I said, 'Yes, I can.' He said, 'OK, I'm going to leave you alone. You've got six months.' So I had to go in there and knock this band into shape."

In the event, the album took six weeks, not months, to record at the Record Plant in New York, before Mike Chapman and Peter Coleman opted to get away from the big city by taking care of the manual mix on an obscure Sphere console during about 10 days at a small studio named Forum in Covington, Kentucky. Indeed, since only five weeks were initially booked at the Record Plant, the final recording sessions were switched from that facility's Studio A to what Chapman now describes as "the slummy room at the top. It was a real bomb of a studio, but hey, a case of whatever we could get... There was an API console in the room that we started in, the main monitors were Westlakes, and we recorded to 24-track.
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Suffering the effects of Mike Chapman's incredibly high playback volume during mixing for Parallel Lines.
Suffering the effects of Mike Chapman's incredibly high playback volume during mixing for Parallel Lines.

"Back then, I liked pretty much any speakers that were big and loud. For nearfields, the only thing we had in those days were Auratones, and we'd normally just use one of those to check out the sound in mono, since we still had AM radio playing number one records. Then again, having grown up listening to everything on '11', I'd turn things up as loud as they could go, thinking that if it felt good and sounded good at that level it must be right. That having been said, for the early records that I produced in England I was always working on Neve consoles, and they all had that little mono speaker. Well, we would check all of our mixes back on that tiny little mono speaker. It sounded dreadful, but if your mix was good coming out of that, and at 4000 watts, then you knew you'd got it right."

Not as informed about — or interested in — recording technology as he would become once computers entered the scene, Chapman would usually remedy a sonic problem by instructing engineer Peter Coleman to "just keep turning the knobs and I'll tell you when it's right."

"I used to act dumb by using a lot of that terminology in the studio," he now admits. "I did that for two reasons: I wasn't very technically proficient because I just hadn't paid enough attention over the years; and with most bands, especially Blondie, it was important for them to see me as somebody who was fighting for performance rather than trying to make them sound spectacularly hi-fi. I was there as one of the foot soldiers."

Evidently, this approach paid off. "He was a very good producer," Jimmy Destri later remarked. "He wasn't very technical, but he was very organic and he was a very good mixer on his own, too. I mean, he knew the console like nobody else I've ever seen. He would say things like, 'Jimmy, if you shut out the lights I'll be able to EQ by ear' without even looking at the console! He taught me a lot about making records, that's what Mike did. And he was another member of the band at that point, and he was just like in there with us. And from Parallel Lines and onwards, Mike was integral, he was really integral, as we couldn't go in the studio without him. As far as the recording process of those albums goes, we all learned a lot from Mike."

Not that his input was always appreciated. Tension was often a part of Blondie's make-up, and during the Parallel Lines sessions Nigel Harrison and Mike Chapman butted heads when the producer kept pushing the bass player to improve his performance.

"We almost came to blows," Chapman recalls. "He told me, 'Shut the f*ck up! What do you know? I'm trying my best,' to which I responded, 'Well, it's not good enough.' Still, no matter who I pissed off — and Jimmy was certainly among them — the Blondies all basically knew I would get it right. They sometimes didn't like the procedure, they didn't like the amount of time they had to spend doing it, but after we'd finished Parallel Lines they understood why I did what I did and they were all very proud of the record."
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Heart Of Glass

In geometric terms, parallel lines conform to a pattern but they don't connect, and neither do the characters in most of the songs on the aforementioned album: Harrison and Harry's 'One Way Or Another'; Destri, Harry and Stein's 'Picture This'; Harry's 'Just Go Away'; Stein's 'Sunday Girl' and 'Fade Away And Radiate'; Harry and Stein's 'Pretty Baby' and 'Heart Of Glass'; even non-band-member Jack Lee's 'Hanging On The Telephone'.

