____twoism

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 2:47 pm**

Hi guys.

Sorry if this topic has probably already been discussed a lot in the past, but I've never really found a clear answer to this particular question. Maybe it's simply because of my inexperience with production workflows, maybe not. It'd be great if some of you guys could clarify this.

How do BoC work on hundreds of tracks simultaneously, building them up in parallel, using only analog equipment (presumably including an analog desk for mixing) and therefore not being able to save and recall settings?

Their music relies heavily on textures and small details so I can't imagine them writing down parameters and recalling them every time by hand. On top of being impractical, the combination of settings would result in a slightly different sound every time, which would probably make it impossible to make the kind of extremely detailed stuff they do.

They probably don't bounce sounds or tracks either, because then they wouldn't be able to go back later and make small changes, something they probably do all the time. Think about it, they work let's say four years on a record, with a specific overall palette of sound, and it totally makes sense that they would go back on tracks even months or years later, for example to make small changes in composition or sound treatment to keep things consistent, or simply add a sound or note here and there.

The doubt also comes from the fact that I remember reading a Future Sound of London interview where they were talking about the downside of them using only analog equipment in the 90s, where once a track was done they couldn't go back maybe six months later and make changes to it. They made a different style of music than BoC, but they had a similar approach where their tracks were more like "paintings" than simply recorded musical performances, and they had specific palettes and themes for each record.

There's also the fact that we don't really have that much information about BoC's workflow. We know just a few small bits from interviews and we constructed stories around it, but for all we know, yes they do use all analog sound sources and gear for processing, but then they could maybe also be using computers in their flow a lot more, for example for mixing, which would already make things a lot easier in terms of saving and recalling mixing parameters instantly. I dunno, just speculating.

Or maybe I'm just exaggerating this whole thing and in fact maybe they simply collect hundreds of ideas in their samplers or tapes, but then when they go about expanding them into full fledged tracks they work on them one at a time, and once it's done it's done.

Any thoughts on this?

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 3:34 pm**

They don't. They will be using a computer or multitracker to capture it all somewhere down the line, probably always have done. It's the fans that have probably Chinese whispered the story that it's all made, recorded, captured analogue.
All the soundsources will be created with gear, analogue or digital and lots will be built up outside of the DAW/Tracker and eventually when an idea is formed it will be built in a box of some sort.
Their music is far too complex to be jammed and mixed on a console before capture in it's entirety or bounced around on tape to get the final mix unless it's completed. I also doubt they had enough money to have this sort of console/tape machine config either. Like many artists who use gear, they will have ideas on various formats, tape, sequencers, minidisc, samplers, multitrackers, remembered synth settings, remembered riffs and when a few elements fit together the process of a track is formed and when enough is, it gets jammed, recorded, sampled, processed etc and eventually built, edited and reworked in a box until we hear it.
Might be wrong but this is how I see it as it's exactly how I work.

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:28 pm**

I would guess their workflow is something like this...

- Jam until an idea emerges using both midi and analog gear
- Record midi where possible, sample analog otherwise
- Carve song structure on DAW using mixture of midi and samples of analog
- As song takes shape samples may need to be re-recorded, each sample from analog gear will have all settings and methods recorded.

Outside of that I'm pretty sure there are moments of spontaneous live magic e.g. Farewell Fire, and these moments are both tracks in their own right and performances played over sequenced arrangements.

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:06 pm**

Thinking about it I guess they simply do bounce most of their sounds to audio, since they are often the result of a long chain of processing, so at that point the original sound doesn't matter much anymore.

As for sequencing they use both hardware sequencers and computers, in a TH interview they said they switched from "software" to only a hardware sequencer. But I don't think it matters much because they probably used only hardware sequencers for most of their career, only introducing computers later and using them sparingly.

So the only question is mixing. Maybe they simply always used a digital mixer with recall. I guess it can't be any other way, in a TCH interview they even explicitly said they "mix as they go" since their tracks are texture-based.

