Notes from the recording sessions for "The Sun Came Out" by 7 Worlds Collide.

Interviews with Neil Baldock (recording/mix engineer) and Jim Scott (mix engineer/producer)

“The Sun Came Out”, the new 7 Worlds Collide album, was released at the start of September. Co-ordinated once again by Neil Finn, this project has seen a return of familiar faces from the first 7 Worlds Collide album, such as Johnny Marr, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway of Radiohead but this 2009 album also features a whole host of new guest talents such as KT Tunstall, Wilco, Bic Runga and Don McGlashan.  Beneficiaries of this album are Oxfam who work to help fight poverty worldwide - as well as music lovers everywhere.

Neil Baldock -

A limited amount of time was set aside in January this year to write and record all the songs for “The Sun Came Out”. With musicians and families welcomed into Roundhead Studios in Auckland, the facility became a constant whirl of creativity and energy throughout the time allocated to create the record. Neil Baldock, Chief Engineer at Roundhead, commented, “Roundhead Studios was a buzz of near non-stop activity for three weeks solid with 16-hour days being the norm.”

To cope with the sheer timeframe and size of this project it became obvious that a third fully equipped studio would be required. Protel supplied and set up most of this studio within the Roundhead building, basing it on Digidesign’s ICON D-Control ES, Pro Tools|HD3, Genelec DSP active monitoring and remote-controlled mic pres from Digidesign and Focusrite. The functionality of ‘Studio C’ demanded a full microphone complement for tracking, a sophisticated bussing and routing structure for headphones, monitors and other sends plus a generous complement of Plug-Ins from Waves, McDSP, Sonnox and SoundToys for mixing.

Photo by Darryl Ward

“It was almost like having six bands in at the same time, with more than fifteen musicians present including multiple drummers and kits, two bass players and many vocalists so the flexibility and reliability of our systems was crucial.” said Neil. Multiple times per day the engineers would be required to swap out songs from studios as musicians rotated between rooms, even working on the same song in different studios on occasion. ICON can do this changeover in minutes with virtually no setup time, pulling up previous mixes including all takes, effects, patching and automation. Neil continues, “There is no way we could have coped with this sort of demand had Protel not installed the D-Control Pro Tools|HD system before the sessions started. It really was a life saver!”

Almost all songs on the double CD were either partially or fully recorded in the ICON-based ‘Studio C’ with many being mixed in there as well. Also with various mixing credits on the album Neil Baldock stated, “The demand on our studios and people was so high during the making of ‘The Sun Came Out’ that I don’t know how we would have got there without Protel’s help. Everyone there is so knowledgeable and professional and the studio gear they provided worked flawlessly. The recordings sound fantastic and the whole thing could have been a nightmare if it wasn’t for the ICON studio and the assistance of René and Rob from Protel.”

Photo by Darryl Ward

For more information on professional music production systems, including Digidesign ICON with Pro Tools|HD, Genelec DSP Active Monitors, Focusrite, SoundToys, Waves, McDSP or Sonnox, please don’t hesitate to call us.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jim Scott (pictured above) was called in to produce and mix the 7 Worlds Collide project. Jim is based in Los Angeles and has a Best Engineered Grammy nomination for his work on Sting's first solo project, Dream of the Blue Turtles, and a Best Engineered Album win for Tom Petty's Wildflowers. His prolific body of work includes projects with Santana, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Robbie Robertson, Matthew Sweet, the Foo Fighters, Matchbox Twenty and the two most-recent Red Hot Chili Peppers releases. Jim has his own take on the project as indicated by the following excepts from an interview Jim did with Protel's roving reporter, Rene Bullinga.

Roundhead Studios...

Jim Scott -

Rene: 7 Worlds was your first time at Roundhead, is that correct?

Jim: Yes

Rene: How does Roundhead Studios compare to what is on offer internationally?

Jim: Well, it is without question a fine recording studio; it has a great vintage console which is one of the things that I always gravitate towards. I love the vintage Neve consoles, I like the old microphones, I like the old compressors, things that give a vintage sound,, and Roundhead was really versatile, a great big tracking room which was great, having the three studios up and down just to run back and forth and share all the information. For the Seven Worlds project, it was really necessary to have that much space, that much room, that many recording areas and control rooms to work in. As for Roundhead, around the world, it’s a class A studio, it’s everything you could want and more, great staff, great sounding rooms and really comfortable, lots of sunlight which is rare, and overall just spectacular.

Rene: Good feel?

Jim: Oh yeah. Lots of smiles. We’re the luckiest people in the world – we get to make music all day long.

Rene: Did the feel contribute to the vibe that has made it to the album?

Jim: Well, it clearly has, just the amount of collaboration, and it was a great opportunity for eh, you know, the music business is actually really small, but the people that are in it are really busy so it’s difficult to meet other people, you might run in to them at a festival or run in to them in a session but just to get this group of people together, and combinations occurred that would never have happened in the real world or just people interacting. I don’t know if you would have gotten a band from Chicago, and a band from England, bands from New Zealand, and band from Australia all in the same place at the same time to do this kind of thing. You might have run in to them at a hotel lobby somewhere, but would never have spent a month with them working. Radiohead and Wilco, Johnny Marr and Crowded House would never have gotten together in the same room at the same time for any other reason. And not forgetting the other people, to get those people together was a singularly unique experience.