These were supplemented by Infante's 'I Know But I Don't Know', Destri's '11:59', Lee's 'Will Anything Happen' and an energetic cover of Buddy Holly and the Crickets' 'I'm Gonna Love You Too'. And as directed by Mike Chapman and adorned with Deborah Harry's slut-next-door appeal, this added up to a platinum-selling album. Yet only some of the songs were completely written when the participants first entered the studio.
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Blondie guitarist Frank Infante and bass player Nigel Harrison supporting Mike Chapman.
Blondie guitarist Frank Infante and bass player Nigel Harrison supporting Mike Chapman.

"Debbie and Chris had a great set of ears," says Chapman. "When they said they wanted to record a song, I never said, 'No', even if it was an outside song, and in this case there were three of those numbers right from the start. 'Heart Of Glass', on the other hand, was called 'Once I Had A Love' and they had it in a lot of different versions, but it wasn't right in any form."

Originally recorded by the band in 1975 with a relatively slow tempo and blues/reggae vibe, 'Once I Had A Love (aka The Disco Song)' made its way onto a digitally remastered 2001 reissue of Parallel Lines courtesy of a 1978 Chapman-produced demo.

"After they'd played me the covers, as well as some of their sketchy song ideas, I decided the first thing we should work on was 'Once I Had A Love'," Chapman now recalls. "I thought that track was the one that probably needed the most attention, because even though it was complete, it was wrong, and I knew that if we could get it right it might be a big hit. So there we were on the first day of rehearsals, in some little hole-in-the-wall on the Lower East Side, and all of the band members were being very, very cautious about having a new producer. This was not their idea, they would have gone back to Richard Gottehrer. And although they knew who I was and what I'd accomplished, they didn't quite understand what was going to happen. Neither did I.

"In discussing what to do with 'Once I Had A Love' I tried to include everybody, and after we played it a few times I said, 'Let's get rid of the reggae.' We then tried to do it as straight rock, but that didn't work, and I could see Debbie was getting a bit frustrated. So, I asked her, 'Debbie, what kind of music that's happening right now really turns you on?' She said, 'Donna Summer.' I said, 'OK, then how about us treating this song like it was meant for Donna Summer?' Thay all looked at me as if to say, 'What?' I said, 'Well, it's disco, right?' 'Yeah, it's disco,' they mumbled, but when Debbie then said, 'I like disco,' the others basically went along with it.

"Anyway, we fooled around with the song, and after a couple of hours of very intensive work we had it sounding pretty much the way it sounds today. We had a little Roland drum machine, and I said, 'Why don't we just put a groove together in this and play along to it?'

"At the same time, we also changed the title. I said, 'You can't call it 'Once I Had A Love'. The hook line in there is 'heart of glass'. Let's call it 'Heart Of Glass'.' So that's how the song evolved, and after leaving the studio that day all of us were on the street, getting cabs or whatever, and Debbie walked alongside me and said, 'Mike, I really like what you did with 'Heart Of Glass'.' 'Thanks, Deb.' 'You're welcome.' We had broken the ice. Still, recording 'Heart Of Glass' was tortuous. In those days, we didn't have MIDI, so we used the Roland drum machine and, because I added a time change in the middle, I had to actually sing through the song with that thing going at the same time, and then press the button to stop and start it again so that we were on the right beat."
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Group Dynamics

"You see, 'Heart Of Glass' was the only track that we put together piece by piece. Everything else was played together as a band, and since we didn't use click tracks for that whole album I set up a mic in the middle of the room. Debbie didn't want to sing scratch vocals, and I didn't want her to, either, because it would have blasted her voice. So while she and Peter Coleman sat in the control room and laughed at me, I would be in the live area with the rest of the band, keeping time and singing scratch vocals for all of the songs. I was isolated and wore a set of headphones, and I'd say, 'OK, here we go. Count it off, Clem, and watch me for your time.' Then I'd launch straight into it, getting very nasally while screaming and jumping up and down, and when I'd look into the control room Debbie would be in fits of laughter because I looked so stupid. We didn't have video cameras in those days — I wish we had. It was entertainment for her.
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The track sheet for 'Hanging On The Telephone'. Note track 24...
The track sheet for 'Hanging On The Telephone'. Note track 24...

