Chapter Four, in which we instigate Plan A
Columbia went quiet for a bit, and came back saying that they thought what we'd done was really good and everything, but that they preferred the demo. This provoked a lengthy triangular musical correspondence between Dan in London, Columbia in New York and us in Texas or wherever the fuck we were. The combined analyses were: we'd recorded it too fast, we'd gone with the wrong drum part in the chorus, there was far too much big loud guitar, we'd missed out all the good things from the demo. About the only thing that everyone liked about the new version was the vocal and the extra chorus we'd put on the end. It was time for Plan A(b).
Since we were in the middle of a tour, Dan turned to our friend Technology to fix the problems. It's almost unbelievable how many options there now are in the realm of digital musicPatronising Glossary to jigger with your music. The signal you get through your microphone is merely the beginning of the journey your sound can undertake.
The big thing in the last five years has been Virtual Instruments. It all started with the synthesizer, whose sounds were waveforms created electronically that could be edited to resemble the waveforms of acoustic instruments. The results were generally piss-poor, but as usual, the piss-poor saxophone sound began to be used for its own piss-poor merits and a wholly new-sounding music was created. The next development was Sampling, which grew out of DJing, where you could use snatches of existing records to make new ones. This initially allowed you to add James Brown going "Get on up" and orchestra hits to all your music, but it wasn't long before the Keyboard Player's arsenal of sounds were based on samples of actual source material. This was where it started to get difficult to tell the difference, because the fidelity of the sample was only limited by the computing power of your sampler.
As computers became increasingly powerful and everyone threw away their tape machines, developers started creating software that, instead of replaying previously recorded source material, would construct a digital model of the source and get it to behave exactly like the real thing. It's the same concept as computer generated animation, which creates an environment and subjects it to logical rules whereby if it rains things get wet and if it's windy stuff blows around. So we've had thousands of software developers analysing the rules that make an amplifier sound like an amplifier, or a Hammond Organ sound like a Hammond Organ and then making a digital amp out of digital wood and and speakers and putting a little digital mic in front of it in a little digital room. Then they can ask you if you want to plug your digital Mesa Boogie head into a digital 50s Fender cabinet and replace the digital 90's valves with 70s ones, and whether you'd like to replace the digital 57 with a digital 87, and whether you'd like to digitally move the mic digitally nearer or digitally further away.
This kind of technology has gone crazy; you can run your virtual piano through emulations of classic microphones and compressors, and then you can place it in a recreation of Sydney Opera House or (for some reason) the back of a Lincoln Navigator. Does it make the song any better? No. But it is useful if you discover you've fucked up your recording and need some emergency help.
Dan started bringing in elements from the demo (which had to be timestretchedPatronising Glossary to be the right wrong tempo) and programmed an alternative drum part using a program that allowed him to recreate the sound of Dave's drums, but playing something different. We began gingerly playing the song during soundchecks to try out the new ideas with partial success.
Eventually we moved on to Plan A(c) and the whole thing got passed, like a heaving octopus in a greasy bag, to the renowned producer Jack Joseph Puig, who had done a radio mix of Brighter than Sunshine the previous year. The great thing about this was that he was an Expert, and since between us and Columbia nobody seemed to be able to explain what they wanted any more, we could just leave it all up to Jack.
His solution was something else again - slowed to the original tempo, with machiney drums and a formless harmonic mush in the middle, topped off by the vocal INCREDIBLY LOUD. It was closer to New Order than U2. I had absolutely no idea how it had been arrived at. But it sounded a lot more like a hit. Matt and Columbia announced themselves satisfied, then everything went quiet again.
