RECONSTRUCTING A LIVE RECORDING IN THE STUDIO WITH PHIL BATES

Imagine you’ve spent a lot of time and money setting up a one-off gig in a historic castle, for a select audience, with the aim of recording and videoing the performance for future release. Then disaster strikes: catastrophic equipment failure leaves you with half a gig on multitrack tape, and major rebuilding work is needed later in the studio.

Phil Bates mixes some cement, rolls up his shirt sleeves and tucks his pencil behind his ear......

The date was the 5th May 1996. The venue was the Banqueting Hall, Tamworth Castle, Staffordshire. The event was an acoustic gig featuring members of ELO Part 2, Gordon Giltrap and vocalist Jo Bates. The idea was to record and video the gig for CD and video release later in ‘96.

Everything started well enough. There was a bit of time difficulty, because the curators of Tamworth Castle would not allow us access to the banqueting hall of their lovely castle until 4.30pm, as before this time there would still be members of the public roaming about. You might think that as this was just an acoustic gig, there wouldn’t be much to upset you - but you’d be wrong.

Firstly, we had to set up a stage big enough to handle six people, three bass guitars, five or six acoustic guitars, two light trees, a small bass rig, a multitude of monitors and a pair of congas - and we were losing about six feet of room space because of an antique and very valuable table that was on loan to Tamworth Castle from the Victoria & Albert Museum, couldn’t be moved, and couldn’t have anything put on it. Six feet doesn’t sound very much, but the banqueting hall in question was small to sart with, and it was going to be a struggle to seat the 90 punters we’d sold tickets to.

Another complication was that the stage had to be carried manually across Tamworth from another venue, and then assembled, section by section, before the PA, lights, video equipment, and so on, could be put in place. However, we managed, by dint of some very hard work, to have everything in place by 7.30 when the doors opened. We even managed a soundcheck, although not a very comprehensive one. Positioning the recording engineer and gear was something of a problem, but we solved it by putting the engineer on a landing halfway up a staircase that ran off ther banqueting hall. This meant that there was no visual contact between stage and engineer, which was not ideal, but our engineer, Dennis and his wife Jude, seemed happy enough. It’s unfortunate that the problem I’m about to recount fell fairly and squarely into the lap of this obliging chap...

The problem has it’s roots in my choice of recording medium, I decided to hire an analogue 16 track to record onto, and as we were on a fairly restricted budget I had to go for a Fostex E16. I myself have an ADAT digital 8-track at home but eight tracks wouldn’t be enough, and I felt uneasy when I visualised the potential sync problem using ADAT’s - but I definitely didn’t want to take the risk of this particular night being a first. My logic was simple. With our limited set up time, it would be one less worry for Dennis if we could just record straight onto a 16-track machine.

To be fair, things went swimmingly for the first hour or so - the music was good, and the audience were incredibly appreciative. We were on the home straight, with four or five songs to go, when Jude appeared at the side of the stage looking worried and asking us to tell a few jokes or something, because there was some sort of problem. We duly obliged, but time was getting on, and anxious looks were thrown in the direction of Jude, especially when Gordon Giltrap threatened to launch into a George Formby medley. Things were looking bleak, but they became even bleaker when Dennis appeared, shaking his head. That was it, there would be no more recording tonight. The multitrack was defunct, it has shuffled off it’s mortal coil. Up to this point the audience had been rocking away, and we had no choice but to carry on. I put on a cheery face, but my insides were churning while I tried to conceive of a rescue package for my treasured project.....

I gradually became aware of a dim light at the end of a very dark tunnel. The situation might be redeemable, thanks to the fact that we had three video cameras in the room. If there was some usable audio on the video tape, we could rebuild the missing tracks from scratch in a studio situation. I must admit that when this solution popped in to my fevered brain I felt a lot better. Now all I had to worry about was, firstly, whether there was any audio at all, and secondly, if there was, would it be clear enough for the musicians to hear what they played on the night, and to recreate their performances? (Don’t forget that we still had to sync sound to pictures.)

Post-gig discussions with Dennis revealed that our Fostex E 16 had spontaneously developed some sort of motor problem. It would operate in fast forward and rewind, but did not want to do anything with play mode. One spindle was turning, but the other was stubbornly stationary and without stripping the damned thing down there and then, there wasn’t much we could do.

Anyway, at the first opportunity I got VHS copies of the footage that each of the three video cameras has taken and listened to the quality of the audio tracks. After playing a few minutes of the first tape, I found my head in my hands, yes, there was audio, but it sounded as if the whole thing had been fed through a Boss Heavy Metal pedalon full overdrive setting. Things started to look brighter with the playback of the second tape, because it was taken from a fixed camera that had been positioned in the minstrel’s gallery at the back room. The audio wasn’t even what you would call lo-fi, but it wasn’t too distorted, and it was possible to hear almost everything. There was certainly enough clarity for the musicians to identify much of what they had played on the night.

We were now faced with the painful process of recreating events that had occurred in a great atmosphere and with a certain amount of spontaneity a week earlier, in a cold clinical recording situation. After the breakdown of the multitrack, some of the performers, thinking that the pressures was off, had started to relax a little - a little too much, in fact, resulting in some fairly strange musical moments. We would have to recreate them all, in the sober and sterile atmosphere of a recording studio.