"I had all the energy that the band needed. You know, 'Just take the energy from me.' That's why I liked to stand in the middle of the room with them and conduct and sing and scream and jump up and down. I didn't care if it ended up leaking onto the drum mics so long as the performance was right and the groove felt good. Never mind if I was completely out of tune. I'm sure that the vibe I gave off was part of the reason they were able to put that into the track.

"I basically served as the drum machine on most of the songs, whereas on 'Heart Of Glass' we used the Roland. It took us ages to get that part right. Then, when it came to the real drums, we had to record them one piece at a time, which none of us had ever done before. They were all looking at me like, 'Wow, this is cool. We're experimenting.' I said, 'Let's just have fun with this,' and by the end of that first day we had all of Clem's drums down. We put the kick drum down first, then a hi-hat after that, followed by a snare... He didn't want to do it this way at all, and he was very, very moody, but Debbie and Chris were running the show and they said, 'Just do it.' He hated it, and he probably still does, but at the end of that first day we had a great drum track and we all knew it.

"After that we put down sequenced parts with various different keyboards, trying to incorporate that Donna Summer vibe, and then we added lots of Chris's guitars with echoes on them. At that point I realised everybody was actually having fun with this track. Having made hit records for the past seven years, I had a handle on what I was trying to accomplish, and I knew that with each piece that we added we were getting closer and closer to our goal — which was to have this incredible track that didn't sound like anything else. It was a combination of all sorts of different things, and although Debbie's voice and the song's structure meant it was Blondie, it was Blondie as they had never sounded before. When Debbie sang it, she really did become Donna Summer, and I thought it was good that the track wasn't like anything else that was on the album."
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One Way Or Another

At the Record Plant, the recording setup for Parallel Lines was a traditional one. The drums were miked with a Neumann U47 on the kick and KM84s on the toms, snare and hi-hat, along with a couple of U87s overhead.

"After the basic track was cut, we'd go through the whole thing and tighten up the kick drum with the snare, by way of pencil erasing," Chapman says. "That meant using a pencil to hold the tape away from the head and erasing up to the kick drum. If a bass part was ahead of the kick, you could erase it so that it sounded like it was on top of the kick. That's very easy to do these days, but back then it was quite a procedure just to get the bottom end sounding nice and tight."

While the bass combined a DI signal with that from Nigel Harrison's amp, and the DI/amp method was also applied to recording Jimmy Destri's Farfisa synth, Frank Infante's Les Paul was recorded with a combination of Shure SM57 and AKG 414 mics on his Marshall cabinet.

"Chris had all kinds of weird and wonderful guitars," Chapman remembers, "and he also had some weird amps, although he liked Fenders, too. He didn't care so long as it sounded good in the control room."

Once the basic track was recorded, this would be followed by the lead vocal, backing vocals and then overdubs, and while there'd be plenty of the latter on subsequent albums, in the case of Parallel Lines it was rare for a song to utilise all 24 tracks. Not that this was always obvious in advance. Many of the songs, such as 'Sunday Girl', 'Picture This' and 'One Way Or Another', were still only half-written when the rehearsals took place, the last-mentioned simply comprising a riff with no melody or lyrics.

"Debbie started writing that song during the rehearsals and it was finished just prior to going into the studio," Chapman explains. "Then again, I don't think the lyrics to 'Sunday Girl' were written until we got to the studio, and the same probably applied to 'Picture This'. I also remember 'Fade Away And Radiate' being very sketchy at the rehearsal and Chris repeatedly saying, 'I want to get Robert Fripp, I want to get Robert Fripp'. I was thinking, 'Oh heavens, no! Who knows what he'll do?' As things turned out, having his guitar part was a good idea.

