INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONARY

Alan Moulder; Recording Nine Inch Nails & Smashing Pumpkins

Published in SOS May 2000
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People + Opinion : Artists / Engineers / Producers / Programmers

As a producer and engineer, Alan Moulder has been responsible for some of the most sonically innovative rock music of recent years. In a rare interview he talks to Richard Buskin about his approach to recording and working with Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins.

"I will always try other people's ideas, because I've learned, through bitter experience, not to shoot the baby before it's born," says Alan Moulder. "You can learn from anyone. Sometimes someone with no musical idea will come up with something from a completely different angle which is sheer genius, and I have found that you can learn a lot from the most surprising sources."

As some of these sources have included seminal acts such as Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Moby, U2, Swervedriver and Curve, you can tell that Moulder has enjoyed an enlightening and varied musical education. And for a large slice of the past two decades, this versatile and highly accomplished producer, recording engineer and mixer has lent his own considerable skills to the work of an eclectic group of artists. The results have ranged from the sublime to flat-out nail-your-ears-to-the-wall ball-busting asperity.

Hailing from the small English town of Boston in Lincolnshire, Moulder played guitar in local bands, first saw the inside of a studio when recording some demos, and actually landed a job as a tea boy at Trident Studios in London soon after leaving school in 1980. However, he quickly realised that, with band activities still occupying his thoughts, he just didn't have the will or the personal commitment to spend long hours waiting on people inside a control room. The solution? Well, he returned to Lincolnshire and a 'proper job' at the Ministry of Agriculture — and we all know where that was headed, don't we?

By the age of 24, Moulder had spent four years doing research into plant diseases, but his rock star aspirations were still unfulfilled. Suddenly the idea of sitting behind a recording console didn't seem quite so unappealing. He therefore returned to Trident and, over the course of the next four years, graduated from being an assistant to a fully-fledged engineer.

"When I was there I was very lucky, because that was a fantastic time at that studio," he now recalls. "I worked a lot with Flood, who was then the house engineer, as well as Clive Martin, while Steven Stuart Short — who owned the place — was very inspirational to watch. I'd be put on his production sessions, and he really taught me the ropes with regard to professionalism.

"The good thing about Trident was that it wasn't an expensive studio. The house engineers were good and so a lot of people used them, and that meant you were always given a chance with the different types of music that were coming through. We used to get quite a few alternative bands who were on a budget, and so we'd get to experiment. There would be real drums, real strings, and the whole gamut of instruments. A little later on there was the Stock, Aitken and Waterman explosion, where people were building studios with just overdub booths because they all thought that the tried and trusted methods were going to disappear, but fortunately I managed to catch the tail end of how things were before that trend took over."

Alan Moulder's early engineering credits were pretty varied, ranging from acts such as Antenna and The Smiths to machine-driven Hi-NRG disco material for the Record Shack label. Nevertheless, after Trident Studios underwent a change in ownership, Moulder felt that it was time to move on. It was 1988, and he had already been doing some work with Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, who had opened his own facility, The Church, and set up a production company named Fundamental Music, run by Karen Ciccone.

Stewart and Fundamental later went their separate ways, but Alan Moulder retained Ciccone as his manager, and he is still on the Fundamental roster today. In the meantime, as a fledgling freelance engineer, he worked with Dave Stewart's signings, as well as on the dance material of remixer Danny D.

"I had seen a few people make the mistake of going freelance when they only had one regular client," says Moulder. "Well, if that client stopped working, obviously they were stuffed. I, on the other hand, had some good advice from the people around me, and so I waited until I had a few clients to fall back on before branching out on my own."

Thanks to all of the work coming his way, courtesy of Danny D, at one time it did look as if Moulder was destined to carve out his niche specifically as a dance mixer. "I really enjoyed that," he recalls. "I was just happy to be engineering, and I started to appreciate that genre of music much more than I had done previously. So, I was quite up for being a dance mixer and dance engineer, but then I was asked to do some live sound work for The Jesus & Mary Chain. I had assisted Flood on one of their singles and we'd got on really well, so I did the live work, got to know them better, and then they asked me to engineer Automatic. Well, that album changed everything for me. I knew their manager, Alan McGee, from when I'd been living in Boston. He'd been running Creation Records and, after he heard what I'd done with the Mary Chain, he got me to work with Ride and My Bloody Valentine, and that's what took me off on the alternative route.

