Old-School Contemporary

Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Paul Tingen

           

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Out of the Box

If you think that most contemporary records are constructed “in the box” by young musicians endlessly peering at screens and applying multitudes of plug-in effects, or that conventional recording studios are for an older generation on its way out, meet Gil Norton. Consider this list of rock musicians, all of whom he recorded and produced using his tried-and-tested old-school ways: Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, Feeder, Gomez, Ben Kweller, and Morningwood.

With 26 years of working in recording studios, Norton, an Englishman, definitely qualifies as old guard. At the same time, with credits including Echo and the Bunnymen, Foo Fighters, the Pixies, and Throwing Muses, he's that rare combination of living legend and contemporary, happening producer (see the sidebar “Gil Norton: A Discography”). Norton specializes in producing bands of the post-new wave and grunge varieties, with the occasional oddball thrown in, like the acoustic-alt rock sound of Counting Crows and Gomez or the pop sound of Morningwood.

Norton's productions feature guitar-driven walls of sound, played by real bands in traditional recording studios — in other words, projects that involve strings, pedals, amps, drums, microphones, baffles, mixing desks, and outboard gear. In short, Norton deals in everything that sitting behind a computer screen is not.

Instead, he delivers an invaluable service by carrying old-school studio know-how into the 21st century. The ongoing commercial and artistic success of his approach shows how relevant it remains. The roots of Norton's methods can be found in his beginnings in the late '70s when he studied music and trumpet at Mabel Fletcher Technical College in Liverpool. While there, he played bass in bands and recorded musical acts in the 8-track demo facility of Amazon Studios. Norton recalls, “A lot of bands couldn't tune their drums — some couldn't even tune their guitars [laughs] — so I ended up getting heavily involved in the musical side of things and drifting into production.”

FIG. 1: Adrian Bushby often engineers for Norton, who prefers to concentrate on the -production aspects and leave the knob twiddling to others.

Speaking from one of his favorite studios, central London's RAK, Norton agrees that his approach is “totally traditional,” and adds, “I mainly do bands, so it's not like I'm involved in dance music, which has more to do with sonics, drum machines, loops, and keyboards. When you're working with a real drummer and a real kit, you get a lot of character. So most of the time I work in a traditional studio environment, and it's all about capturing the band as best as possible. It's all about the songs and giving guidance about performances and why you think they're great or could be better. I like the whole psychology of working with a group of people. I like human interactions.”

Firm Believer

After engineering at Amazon, Norton worked for nearly a decade as a producer-engineer, but the last album he engineered entirely himself was the Pixies' Doolittle in 1989. Since that time he prefers to have a good engineer at his side. “When you are worried about the technical aspects of things, it's harder to concentrate on the music and the band,” he says. In the past five or so years, he's worked frequently with engineer Adrian Bushby (see Fig. 1), who is a producer in his own right. Bushby has engineered for Norton many times, working with Dashboard Confessional, Feeder, Gomez, Natalie Imbruglia, Minogue, Morningwood, My Bloody Valentine New Order, and Kylie Placebo.

FIG. 2: Norton’s belief in preproduction was in -evidence when he produced Gomez’s How We Operate. The band refined the arrangements by -recording all the songs first in their home studio.

Norton and Bushby collaborated recently on Gomez's How We Operate (see Fig. 2). The CD is the band's fifth, and its first on the independent ATO Records label. How We Operate climbed to No. 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart and No. 7 on the Billboard Top Independent Albums chart, receiving widespread acclaim (allmusic.com called it “a quiet stunner”). It was also the first Gomez CD that wasn't self-produced. Norton's influence is clear; the songs and arrangements are more downbeat, acoustic, melodic, and integrated than the band's previous offerings.

“When I met the band, the big thing for me was that I wanted them to work as a band,” says Norton about recording How We Operate. “I didn't want a bitty album of individual writers doing their own thing and the others acting like session musicians. I wanted to put them in a room together and work them through the songs. I am a firm believer in preproduction before going into the studio; to me, it is the most important part of recording. Gomez had never done that, because they tended to do everything in the recording studio. I wanted to make sure that we all understood what each song was about and that everyone had their parts worked out before we recorded. They've been touring a lot, especially in the U.S., and I thought it'd be good to have some of that energy on the record.”