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:44 pm**

adanacfosdraob wrote:in a TH interview they said they switched from "software" to only a hardware sequencer.

I'd be amazed if that applies to the entire album, but who knows, the crazy bastards.

Posted: **Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:43 pm**

adanacfosdraob wrote:So the only question is mixing. Maybe they simply always used a digital mixer with recall.

I'm not so sure of what I wrote. I mean, wouldn't that only work if they had a mixer with motorized faders or something? Did they even exist in the 90s, and wouldn't they be prohibitively expensive?

For Geogaddi they said they did 400+ vignettes and 60+ full-on tracks. More or less the same for the other records. So how the hell do they work on hundreds of tracks simultaneously if they have to recall mixing settings every time?

I can't imagine them mixing with computers.

I dunno. Maybe they don't work on music the way I think they do.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:12 am**

Their hermeticsm combined with the brother to brother mind meld they achieve in the studio grants them augmented powers for naming and recalling all the strange bits as they work through them. Those of us that work too close to screens and smartphones are all plagued with a modern level of ADHD and disorganized memory that they are less afflicted by. Also they are wizards.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:16 am**

Not that I claim to be aware of their process, but on the question alone as to how one can save settings and work on multiple projects simultaneously in analogue - One can easily have more than one analogue multi-track tape machine on the go at once, you find a nice set of mixer settings for your multi-track, bounce it to the other machine and have them all "saved"

If you have a pair of professional Ampex 2" tape machines that have 24 tracks and run at a pretty impeccable speed and thus almost perfect quality, certainly more sound captured than the bitrate of any high end digital device, you can bounce a demo mix from one to the other as you improve settings a pretty considerable number of times before the tape begins to wear out or before interference from the added generations takes over. Look into how Mike Oldfield recorded "Ommadawn" if you want more details, but it was essentially the same process.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:17 am**

Again, more visually than what is spoken about as not much detail has light shed on it, but one can get a pretty clear view of the studio and the various signal paths that are used in recording when bouncing between multi-tracks.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:55 am**

You'd have to have a good amount of money to have that kind of gear, maybe they do now and the fetishism of gear lets them mix that way later on but early stuff and MHTRTC, even Geo, they would have been using meagre setups. I mean, they will definietly have some oddball stuff that would be worth a fortune now that could have been picked up cheaply in the ninetees but not the kind of studio hub that you would need to execute what you are talking about.

We give them and other artists far too much credit in the way they create the music we love. Credit is due for it of course but we fantasize and elevate it to such a degree that these people seem like gods. They are not. They are talented people of course but these tracks could be fumbled, fluked together with no master plan. They could just be doing it just like we do and the happy accidents turn out to be really nice.

The music IS amazing and i'm not trying to play them down but the reason we love the music so much is because it's taps into something a certain type of person likes (i'm talking about the first time we hear an artist, for me ROYGBIV) and we go through that honeymoon period of playing it over and over. We are now hooked, a fan. Now, anything else we hear of them, we give it time, because we are fans, we don't judge it imediately like another new artist that maybe does not hit the mental instant like button. We maybe latch onto the immediate buzz of a track in the context of an album and the rest, over time become more liked because of familiarity.
Familiarity is why we love BoC.

If TH came out as a new artist, i'm not so sure it would have been hailed as highly as it is, not because it's not good, because it's a grower and we have no previous benchmark to judge it on to give it the time it needs to become something for us, it may have just been a cool album but many of us may never have known it's potential because it didn't have enough airplay to worm it's way in.

I'm not sure where i'm going with this, what was the point again? haha

Basically, I think the Bros are normal dudes using gear to create music they like and we instantly like it because we have familiarised ourselves so much that nothing they can do will ever be bad. They are not magical beings getting things out of machines that no one else can do, they work like the rest of us, just the resulting music is different. The fact they can spend so much time on the music and possibly not need to work means that the music is of a high level of competance. We will never hear their scrapbook of bad or just ok ideas because all we get is the cream of the crop.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 11:10 am**

I agree with the above, I don't personally subscribe to the view that they are 100% analogue purists at all and it is clear from some of the frequencies that people isolated from Geogaddi etc that a computer was present in recording, also from live photographs showing various solid state devices etc and IIRC a computer monitor is visible in some photos.