Rene: How were you using Pro Tools in the 7 Worlds Sessions?

Jim: There was some discussion on recording the project on tape, there is a sound that 2” tape has that sounds like that, and a lot of people like that sound, but Pro Tools also has a sound, and as over the last ten years that has got more popular and more worldwide, that’s the sound that people are coming to expect – the clarity and the depth. So, Pro Tools has a sound, like any other great tool that we use. A Stratocaster has a sound, a Gibson Les Paul has a sound, a Marshall Amplifier has a sound. When I saw the mountain of work that lay ahead of us, I realised how much work it was going to be and how quickly we were going to have to move, and how the same piece of music was going to be running from one studio to the next, and sometimes working on the same piece of music at the same time in different studios. Tape would have been cumbersome and slow, and there would have been a mountain of it and it just wasn’t feasible to use tape so we went for Pro Tools (which was certainly no sacrifice) and because of that all the advantages of having Pro Tools and a computer were used every second of the day, all day long, by everyone on the project. Nothing was lost, nothing crashed, nothing was recorded and then mysteriously disappeared and it all sounds great. Just the amount of music that was recorded in a small amount of time, the only way you could have done it was on these Pro Tools HD systems.

Rene: You’ve worked around the world for years with some great people in some very cool studios, but when did you first encounter Pro Tools?

Jim: Well, I worked at Cello Recording Studios in Los Angeles for a long time, and I’m sure that when the first Pro Tools rigs were available they would have had them there. I don’t really remember the first album I had to mix off it, and I resisted for a long time because I was comfortable using tape at Cello where they had great tape recorders and there was still a time in the not so distant past, where you make a record on 24 tracks or maybe 48 tracks if you had a budget and the luxury of a studio that had two tape recorders and enough console for you to monitor through. That’s not all that long ago, but because of the digital revolution it seems kinda ancient, but it’s not that long ago. I’m sure that I was sent records to mix on Pro Tools, just as soon as the first guy recorded his album on Pro Tools and then sent it out. Sometimes we’d transfer the files from Pro Tools to tape, just to get the tape sound. As producers and engineers and Pro Tools itself got smarter and bigger and more powerful, more and more tracks started coming in so that wasn’t feasible any more so you had to take it off the hard drive.

Rene: Did you do any work upstairs (ICON Suite) or were you primarily in A Studio?

Jim: I was in A the whole time. I visited and put in my 2 cents but Neil Baldock was downstairs and Simon was upstairs and that’s pretty much how it went.

Rene: You are doing another project here at Roundhead now. Is there any difference in how you are using the equipment now, from when you were here at Christmas with 7 Worlds?

Jim: Well yeah. This is a smaller project and easier to handle. Neil and Crowded House and a finite number of songs, 14 maybe 16, maybe 12 if we are lucky, and only 4 or 5 musicians involved at the moment, so the difference is that we are using Pro Tools and tape simultaneously. The sound of the 24 track transferred in to Pro Tools, it’s got a really good combination of the depth and fatness of tape and the precision of Pro Tools.

Rene: Do you have any favourite indispensible toys that you can’t do without?

Jim: I hate to say there is something I can’t do without, it sounds ridiculous, I think that my spirit, personally, could work in to any situation and get it happening whatever gear was in the room. It’s really about people, and making people comfortable and making sure people can hear what they like to hear. It’s hard enough to do that with all your favourite tools you are really used to. It’s not an automatic thing, so my indispensible tools are my experience and my luck!

Rene: A lot of the traditional creative effects in the studio are now modeled as plug-ins for Pro Tools. Do you use any of those plug-ins, and have you compared any of them with the hardware equivalents?

Jim: The answer is – but very little. We use very few plug-ins. I use real reverb, real plates, real tape delay. Any combination of those things usually makes a beautiful effect. In my world with the kind of records I make, those three effects, some spacial enhancers, some tape delay, and a little bit of compression and you can create a beautiful atmosphere. But that being said, sometimes I am working with clients who need a certain unusual sound you don’t get from those simple tools. Amazingly enough, when you buy a Pro Tools rig you get a lot of free stuff, it’s amazing, and yeah, we use it occasionally

Rene: When making a good record, how much is signal chain, and how much is the musician?

Jim: It’s always more about the guy than the gear in every facet of it. If you don’t have a song you might as well just not come to work. I still approach it from a 70’s mentality in a way. It’s the system that I learned but Pro Tools is really a smart system and it does all kind of really smart things and is way faster than tape recorders. It sounds good. You record into Pro Tools, and it comes back sounding just like what you heard. I wouldn’t describe Pro Tools as colourful, but that’s a good thing! I don’t know how much memory we used on 7 Worlds Collide, but it was huge. Even on this session we have new hard drives coming in every couple of days.

Rene: Are you doing the Crowded House Sessions at high sample rate?

Jim: We’re doing it at 88.2KHz. I don’t know why, I think it’s the house standard.

Rene: Jim, a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for your time and insights.

----------------------------------------------

The Sun Came Out double album by 7 Worlds Collide is widely available in CD stores now.

Want More Information?

For further assistance please contact Protel at our Auckland or Wellington Offices.