In addition, the budget for How We Operate was relatively limited, which added to the incentive to come to the studio as well prepared as possible. Preproduction took place at the band's rehearsal room and studio in Brighton. “It's a nice environment,” says Norton, “and we would try out different arrangements and lots of different drum parts and feels. We didn't demo to a high standard and didn't use any of the demo recordings. It was more a matter of putting ideas down and checking whether they worked. Nearly all the lyrics, arrangements, and rhythms had been completed by the time we began recording in Studio 1 at RAK in October 2005. ‘See the World’ was the only song that wasn't quite worked out, so we had to spend time in the studio on the rhythm section for it.”

Shock and DAW

Norton's main reasons for recording in RAK Studio 1 were its API desk, enormous live room, and extensive mic collection. “We tried to do as much as we could live, and then added overdubs,” he says. “The room at RAK is big enough to be split in half, so we had the drums in one section and the amplifiers, keyboards, and vocal mics in the other. The band members were all playing at the same time; there was a little bit of spill, but not a lot. We had lots of screens and blankets and stuff. We made sure the tempos were sorted out and recorded the tracks live as much as we could. We were in the big room for 15 days — each day recording the basic tracks for one of 14 songs, even though only 12 made it to the album.”

Norton confesses to having a predilection for older Neve and API boards when recording. “That is where you get the sound,” he explains. “So most of what we recorded in Studio 1 went through the API. It's nice and clean; it sounds great. After the two weeks there, we went to RAK Studio 4, which is just a back room with only an SSL and a small overdub booth. We did a little bit of fiddling with the acoustics there to turn it into a great-sounding mix room. We were there until Christmas, overdubbing mainly guitars, keyboards, vocals, and finally mixing.”

For the longest time, Norton considered himself a purist — a man who preferred tube and analog gear. But even though plenty of analog compressors, mic preamps, and EQs were used on How We Operate, the CD was tracked using Norton's two Digidesign Pro Tools systems, both filled to the brim with plug-ins.

Norton became a digital convert about two years ago. “Until recently, digital wasn't very good,” he explains. “I used the Mitsubishi X850 digital 32-track recorder with Echo and the Bunnymen, and that sounded okay in the beginning. But the more I added, the more I could hear the digital processing, and it sounded harsh. I was still using analog when I did Recovering the Satellites with Counting Crows, and ended up filling 100 reels of 24-track tape because we had recorded the preproduction as well. Then, when producing Jimmy Eat World's Futures album in 2004, we did a big A/B shoot-out at Cello Studios in L.A. and compared a 2-inch, 16-track Ampex machine with Pro Tools HD 96/24. We all felt that the Pro Tools sounded better, especially for rock music. That was a bit of a shock.

“The big thing is the HD sampling rates. That is where digital has become as good as analog tape — you start getting the air around the sound. It's more punchy than what's coming off the analog tape, so everything that we record now goes straight to Pro Tools via the 192s. I still use analog because it can make things sound softer and warmer, so I mix to ½-inch analog and master off that. Occasionally, I'll move something over to analog tape and back to Pro Tools again just to get the tape compression, and I still enjoy doing tape edits with razor blade. But digital is great for the convenience of editing and recording lots of takes. Tape is so expensive, and you can only record three takes on one piece of 24-track tape. Now you can do eight or nine takes in Pro Tools and see what you have.”

And so, to his own surprise, Norton has found himself recording exclusively in the box since 2004, and his working methods are now a blend of old and new. “I have a little [Digidesign] control surface,” he says, “but I still prefer to use conventional desks. I'm running one Pro Tools system on my old [Apple] Dual 1 GHz G4, which I use for recording, and the other, which runs on a G5 Dual 2 GHz, is for editing. I try to have the editing done in a different room than the control room, so it doesn't get in the way of recording. I don't think bands like sitting around looking at a screen all day; they prefer to be creative and record stuff. They don't want to sit there while someone is editing, so I tend to keep that away from the band.” More Gil Norton >>>

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