Collaboration & Experiment     "As a producer I don't have any hard and fast rules," explains Moulder, "So I found the Fragile project exciting from the perspective of never having worked this way before. However, I also probably won't rush into doing it again! Different people have their own ways of working, and when you're working with Trent or Billy Corgan or Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine — who are all pretty special — the best thing to do is run with them. They'll come up with some wild ideas and you have to try them, because they definitely come at things from a different angle to most people anyway, and that's what attracts me to working with them. Exploring and trying to achieve what they have in their heads is, firstly, a big challenge, and secondly generally very rewarding. "They're all pretty good at communicating what they want. Trent used to be an engineer and now he's a programmer, so he can explain things, and Billy is very technical. We'll discuss what they want and perhaps use other records as a reference — albeit in a completely different context or with different instruments — and generally I'll get an idea as to what they're after and try to interpret it as an engineer. They then might say, 'No, more like this,' or 'more like that,' and we might even end up with something that isn't quite the way they originally envisioned it, but which they like nonetheless. "That's why I generally won't turn down an idea until we've tried it. I can remember working with Ride and the drummer saying, 'I want to try to double-track the drums on this part,' and I thought, 'Yeah, right. That's going to sound fantastic, isn't it?' Then again I also thought, 'No, no, as long as he's reasonable I should give him a chance. I'll quickly set up a rough drum sound, it won't take long, I'll let him hear it, and he'll hear that it doesn't work. It won't take long. Let's give it a go...' So we tried it and of course it sounded fantastic, and I was thinking 'Thank God I shut my mouth!' That's happened to me more than once, so something has to be pretty ridiculous for me to say I'm not going to try it. Then, if we try it and I don't like it or it doesn't work, I will stand my ground."

"At around the same time, I co-produced the Shakespear's Sister album Hormonally Yours with Siobhan Fahey, and I also did something with Bomb The Bass, and the alternative bands all liked the fact that I was working with these pop acts. Back then there weren't all that many trained and well-qualified engineers who wanted to do that kind of alternative stuff so, fortunately for me, they felt as if they were getting somebody who really knew what he was doing."

While setting out to become a first-rate engineer, Moulder had always harboured the desire to also work as a producer. As things turned out, this wasn't too hard to achieve. Many of the bands whom he engineered didn't really have a producer; they just produced themselves, and so Moulder's progression into that role evolved fairly smoothly. "When there's no producer, the engineer's automatically another sounding board, so it was a natural step for me to start producing," he explains. "Nowadays I always do co-productions with the bands that I work with, and I also engineer them."

It was on the back of his work with Ride and My Bloody Valentine that Moulder was asked to mix Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dreams album. This led to a similar assignment on Nine Inch Nails's Downward Spiral album, before co-producing the Pumpkins' Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness project with Flood and Billy Corgan, and then NIN's recent double album The Fragile.

Sessions for Nine Inch Nails's The Fragile took place at Trent Reznor's Nothing Studios in New Orleans, and to say that Moulder was spoilt for choice in terms of equipment would be an understatement. Reznor's setup centres around a 72-input SSL G-Plus console with Ultimation, two Studer A800 multitrack machines, a wealth of Pro Tools gear and "every synthesizer and guitar imaginable". Wrapped around the large control room are three different live areas, each visible via closed-circuit monitors rather than windows. One has a PA setup for either rehearsals or live drums, another is a similar but deader-sounding room without a PA, and the third is basically a garage area.

"Trent didn't really know what he wanted the record to sound like," admits Moulder. "He knew that the previous album, The Downward Spiral, had been very lauded for its sonic approach, and that the eyes were now therefore upon him in terms of how the new record was going to sound. Consequently, we couldn't go into this project with a fixed idea as to what it would be like, especially as during the few years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, there had been such a massive evolution of equipment. Suddenly, all of the sounds that Trent had cleverly manufactured on Downward Spiral — sampling, resampling, changing sampling rates — were available on a plug-in and could be achieved really quickly. So we had to have a bit of a rethink and try to be a bit canny.

