One Two Testing musicians' magazine - May 1985 
Interview by Tony Bacon

After the vast electronic soul of last summer's collaborations with Arif Mardin, Green is back with a new album and a new Scritti Politti - Materialist Fred Maher and machinist David Gamson. In their very first collective interview, Scritti talk to Tony Bacon of tricks, tracks and a percussive obsession.

Are there any real drums on the half-dozen or so post-Arif Mardin produced tracks on the new LP?
F: No, apart from some percussion and some real tom toms. We were at the Garden studio - we also used Wessex, Eden, Battery, Jacob's and Island - and we decided to do some samples there, just bunging stuff down on tape. So some of the toms are AMS-derived, some are real.

G: And there are some AMS snares, some AMS bass drums.

What do you think of the quality of the AMS sampler?
F: It seems to be the best.

D: Well, it's a funny thing. The samples are great, but sampling drums, with ambience, is...

F: Tricky.

D: Very tricky to make it work right and not sound like sort of white noise.

F: Yeah, the 'shoosh' factor always ends up quite high.

What's the trick then?
G: Fucking about with the tuning, taking them up and down.

F: We did a lot of mixing about, too - we'd end up with four snare tracks, say: one is a dry Linn, one is AMS sample A, one is AMS sample B, and the other is a rim shot. And there'd be different amounts of ambience added to each one. Then we'd mix them around...

D: It seems to work out best, in fact, if you just go for one good-sounding snare drum!

G: There's the lesson: don't be tempted to have four snare drums on tape, because you'll fuck yourself up for days on end.

F: But what you really end up appreciating after all this is that the samples for the DMXs and Linns and stuff, their stock sounds, must have taken so much time and effort. As standard and silly as they are, and no matter how much you want to avoid them, the fact remains that they are pretty good sounds to begin with.

G: On the other hand it can be quite a speedy process - stick a snare in the bog, put it down. It's not that laborious - being decisive about it is the trick. Not making decisions takes time.

D: But if you're building up a track of drums first, in that way, especially sampling with the AMS, by the time the rest of the track's done, most likely your drums aren't gonna sound right any more.

G: Yes, we did end up replacing drums quite a bit - snares, even kick, later on.

F: We did a lot of samples with ambience in the samples, which can get tricky, with that white-noise-type problem we mentioned.

G: A lot of that was to do with where we did the samples. With no disrespect, we were doing them in a really small men's toilet at Eden. You can get some interesting things that way, but you are in a tiny room with ceramic tiles. It certainly isn't the Power Station.

So most of the drums on the album are in fact AMS-derived. How many tracks of drums did you average?
G: Heaps. Many, many, many, many tracks.

F: Oh, there's a bit of triggered Simmons, too.

G: Funny thing about the Simmons sounds is that very often on their own they sound like real garbage. Well, pretty, er...

F: That's not true, actually. There's toms on the dub of HYPNOTIZE with Gary (Langan) at the reverb controls, which are fine.

You've used AMS, Linn, Oberheim, Simmons and so on for the drums in different capacities. Isn't there a need, then, for an all-purpose drum machine, or is there an advantage to having all these components?
F: Well, my ideal drum machine would probably be eight AMSs in a rack, modified appropriately and linked up to a massive computer that would trigger in the same way that drum machine computers trigger their samples. You could have a Sony F1 (digital recorder) tape full of stock library sounds.

D: Hi-hats are a problem.

F: Yeah, I should point out that all the hi-hats on the LP are either Linn or DMX. We didn't even consider sampling ourselves because it would have been so time-consuming.

D: Machine hi-hats are horrible, though.

G: Unless you obviate them. Don't try to pretend they're not horrible.

What about using a real hi-hat?
G: Wasn't it because mixing in a real hi-hat with everything else was the one sort of human element?

D: It seemed to stick out.

G: Even when we had a drummer as good as (Steve) Ferrone on the Arif sessions, someone like that you'd think, well, he must hit really hard and really regularly. In fact the hits are never even. And there's the sound of the whole kit moving air in a room. And no matter how good you get the real snare into your AMS, each time it's going 'dak, dak, dak', it's exactly the same. Normally, you wouldn't even notice that there is a sort of organic shift in what an apparently rock-solid drummer is playing.

Some machine makers have tried to program in some so-called 'human-ness', haven't they?
G: It never happens, though, does it.

F: It's not that, it's the actual differences in the strikes and emphasis on every fourth beat of every bar, say.

G: You can program that to happen. But you get some overhead mikes in a room picking up the whole kit, all the bits. I don't think you can get it down to specific rattles and buzzes, or anything in particular, but there's this ensemble sound of wood and metal in a room.

F: And mylar. That's what the heads are made from.

OK, so that's the drums dealt with. Would you...
G: It's only just begun to deal with the drums. There's so much more to say. Terribly important, drums.

D: We get obsessive about drums.

F: We probably spend more time on drums than on anything else.

Are there any instruments on the album other than drums?
G: Scarcely, scarcely.

F: There's a bit of singing.

What about the 'varispeed vocals' debate, Green?
G: Other than in small degrees in certain places, it isn't. It genuinely is a way of singing. People think the sound of my voice is varispeed, but it isn't. It's the sound of my voice. I made a choice to sing high up in the throat - it was something I wanted to do. I'd listened to certain singers, and I wasn't actually trying to emulate them - it was almost a sort of reaction to the entrenched English school of post-Bowie vocalists, too, those really leaden male singers. I much preferred certain women singers, and that tradition of black male American singers who sing with quite high voices. You could start with Smokey Robinson and take it through to Eldra DeBarge. They do it a lot better than I do, but that would be the school which influenced it. To some extent it can be limiting, so I have opened the singing up a bit on this LP.

