| It turned out that except from one song we had no criticisms. And any track is always a shade too loud or too slow even in The perfectest mix and you could continue mixing for years if you want. Since we worked up to 10 weeks on each single track, we became so one with The songs during The mixdown (per song about 5 days) that we lost completely The distance. But with surprise The results were unusual well-balanced and a hundred percent appropriate to The atmosphere of each song. Obvious The lost of The distance leads to a kind of ability of transmission and brought The song to The famous certain point. Which criterion ever might influenced The result, an essential factor was for sure The co-operation with Klaus Schulze as co-producer. Probably we would have done The whole production by ourselves, if Klaus Schulze hadn't appeared this night in May by chance in our studio. Although we didn't know each other a spontaneous sympathy was The reason for The decision to produce one song together. Klaus impartiality and his musically sensitivity and his unobtrusive, but fascinating know-how created an excellent co-operation. Undoubtedly it was exciting for The band and for Klaus, too. And Klaus behaved not like The "hyperprofessional" producer-wizard, who suggest to underlay The song with a "Four on The floor"-bassdrum because of commercial reasons, but he let us our way and boosted always our courage to do daring things, from which we would have certainly shrunk back without this "objective instance".The actual planned weeks were finally nearly 2 years for Klaus in Berlin, what he accepted without ever getting impatiently. There's no need to emphasise how unique that is. | And so we can say, without going red, that about 90 percent of The whole album comes from The sequenzer, except The vocals. Whether directly recorded, edited or "from scartch" programmed. Absolutely necessary for The whole machine work was a big 32 x 32 MIDI switch-machine, navigated by a central computer and built by our "Daniel Düsentrieb" of studio technique even in software and hardware. Recorded with The multitrack were only The timecode, The bassdrum as synchronisation- and reference- track and all acoustic instruments like guitar, saxophone, trumpet, standing bass, cymbal, hihats and naturally The vocals: The advantages are obvious: 1. It's possible to intervene as far as to The mastermix in everything coming from The sequencer. If necessary you can program a snareroll or whatever. 2. There are enough tracks at the tape in order to bounce, vocal or guitar tracks, which were recorded before on parallel many different tracks. Nowadays you must see the sequencer as extension to the tapemachine as long as there are no sync-problems (and there are nearly always some). But prerequisite is a big park of Sound-generators. Which must be there in exactly the same constellation also for a possible Remix. All tracks except 2 were programmed with the creator, who is distinguish by flexibility and fastness while working. But that's nothing new. But the first two tracks "She fades away" and "Patricia's parks" were recorded with the good old QX1. Special for the instrumental part of "Patricia's Park" it did a great job. The song comes complete from the machine and would have been impossible without incredible dissolving of 384 clocks per crotchet and the 8 separated MIDI ways out. Nothing is worst than an inexact working machine, for example if The machine causes MIDI-delays. Since the MIDI-delays come out in succession (because of the system), you can hear Flams already at the percussion-attack (drumsounds) if you programmed | 3-4 Events to the same point. Horrible. Next to the possibility to a spare arrangement, there's the only solution to use many MIDI-ways out, like the QX1 for example. It was a great experience to dissolve a simple piano-composition into the separate sounds and lines and to distribute the Events just exactly in the same way, that it creates the impression it's really played. (That's special hard if it's a song without a continuo drumbeat) If you still program tempo-changes, Velocity and modulation-dates in order to get the right flow and the right dramatic you're fed up to the back teeth with MIDI. Than it's a pleasure to work with a live-instrument, for example for The song "For a million". The co-operation with the guest-musicians happened mostly as spontaneous as the co-operation with Klaus. In the most cases it were friends of us or Klaus, who came by chance and we're interested in the song we just worked on. From "For a million" we even sent tape to 2 guitar-players in order they can get used to the atmosphere of the song. Both Manuel Göttsching (Ex-Ashra Temple) and Eff Jot Krüger (Ex-Ideal) helped a lot to make the song success. Both played very intuitive and emotional, so we had the luck to record 10 continuous tracks, from them we bounced the best bits later together. In that way you don't loose expressiveness, how it's often with the drop-in-methods if you try to correct mistakes. But to keep the inspiration of the moment applies not only for live playing. Echolette played for "For a million" a piano solo with the S-50 into the creator. Listen to The result there was a decent vibrato you couldn't hear while recording it. After the first shock we thought this effect is absolutely suitable, but a bit too violent. What was happened? With the recording there were additional many Aftertouch Events and the S-50 reacted only with The play back. |
| Unreplaceable
helpful Sounds |
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| As well two actual helpful sounds weren't replaceable: we played an intro with a D-50-organ-sound, but we won't use it because of the extreme noise. Finally it was the only one suitable expression after trying this time with 100 other sounds | ||
| The
man
and The machine |
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| The days of drudged rhythm-boxes are over- or do we experience already revival with The good 808 ? |