"In the beginning Trent had a template of ideas that he wanted to cover," Moulder recalls. "So I went into the studio with him and we just started going through what he had and what he wanted to do. We never worked on anything to completion but just kept evolving things, constantly updating and moving on. We'd work for two or three days on one piece — 14 or 15-hour days — and it would be a case of 'anything goes'.

"We'd often start with guitar, just plugging a guitar into anything that took our fancy, be it an amp, DI, or amp and DI. Then we might think, 'Oh, let's do some drums,' so we'd set up a drum kit, record the drums, then do a bit of bass, some keyboards... Whatever Trent was inspired by, we'd do it. It was never a case of us saying, 'OK, now we're going to do drums on the album,' and that was fun because it meant we'd always get a different drum sound. At the same time, since no drum sound was intended for the whole album, we wouldn't spend a day trying to get it. I probably would only spend 20 or 25 minutes getting the sound, and then after we'd recorded it we would move on, so sonically nothing was that precious. It was more a case of being inspired and keeping the momentum going."

No more than two musicians ever recorded together at the same time: for the most part Trent Reznor played everything, while a guest musician would occasionally drop by for a day or two in order to make some contribution or other.

"Everything went straight onto Pro Tools," says Moulder, "and then, because it could be anywhere between a month to three months before we'd listen back to one of the tracks that we'd worked on, we would have mammoth cutting days to sort through the material. After working on things and evolving them for so long, we would get to the point where we would forget what we'd done. Then we'd come back to it and it would be fantastic. It would always sound better than we thought, and that was great.

"The instrumental tracks were all recorded in one go during the early stages of the project. We'd get to the point where we'd built up the atmosphere and there was a general arrangement that we'd come up with by way of overdubbing, cutting and pasting. Then we'd start mixing, Trent would hear it shaping up, it would become apparent that certain things needed redoing or supplementing, and he'd generally become inspired to add another section. This would all be running on Pro Tools — we couldn't put it to tape if something wasn't finished — and he'd either want to add a section or extend one. For instance, we might both think, 'That sounds great now, but we could extend it with another four bars in there and hold off on this sequence until it comes in four bars later,' and so the whole arrangement and length of the song would be completely changing all the time we were mixing. I mean, at the end 'Pilgrimage' had three more sections than when we started mixing it. Three completely different sections evolved, each clearly delineated with starts and stops — guitar and synth sections, and the marching band at the end which Trent and I created by foleying, making samples, playing drums and adding brass."

There was also plenty of cutting and pasting between tracks, with parts intended for one song being edited out and dropped into another. "There were entire songs made up that way," Moulder confirms. "We made a database of all the songs, all the bits, the riffs and all of the keys, tempos and time signatures. For instance, there was a track called 'La Mer', which consisted solely of a piano take. Then we took some drums from another song which were in a similar tempo, and we thought, 'Well, that kind of feel might fit,' and so we shrunk that to the right tempo and added it as a drum part. At the same time, we had a separate guitar effects loop: the [Eventide] DSP4000 has a sampling loop which you can overlay, and we got a whole bank of different ones in different tempos with different textures, and we took one of those that was in a similar tempo, shrunk it and put that in. So those three different pieces became a song. Then, when we decided to remix it later on, it became yet another song. We played the bass line on a different instrument, changed the drum sounds and the drum pattern, and kept the chords and tempo identical to 'La Mer', and that became 'Into The Void'."

Experiment played a particularly significant role in the evolution of the percussion sounds, as Moulder explains: "We got bored one day and we started doing some drum sounds. We set up a drum kit and we decided to have the drums trigger the synth and stick it through the PA. I tuned the drums because there wasn't anyone else there, and I tuned them really low and really badly, and really quickly that started to sound amazing; a mixture of the natural and the synthesized going through a PA in a room, recorded with ambient mics. That then started vibrating some acoustic guitars that were hanging around, so we tuned those to a chord, put a compressor pedal on them and recorded them DI. The result was a whole load of drum sounds which we used on a lot of the tracks on the album."