I did have to answer the question, though. Yes, it is possible and not actually that difficult. One could do it on a lower budget, too.
I don't think BoC are that autistic about volume levels of individual tracks having to be preserved to the decibel and each mixer setting having to be encased in concrete, though. You can hear the sound of a fader with a tad of dust in it being pushed manually on New Seeds as it goes into the ending section, it isn't that difficult to approximate and go by ear for each track you have on your tape and then record it to a final stereo recording device. Two Ampex machines wouldn't really be needed, you could do that with an 8-track and a good quality cassette recorder in theory.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 11:55 am**

i hear high quality studio mixing boards in some if their work. i have a soundcraft 40 channel tube console that sounds similar in tone to what is heard on TCH. i am also pretty sure but not certain they probably have multitracking reel to reel tape console or even a tascam 688 which is a 10 track analog/midi cassette recorder.... plus dat machines and adat.... could easily be done. i’ll do a video demo of what i think the process may entail... or something similar

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 2:06 pm**

adanacfosdraob wrote:using only analog equipment

I don't know where this idea came from. It's not possible for most of their music to have been made without at least a digital sampler. Unless you just mean hardware in general, which can be analogue or digital or both, without the use of a computer.

Posted: **Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:08 pm**

Hell of a lot of long posts for what should be a simple answer lol.

Hardware and software sequencers for anything which has midi.
Anything else is either tracked or sampled, when sampled they can make some adjustments.
All of this in to an analogue desk and then cut to tape or dat.

I should imagine that as time has gone on, they have started making use of DAW's like Ableton/Logic/Reaper and so on as it helps to track stuff and still be able to manipulate it after the fact.

In reality, without being in the studio with them, we will never really know

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 9:39 am**

Valotonin wrote:Not that I claim to be aware of their process, but on the question alone as to how one can save settings and work on multiple projects simultaneously in analogue - One can easily have more than one analogue multi-track tape machine on the go at once, you find a nice set of mixer settings for your multi-track, bounce it to the other machine and have them all "saved"

If you have a pair of professional Ampex 2" tape machines that have 24 tracks and run at a pretty impeccable speed and thus almost perfect quality, certainly more sound captured than the bitrate of any high end digital device, you can bounce a demo mix from one to the other as you improve settings a pretty considerable number of times before the tape begins to wear out or before interference from the added generations takes over. Look into how Mike Oldfield recorded "Ommadawn" if you want more details, but it was essentially the same process.

I don't really understand this. How does bouncing the mix to tape save the actual mixer settings?

Anyway, it's true they do a lot of things manually and "on the fly", you can clearly hear that in many tracks. Lots of stuff that captures the moment, gets set in stone on tape and couldn't be readjusted later. Maybe for mixing they simply take notes for every song and recall the settings manually and approximately, which maybe is easier than I think. I dunno. They surely approach recording more like a traditional band than the way most electronic artists tend to work with computers nowadays.

After all they started as a traditional band and integrated electronics in their music much later. Which by the way is also why they always had hardware gear since the beginning, even more so on their older records. At that time computers sucked for music and they only introduced them much later, thus relegating them only for things like sequencing and reverb, since they already had an established hardware based workflow. They also have been acquiring gear since they were teens and their parents already had a lot of things like tape recorders and stuff, since they were musicians too.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:37 am**

adanacfosdraob wrote:I don't really understand this. How does bouncing the mix to tape save the actual mixer settings?

Its true, it doesn't truly save them hence why I put "saved" in quotes. Bouncing between two tape machines means that one can find a mixer setting they like, record onto the other machine with those settings and then make more minute adjustments to the settings one had recorded over the first time. It means that the settings aren't set in stone and are just gradually tweaked. Recording to tape really doesn't set something in stone in my opinion as one can always erase and record again to a limited extent as the tape will become damaged after a while of constant overdubbing.

