May I begin by sharing with our Townspeople what a thrill it was for me to chat with producer/engineer Roger Bechirian! As a teenager, while intently studying the liner notes of the records that first made me feel as if I’d finally hit on “my” music, music made for me and my bandmate friends, his name kept cropping up. My friends and I never saw a picture of him, and we still don’t know exactly how his surname is pronounced, but this Roger Bechirian fellow was held in very high regard among our band of nobodies.
If I may, I’ll continue in the first person plural, because that’s how strong my love is over this guy’s work – and beside, my old friends and fellow Townsmen, Andyr and Chickenfrank, contributed to this interview. Our introduction to Bechirian was as the engineer on all those great Nick Lowe productions for Elvis Costello and The Attractions. Shortly thereafter, we saw he had his own thing going as producer of The Undertones, the band in our wildest, humble dreams we thought we could emulate.
With Costello, Bechirian produced the one Squeeze album we all agreed sounded great and steered clear of the stiff, awkward moments on their earlier albums. Then we noted his name on the credits for what we thought was The dBs‘ last great single, “Judy”. This guy not only engineered my all-time favorite album, Costello’s Get Happy!!, but he produced one of my favorite overlooked gems for listening to in my bedroom with the shades drawn, The Undertones’ Positive Touch. As Elvis would eventually have an album produced by George Martin engineer Geoff Emerick, we fantasized having an album produced by Nick’s right-hand man. Considering the likely disappointment (for him!) resulting from this fantasized collaboration, his taking the time to answer the tough questions from Rock Town Hall is more than enough wish fulfillment for anyone to bear… But enough of this ass-kissing, no matter how sincere it is! Let’s get on with the questions.
RTH: I’ve read that you were born in India and moved to England when you were a boy. When did you get into music and how did you get into recording?
RB: There was always music on in the house. My father was a big Jazz fan, and my sister would get all the latest hits from the UK and the States. I also played piano, and would spend hours making up my own tunes. We had a tape recorder at home, and I soon started making up my own sound montages by editing various recordings… I did the same thing as you, scouring album credits, looking for the engineering and studio credits. I got my first job training as a mastering engineer, cutting vinyl!
I was so opinionated, and couldn’t stop myself from telling people what I thought they should be doing!
Awesome job, Mr Mod!
I’m glad he addressed the “soloing” issue. I’ll have to print that out so next time I ask to hear a track by itself, you won’t give me or chickenfrank that hippie-ethic crap of only listening to it holistically with everything.
ahhh…
listening to a track solo is useful for finding things out about a track.
but when mixing, hearing it with everything else is what it’s all about. it will eventually live with everything else.
you’re both right.
more importantly….
it was a GREAT interview, mod. i thought his comments about the Undertones were very interesting. i never had a feel for the wherefores of “positive touch”, and he casts it in a very unromantic, earthy light that explains it pretty well.
thanks for this….Art
Great job Mr. Mod. As a fellow long-time fan of his work with EC, Squeeze and The Undertones, this was fascinating to read and Bechirian came across as very cordial and honest (scathingly so when necessary).
That was swell.
Wow. This was so cool.
Yes, kudos to you, Mod, for a GREAT interview.
Now, Sat, where are those comments on the Seeg track?
As an aside, I love how the randomly assigned images in our banner sometimes coincide with content. Right now, I just clicked on, with Roger Bechirian’s interview looking me in the face and an image of The Monkees in the sand up in the banner. Earlier, after clicking on HVB’s G.E. Smith Exposee, the banner showed HVB’s hero of his classic Guitar Tone presenttation at our first and, to date, only LIVE RTH program. There’s an element of wizardry coming from The Back Office!
An excellent interview–maybe the best yet, in fact.
I hate to admit that the part of this I’m most curious about now is his experience with Davy Jones. Has there been a dark side to that “7A!” studio chatter before “Daydream Believer” all these years? I may need to rethink my Monkee rankings from a previous Dugout Chatter now if Davy’s an even bigger jerk than Dolenz.
HVB!
don’t worry…i’m gettin’ to it…!!!
i know…while you’re young, while you’re young.
it’ll happen within the next 24 hrs.
i’m just pleased to see that the whole solo vs. in context debate hasn’t gotten out of control. as i say, they’re both important. i think B’s comments suggest that, too.
Awesome. If he works with Springsteen, he said he’d record N.H. next. We’re going to Holland.
(what if he records Marah?)
I’m not fooled by this “going to Holland” slang. Don’t think I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I remember when andyr “went to Holland” about twenty times a week, minimum.
Great interview!
a few things:
hvb, my response to bob seger’s “white whatever” (i kid, i kid…it aint bad!) is posted. forgive me for arriving at the party, ready to whoop it up, at about 4am when everyone else had left (except for the one guy who’s sinking deeper into the couch) and the hosts wanted to go to bed.
mr. mod…i keep thinking about this solo vs. in context thing. sorry. i can’t help it. i record alot.
and i must say, i really sympathize with you, having to deal with those knuckleheads who keep asking you to tweak while the track is solo’d (a front man and a bassist in a garage band developing engineering theories? puh-leez). and it strikes me that while it IS a useful practice for finding basic things out about a track, the people who actually DO alot of recording (like US), know that ultimately, what a track sounds like when it’s solo’d DON’T MEAN DICK. so the more tweaking you do in context, the more you’re *really* learning about where that track will live.
