My First Studio Session with Nick Chan!
I sat in the train with great anticipation, as held on tightly to my little china bag bought back in my signal trainee days in stagmont camp. As i pinched the soft fabric of my bag, i could feel what i remember placing inside. A 320 GB hard disk loaded with all my personal data; but more importantly, my entire collection of Cubase SX projects. These were the heart and soul of my music, where my little mixes were realised and came to life in the form of an mp3 after mixdown. I pondered over how amazing the thoughts of a human brain can be stored in the form of zeros and ones, even percieved sound and ideas, guitars, pianos, singing.....
I delved into an endless world of thought and wonder, until the words from the MRT PA resounded in my head. "Little India," said the all too familiar voice. "Little India." My mind jolted back to the reality, which was quite frankly, more fantastical at this point in time. I was about to meet Nick Chan at Tekka Mall Foodmore for lunch and would head to the Wall Work studios after that.
I've only seen him once in person before, and that was back at the Noise Singapore Interview. Back then, I remember our little conversation about compression on male vocals and his remark on my Noise Writeup about how Thomas Edison wasn't the discoverer of the filament; his assistant was. His distinct voice was later heard 2 times on my ancient monochrome phone; once after i heard from the Noise Organisers that I was chosen to be an apprentice, and twice the saturday before this Little India train ride. That saturday, we agreed on meeting after the first phone call but he was down with a fever, which came to my knowledge through the form of an sms. Unfortunately that day, I was mobilised by my Unit and had to rush back to camp and don my Full Battle Order, scan the card, wait for instructions....
Speaking of army life makes me rather nauseous. Back on the topic, he called me later that day and told me he could meet me later after my mobilisation. Remembering the fever, I insisted that we meet another days because I was worried about how bad was the fever, and I had that paranoia of the falling sick sensation so i always told my friends who are down with fever to get plenty of rest. We agreed to meet 30mins after I stepped out of the train into the Little India Train Station, at 1pm in the afternoon.
I was early. I walked through the bustling atmosphere of little india tekka centre, and crossed to road over to Tekka Mall. The 20 mins countdown had begun.
He appeared later at the bus stop after i phoned him. Wearing a white T-Shirt and black pants, he recognised me after a few blinks. "Probably the haircut." I thought to myself. I has a major hair cut the previous night in anticipation of a much hated regimental parade season back at camp. I waved and smiled.
He told me he had already had in mind what he wanted to get, so i headed to get a plate of chicken rice.....
"So, what kind of genre are you into?" That was the question probably about 20 mins into the lunchtime conversation. This was a question that struck me. In comparison to the work I have submitted to noise, what was constantly blaring in my ears was the "indie" kid's delight: Bloc Party, Radiohead, The Strokes, The Cribs, Joy Division, Interpol, etc. And when i switch on my own song "Square Well", it had such a John Mayer vibe to it. I recalled the Bible verse: One man cannot slave for 2 masters.
So indeed i was trapped in some kind of tug war of sorts. To play in a band or not to play in a band. To play guitar or bass. To go use synth instruments or stick to acoustic instruments. And the big question: To continue writing songs with a blues/rock/jazz/pop vibe or a Post-punk 'cool as a cat' sound.
"As you develop your ear, you must not have genre bias," Nick told me a couple of minutes later. Nick told me I was the luckiest apprentice not only because I am his one and only apprentice, but also I get to visit wall work studio almost every time and I get to learn the sound stuff in greater detail. I appreciated this fact; at the interview, I emphasized how heavily that I wanted to learn about what went on behind the studio, rather then just jam all day in a band.
As we walked to the studio, I wondered how it would be like. I recalled photos that I've seen at the muon myspace page, and listened the music there repeatedly in anticipation of nick's style. I stepped in and saw, a whole load of gear racked around, expensive gibson guitars on the stands, a mixing DAW(2 boxes of digital plugins) with 2 lcd monitors, and a live room loaded with boutique amps. It was everything I anticipated a audiophile producer would be working in, and took a deep breath in amazement. He immediately proceeded to show me he huge libary of compression plugins, and beefed a bassline to get more character. "I like to run through my signal into these vintage eq plugins and simulations," he explained. "Usually i put things all the way to zero, but somehow when the signal comes out, it is coloured and has just that extra punch. All these compressors over here come up with different results."
He proved his point to and showed me how the coloration is added. He did a phase cancel of 2 clone channels of a bass guitar line, and they obviously became silent. Then for one of the track he switched on the vintage eq with everything set to zero, and walla; the phase cancelling failed! There was some left over sound after that, and he explained that it was the coloration added. In fact i could hear a huge meat of the audio. That's really alot of coloration.
He proceed to tell me how some producers take this to the max; where most of us just do the mixdown at our computer, he met this guy who sent every channel to a real analog mixer and mixed it down on the mixers stereo out, sending it back to the computer, just to get that desired coloration. I was amazed at how much producers like nick valued the coloration of vintage compressors and eq.
Next he went into drum mixing. Using the same method, the raw snare turned from a shy poke into a huge smash after aggressive chaining of compressors and eq. "This snare sound is really shiok." He remarked. He proceeded to show what I never did before in cubase - grouping.
"Grouping is when you want to make a group of tracks pass through the same effect," he explained. "this saves you cpu power if you are going to use the same effect for a few tracks".
Then I realised he was doubling up the same tracks and tweaking them differently. There were two snares playing exactly the same thing, but he shaped it extensively. I came to find out why later.
Nick rolled of eq areas where the sound can't be heard. "inaudible sounds at the unneeded frequencies collect into mud," he explained. "Therefore you must roll of the eq portions you don't need of a certain sound." This really opened my eyes to the world of mixing, where a clean a neat signal is needed for every instrument to stand out. Much like arranging cabinets in a room, if a few pieces of paper from the cabinets fly out and left unchecked, they will accumulate into a mess. Mixing is where different sound elements are arranged to make full use of the sonic space.
He then bass rolled of the xy mic channel, and reduced the highs of the overheads. All those tweaking, i could see, was to make the parts that needed to stand out stand out.
After much of the demonstration, he loaded up my harddisk and played my mix of balloons. He tweaked around the vocals abit, and realised that my guitar part was rather muddy. He told me i should actually record straight into the mixer, not through an amp.
He also showed me how my mix was clipping because i did not run it through a limited. It was soft and yet clipping because of the dynamics. Added the limiter, there was a volume boost but the clipping was reduced.
He taught me how to double track the guitars to fatten up the tone, and at this moment i'm typing this, itching to try it out in remixing one of my own songs...
I have learnt so much in a single day.
posted by jordan @ 9:11 PM
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