I would just like to note again that this isn't at all what I feel BoC do in the studio and was more of a conversation as to how it could be achieved in theory.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:38 am**

If they were using tape they wouldn't recall settings, they mix as they go and have to deal with whatever comes up if they come back to it later on. You're talking about them needing to have a modern workflow in a oldschool setting, that is not realistic. You recorded stuff and it was set, no tweaking like you can in a DAW nowadays. Well not to the extent you are alluding to.
They simply wouldn't have managed to achieve what they have with post MHTRTC without some sort of DAW whether it be a simple amiga setup or primitive cubase. Computers must have been present to an extent even just finish up. The fidelity is too high for them to bounce back and forth on tape and I doubt they would have a 24+ track tape machine in the early days.
They will definitely be mixing things on the fly as it goes to whatever source (tape, multitrack, computer) and maybe even brought back out for extra fiddling/processing. Everything sounds regurgitated but the end result is still high quality. If it stayed and was finalised in the outboard domain after so much processing it would be so muddy or noisy, Listen to SYRO by Aphex, that's noisy as hell and that's run through insane amounts of top gear and everything is gated to fuck to compensate and even that is finished in a DAW most probably.
MHTRTC is sparse and has space even though it's obviously dense with analog gear and noisy samples. This would need to be collated and mixed in a clean environment for the finished product it is.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 12:24 pm**

Valotonin wrote:I would just like to note again that this isn't at all what I feel BoC do in the studio and was more of a conversation as to how it could be achieved in theory.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 3:29 pm**

Sorry, i'm not aiming at you man, The OP.

Posted: **Mon Sep 24, 2018 5:52 pm**

Geogandhi wrote:If they were using tape they wouldn't recall settings, they mix as they go and have to deal with whatever comes up if they come back to it later on. You're talking about them needing to have a modern workflow in a oldschool setting, that is not realistic. You recorded stuff and it was set, no tweaking like you can in a DAW nowadays. Well not to the extent you are alluding to.
They simply wouldn't have managed to achieve what they have with post MHTRTC without some sort of DAW whether it be a simple amiga setup or primitive cubase. Computers must have been present to an extent even just finish up. The fidelity is too high for them to bounce back and forth on tape and I doubt they would have a 24+ track tape machine in the early days.
They will definitely be mixing things on the fly as it goes to whatever source (tape, multitrack, computer) and maybe even brought back out for extra fiddling/processing. Everything sounds regurgitated but the end result is still high quality. If it stayed and was finalised in the outboard domain after so much processing it would be so muddy or noisy, Listen to SYRO by Aphex, that's noisy as hell and that's run through insane amounts of top gear and everything is gated to fuck to compensate and even that is finished in a DAW most probably.
MHTRTC is sparse and has space even though it's obviously dense with analog gear and noisy samples. This would need to be collated and mixed in a clean environment for the finished product it is.

I somewhat disagree.... i have recorded 100’s of analog songs with extremly high quality and all are stored as a catalog with mixer template setting sheets so that when i load up my tracks, i can review my notes and find the same settings. I employ multiple 8-track midi recorders in sync and all have storage... while those are technically “digital” they have a/d converters and i can store every rythm/note either “programmed” or recorded/looped on the fly.... my tascam 688 has a decent “scene” saving feature as well and with that.... i can track and loop and then save them on multitrack tapes or my multi-track reel to reel. the quality is honestly better in my opinion than anything digital ive ever really heard. id even compete haha

i know they also use samplers of their recorded material and am pretty sure they mixdown to that a lot as well. and with a sampler, you don’t need to have tons of mixable settings.... plus no one mentioned “sub-mixing/bus” and sub groups of “like” instruments.
gurantee they are OCD about storage

____twoism

How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using analog?

How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using analog?

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

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Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

Re: How do BoC work on 100s of tracks in parallel using anal

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