HOWEVER, in sympathy with the knuckleheads, i must also urge: do not be afraid to *really* have at those knobs. the frustrations of your somewhat dim bandmates may come from having to crane their necks after only a subtle push of the fader, only to wonder whether they’re really hearing a change, or if they’re imagining it.
in other words, don’t fuck with the poor lads, too much, okay? humor them. solo the track every now and then and let them play around.
Sat,
Your support and tact are highly appreciated. Thanks!
Is there anyone who thinks that soloing a track is anything more than a starting point? Ultimately you obviously have to tweak in context, but the starting point will always be instruments that sound good on their own. Then when you throw them together you start notching and boosting etc.
In ever-so-slight defense of Andyr and Chickenfrank — it is true that once you tweak sounds “in the mix” *too much*, you may have a hell of a time reproducing those sounds live.
But, in general, you are right and they are wrong. Having said that, I find it helps to decide on an instrument or two that will be the “living room couches” in a song, i.e., the things you love just as they are, that will largely remain untweaked, around which other things need to fit. But it’s madness to try to make *all* your individual instruments sound perfect on their own, and expect your overall mix to sound good. But you knew this already, I am sure.
Those who don’t solo an instrument live in fear! Very common for engineers. They are afraid that someone will hear a squeak or a slightly muffed note that they want to re-do. The re-do, the bane of the engineer. So, engineers play it all together and hope you don’t hear those notes with “personality” over the thunderous drums.
Yes, I was going to say that one reason to solo a track is to see if there are any problems, like squeaks, with it that are being masked by the other instruments in the mix, but then I realized that if the problem is masked in the mix there’s no point in worrying about it.
Chickenfrank, we hardly knew ye! You’re the last person I would expect to obsess over squeaks and farts in a backing track. My rule of thumb is: if the only person insisting on listening to a particular track is the person who played on it, don’t let ’em! Corollary: if the only person who hears something “wrong” on a particular voice *in the mix* is the person responsible for that voice, ignore them!
Come on, Chicken, submit to the will of the collective! You’re a BAND MEMBER! Sheezus!
(Mind you, if this is camouflage for Mod getting to mix everything the way *he* wants, then all bets are off.)
HVB, I feel the camaraderie of your entreaty, and I agree with everything you’ve written except when it applies to me.
What seems to be “buried” in the mix has a funny way of being really in the face of the musician that played it when the final track is completed. Conservatively estimating that me alone is somewhere between 7% and 10% of the entire audience that ever hears my recorded “work”, I’d say I’m a pretty important listener. I won’t let that 10% of my audience down with a disruptively noisy track! Come on engineers, leave your ivory towers. Listen to a track in the trenches.
Production values class war!
chickenfrank fusses:
The re-do, the bane of the engineer.
I say:
Of *course* it’s the bane of the engineer. And the producer watching the clock and the wallet. And the rest of the band who wants the diva rhythm guitarist to politely realize he muffs notes much more often than he is aware of.
Listen to Chuck Berry’s “Come On” when the guitar solo comes in. He’s got a bad cord, and it crackles and buzzes through the whole solo. I always loved that song and was charmed by the fact that no one thought they needed to stop the song and fix it. They went ahead and released it as a single. Or Willie Dixon’s “Can’t Judge a Book By It’s Cover” when the bass goes to the four at the wrong time, and it’s pretty jarring, but the whole song sounds great, so they went with it. I think “Could You, Would You” or one of those songs by Them has a similar gaffe. I am, I think, notorious for being ok with a fair amount of this stuff, partly because such mistakes are part of a typical performance for me and mine. I will go back over an inoffensive track to get more energy or a better feel before I’ll go back to fix a blip.
When Big Mess did that Beefheart cover for that compilation a while back, the producer of the record insisted on coming in to mix with us. Right about the third measure, he wanted to move a bass drum attack so it would line up better with the horns. I told him to think about the name of the band, and the fact that with 32 tracks of stereo and four minutes to get through, he would have to readjust his definition of “acceptable.”
I have spent a lot of time in the musical trenches, and at the board, and don’t change my views with my seat. It isn’t a class war, unless “anal diva” is a class!
I’m truly astonished at the passions that have arisen over this To Solo Or Not To Solo topic. As you’ve now surmised, the entire point of this interview was to settle a dispute I’ve been having with my bandmates:) I figured that Bechirian had the final word on the matter, tactfully giving consideration to the soloing contingent while ultimately coming down on the side of what’s right, right alongside me! Your passion for this topic tells me that all are not convinced, and that’s fine.