Other instruments. Any sequencers, David?
D: I've used the MSQ700, which I don't like. The real-time's useless - I have to step-load everything. And the quantising on real-time is just so horrible.

F: It chops notes.

G: Isn't that what Howard Jones likes about it?

F: Yeah, that can be cool for bass lines, real hiccupy.

D: Step-loading is time-consuming - to get any feel, each note has to be a different length and so on. I hate it.

F: Being a non-muso, unable to step-load anything other than strange drum machine stuff, I've tried the MSQ700 in real-time and it's a complete pain in the ass.

But if you don't use the MSQ, then what? A computer?
F: That's it.

D: The QX1 seems like it might be good, and the Linn 9000 too. But they weren't out at the time. It seems like someone should come up with something like Fairlight's Page R, which is real easy to use.

There's no real bass guitar on the post-Arif tracks, so presumably it's synth bass. A nice Minimoog, David?
D: That's the boy.

F: This is Dave's big department, bass. Bass is next in line to drums for us when it comes to obsession.

OK David, how d'you get that fantastic bass synth sound?
D: Well, the Minimoog's a good start. A good deal of the bass lines were sequenced. Like the drums, the bass sounds were usually a combination of many things - the all-important Minimoog, the DX, and the fairlight. How can you go wrong with a Minimoog? You turn it on, put the oscillators down, there's your bass sound. With the DX, I do alter the presets. I do it by ear, I can't imagine doing it by numbers. But I was reading that there's a really thick Yamaha manual where they have the numbers for getting analogue-like sawtooth, triangle and all the rest. So there's a way to get them - you can get there and then move away. I think DXs are great, though.

G: There are problems.

D: Yeah - if you start brightening them, you get a transparency to them that doesn't want to sit right in the track.

G: This is something Trevor Horn was trying to tell us, back when we were working at Sarm, and we were poo-pooing the suggestion that there could be problems in getting DXs to sit in the track properly. They can be a problem when you deal with reverb.

D: Yeah, one peculiar bother is the way they pick up reverbs. They don't seem to pick up reverbs in the same way that analogue synths do. You have to put lots of reverb on before they respond, and even then it's not the same, somehow.

G: And you have to mix them with other DXs, or other things. The sound of one DX on its own is a very peculiar noise.

D: If you brighten up a DX patch with EQ in the mix, especially the patches that are bright anyway, they begin to get this transparency. It implies there's something at fault in your original patch, I guess. But those two things are problems when you're recording DXs.

You said the other element of your synth bass sound was from the Fairlight. A sampled bass?
F: I took a course on the Fairlight, and I concluded that the synthesiser part is untouchable. It's the most complicated form of synthesis there is. So we just used it for sampling, yes.

D: With the bass and quite a lot with guitar, what we did, once we knew what the part was, was actually to sample each note of the part rather than taking samples out of their range. That works much better.

G: It does beg the question why you want to do it, sometimes.

D: Oh, there's a very good reason - then it sits in a lot better with my Minimoog.

So why use the Fairlight as a very expensive sampler?
F: Page R, basically. It's incredibly easy to use. We have a programmer come in when we use the Fairlight, but Page R is easy. And also, to answer your question, the Emulator II wasn't out when we were working on this. Believe me we wanted one! Couldn't get hold of one.

D: I think you can get a bit obsessive about equipment and stuff.

G: Not that we ever would. Particularly Dave.

F: God, no.

D: But I think the arrangements are much more important than what you're playing them on. There is a definite point of view to the arrangements.

F: Counterpoint.

D: Timbral and rhythmic counterpoint, really - as far as I'm concerned that's what funk music is all about. Counterpoint? It's two independent lines that work horizontally and vertically - on paper they work individually and they work together, harmonically. That's what all the arrangements are about. And also timbrally...

G: Cod funk shit. That's what it is.

F: Inside joke. Sorry.

D: But anyway, I think there is timbral counterpoint. You can keep the interest going by changing timbres, with the same actual amount of musical information going on.

F: And we do use as many digital reverbs as we can possibly lay our hands on.

G: We're buggers for it.

F: Because if you only have one reverb, you basically have one sort of universal patch. You start sending stuff that needs ambience to the same spot, and you end up with a mix that sounds pretty one-dimensional. All those things that need ambience are all going to the same synthetic room. And especially when it comes to digital reverb, rather than a whole bunch of people playing in a real, same room, as the digital samples are always the same, so will be the reverb - even though you're sending and getting back different amounts of reverb. So that's why we like to use as many digital reverbs as we can get hold of.

G: Way beyond the realms of reason.

So any favourites from amongst this vast pile of digital reverbs?
F: The Lexicon 224X is number one on our hit parade at present. It's definitely the most versatile.

D: Its digital plates are probably the best around.

G: I like the Sony DRE2000. I think there's only one or two in the country. Britannia Row had one which they've given back to Sony, and there's one in Glasgow. The Yamaha Rev 1's interesting, too.

F: Take an AMS digital reverb - which we use a lot for strange effects like reverse-rooms and the non-linear programs - and if you try to get plate out of it rather than the 224X, there's no comparison. But nothing really replaces a good old real plate. Wessex had some great ones, for example.

G: But we can always find a use for any old bollocks, somewhere.