Other percussion sounds on the album came from equally bizarre sources: "We all kind of liked that Tom Waits type of unusual drum sound and we said, 'Well, let's do something like that.' So we had a shopping trip to a percussion store and bought loads of different instruments, and then we just amassed as much junk as we could from around the studio: various sized boxes, empty water bottles and so on. I set Trent up in a small area of one of the live rooms, surrounded by all of this junk, so that he could use different mallets to hit things and make them resonate without having to worry too much about how they would sound.

"There was a screen on each side of this mass of stuff, and I had PZMs on those, and then a bit further back — about 8 feet away — there was an SASS-P stereo mike, and a couple of Neumann U87s about 15 feet away. I was driving them pretty hard on the mike preamps — the PZMs were starting to distort and the 87s were on the edge of distortion. I compressed the 87s with 1176s with all of the buttons in so that they started to really pump, and again we instantly got a fantastic sound. It was really unique. The room sounded good, so we put up a click and he just started playing. These loops were used on the title track 'The Fragile' and on 'I'm Looking Forward To Joining You Finally', while we also got a bank of sounds that were used here and there on different songs."

For all that Reznor and Moulder pushed the boat out on the sonic front on The Fragile, however, perhaps the greatest challenge came from a song called 'We're In This Together' which they were worried sounded too conventional. A lot of time and energy were wasted trying to make it something that it innately wasn't; to make it 'gratuitously unusual', as Moulder describes it, where all of the other songs were naturally unusual. "That's probably because we all had our heads up our arses," he says. "We were maybe waving the art banner a bit too far, but at least we did eventually realise that we were in danger of killing it. That was an interesting lesson — it is what it is and it's good, so don't try to ruin that."

Nevertheless, the genesis of the track was interesting in its own right, evolving out of one of the days that had been alotted to simply creating new sounds rather than working on specific songs. "Trent got the sample card for the Eventide DSP4000 and he could do the loop, and record the overlay," says Moulder. "We'd have a send to the DSP4000, and so he'd start with a pretty distorted or mangled guitar sound that would be put in and looped, and then he'd keep adding to that. He'd work out a note that complemented it and feed that into the loop, and we were constantly running a DAT, so it was kind of evolving on the DAT. That would then go to a point where either a mistake was made and it was ruined, or it was just full, and those were then chopped up into arrangements of ambient-type songs. Well, that became the starting point for 'We're In This Together' — it was just a static sound from one of those bits, and everything else was written around it."

Around 120 songs were eventually recorded for The Fragile, and these had to be whittled down to a much more modest number for the double-album format. Meanwhile, in order to intermittently alleviate the boredom and also to offset any feelings of paranoia over long-term non-achievement, mix sessions took place at various stages during the two-year period. Some tracks were, in fact, mixed more than a year before the album's completion in August of 1999, yet as a result there was also concern on the part of Reznor and Moulder pertaining to consistency of sound and feel. "I think doing it all in the same studio and with the same people helped in that regard," says Moulder. "Also, the material was pretty varied, and so that was more forgiving. Still, in the case of the first track that we'd done, 'Somewhat Damaged', we did have to go back and pull it into line. It just sounded a little more old-school Nine Inch Nails in terms of the drum pattern, the bass synthesizer and the guitars. Trent wanted to play guitar on this album more than keyboards, and during the course of it we'd evolved some pretty good guitar sounds and his style had changed to quite a degree, so we just put some of that on there. Fragile was a bit more complex than Downward Spiral, and so those kinds of subtleties applied to it."

Currently taking a well-earned break from the recording process, Alan Moulder is drawing inspiration from all of the new technology while turning his attention towards new musical avenues which he would like to explore. "Flood and I have started to look at film projects," he says, "That would mean actually creating music and writing; a combination of doing the original score and inserting other elements. So, that could be really exciting, while in terms of production I think I just have to look at every band as being a different adventure. I'm looking forward to doing stuff that's a bit different from what I've done already if possible, because it's a challenge and, like I said before, you can always learn from people. It's always good to have that feeling of nervousness. You know, 'Oh God, am I out of my depth?' That's what keeps me interested."

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