"'Pretty Baby' was in fairly good shape, but, as with many of the songs, Debbie didn't finish writing the lyrics until we were in the studio. In fact, a lot of the time she was still scratching out lyrics when I was asking her, 'Are you ready to sing?' 'Yeah, just a minute...' Some classic songs were quickly knocked out like that by our Debbie."
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Modern Times: Mike Chapman Today
"It's like the old days for me," says Mike Chapman with regard to producing LA 'blast pop' band the Automatic Music Explosion, among numerous recent new-artist projects. "Unlike alternative groups like the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who I think are wonderful, today's emo-style bands are so contrived, all doing the same thing as each other. There's nothing special about them, whereas AME is like stepping back into the past with a fresh approach. It's pure pop music, they're great musicians, they put on a great live show and the whole album rocks like hell."
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Mike Chapman in his home studio in Conneticut with current project, the Automatic Music Explosion.
Mike Chapman in his home studio in Conneticut with current project, the Automatic Music Explosion.
That's quite an endorsement from a man who, in addition to following Parallel Lines with three more Blondie albums — Eat To The Beat (1979), Autoamerican (1980) and The Hunter (1982) — helmed projects during the '80s and '90s by Deborah Harry, the Divinyls, Lita Ford, Rod Stewart, Altered Images and Bow Wow Wow. After splitting with songwriting partner Nicky Chinn, Chapman also enjoyed compositional success with Tina Turner's 'Simply The Best' and Pat Benatar's 'Love Is A Battlefield' (both co-written with Holly Knight). And now, based on the East Coast, with a resumé that includes 140 Top Ten hits and estimated worldwide sales of 350 million records, he has "fallen in love with the whole package" that comprises AME: singer/songwriter/guitarist Matt Starr, lead guitarist Chris Price, bass player Jeff Covey, drummer The Max and singer/tambourine player Jodie Schell.
"Jodie's got an awesome presence onstage and an amazing, animal-like voice that can also sound cool, controlled and extremely sexy," he remarks. "When I saw Matt Starr basically running the show with his boundless energy, I knew that all I had to do was make a great record. We all know, in this day and age, that the music business is floundering. Nobody knows what they're doing, nobody knows where it's going, and everybody's so focused on so many things that nobody's focused on anything. With this band, and a number of other bands that I'm contemplating working with right now, all I need to do is focus on what I've always focused on: great songs and making a great pop record. And if I can pull that off, then no matter what the business is doing there will be a place for it.
"I believe that the old fashioned way of making pop records is still the best way, and so we cut these tracks on two-inch tape and dumped everything into the 48-track Otari Radar setup at my house where, in a Westlake-style room that I designed, there's also a 48-channel SSL K-Series console, two Otari MTR90 multitrack machines and a full-blown HD Pro Tools setup — I don't use Pro Tools, but since everybody else does, I have that to transfer stuff into my Radar. While the main speakers are custom-designed Radians, I still use [Yamaha] NS10s to monitor, and I recorded AME all-live just the same way as I've always done it, in the room together, and then comp'd each song from the best two or three takes.
"They know these songs back to front, and so the whole thing took a couple of weeks. No click tracks, just honest, straight-ahead rock & roll performances. That's what the business needs and that's what I'm coming back for. I work with a lot of young artists these days — the new artists are all I care about — and they're not letting anything stop them. The spirit is alive out there. They're still playing and they're still writing, and if the business could just figure things out, there are still people like me who can make great records with these kids. I'm telling you, there's a dozen bands that I've found in the last 12 months that I could put in the charts..."
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Hanging On The Telephone

One number for which she didn't have to put pen to paper was Parallel Lines' dynamic opening track, 'Hanging On The Telephone', which was also the opener on a 1976 EP by guitarist Jack Lee's short-lived LA power pop trio, the Nerves. Blondie had shared a bill with the Nerves on one of their first visits to the West Coast, and they had already worked on the song by the time they introduced it to Mike Chapman.