Our home set up, The Panic Stations, is nicely, if a little modestly, stocked with digital recording equipment, synths, samplers, guitars, preamps and so on - though the room itself looks as though it’s been spring-cleaned by an irate poltergeist. Having been lucky enough to find usable audio, I set about transferring it to track 16 of yet another hired E16. The first track was to establish a guide track - something down on tape that was actually playing in time with out track. The job fell to me and my trusty Takamine EN10 guitar, ably assisted by a Fisherman Pro EQ going through a Peavey ProFex II Preamp. By now, the relief I had felt when discovering that we had something useable was giving way to increasing irritation at having to listen to a middly, semi-distorted soundtrack to a nightmare, that sounded as though it had been recorded through an old Reslo ribbon microphone from the other end of an extremely long tunnel. My disposition didn’t improve with repeated attempts to follow the ever-changing tempo of the track, though I eventually got my head around it. I did try to approach this first guitar track as if it were the real thing rather than a guide, because I wanted to maintain some edge and some feeling of spontaneity, which I think I managed to achieve: you certainly couldn’t mistake this piece of playing for one of my usual studio takes.

Next up was the percussion. The decision to put on the congas at this early stage was based around the fact it was fairly difficult to hear exactly what they were doing on the soundtrack from hell, and by the time we’d replaced more instruments there would be a temptation to listen to the new stuff we’d recorded and just go with the flow, rather than recreating the original conga track. Again, we were of our need to sync our soundtrack with the video footage. I need conga samples, rather than going through the potentially torturous process of getting percussionist Bev Bevan into the studio to match up his original performance, and though replicating the foibles of a live performance proved difficult, the tracks in question were, fortunately, medium-paced, so there wasn’t too much showing-off.

I brought ace guitarist Gordon Giltrap in next. He had come up with some wonderfully intricate parts for two tracks, and had also provided the intros to both songs. This was going to be another tricky job. In the end, we did what everyone does when they have to sync with something when they have no count: we found an identifying noise - a cough, or a stray note, or something similar - and made a mental count between that noise and the start of the track. This process can be hit or miss, because the interval usually ends up being five and three quarter beats, or something similar, but for a musician of Gordon’s calibre it didn’t present any problems. He sailed through his parts virtually first take, getting beautiful sounds from his Taylor 912C acoustic guitar, fitted with the Mimesis Blend System which combines a magnetic pick-up with an internally fitted microphone. He then feeds his signal through his own GG10 Signature preamp, made for him by Award/Session.

Things were going swimmingly. We had some decent-sounding bed tracks, and things would become progressively easier from now on. Next in the hot seat was bass player Mark Knight. Mark’s job was easier, in some ways, because he was not seen too much in the video footage, partly because he has a tendency to hide in the shadows at the back of the stage. This meant that he didn’t have to finger-sync like the more visible of us.

Violin was next, and this was potentially the biggest problem because Mik Kaminski is a pretty spontaneous player, so it’s virtually impossible for him to duplicate any two performances. We were saved to a certain extent by the fact that fiddlers don’t pluck, and so to musical plebs like me it never actually looks as if they’re playing what they are actually playing anyway (only another fiddler would know) Mik is another good pro, so he and his Zeta electric violin were soon putting their feet up and drinking a can of Caffreys together.

Vocals came last. I was putting this off because I suspected that it could be the most difficult part of the whole process. And I wasn’t wrong. I went in looking like a sprightly 43-year old, and came out two hours later looking like Freddie Kruger. All those ad libs had to be reproduced because of the lip sync: my ugly mug was going to be there taking up the whole of the screen at several points, and I didn’t want people to think I was miming. Another problem, and one I hadn’t anticipated, was the between song chats. How was I going to lip-sync that? The problem solved itself, because it soon became obvious that we couldn’t actually feature any chat. It was going to be far too complicated. Regrettably, this was one of the reasons why the video took the form of a series of single songs, rather than a concert that flowed straight through. But I really couldn’t see any other way around it.

Harmonies were pretty easy. We resisted the temptation to subtly double-track and did them straight off, as if on a gig. I didn’t have a Shure SM58 to hand to try and reproduce the stage vocal sound, so I thought I’d try my excellent Rode NT2. I was aware that the difference in sound was a potential problem, but I was pretty sure I could fix it with EQ on the mix. I was fairly happy with the results.

The next (and last) problem was mixing. I wasn’t sure how much of a difference there would be between the material recorded on the night, and the material recorded a week later. In theory there shouldn’t be much difference, because everything had been recorded flat through our Mackie 8-buss mixer, and onto a Foste E16. In the end , the biggest difference between the two turned out to be the way everyone actually played their instruments. On the night everyone was turned up loud and hitting things fairly hard, and for some reason it doesn’t sound the same when you try to recreate those dynamics in a studio situation. It just sounded contrived. I didn’t panic, though I felt that, with a little work and a lot of patience, it was possible for the two elements to sit side by side without the difference being too noticeable yet, or if they have they’ve been incredibly polite!

Would I do it all again? Of course I would!

Phil Bates 'Sound on Sound' Magazine - June 1997.