What Chickenfrank and BigSteve suspect, that as an engineer I don’t want to be confronted with a blemish that no one’s going to hear in context, IS part of my beef. A larger part, however, involves a bandmate who has wisely stayed on the sidelines during this subthread of Roger Bechirian’s excellent time spent with us. Said bandmate will ask me to solo each track, asking for “more treble, more bass” until all 4 mics on that musician’s instrument is hogging the entire spectrum of recorded sound. I say, Less options! Work within limitations!
The other thing, for us, that’s in issue is that the way our board is configured (I don’t know if this is the same for the solo buttons on all boards or not), when I hit “Solo” we hear the track without any of the effects that we’ve already been listening to in context. Certainly soloing is good and necessary for checking that there’s no digital clipping, for instance, and generally checking the tone of each track, but when we’re in the mixing process (even rough mixing) and hearing tracks in context, with effects, etc, I find it more useful to hear how the track is working in context. For instance, I could make each instrument sound “ideal” by itself. Put them altogether, though, and the highs, lows, and mids are stepping all over each other. Sometimes I purposely do something like cut a lot of low end from one guitar relative to the other one. Now, the guy with the thin-sounding guitar is never going to be happy hearing his guitar soloed, but in the mix, he may dig his axe’s Mick Ronson-like ability to cut!
Andyr and I had a long heart to heart on this the other night. He now understands that I’m not as opposed to muting all the other tracks to hear a particular track as I am to soloing the same track. I think this interview with Mr. Bechirian has gone a long way toward settling our differences. I hope that Chickenfrank agrees as well. I hope that each of your and your bandmates find similar healing through what we’ve been discussing.
Once again, thanks to Roger for making time with us. The experience continues to brighten my days.
I want to comment on what HVB said. I agree with what Chickenfrank wrote in that I do think it is very important for the musician to be comfortable with their performance on a track.
I know I am much harder on my vocal performances than Mr Mod or Chickenfrank are. I’d say more than half the time, they think a take is great, then I go home, listen to it, and think it is total shite. And after I redo them to my satisfaction, they always then hear the difference and agree. So there!
Right. You solo a track because you ALREADY hear a squeak or a buzz of some kind, and you’re not sure which track it’s on. Don’t go looking for trouble.
I’m no slouch when it comes to recording my part a thousand times (or, for that matter, needing to), but a flub that you not only can’t hear in context but didn’t notice when you were actually playing it? How bad can it be?
Reminiscent of house soundmen who spend half an hour on the kick drum and realize they have about 30 seconds for the rest of the band.
All those examples of band’s leaving in mistakes were perpetrated by whom? Oh yeah, Awesome bands! When you’re one of the names you listed, you allowed to leaving in a “charming” misstep. Those bands overcome those brilliant mistakes with the rest of their playing.
When you’re not in that class, it’s just a mistake.
I know all you guys are in the Engineers union.
chickenfrank grasps:
All those examples of band’s leaving in mistakes were perpetrated by whom? Oh yeah, Awesome bands!
I tut tut:
Now, Chicken, be realistic. You and I were not excluded from the Great Recordings of Our Time by the fret buzz on the second chorus. A great song cannot be sunk by a moderate glitch, nor can an adequate song rise to greatness by its lack. So keep your jewelers’ lens focussed on the bass track if you wish, by I’m bellying up to the Get On With It bar, before the barmaid stops giving me the band discount on Bud Light in plastic cups. (Don’t start a beer thread on me, now, anyone.)
Not all mistakes are the same degree of mistaken, obviously. Isn’t the issue how big a glitch the glitch is? So how big a glitch are we talking about here?
Recordings made for Chess Records are not good points of comparison. To state the obvious, they were made in an era when you could not solo a track the way we’ve been talking about. Also, for all we know the Chuck Berry or Willie Dixon may have wanted a retake and Marshall Chess couldn’t be arsed. Or they might have been too drunk to notice. Can we be sure they wouldn’t have done it differently, if they had the time and the access to technology we do today?
To be honest I think it’s condescending to suggest that black musicians have some secret ‘feel’ that we would do well to imitate, if only we could learn to make the right mistakes.
BigSteve wrote:
Sure they would have fixed stuff. As the works of many artists prove over time and “advanced” recording techniques, their music risks losing something the more they can fiddle. Black, white, yellow, and green artists from the ’50s suffered when mics were shoved up Evans Hydraulic Heads on their ’70s recordings.
Big Steve implies something?:
To be honest I think it’s condescending to suggest that black musicians have some secret ‘feel’ that we would do well to imitate, if only we could learn to make the right mistakes.
I wonder:
Are you suggesting this was my drift? Let’s keep this thread away from narrow-mindedness and bigotry, and keep it focussed on the mindless preening self-adoration of players and the money-grubbing philistinism of myopic tone-deaf producers. It’s true, the folks I was mentioning are black, but I certainly didn’t suggest any racial/note-flub algorythm! No, I was just hankering for a view where the totality of the song succeeds regardless of a flub or a noise. And, while it’s true, they might have changed the results had various things been different, the song lives on half a century later as is. I was only suggesting that whether any of the jokers on this list have songs kicking around the ether in 2060, it won’t be because of a few glitches more or less.