"That track was magic from the beginning," he says. "Unlike some of the others, it was an easy one to cut because it was more like Blondie's normal, frantic sort of style, and I also vibed it up a lot. Initially, they didn't know quite how much to put into it, but I told them, 'Look, this is more like the stuff on your first two records. Let's give it that sort of punk/new wave attitude.' I knew that the energy level on that track would make or break it. If we didn't have that energy we'd miss the point, because the musical structure of the song is very tense — it sits you on the end of your chair, and we had to have a track that did the same thing.

"They were all very much into giving it that full-on energy, and of course this was Clem's favourite way of playing. If he really liked something, that in itself added extra energy. So, I think we did four takes and I then took the best one to work on and fix things. If there was a guitar mistake or a bass mistake, we'd punch in and out. In those days, I didn't cut the tape a lot like I'd do later on."

While Burke's sharp drumming and Nigel Harrison's pumping bass are punctuated by Frank Infante's electrifying, punk-edged guitar lines, 'Hanging On The Telephone' is nevertheless powered right from the start by Deborah Harry's energetic, in-your-face vocals as she spits out the song's staccato-style opening lines with machine-gun rapidity: "I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall. If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall. I know he's there, but I just had to call..."

"Debbie always got it right away whenever I tried to describe what to do, but a lot of the phrasing was totally down to her," Chapman states. "She has a strange way of delivering certain phrases, and I found myself accepting things from her that I never would have accepted from anyone else. I would have had other people change it, whereas with her I'd think, 'No, no, no, I've got to leave it like that,' or else it just wouldn't be her. For instance, in 'Hanging On The Telephone', the lines 'I heard your mother now she's going out the door. Did she go to work or just go to the store?' — I remember listening to those and thinking, 'This is the dumbest lyric I've ever heard.' However, it was so dumb, it was beautiful, it was brilliant, and when Debbie then sang it in her inimitable way it suddenly sounded even funnier. It just sounded like the weirdest, most bizarre thing I'd ever heard."

"I can't remember all of the specific phrasing issues, but I know there were many times with different songs where Debbie would phrase something in a very strange way and I'd think, 'Well, if I change that and make it normal, I'm going to take some of the character out of her voice.' It was always very important to me with the Blondies in general to present them the way they were. This wasn't a band that you messed around with or tried to reconfigure or reconstruct. Either it was going to work or it wasn't, and 'Hanging On The Telephone' was one of those cases of 'Just get out there and play it full-on!'

"I used to say to them, 'Think of being onstage. Imagine you're playing this to an audience, because we're trying to record something that you're going to have to listen to for the rest of your lives. So if this is not a high-energy performance, you're going to say, "How come we now do it better live than on the record?"' So many bands end up saying things like that: 'How come it always sounds better live?' Well, that's never going to happen with me as a producer. And in the case of 'Hanging On The Telephone', that's probably the best track on the album in terms of energy, although 'One Way Or Another' has a similar edge."
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This Is Blondie

Once Harry's lead vocal had been recorded and comp'd, she and Chapman then contributed the backing vocals, with him harmonising an octave under her on the chorus title line, as well as on the 'whoa-oh' chants as she insists, "Hang up and run to me," and the song races breathlessly towards its manic finale.

"That 'whoa-oh' backing was something that I came up with because I felt that it just sort of added even more energy to the end of the song," Chapman recalls. "Then, after we had the track down, I said, 'You know, we should put a telephone ring on the front of this.' The Blondies all thought that was stupid and too gimmicky, but I said, 'C'mon, guys! Gimmicky? This is Blondie. Let's give it a try!' I told Peter Coleman to call anyone he knew in London in order to record a British phone ring, and then once we stuck that on the front of the song they all went, 'Oh, yeah, that does sound pretty cool.' It certainly heightens the impact of the opening: the ring, then a pause and — wallop! — in it comes.

"That's the magic of Parallel Lines. Every track is perfect from top to bottom, and it's a beautiful album because it works in every respect. It's hard to find a flaw in it, and there aren't many records during your career that you can say that about."
Published in SOS June 2008

Brian Eno-PRO SESSION - The Studio As Compositional Tool

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

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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: in-studio 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.

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