G’day. In ye olden days there were two types of pop recording. Your home made demo, which was basically zero budget shit, and of no commercial use except in the lofi garage scene, and acts that were SIGNED TO A RECORD LABEL. Record labels would throw some money at signed artists to make them sound good and pay for musicians, producers, expensive studios etc. So a commercial record would have pretty plush production values.

It’s all changed now.

At the bottom end of the market, anyone who owns a home computer essentially has free access to the majority of the facilities that would previously comprise a multi million dollar recording studio. So there is now no real differentiator between ‘home made’ music and ‘professional’ music. At the high end, most traditional labels are starved for cash, conservative in their A&R and not throwing money at developing new acts – so the chances are even if you are signed you don’t often have much scope for elaborate recordings. Even artists as established as Beck have commented that since no-one BUYS his music anymore, they just file share it – there basically isn’t a cashflow to put into complex expensive recordings any more, and though he can make good sounding records – they are creatively different from the days when there was a noticeable budget for making a record whatever way he wanted.

Now I am of the belief that all these changes are overall for the better. However, something negative has been happening to the palette of sounds producers are using. Essentially – any sound that can be made by a computer plugin, performed by a commonly found musician, or recorded on one microphone is still in circulation. Any sound that requires many musicians, large recording studios, specialist skills and equipment – or basically costs a lot to record – is disappearing from most records

These are the lost sounds.

I spend a lot of my time trying to find them again.

Choirs, orchestras, brass sections. The oldskool shit. And don’t talk to me about sample libraries and software emulations. They can cover you on certain phrases – long notes and short stabs, but they can’t mimic the phrasing of a collection of real, imperfect, players.

In the 50s, 60s and 70s – pretty much ANY commercial act that asked for an orchestra to play on their record would get one. These days, in dance music in particular, its very unlikely to happen. Hire all the musicians and facilities required to record full orchestral session costs a minimum of £3000, and probably much more. i.e. More than most records will ever be likely to make, and more than a good remix package for your record. NO-ONE does orchestral dance music now.

But they used to. Disco was heavily orchestral and we LOVE the sound of it, which why we keep sampling it. Then the whole War of the Worlds into Hooked On Classics orchestra with a drum machine vibe is a bit kitch and naff, but I think its a great ‘lost sound’ for dance producers.

I wanted to find a way to be able to re-capture these orchestral sounds without having to sample someone else’s work, in an affordable way.

Basically I’ve cracked it. I’ve managed to get to the point where we can record a convincing orchestra using one mic and around 2 to 5 musicians for around £500. The down side is it takes forfuckingever and you have to have a strong working knowledge of arranging and mixing for an orchestra to make it sound decent. Essentially its blindingly obvious. Record a small number of players a lot of times and track them up – rather than recording 60 people in a room at once. In practice there are lot of do-s and don’ts about making it sound convincing. Which would take too long to go into here.

But on our new album, mid way through we drop fully into Puccini Opera, in which we have performed every single instrument of the orchestra one at a time, between me and 1 violin player using mostly ‘real’ instruments, padded out with good sampled instruments low in the mix. You have to do no end of hacks to make it work. To make one string player multitracked sound convincing you have 1) Make them keep standing in different parts of the room 2) Make them play ‘like different people’ – different vibratos, different bow positions. 3) Tune the violin down to play the Viola parts 4) Play the violin through an octaver to do the cello parts, then add in cello samples to cover up the carnage etc. etc. etc. And edit and mix it for days. But the end result is an entire symphony orchestra and opera singer recorded for just a few hundred pounds. Of course spread this attitude over a whole album, throw in a few guest performers etc and you still end up spending over 10k of your own money that you may never see back again, but at least it was POSSIBLE.

Which brings me to our first track for today, The Young Punx theme. This track is basically me and Phonat trying to capture the essence of those late 70s orchestral disco records, but with a 2010 attitude.

The Young Punx – The Young Punx Theme [mp3]

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um… I hope you like it.

We are more than happy to have some more versions of the track on hand, so for those of you who are producers, here are the remix parts for the orchestral elements, in case you want to make your own remix of it. 125bpm, once it gets going.

For those of you who are interested in how this orchestral sound is built up, here is a screenshot of logic showing; tubular bells on the sampler, 3 trumpet tracks, 2 high trumpet tracks, 4 trombone tracks, a synth flute, 4 tracks of the trombones playing out of position to mimic the sound of French horns, 3 tracks of flugal horn, 4 choral singers, then a load of sampler orchestral percussion and piano. All put into a bus, compressed and then put through a convolution reverb of a concert hall. That’s 3 musicians (me, the trumpet/flugal player and the trombone player) plus 4 choral singers. And a lot of work.

I’ve also employed this approach in a Mashup context. For example, I wanted to do a mash up of Deadmau5 “Ghosts N Stuff” with Shapeshifters “Lola’s Theme” (or more accurately with Johnny Taylor “What About My Love”). However – all the instrumentation in the sample made it far too cluttered, and if stems exist, I certainly don’t have them. So we pulled in a violin player, a trumpet player and a sax player, and some days editing later we have this, which is one of my favorite mashups.

The Young Punx – “Lola’s Ghost”
Deadmau5 VS Johnny Taylor / Shapeshifters [mp3]

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Anyway. Screw you guys. I’m going home. :-)

See you tomorrow.

Hal